Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Kip Grady/Scott Hunter, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Kip Grady, Shane Hollander, Background & Cameo Characters

Additional Tags:

Alpha/Omega, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Character Study, Omega Scott Hunter, Alpha Kip Grady, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Social Media, Press and Tabloids, Romance, scott hunter pov - Freeform, Outing, Secret Relationship, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Omega Shane Hollander

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-20 Completed: 2026-02-27 Words: 17,696 Chapters: 8/8

Inner Workings

Summary

After a thorough evaluation of Mr. Hunter’s medical records as well as a physical examination by independent MLH medical staff, it is the duty of this investigation committee to confirm Mr. Hunter’s disclosure: that he is now and has always been a primary gender male and a secondary gender Omega.

Scott Hunter has lived his life the only way he knows how, but all things must change.

Notes

Ok, this one is something different. I have some ideas and I'm excited to work through this character study about masculinity and the different ways to be in your body in a way that feels true. This is an Alpha/Omega 'verse, one a little different than my usual fare.

I hope you enjoy this first taste, and let me know what you think about Scott's journey to come!

Chapter 1: Three Press Conferences

2009

“...Yeah, this was hard loss. We were really hungry for the Cup this year. But, uh, I think it’s clear what we’re going to be working on for next season and we’re going to come back in the fall ready to go all the way.” 

It’s pretty low energy in the press room after the Admirals are knocked out of the playoffs at home against Boston. Amid the rustle of notepads and the click of phone cameras and tablet keyboards Scott is doing the hard work of being captain, keeping it together for the guys at the table with him with an icepack strapped to his ribs (again) when all he wants is to go home and get blindingly drunk. 

This is the job, and Scott, after three years of it, knows what he’s doing. He bats around a few more questions about some of the turnovers in the third period before a journalist in the front row takes things in a different direction.

“Looking at the draft, there is a lot of chatter about an up-and-coming player out of Ottawa: Shane Hollander.” 

A phone camera flash goes off, and Scott has to blink the spots from his vision for a second. “Uh, yeah, I’ve heard about him. He’s playing some good hockey.” 

“Hollander would be the first Omega ever to participate in the MLH draft, and if he goes as high as expected, the first openly Omega player to see significant ice time in the history of men’s hockey.” 

“Sounds pretty historic,” Scott agrees, to some friendly chuckles from the scrum. 

“Do you think an Omega can mesh with a team in a predominantly Alpha sport?” 

“I don’t see why not.” His ribs throb, but he keeps his face open. Neutral. 

“Would you have an Omega in the Admirals locker room? Do you think the team that drafts Hollander can handle the inevitable disruptions?”  

“I leave those decisions to the guys in charge. As far as I can tell, the kid’s fast, he’s got good hands, and he’s got his eye on the net. Sounds like a good draft pick to me.” 

Scott glances at the publicity manager in the corner and Marcelle nods back. He’s done with this topic. The next reporter called on asks about rebuilding their defensive line after Svenson’s retirement, and Scott settles back into the regular post-game analysis with the ease of long practice. 

After the scrum Scott leaves his teammates to duck into the infirmary. There were no major injuries and all the other guys are patched up, so the room is empty except for the middle-aged nurse practitioner who's been with Scott since he came up from the juniors. 

Scott drops into a chair by her station, blowing out a long breath. “Hey, Shelly.” 

“How are the ribs?” 

He rolls his shoulder with a wince. “I’ll live.” 

“Saw you on the monitor, talking about the Hollander kid,” Shelly says pointedly, sliding a carbon paper form across her desk. “That was generous of you.”

“More diverse players make for better hockey,” Scott manages to say with minimal irony. He adds his initials beside her signature, and she releases his pills from the safe under her station. 

“Well, I’ve seen the proof of concept.” 

Scott cracks a bottle of water and pops the lid on today’s labeled blister pack. 

Heat suppressant. 

Scent neutralizer.

Birth control. 

They wash down easy, like they always have. 

“I’ll send you home with the off-season kit after the team all-hands tomorrow. You know the drill.” 

“Yeah.” Scott adjusted his ice pack again. Heat was going to be murder with a cracked rib. “Thanks, doc.” 

“Take it easy, Cap.” 

2014

“Scott, what do you say to the report that a fellow captain is taking the coming season off for parental leave?” 

It’s well into May and they’re only in the second round of the playoffs because of the Olympics. The Admirals are up 3-2 against Toronto and flying for the next set of away games in three hours. Scott leans into the microphone, elbows heavy on the table after a bloody third period that had their goalie on a stretcher. 

“I’d have to say I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“Shane Hollander. The Metros captain has just released a statement confirming his pregnancy, and that he’ll be sitting the bench next season with the blessings of team management.” 

A kind of hush falls over the room. More than one mouth hangs open, including his own. Scott glances at the team publicist in the doorway, who throws her hands up, just as surprised as everyone else. 

“Wow. Uh, if that’s true then congrats to him I guess,” Scott manages after several beats of awkward silence. “I’m sure that’s great news for his family.” 

“Do you think a player can really take a year off and expect to stay a competitor in the League?”

Scott tries to shake the exhaustion out of his brain so he doesn’t say anything too stupid. “It’s a lot of time off the ice, but that’s between him and his coaches, and from the sound of it he has support in Montreal.” 

The Metros had been a surprise early knockout. It’s clear a narrative is building as to why. Scott breathes, and tries to focus through the clench of nausea in his gut.

“He’s only been captain for two years,” The reporter continues, “Shouldn’t his responsibilities to his team come before—” 

“What is it you want me to say?” The room falls silent again, and Scott realizes he’d been too loud. Too sharp. That his fingertips were white and bloodless gripping the edge of the conference table. He sits back, and takes a long drag from his water bottle.  

