Page 75 of Game Misconduct

That had been before he’d given up and started getting into fights, anyway.

The dressing room before the game reflected some of the tension. Mike looked around at his teammates. Netty was joking with Sally, or at least Netty was joking and Sally was giving him murder-eyes. Singer and Reed were already dressed by their stalls, heads together, going over some kind of complicated play, Reed making expansive gestures with his hands. Mäkelä had an AirPod in, blissfully jamming out to some kind of weird Finnish metal (or folk music, it was anyone’s best guess). Bee was sitting next to him with the other bud in her ear, frowning at whatever she heard.

Mike was seized with affection for all of them, even though none of them really knew him, except Bee. And even though they didn’t, they still treated him like he belonged.

Once he hit the ice, he was just focused on the game. Slowly, he’d been starting to play closer to the crease, switching it up with Lindy depending on who had joined the rush. Graham was still out with a head injury and Mike had somehow failed his way upward into an almost permanent second pairing with Lindy. Parsons had grumbled about it, and Kelly had grumbled about it, but Coach had just shrugged and said, “Sato earned it.”

Mike had kept that one close, but texted Danny about it afterward. Danny had written back,that’s my boy, and Mike had felt a weird, confused flush down his chest, reading the words. He tried not to think about it now.

The first period went by quickly, especially because he was agonizing over whether he should fight Danny or not. People almost expected it, you could hear the gasp in the crowd whenever they were on the ice together, but he hadn’t had the heart to hit him. He tried to just pay attention to the puck, to keep it moving, to run interference when Lévesque or Artyomov (he still could not entirely believe that he was putting up minutes againsteitherof them, in his wildest fucking dreams he wouldn’t have expected that) came too close to Mäkelä’s crease.

It was difficult when his eyes dragged toward Danny against his will, when he was acutely aware of wherever he happened to be on the ice. When he knew Danny was watching him too. He was trying to play clean, but then when Mike was battling along the boards against Landry, finally got his stick on the puck, someone slammed into him from behind, knocked him into the glass and right down onto the ice.

Danny.

Mike was up on his skates almost immediately, even though his entire body ached. Danny looked at him and dropped his gloves, and Mike, who realized that this was the first time Danny had ever tried to fight him, dropped them too. They circled each other and Mike searched his face, trying to gauge how this was going to go. Danny just looked tired. There was none of the humor behind his eyes that there usually was. Like he didn’t want to do it but had gotten tired of waiting for Mike to go for him.

For a second, he felt really guilty, but then Danny punched him in the face, and he got his shit together.

It wasn’t like Mike was holding back, but he was aware of the differences fighting, like, now, and fighting before. He really was trying not to hit Danny too hard in the head, to leave his helmet on, to mostly aim for the sturdier parts of his body. Of course, that meant he had lost any advantage he had, because Danny had reach and weight on him.

He didn’t even really care when Danny’s fist slammed him in the side where his pads didn’t cover and knocked the breath right out of him, didn’t even really care when a sort of messy wrestling move landed him flat on his ass on the ice with the crushing weight of Danny’s body on top of him.

Like...you know, it hurt, but also, he kind of had an aborted boner.

“Dude,” he wheezed, as the linesmen pulled Danny off of him, “we still doing this? Even now?”

“Got a reputation to uphold,” Danny said, and knocked his helmet gently against Mike’s.

He knew it was an affectionate gesture, but it got Danny an additional two minutes in the box.

It was a shitshow of a game. Mike actually ended up fighting Danny again and, with the game misconduct, was forced to sit out the rest of the game with just under ten minutes to go. The final score was 6–5, with Reed taking the game-winning goal in overtime. Afterward, Mike was in the process of stripping off his pads before he got cornered by reporters. Of course they had questions about the fights, they always did.

“Uhh...you know, I guess we just have a thing,” he said, exhausted and grumpy and hating the fact that he was being kept here.

“A thing?” the woman—she was from Pittsburgh; he couldn’t remember her name—repeated.

“Yeah, you know. I break his face, he breaks mine. It’s like a tradition at this point.”

She looked delighted, and Mike took the moment to make his escape. The Hornets weren’t playing the next day, but Danny had asked for an exception to return on a commercial flight instead of the chartered plane. He hadn’t told Mike how he’d managed it, but Mike wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. Usually that kind of stuff was only allowed for family and that seemed...uncomfortable, at least, the sort of thing Mike didn’t know how to ask.

Did you tell them I’m family? Like. What.

Danny was already naked by the time Mike made it down to the hotel.Hey, what’s wrong, Mike tried to say, but Danny pushed him up against the door and kissed him so thoroughly that it was impossible to get the words out. Then he completely forgot about the words he had queued up in his head because, well, Danny was naked, and they only had so much time.

Afterward, Mike rolled on top of him and pinned his arms down. Danny looked up at him, exhausted and still a little sweaty, one eyebrow up. He had an entire line of hickeys on his collarbone, one for each time he’d punched Mike during the fights, and he’d gotten them in before Danny shoved him down into the mattress again, but Mike couldn’t even feel smug about it.

“What’supwith you, dude?” he demanded.

Danny twisted his wrists to see if he could break Mike’s grip, but Mike just held on harder, and eventually Danny surrendered. “Mike. If you couldn’t play hockey, what would you do?”

Mike blinked. “If I couldn’t play hockey?”

“Yeah. If you could do something else.”

Mike let go of Danny’s wrists but didn’t roll off of him. He traced the muscle of Danny’s chest, scratched his fingers through the soft curly hair there. “I never thought about it.”

“Yeah,” Danny said, and sounded, like, resigned.