Work Text:
i.
“Your tie’s crooked.”
Jack’s hands freeze where they’d been hovering at his collar, absentmindedly fiddling due to the lack of anything better to do. His father sits on the bed behind him, hands folded neatly as he examines Jack’s suit. Jack swallows once and turns away from the mirror, shutting his eyes too many seconds longer than a blink. Kent’s already gone down to the banquet, had gone down with Curly and Mack and the rest of the guys almost ten minutes ago. Jack should be with them, even if he might only be captain in name; there are still things expected of him. Things like attending the end-of-season banquet, seeing off their oldest players and wishing them well.
But then Jack would have to contend with the fact that next year it will be him the Oceanic are seeing off, him and Kent and Danny and all the rest of the guys their age. This isn’t surprising, or new information, but staring down the barrel of it gives Jack a sinking feeling in his gut that’s all too familiar.
At his hesitation, Bob Zimmerman stands, letting out a world weary sigh. “Is your mother still talking about California?”
That’s enough to freeze Jack entirely, feet sticking to the carpeted floor, head ducking to avoid eye contact. “We’re leaving in a week. She says the sun will be good for me.” Of course there’s the matter if he buys it, but his mom had left very little room for argument. In her own words, she only got so much of the year with him, she wouldn’t spend them still stuck in Quebec.
Jack doesn’t expect his father to understand, quit playing the messenger too many years ago to care. “The ice out there isn’t natural.” It’s not directed to Jack so much as it’s the crotchety complaint of a man who still considers the Sharks and Ducks newcomers the league. Therefore, Jack doesn’t bother arguing that the rink he’d be on in Montreal is just as manufactured, that in the dead heat of summer there’s little natural ice to be found.
Mercifully, Bob Zimmerman seems content to drop it, perhaps a sign of his continued mellowing out. Commentators loved to wax poetic about how “Bad Bob” Zimmerman could fill a room and turn play on the ice into a one-man conversation. He might not be in his prime anymore, but still he drags the air from the cramped hotel room and Jack’s lungs just the same. “Need to get your game face on, boy.”
Jack doesn’t bother mentioning that he’s not really a boy, that he’s sixteen and might as well be older for all that age matters around here. Instead, he clears his throat. “There’s no game tonight. The season’s over.”
Just as surely as a clock hitting 12 at noon, Bob stands, clearing his throat. “Hockey season’s never over.” He smiles like it’s funny, and Jack does his best to ignore the ache in his gut, the gaping wound that never quite seems ready to scab over. Worst of all, he does know.
It never ends.
ii.
Every year, on schedule, the NHL sends an old teammate of Bob Zimmerman’s to Jack and Alicia Zimmerman’s door. On the same schedule, Alicia pretends to hear whoever it is out, nodding in all the right places and furrowing her brows in the practiced expression of grief.
Jack does his best to slip away early, knowing his mother will decline the invitation to present the Zimmerman Trophy while offering her best to whatever poor schmuck the NHL will strongarm into doing it in her stead.
Almost a year after Jack wakes up in Montreal General Hospital, his throat impossibly dry and chest impossibly tight, the NHL sends Liam Provost, the last of the Montreal core to retire. Together, they’d won three cups in all, but after the third Bob had left, signing in Pittsburgh. Provost had been the only of the Habs to look Jack in the eyes at the funeral, to pull him into a bone crushing hug and shed a tear.
Truth be told, Jack barely remembers the game itself, the incident. Even if he’d been in the stands, even if there are photos of a seven-year-old him pressed up the glass, mouth half open and tears streaming down his face. There’s something nauseating that what should be the worst moment of his life is immortalized like that, but Jack’s done his best to forget it even if the entirety of Canadian hockey media is hellbent on remembering.
The questions are never really about his dad, instead Jack’s asked about the impact his father had on the game, how Jack feels about following in his footsteps, if he’s ever considered adopting Bob’s number as tribute. No matter how stringently his mother tried to keep him away from the media, they’re like the tides—out and back, out and back. They serve to shape Jack’s image of his father around his absence, the absence of Jack’s memory but enduring influence nonetheless.
Not even Provost can manage asking Alicia to present the Zimmerman without a faint wince, his brow furrowing. The trophy itself was a nice enough idea, given to the player who demonstrates the most passion and dedication throughout the NHL season. Jack’s never watched the presentation, but apparently it always involves a tribute where the league collectively pretends to forget that Bob Zimmerman’s displays of passion involved bloody knuckles and concussions more often than not.