“I wish him the best.” He says at last, voice flat and disaffected. “When Hollander is back on the ice the Admirals defense will be ready for him. Next question, please.”

Everybody and nobody wants to talk about it in the locker room. 

“Saw you growl a little for Hollander out there, Cap. That’s cool of you.” 

Scott finally peels out of his padded undershirt, the sweat cold and sticky now against his skin. “I’m just trying to keep it about the hockey.”

“True that.” Vaughan shakes a can of deodorant before spraying it heavily under his arms. “Crazy though. When do you think he’ll be back?” 

Scott scrubs a hand over his face. Admits: “I don’t think he will be.” 

He grabs his towel and heads for the showers. 

Very few people say it in front of a microphone, but the consensus in private is with Scott, from players to management to the gossip at the bodega:

The Omega Experiment is over. They just aren’t built for the intensity of the sport. The personal sacrifices. 

Except.

Hollander is back on the ice in eleven months. They play Montreal away and between periods Scott watches the jumbotron zoom in on an older couple in Metros colors helping a tiny bundled up infant in earphones wave at the camera. 

“Hollander’s kid is pretty cute,” Vaughan says next to Scott on the bench, looking up at the screen.  

“Yeah,” Scott agrees, throat strangely tight. “I guess so.”

The Metros take the win, 3-2. Hollander scores twice.

2016

The win against the Centaurs is expected, but still feels good on home ice. Scott assisted a few first-time goals for the new rooks, and the energy is buzzy as they clear the tunnel and can celebrate without looking like bad sports after winning 7-2. 

Phone screens light up across the room as the guys check their messages, and it takes Scott too long to realize that a strange, numb silence has taken over the post-game chatter. 

He pulls off his jersey and feels eyes on him. 

“Cap?” 

It’s Breezy, one of the rookies. Beside him, Farmer is staring at something on his screen with a slack jaw.  

“Have you seen this?” 

A phone gets shoved under his nose. His own is off, somewhere in the bottom of his gym bag. A sharp headline burns against the webpage of NYT Online:

Major data breach at Mt. Sinai Hospital reveals irregularities in the records of several prominent NYC athletes

Still half in his pads, breathing hard, Scott doesn’t really understand what he’s seeing. He scrolls to the next headline. 

Mt. Sinai Data Breach: Islanders’ John Tavares, Admiral’s Scott Hunter among athletes under scrutiny after anonymous leak

The words begin to slide out of focus as Scott breaks out in a fresh, cold sweat. All of his medications were handled through Shelly. Since he was nineteen, they had their system and it worked. They documented everything, and everything was airtight. 

Except the heat in 2002. The bad one. 

The one when they were still figuring out his doses in a panic after his late presentation. The one where he’d screamed and bled, enough that Shelly had taken him to Mt. Sinai at three AM with cash and about a hundred NDAs in a binder under her arm. 

He feels like he’s bleeding again now, like it's all draining out of him and all that’s left is dread.  

“Are you alright, man? What’s this about?”

“I-I don’t know.” He blinks, hard. “I need to, uh, talk to the media team, I think.” 

He shoves past his teammates, unable to stomach the doubt in their eyes. The hallway is quiet for a moment, until Scott lurches around the corner looking for Dan or Marcelle and realizes his mistake. 

The hall around the press room is packed, all the visiting Ottawa press and their regulars waiting to file in. Dan spots him and goes milk white, holding up his clipboard like he can block Scott from view. 

“Hunter, wait—” 

But it’s too late. What feels like a million flashbulbs go off. The sound hits him in a wall as every one of the vultures leaps for the chance at the first soundbite. 

What do you have to say about the allegations? Is it true that you’re on hormones? Why are your medical records sealed? Why is this leak the first fans are hearing about your treatment regimens? 

One voice jumps from the crowd, the words too pointed. Too clear in their assumptions. 

Too damning.

“Scott, what are you taking?”

“Taking? What are you—” 

“Do you feel pressure to keep up with younger players? Is that why you’ve turned to drugs?”

A fine ringing takes up in Scott’s ears. An assistant manager is pushing on his chest, trying to get him back in the locker room, but Scott surges forward until he has the reporter’s shirtfront in his fist. 

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” 

It takes Dan and two assistant coaches to pull Scott off the guy. There are a lot of pictures. There’s video. It circulates for weeks, his red, blurry face and hoarse voice, his grip white knuckled as he shoves a terrified SI journalist into cinderblock. The image goes great with the new headline that emerges: 

The New York Admiral’s Scott Hunter primary name attached to potential MLH doping scandal

K: I’ve just seen the news

K: Honey are you ok? 

K: Call me please I just need to know that you’re alright

K:...

K: Scott?

Chapter 2: Kip

Chapter Notes

Thank you, everyone, for reading and giving this fic a chance! I hope you enjoy these snippets of Scott and Kip's life in this version of the story.

2014

The smoothies don’t matter. 

The smoothies are nothing. 

They are an excuse, because Scott stops into a random business looking to tip ten dollars for a glass of ice water and catches a scent that says you concussed fucking dumbass, find a reason to stay here and show this guy your throat.

Scott drinks a smoothie (that, again, he does not give a shit about) so that he can stare at the hands of the Alpha who’s making it. So that he can pretend to text and catch how Kip’s eyes hook into his jaw, his biceps, and the cling of his compression top to his abs. Scott knows for a fact he’s giving off almost no scent, giving nothing in return to the warm, comfortable curl of yes that he’s pulling into his lungs. 

This Alpha is still looking at him. 

This Alpha, who clearly thinks Scott is an Alpha, is looking at him. 

Scott wants Kip to keep looking. 

Scott is still purring over the taste of Kip’s come in his mouth when the Alpha (his Alpha, insists the freak part of his brain that can’t be chill for one fucking minute) pauses tugging the boxers down Scott’s hips for the first time. 

“Oh.” 

