Page 34 of Game Misconduct

How had he even gotten this far?

It was because he was good at what Coach used him for. Being a pest, throwing himself into a fray, running a physical game. But when he compared himself to Bouchard, when he’d still been around, or Novotný or Lindberg and Graham, there was no comparison. He’d let Parsons guide his game his rookie year because they were a pair and Parsons had longevity with the team but... Jesus.

Mike threw himself into the drills and skated until he was sweating bullets. Bee didn’t even seem particularly fussed as she wheeled and dodged around him. It wasn’t ideal. Half of their movements were scripted, and the other half he could guess himself, because he knew her, and he knew the way she played.Translate that, the internalized Danny-voice said, and Mike almost bit his tongue in horror.

“You okay?” Bee asked him.

“I just realized something,” he said. He skated over to the side of the rink where they’d lined up their water bottles and gulped some of it down.

“What?”

“I’ve just been thinking about this all wrong, I guess.”

Bee was staring again, like she didn’t even know him. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, buddy, but I like it.”

“You don’t have to stick around for the agility stuff,” he mumbled, unable to meet her eyes. “I know you probably have shit to do.”

Bee did them anyway. It was like old times at development camp, pounding the ice together and dodging around the public skaters. That was tough on its own. Bee was kind of a local hero at this point, and constantly getting stopped by little girls and little boys, and not-so-little girls and boys, for autographs and pictures. No one really bothered him, but it was probably because Mike was looking murderous and feeling murderous, the more he could feel the burn of his muscles and his lungs.

It was good.

He didn’t want to be bothered anyway.

Danny saw the fruits of his experiment early. Mike sent him a link to some random woman’s Twitter: she’d been at the rink for the public skate and taken a video of Mike and Bee running Danny’s drills. That was a surprise, since Morin wasn’t the kind of player who needed extra practice, but also wasn’t really a surprise, when he remembered she and Mike lived together and had been practically joined at the hip since their first year on the Cons.

It was, admittedly, a pretty cute video. The girl had captured the two of them staring each other down, mock-serious, before Morin tried to weave around Mike and he controlled the space she was able to take up, herding her away from the crease. Toward the end of it they’d exploded in mock-shoving, gloves on the ice, like little kids or overly energetic puppies.

There was another video of Mike without Morin, doing the horseshoe drill around obstacles that proved to be mostly the general public wobbling on shitty rental skates. He was—this was what Danny had wanted to see. Mike’s speed and agility, without the constraint of feeling like he needed to constantly board the forwards, constantly fight them.

Danny would have smiled, but he was still pissed off. Not that he’d expected an apology, but Mike had cut him deeper than he’d probably realized. Nothing like having your failures casually thrown in your face by a guy you wanted but couldn’t have.

Mike had been doing the drills, clearly, but Danny didn’t really feel like talking to him very much.

He’d pushed himself at the game against the Cougars—his most recent team before they’d traded him at the deadline for a conditional seventh-round draft pick—harder than he should have. He’d followed his own damn advice and focused on playing as technical a game as he could, and it had paid off with a three-point night, two primary assists and one secondary. He couldn’t skate, but he could still fucking clear the puck. And it wasn’t like the Cougars were actually any fuckinggood; it was just like he had to do something because it was Detroit.

He hated coming home for games. He knew his parents were out there in the crowd somewhere, and he hated when they watched him play these days. It was one thing if they were at home, but another if they were there, in person, seeing his body break down. He hated that he still felt like he couldn’t actually talk to them, hated that he didn’t feel like he could find them in the crowd afterward and give them a hug, hated everything about it. It was easier to avoid them, but that didn’t mean he liked it or didn’t miss them.

His dad, especially, gave really good hugs. He was almost as tall as Danny, all barrel torso and chicken legs, and his arms were just as strong and enveloping as they’d been when Danny was a kid.

They wouldn’t have been very proud if they knew anything about his life right now.

“Hell yeah, bro!” Landry said, holding up his fist and eagerly waiting for Danny to fist-bump him back. “Garcia with theassist. We make a good team, huh?”

Danny wondered if there was a prayer for god to save you from overeager children who needed your attention, but instead of trying to find it, he raised his fist and touched it to Landry’s. The kid’s eyes widened and he ducked his head to hide the grin, and Danny sighed. Inaudibly. He wasn’t a monster, and he’d promised Marty, his old coach on the Boilermen, that one day he’d pay it forward. “Nice goal, kid.”

Landry was floating by the time they made it out of the dressing room and into the postgame meal. He wasn’t a bad kid, just...didn’t think about the shit that came out of his mouth on the ice. Maybe. Danny caught Lévesque watching him and he wished he had a drink instead of the chewy Detroit-style pizza the team had had delivered to the Cougars’ visiting room.

He’d been on teams where the captains had nicknames, but he couldn’t imagine referring to Lévesque with one. There was something too serious about his face and his general everything. People usually referred to him with all three of his names, like two wasn’t enough to show the full respect. Sometimes they’d have to include his title too. Henri Jean-Philippe Lévesque, the captain of the Hornets.

“Yeah?” Danny said, when he saw Lévesque was still looking at him. He took a big bite of his pizza and chewed. Wasn’t hungry but he needed to make a point.

“You were different on the ice today,” Lévesque said, with his vaguely French and very flat affect. It wasn’t a question.

Danny took another bite of his pizza. “Yeah?”

“You don’t usually play with that much attention to detail.”

“I’m an enforcer,” Danny said, wiping grease from his fingers onto an already-crumpled paper napkin. He felt like he was channeling Mike, except it wasn’t really a good look on a dude who was closer to forty than twenty. Most people probably wouldn’t have thought it was a good look on Mike, either, even though Danny liked it very much. Still. Something about Lévesque and his know-it-all arrogance and perfectionism brought it out in him. “I’m not really on the ice to pay attention to the forwards unless I’m fighting them.”

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