“...I really wish I could….” Alicia Zimmerman’s words float from the parlor to the sunroom where Jack has tucked himself away in an attempt to avoid any pitying gaze Provost might have for him. For someone who in a different life might have been like an uncle to Jack, the retired forward had gone just as silent as the rest of the hockey world, leaving Jack to whispered conversations away from polite company.
That’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?
“...understand. It’s good to see you looking so well, Alicia.” Provost’s flattery is unnecessary but Jack still hears his mother laugh, not entirely honest but as close as she’s gotten in the past eleven months.
“You don’t need to lie to me. You’re on television enough as it is.”
Provost laughs and says something else but Jack has already tuned out their voices, eyes drifting to the sliver of visible horizon, just wishing for things to get quiet again. Even still, with the quiet came his father, his disappointment loudest of all.
iii.
The sound of yet another puck hitting the post echoes off of Faber’s ceiling, off the glass and through the empty stands. Jack bites back a curse and resists the urge to hit his stick against the boards—the coaches had already chewed him out once for “not treating his equipment with the respect it deserves” and he wasn’t particularly looking for an encore.
Shooting on the ice after a game was already bending the rules and Jack was just lucky the Zamboni driver took bribes. With his best attempt at a steadying breath, he pulls in another puck from the pile and does his best to relax his grip.
Another puck sails past the net, this time colliding with the glass before falling to the ice. Jack moves to skate in a circle, reset, but instead movement on the bench catches his eye.
His father had never been a coach, was too busy playing, but in the summer he’d take Jack out on the ice, forfeiting his own time and development to pass pucks to the one-timer, cheering like every goal Jack put into the back of the net won a cup.
. Some of the most fun Jack remembers having on the ice came in those summer days, when he was just young enough to truly relax, when there was no season, no record, no points to try and rack up. Even better was when Bob dragged teammates with him, new rookies or vets who couldn’t be bothered to leave town. Provost, Rinker, the lot of them seemed larger than life to an elementary Jack but still they’d let him practice checking, falling dramatically to the ice when he landed a good hit.
It’s from those memories Jack could understand teammates—Kent—saying they’d been born to play hockey. Moments like those when the cold air fills your lungs and you can’t keep from smiling despite being sore and exhausted are the lifeblood of the sport. They’re what keeps you going long after everyone else goes home, chasing that impossible high.
Of course Jack was fourteen the last time he really felt that, the face-splitting smile as he tumbled to the ice with Kent Parson, the lights turned off on the rink in a fruitless attempt to get them away from the ice. But Jack had found other ways to fend off the weight of the world on his shoulders while Kent took it willingly and everything else was just pretending otherwise.
It was why Jack was at Samwell University and Kent in Las Vegas, it was why Jack couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone aside from his mother’s calls.
Bob Zimmerman isn’t smiling behind the boards, all the part of a coach aside from an absent clipboard. Instead his face is split between exasperation and pity, something Jack is all too familiar with. “Are you trying to guide the puck or are you trying to shoot it?” The question is unnecessarily cryptic and Jack hates that he understands it, hates that it’s echoed in every coach he’s ever had.
He’s too controlling, too focused on perfect technique, to truly feel it, to reach the level he needs to. Of course that’s stupid, because if he was just precise enough guiding the puck and shooting it would be the same, but no his hands are too slow, his timing off kilter, skating still not the same as it was when he left Rimouski.
“Are you going to say anything helpful or just sit here and tell me how I don’t measure up?” Jack’s more flippant than he used to be, but Samwell has rubbed him raw in all the worst ways. He has no time for ghosts, not when he’s done his best to shed his past, leaving him alone and uncomfortable.
Bob Zimmerman’s throat bobs once, twice, and in the half-lit rink he looks almost translucent, immaterial as he actually is. “Try again, release earlier than you think you need to.”
Jack has nothing better to do and no desire to go sit in his dorm room listening to his roommate snoring, so her returns to the area above the circles, adjusting his grip on his stick and pulling another puck towards him. With a halfhearted stickhandle, he lets off a shot.
When it goes into the back of the net, Bob doesn’t cheer, doesn’t clap. Nonetheless, in the corner of Jack’s vision he nods, the furrow in his brow softening. He opens his mouth to say something, but Jack cuts him off before the ache in his chest consumes him entirely.
“You don’t get to say you told me so, you don’t exist.”
Before his father can respond, the doors to the rink clatter open and none other than Byron Sterling Knight stands illuminated by the fluorescent light of the hallway.
“Dude, who the fuck are you talking to?”
Still staring at the empty space on the bench, Jack forces himself to swallow. “Nothing. No one at all.”