“What?” Scott tries to think past the want. Past his hands catching on the silky drag of the product in Kip’s hair. 

“Nothing, it’s fine.” Kip nuzzles into the crease of Scott’s hip. “I just thought you were gay.” 

Scott laughs, a little uneasily, where he’s laid out waiting for the man he really likes to suck his dick. “I mean…I am?” 

Kip strokes his dick thoughtfully, pressing his thumb into the smooth base where it meets his balls. “Okay,” he says after a moment, and with a hot smile he dips and takes Scott’s cock into the back of his throat. 

Kip warms him up slow, working him with his mouth, so when he traces over Scott’s hole with two fingertips and a hushed “this okay?” Scott is actually wet. 

“Yeah,” Scott can only gasp, and “Please.” 

Kip curls his fingers inside, and he sucks Scott’s cock with the kind of skill that comes from unembarrassed practice. He makes him come, and Scott feels it in his whole body, pleasure quaking out of him like the faultlines spidering across a frozen lake in late April. 

He pulls Kip onto him after, his whole weight, and Kip pushes his face thoughtlessly into Scott’s throat, kissing and scenting. 

For the first time in years, Scott smells like something. Like, even just for now, he belongs to someone.

The smoothies don’t matter, but Kip makes him one in the morning, sliding it across the counter with a shy smile, and that matters. That’s an offering. He’s giving Scott food. Courting him, in the way Alphas did now that they’d evolved past hunting spears and battles to the death, or whatever. It’s silly. 

It’s incredible. 

It’s…a little complicated.

“You don’t have to say anything you aren’t ready for,” Kip says, while Scott pretends to enjoy the smoothie and really enjoys what it means to have the smoothie in his hands, “but I really like you and I’d like to see you again.” 

“Yeah.” Understatement of the year. “Yeah, definitely. Same.”

“So I thought I’d take a minute here,” Kip continues meaningfully, “in case there was anything that you’d like me to know. About you. …So that I can talk about it the right way.” 

Right. Scott lets go of the glass and flexes his hands against the countertop. He kind of wishes he had clothes on for this, but that would mean Kip would put clothes on, and then Scott wouldn’t get to look at him. 

“You’ve put it together that I’m not an Alpha.” It’s not really a question, and Kip doesn’t dignify it with an answer. Scott stumbles on: “I could tell before we had sex you were under the impression that I was, and, um, the things about me that led you to that conclusion were part of the reason you were into me.” 

Kip leans on the counter on his crossed elbows, face open. “That’s fair to say. Most of the guys I’ve dated have been other Alphas.” 

“And that’s cool with me, obviously.”

“Oh, thank you,” Kip says dryly, but his eyes are dancing. Laughing at Scott, a little in a way that makes him squirm. It gives him a little certainty he needs to continue:

“All of that stuff, what you liked, those are still true things about me. I’m—you know—I’m an Omega, but this is what I look like and who I am.” Scott gestures half-assedly at his body. His face. His height. “I’m not on steroids or anything. This is just how I come, give or take fifteen years of professional sports training.”

“It looks great on you.” Kip gives him the kind of look he’d thought he was sneaking in the smoothie shop, and Scott likes this version. A lot. “I definitely clocked you were on suppressants, by the way, but that’s kind of—I know a lot of gay Alphas who do that,” Kip rolls his eyes a little. “It’s like, a femme thing, sometimes.” 

Scott looks at him deeply askance. 

“I’m not saying it’s what I’m into,” Kip says, laughing. “Just, it’s not alien to me.” He slides a hand across the countertop, playing with the tips of Scott’s fingers. “Nothing about you is.” 

“Thanks.” Scott works their fingers together until they’re almost interlocked. Kip has such gorgeous hands. “But I think I know what you were getting at with this, uh, talk, and I appreciate it but it’s not really like that.” He thinks about his pills and his strange, painful heats, but also the way that having Kip’s scent cling to his skin makes him feel. “I’m not an Alpha. I’m an Omega, and I don’t hate anything about it.”

Kip squeezes Scott’s hand. “Okay.”

“It makes things more complicated for my job, and the optics of it all are tough. I can’t, uh—I know people talk about Shane Hollander now, but I’ve been doing this the way I have for so long, that at this point saying anything would be like coming out.” The thought filled him with cold dread. “It would be admitting to everyone I care about that I lied, and I can’t do that. Not right now.”

“I understand.” 

“I care about what I do a lot. Maybe more than some of things I’m not doing so that I can play hockey.” Scott breathes, slow. “But the parts of being an Omega that I get to have, I like them. They’re part of me. And that part of me really likes that you’re an Alpha.” 

He takes Kip’s held hand and brushes it against his mouth. Breathes in against his wrist. 

“I caught your scent and, uh, I want you so bad.” 

Kip's thumb traces the shell of his ear. Scott has never been touched like this. He's starving.

“I’ve never had an Alpha in my space. My—um, my den. Ever. And you’re here, now, and I like it. I like you…and I want you to stay.” 

Kip made him an offering. Scott is reciprocating, in the only strange, intense way he knows how. He doesn’t have any other way to give this, except with everything he has. His whole broken down body. His whole private self. 

He gets home from practice that day, and Kip is on his couch, in soft clothes and with his grad school applications like he lives there. Like he’s been here forever. Like he’s not going anywhere. 

Scott breathes in the scent of his occupied den and goes—maybe—a little crazy.

He knocks Kip’s glasses off kissing him, pinning him down to the sofa with his weight and getting his scent back on him, cheek to cheek and throat to throat until with a shivery rumble Kip snarls and puts him on his back against the couch cushions. He pins his wrists and rolls his weight down to show Scott how much he wants him and when he rasps, hot in Scott’s ear, “Do you want it like this?” Scott’s eyes roll back in his head.

They end up on the floor so that Scott can feel the weight of Kip holding him down properly, pushing inside with enough of Scott’s own slick to manage and enough extra lube to make the hungry squelch of their fuck almost too loud to hear over when Kip asks against the sweaty skin of Scott’s back, “Do you want me to knot?” 

“Yes.” Scott wants the knot. 

He wants Kip to stay. 

He wants everything. 

Two months later

Somebody snaps a photo of them. It’s nothing, really, and it’s pretty clear the photographer doesn’t have any idea what he captured, a blurry shot centered on Scott and Kip half out of frame as they walk down the sidewalk with a Walgreens bag because Kip had needed a new pack of razors. They look like strangers and the caption is just a list of designers the captain of the New York Admirals had thoughtlessly endorsed throwing on the first clothes he grabbed off the floor after they’d fucked to pop out and run an errand.

Even Scott is finding it impossible to catastrophize over. He still buzzes around the kitchen that night with a strange energy. 

“Babe, no one is going to identify me from half a face in a newspaper photo,” Kip says, trying to feel out what the actual problem is behind the obvious. “Even if they did, we’re two people on the same sidewalk in Manhattan. It’s not exactly damning.” 

“I know.” Scott still drummed his fingers on the counter, half an abandoned protein shake going warm by the blender. After another antsy minute: “What if we did identify you?” 

Scott doesn’t give off much scent. So Kip can’t get the kind of read on him he’d like when he asks “What do you mean?” 

Kip holds out his hand, and Scott slides into the stool beside him at the counter. Kip rubs his thumbs into Scott’s wrists until some of the manic energy seeps out of him.

“There’s a couple of guys on the team now whose mates are male Omegas.” Scott curls their hands together properly. “It’s still pretty unusual but nobody gives them any shit about it, as long as they fit a certain type.”

“Okay.” Kip doesn’t really follow where this is going yet. 

“I asked my publicist, just in general, how it would go if I’d met someone like that. ”  

Scott’s eyes flick up to his, nervous and hopeful.

“Oh,” Kip realizes. He opens his mouth to speak but Scott continues, in a hot rush. 

“We wouldn’t have to do too much all at once,” he promises, like he’s ever been capable of doing things halfway. “No MAGs stuff, ever, if you didn’t want to. But, um, we could take steps. You could wear my jersey to a game maybe, and we could leave together, and when people found the photo again and asked, I could say that I’ve been seeing someone.” 

“An Omega.” 

“That would be the narrative. Yeah.” Scott’s eyes dart away. “And it would raise a few eyebrows—it always does, but it would be okay, because it would still kind of fit what people were expecting.” 

“Scott…” 

It’s so clearly not a yes that Scott almost flinches away from it, laughing with no humor as he tries to curl into himself in a way that his frame makes impossible.

“You know what—never mind. I—you’re an Alpha, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to—"

“I would.” Kip puts his fingers over Scott’s lips to stop him saying things that are the furthest thing from true. That make it sound like Kip doesn’t want Scott for the parts of him that make Kip so glad to be a man who loves men. He loves the parts of Scott that make him feel like an Alpha, and the parts of him that remind him being an Alpha is just one thing, and desire is so much better and more complicated than that. “I would try anything if it meant getting to share more of what you mean to me.”

A little tension leaves the air, Scott’s non-scent scent still giving away the big clues. “But…?”

“Baby.” Kip didn’t know how to apologize for something he doesn’t feel guilty about. “The first time anybody googles my name they’re gonna find pictures of me at Alpha Leather Pride.” 

The example is maybe too distracting, because even with the difficult topic Scott’s eyes flicker down Kip’s chest, sparking with interest. “Is that something you’re, uh, into?” 

“I was twenty-two and I liked the way it made people look at me. Not really the point I’m making.” 

Scott draws the hand he’s set heavy on Kip’s thigh back a little. “Right. Sorry.” 

“It’s okay.” Kip will never be annoyed with Scott for wanting him. But this conversation unfortunately isn’t about wanting.

“I’ve been going to Pride since I was sixteen. I’m a regular at gay bars. Being an Alpha, and you know, being queer…it’s a public part of who I am, and I can’t put it back in the bottle.” 

Scott nods. “And you don’t want to.” 

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t.” There are limits to what a publicist can do, and Kip is well beyond them. “I’m sorry. It’s never occurred to me to live secret like that.” Like you. “And now—” 

“It’s too late.” Scott never set his jaw like this when he was mad. He did it when letting go of his control would betray him. When it would show too much of what he wanted and couldn’t have. 

Scott had made choices and now there was no easy way for their lives to fit together.  

“It’s not too late,” Kip promises, pulling Scott into his arms until he’s half between his thighs, his head propped up on Kip’s shoulder. “ Not for us. Just for that version of the story.” 

This close he can pull a trace of Scott’s faint scent from the tender skin of his throat, and it’s so disappointed. Still, Scott holds him, nuzzling into his hair. 

“It’s okay,” Scott promises. “It was just an idea.”

The version of the story that they’re in doesn’t have an easy trick to get them to the end. They keep trying. They really do. 

Scott wants everything. But there’s only so much that Kip can give under the conditions Scott has set himself. There’s only so much that he’s allowed, and Kip can’t break down walls if Scott is the one who sets them up. 

Kip has to go home, eventually, and it’s not over, not really, but Scott still sleeps in his empty nest the first night with the ugly instinctual curdle of having been abandoned by the only mate he’s ever wanted.

Chapter End Notes

Next: Verdicts

Chapter 3: Verdicts

Chapter Notes

Second chapter today! Thank you for all your wonderful comments. If you're just checking in today, be sure to see chapter 2: Kip before reading this.

There’s enough truth to the rumors that Scott is immediately suspended from the active roster pending an official investigation. He misses three games. The Admirals pull up a regular from the farm leagues and hold their record by the skin of their teeth, only getting truly obliterated against Montreal. 

Scott drops off the face of the earth for five days of closed door interviews and medical testing. Cooperating fully is a phrase that his lawyer uses a lot. The blood and urine he’s used to. The pregnancy test is a little hard to swallow, but it is what it is. He’s cooperating fully. 

(He doesn’t even know if a positive result would be possible at this point. If after everything he’s done to himself he even can. He doesn’t think about it and he doesn’t Kip text back. Not yet.) 

He calls a team meeting the day before the committee announces its verdict. Plenty of guys don’t answer the email, probably holding their breath with their thumbs on the button for their publicist approved condemnations until the last possible second, but every single one of them shows up on the day. Twenty-two Alphas, age nineteen to forty-three, spread out in the Admiral’s infirmary at eight AM on a Sunday to hear what he has to say, because Scott Hunter is still fucking captain of this team, and he’s shed enough blood on the ice to earn at least this courtesy.

With everyone assembled, Scott nods at Shelly, who punches in the code on her station safe. Most of his stuff had gone to the labs, but Scott was on a heavy enough suppressant that pulling him off cold turkey was a health risk. Shelly pulled out what they’d left him, and Scott braces his hands on the table in front of him.

“You’re not gonna hear it from a press release,” He says, looking at each man in the room in turn. “You’re gonna hear it from me.” 

The list of chemicals that look an awful lot like illegal steroids make a lot more sense with their pharmaceutical labels. Scott practically tips out his medicine cabinet on an exam table, letting bottles rattle and the blister packs scrape brushed steel. Enough of the guys are mated that their eyes immediately widen in comprehension as they take in the familiar brand names. Some of them need it explained to them, between the sheltered younger players who think Axe body spray is a legitimate scent neutralizer and the veterans working on their sixth pups who have never thought about birth control a day in their lives. Scott gives it out in halting, but clear detail, like he’s a fucking sex-ed teacher, Shelly at his side to answer questions.   

“It’s all here,” Scott promises, when he’s done, and Shelly has set her records on the table with a thud. “It’s all documented, and it’s all legal. Every fucking aspirin I’ve taken since I was nineteen is in this book.” 

There’s a lot more than aspirin in Shelly’s binder. The pills on the table are proof, and the pages of Shelly’s careful handwriting only show the depth of what Scott has hidden from them all for years. 

“Why?” 

Scott doesn’t hear who asks. He shrugs, refusing to look at the ground. Refusing to turn away. 

“When I presented, Omegas didn’t play professional hockey. I just wanted my shot.” 

The conversation struggles for air after that, like a punctured lung has stolen the words from everyone’s mouths. 

A couple of older guys in the back of the room walk out. Bergmann, Dubois, McAllister. 

(McAllister had come up from Rochester. He’d been the one to call Scott “rook” and buy him a Genesee tallboy after his first goal on home ice. Scott had worshipped him. He won’t look at Scott now. The door falls shut behind him with a slam.)  

A rookie gets up shakily, like he might follow the veterans and Scott just hears a hissed sit down, you fucking dumbass from among the defensemen. The rookie sits. No one else leaves. 

“It’s not up to me, what the league decides, but, uh, this is the truth. This is what it is.” Scott swallows hard. “If the path I set on when I was nineteen means I’m gone now, then I’ll just say that it’s been an honor to play for New York.” 

If Scott was expecting applause, or inspirational speeches, he doesn’t get them. But after another long beat of silent, nervous faces, Vaughan steps forward and claps Scott on the shoulder.   

“Alright, Cap,” he says, and it’s not a hundred percent but it’s enough as he manages to slant something close to his usual grin. “Alright.”

Scott has had his phone off for most of the last five days. He’s in his game day suit, pacing the floor of the coach’s office while they set up a press conference where a ghoul from MLH Ethics and Discipline is going to read out everything for anybody with an internet connection to hear. His manager was texting a mile a minute on his ancient Blackberry, when he got a phone call that made his eyes widen. 

“Yeah,” he said into the speaker with no greeting. “Yeah, I’ve got him. Put him on.” 

He put the phone in Scott’s hands, and now Scott was on the line with Shane Hollander.

“Hi, um, Mr. Hunter. Scott, I mean.” 

“Hey, man. I appreciate the call.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Shane’s voice crackles over the international line. “I just, uh, I obviously have a clearer picture of what’s going on here than some people. I felt like it would be fucked up, you know, if I didn’t—If we didn’t talk.” 

“Yeah.” Scott cleared his throat. “Just a heads up, you’re going to start getting a lot of calls in the next half hour or so.” 

Shane laughed, halfway. “Yeah. No worries. We’re prepped for that. Statement of support ready to go.” 

“Thanks, I guess.” 

There’s a long pause. 

“Listen…I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened the way it did.” Five days, and Hollander is the first to say it. “You’ve given a lot to your team, and to the sport, and this should have been your choice to make. I’m sorry.” 

Scott blinks hard. He can’t shut down now. He’s got to go look calm in front of fifty cameras while somebody else decides if he’s ever allowed to touch professional ice again. 

“Thanks. Yeah, it’s…not gonna lie, I’ve had easier weeks.” 

“Yeah. I’ve been there.” 

Someone cracks the door and signals five minutes. Scott nods. 

“I’ve gotta run,” he says to Hollander. “But it means a lot. Really.” 

“Yeah. Good luck.” And then: “I knew I couldn’t be the only one, you know? We probably still aren’t.” 

“Yeah,” Scott repeats. “Maybe. Take care.” 

“You too. Look me up next time you’re in Montreal.” 

“Will do.” 

Scott hands his manager back his phone, and then it’s time. 

The press room has never been so full. The regulars are jammed into the room with a lot of faces Scott has never seen before. By the look of the press badges there are guys here in person from as far as Chicago, and the camera set up sending the result out to who nows how many millions of people. 

This is not game commentary going on the third page of the sports section. This is a story going on the cover of the NYT. This is going on CNN tonight. 

Scott isn’t here to talk. He’s been expressly forbidden from doing so by about eight million lawyers, which is fine, because if he opens his mouth he’s going puke. He’s at the table, Marcelle next to him, but the microphones are all pointed at the MLH official and the pre-written statement. On the other side, the Admiral’s head coach and the team owner are sitting with their arms crossed. Not happy to be there. Not giving anything away. 

Shelly is in the building somewhere. Scott has been doing everything he can to make sure she keeps her job. After today there might be more limits to his influence with management. 

“Ladies and gentleman. Let’s begin.” The official seems to understand the shitshow he’s about to throw them all in regardless of the outcome, and honestly Scott appreciates the gravitas as the room falls into a tense silence. The guy must be almost seventy, comb-over hair and a thick pair of reading glasses on his nose as he pulls his statement out of a sealed manila envelope with a tremor in his hands. 

“This press conference constitutes the public conclusions of a special investigation by Major League Hockey Ethics and Discipline Committee into the conduct of the New York Admirals’ Scott Hunter, regarding information that has come to light as a result of medical files leaked in an internal data breach at the Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. We thank Mr. Hunter and the Admiral’s medical team for their full cooperation with this investigation, and we offer the following findings:  

After a thorough evaluation of Mr. Hunter’s medical records as well as a physical examination by independent MLH medical staff, it is the duty of this investigation committee to confirm Mr. Hunter’s disclosure that he is now and has always been a primary gender male and a secondary gender Omega.” 

Chaos erupts in the room. It’s a brief and hallucinatory tableau as Scott scans the expressions of shock and disbelief. The wall of gasps hit him on a second delay like a thunderclap as the official holds out his hands: Ladies and gentleman. Ladies and gentlemen, if I can have quiet please. 

For about five seconds it’s no use. Scott Hunter is an Omega. It may as well be Jeter, or Carmello Anthony. 

Eventually they get the audience under control, and the official rereads the sentence for the record which had been cut off by the cacophony. 

“Furthermore,” he continues, finally getting to what Scott doesn’t already know, “It is the opinion of this expert committee that at no point in his career has Mr. Hunter participated in the use of any substances or supplements which would exceed his necessary reproductive healthcare, nor stand in violation of the rules and ethical codes of the MLH.”

That’s the big one, and it gets almost as big of a reaction. It means no ban. They can’t take his Rookie of the Year, or his Olympic medal. Scott tries to keep a neutral face but a small, shuddering sound escapes him. Next to him, Marcelle grips his arm, hard. He gives a tiny nod. 

Nothing for the cameras but certainty. 

“It is our belief that Mr. Hunter’s use of long-term reproductive suppressants, scent neutralizers, and contraceptives have been in the service of his health and safety and have no significant bearing on his physical capabilities as an athlete.” The official’s shaky sip of water gives Scott plenty of time to feel the weight of eyes on him in the brief vacuum of bureaucratic language.  “This is confirmed by Mr. Hunter’s years of voluntary participation in league standard drug testing, and the committee has found no evidence to suggest that those test results were ever in any way compromised through the actions of Mr. Hunter or any other person on his behalf.” 

“On the basis of these conclusions, Mr. Hunter remains a player in good standing in the MLH and no changes will be made to his professional record, nor to the statistics of any games in which he has played as a member of the New York Admirals. We apologize to Mr. Hunter for this unfortunate invasion of his privacy and wish him the best of luck in the coming season. Thank you. There will be no questions at this time.” 

The whole statement is less than a full sheet of paper. Scott stares ahead and thinks about the people in the room who will be expensing plane tickets to hear some guy read out fifteen sentences, until Marcelle tugs on his elbow and he’s being steered out of the room amid the barrage of a thousand questions that won’t be getting answers.

“That went about as well as it could,” Marcelle says, depositing Scott back in the empty office. He’s never been so glad to see cinderblock. 

“I guess so,” Scott agrees, with a numbness that’s honestly a little frightening. 

“Management wants you on the phone in ten, and then it’s going to be a bloody afternoon with Under Armor.” 

“Yeah.” Scott scrubs a hand over his face. “Got it. I’ll be ready for the call.”

“Alright. You did good, Hunter.” 

The door closes, and it’s silent. Scott sits on the floor, his back to the wall and cold tile under his ass. He breathes for ten long seconds, and turns his phone on. That’s another two minutes as he waits for the small nuclear explosion of all his missed voicemails and texts to register. He ignores them all, and finds Kip’s number. 

S: Come over tonight? 

S: I just need to see you

K:...

K…

K: I’ll be there when you get home 

Scott turns his phone off again before it can ring and puts his head between his knees.

Chapter End Notes

:'(

Next up: Ease and Friction

Chapter 4: Ease and Friction

Chapter Notes

Thank you for all the wonderful comments! It means so much to hear what aspects of this fic are speaking to you :)

Kip hears the beep of the keypad a little after eight, and Scott practically falls into the apartment, still in the disheveled pieces of his game day suit. 

“Hi.” 

It’s a weird mirror of the first time Scott had ever come home to him. Scott stands in the entryway, blinking slow, like he isn’t sure Kip is really there. 

“Hi.” He drops his bag and his jacket. His loose tie slides out of his collar as he cross the room, The silk hits the floor beside Kip’s bare feet, and Scott’s knees next as he drops, heavy, but still unavoidably graceful between Kip’s legs where he’s been sitting on the couch. Kip finds the dark circles under Scott’s eyes with the pad of his thumb, and Scott winces like he’s touched a bruise. 

“I’m sorry it’s been so hard.” 

Scott closes his eyes. Nods. Pushes his face into Kip’s hand until his whole body is melting and he’s fitted himself as close and tight as he can into the space below Kip’s ribs. 

“‘M so tired,” he says, almost too quiet to hear and the words crammed into the press of Kip’s stomach when he breathes.   

“Hey.” Kip smooths a firm palm up and down the column of Scott’s spine. “Shh. Let’s go to bed, okay?” 

Scott shakes his head, jerky, his hands bunched tight in Kip’s shirt like a pup. He’s trembling so hard. He exhales into Kip’s stomach and it comes out wounded. Kip holds him, as tight as he can, showing him all his strength so that Scott can have this. So that the poison of this awful week can finally drain out of him and soak Kip’s shirtfront. 

“Please,” Kip pushes the words soft into Scott’s hair, because he knows it’s what Scott wants to say and can’t right now. Can’t take one more thing excised from the hidden parts of him that he isn’t ready to give. “Please take me to bed. I need to feel your weight on me. I need to be in your nest and I need your cock inside me. Please, baby.” 

Kip spreads scent into Scott’s hair and makes demands that are really promises.

“Please take care of me.” I’ve got you. 

“Please don’t make me go.” I won’t leave you.

Scott comes back online one muscle at a time until he’s pulling Kip off the couch and into his lap, eyes hot and wet as he finds his mouth and puts all his desire there without having to say a word. They climb and crawl over each other until they find the bedroom and Scott can lick him open, Kip’s face pressed blissfully into the bedding, the only place where Scott’s scent ever has a chance to stick. It’s fingers and lube and work to get Kip open and then Scott is heavy on his back, his cock pushing thick inside and—oh—Kip has missed this so much. 

“You’re here,” Scott shivers out gratefully into the back of Kip’s neck as he fucks him. His hands pull at Kip’s hips and his chest and slide up his arms to curl over the greedy clench of his fists. 

“I’m here,” Kip agrees, in the hot spaces between the sound of their bodies meeting. “Show me how much you want me.” 

Scott rumbles deep his chest, an Alpha sound, but oh, it’s not, it’s not. He’s his own perfect thing and it hasn’t been easy but in this way they’ve always fit together seamlessly. Scott pulls him into the hard thrust of his cock, and in the blur of being wanted Kip realizes one of Scott’s hands is missing from his skin until there’s wet fingers at his mouth. Kip takes them inside and sucks and Scott’s slick bursts across his senses like a drug. 

It’s perfect. 

They come, and in the dark Scott curls around him in the safety of heavy blankets, still giving out his deep, lovely, in-between sounds as he tucks his head under Kip’s chin. He sleeps like the dead, and Kip guards their nest. 

The hard part is not over, but Kip knows he won’t be leaving his mate again.

“What if we went out somewhere?” Scott voices the thought mostly to his bedroom ceiling.

Kip gives a curious trill against his chest, mostly asleep. 

“I’m not saying Red Lobster in Times Square, or anything,” Scott continues, feeling like he’s back in his body after an ugly trip. He smooths his hand down Kip’s back because he can. “There’s gotta be a dive bar in fuck-off Queens where we can go and watch a basketball game or something. Just to be out of here. Just to see what it’s like.” 

“Baby. Yes.” Kip ruffles Scott’s hair, still sleepy. “But it’s three AM.” 

Scott nods. Kip is the smart one. “Tomorrow, then. Brunch in Staten Island?”

Kip laughs, and kisses him. Pushes his face into his throat and breathes in the scent Scott has to give. 

“It’s a date.”  

Things are still a little hot, in reality, for Scott to be on the train, or in bars, or even buying his own groceries. It’s just too soon and his face is too present in the news cycle. He’s also back on the ice, and his first two games are back-to-back away. 

But if he’s going to have to do this anyway, Scott wants to start working the muscles loose that are locked up from keeping himself hidden. 

The bottom falls out of the Admiral’s season. Scott is reinstated as soon as the verdict is announced and he scrapes out another fifteen goals but he’s lost the room, and he can’t blame most of them for not trying. An entire MLH team can’t turn on a dime. There’s no all-hands, there’s no orientation program, and there’s no break for twenty-two guys to wrap their head around their captain being the thing that until now they primarily related to as a hole they needed to get wet enough to stick their knot in, or (more or less flatteringly, Scott isn’t sure) the homemaker who holds the pups while the Alphas play hockey. 

Scott isn’t either of those things, but he isn’t an Alpha anymore, and even the guys who are really giving their best just don’t know what to do with him calling plays like nothing has changed. 

Conversations fall silent when he walks in the room. Passes don’t connect. The chirps at the face-offs die out as guys Scott has competed against for years look at him like he’s a fucking stranger.

Things come to a head at home against Detroit. They’re hanging onto a play-off slot by their fingernails and Scott takes a hard check into the boards he shouldn’t have. He goes down with an ugly throb in his ankle while Detroit sends the puck back to Admirals ice and he’s still on his knees when he hears the buzzer go off. Scott manages to skate to the bench but he’s out for the rest of the second period while Shelly takes a look at him. 

A couple of guys drop gloves when Scott goes down, but it’s pretty standard stuff and the game goes on. It was a clean hit from Detroit’s end. 

The problem is in the locker room.

Scott is the last in the tunnel as always and he’s slow walking on skates with his ankle wrapped so he’s the last to crash into the scuffle going down in the hallway. A couple of the younger D-men are trying to pull Vaughan off of John McAllister, and Vaughny’s linemen are shoving into the mix, half trying to break up the fight and half getting sucked into the spike of aggression that the ice usually deadens in their lungs.  

“Hey. Hey.” Scott shoves his way into the middle and gets a hard elbow in Vaughn’s chest as McAllister gives a threatening snarl. “Cut that shit out.” 

“He left you open.” Vaughan tries to lunge again and Scott has to scruff him like a pup. “He did it on fucking purpose—” 

“And?” Scott forces Vaughan’s head up. “Now you’re gonna send him out to the third period with a black eye from his own fucking locker room? You think that helps me? You think it helps this team?” 

Vaughan’s eyes are darting, the anger rolling off him in waves, and it’s not doing Scott any favors. Guys fight for him. That’s the whole point. Scott’s the center. Scott’s the captain. But shit is different now and he’s not going to have a bunch of twenty-four year olds posturing at threats like Scott’s their battered mother. 

“Put it in the net, Vaughnny. We could use the damned points.”  

After a long second, Vaughan deflates. Submits, the way Scott used to take for granted, eyes down as he slinks back into the locker room with his linemates. The rest of the circle breaks up just as fast, and it’s almost familiar. Almost the way things are supposed to be. 

Except: 

“John.” 

“He’s full of shit, Scott.” It’s the first thing McAllister has said to him directly in two weeks, still leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and the stupid pissed off look on his face. 

“He’s not.” Scott wipes his hand over his mouth. This is supposed to be what he does for this team and instead he’s staring down his own enforcer like he’s a sullen stone wall. 

“You got a problem with me,” Scott says at last. “We can handle it off the ice. But do your fucking job out there. If I can’t see the net we go home this season with nothing.” 

That’s supposed to be the end of it. Scott doesn’t take pleasure in telling off players who have been on the bench longer than him. But he turns to go back inside and pull some kind of game out of a 2-4 scoreboard and McAllister spits on the ground. 

“I thought you could take a hit, but I guess I was wrong.”

Scott braces a fist against the doorframe. He’s so tired. 

“Maybe if I’d let a few more checks through in the oughts, we all would have seen what you were,” McAllister mutters. “Could have spared us this whole fucking shitshow.”

Scott puts a crack in the defenseman’s sour fucking attitude when he slams McAllister into the wall and unlike Vaughan, Scott doesn’t go halfway. John struggles and it’s for nothing. Scott isn’t where he is because he can’t knock heads together when the situation calls for it. There’s not an Alpha on this team that Scott couldn’t pin and he savors the savage pull of it now across his back and shoulders. The blink-and-miss-it flicker of panic in McAllister’s scent. 

“What do you want me to do, huh?” Scott demands, McAllister’s panting breath hot on his face. “You think I wanted this? I would have kept my mouth shut. I would have put my body through hell and cut anyone who came close out of my life so I could retire in two years as just one of the guys. If I’d been able to do it my way we’d still be drinking beers at Gino’s and you’d have no fucking clue because I can take a hit, and you know that.”  

McAllister tries to get in a fuck you, and Scott just shakes him.

“This is it. We’re in this fucking shitshow. And this shitshow has five-hundred and seventy career goals, which is about five hundred more than you have, so get your head out of your ass and do your part for this team like I’m trying to.” 

Scott lets him go with a hard shove, and McAllister glowers, chest heaving as he tugs his jersey into place with an ugly chuff. 

“Whatever you say, Cap.”

Scott wishes John would just call him bitch, like he clearly wants to. Scott could use the catharsis of tearing out somebody’s throat. Instead, he goes back to the locker room and tries to talk any of his teammates into looking him in the eye.

They play. They lose. Detroit takes another two goals, and just like that, the Admirals are out of the playoffs. 

K: Dinner tonight? Out? There’s a hole in the wall dumpling place at the bottom of Bay Ridge

K: No TVs, no cameras

K: We can get take out, even, if it’s busy

K:...

K: But we could go in and order together 

S: …

The door the office opens, and Scott slides his phone away with the text-in-progress bubbles still rolling at the bottom of Kip’s messages. Harv Murdock takes a heavy seat across from him, fingers drumming on the desk he’s held as head coach of the Admirals for almost ten years. 

“Scott, it’s pretty clear we have a problem.” 

What can Scott say? “Yes, sir.” 

“We’ve gotta figure out the future of this team, and you’re a part of that conversation, but something’s gotta give here.” 

“I understand, sir. I’ve got thoughts.” 

Coach Murdock sits back in his chair with a nod. “Alright. Let’s talk.”

Chapter End Notes

🔥🔥🔥

Next: Stretches

Chapter 5: Stretches

Chapter Notes

So excited about some of the scenes in this chapter. I hope you'll let me know what you think :D

“Let me be blunt: You are kicking the shit out of your endocrine system.” 

Now that he can, Shelly convinces Scott to see an actual doctor. Kip helps him do some research, and they end up schlepping out to a nicer part of Astoria than Scott knew existed to see a hormone and GYN specialist who has a good reputation with the queer community and is willing to sign a soft NDA. He leaves Kip with a kiss and an outdated copy of Women’s Weekly in the waiting room. 

(They’re meeting Kip’s dad for Greek food after this. They’re going to sit down in the diner and everything.) 

“Yeah,” Scott says, after more bloodwork and another fucking ultrasound. “Well, we kinda figured my shit out on the fly in 2002 and I haven’t changed much since. I’m open to suggestions.” 

“You’ve had one heat a year since 2002?” Dr. Roth repeats, almost professionally, but when Scott nods he mutters something that sounds like dear god in heaven. “Okay, Mr. Hunter. Let’s discuss your goals for your reproductive health going forward.”

It’s probably the first doctor’s visit Scott has had since he was in juniors where every test and treatment suggestion wasn’t in service of the ultimate goal of getting Scott Hunter back on the ice as soon as possible. They talk about more recent suppression options that would be gentler on his body, and now that he doesn’t have to account for his whereabouts as an “Alpha” every day, it’s pretty clear Scott can have a heat over the Thanksgiving break and in the summer. 

“Two heats really make a difference?” he asks. 

“Two heats is a forty percent reduction in your chance of getting uterine cysts like the one you were hospitalized for in 2002. They’ll suck a lot less, also, once your body adjusts.” 

“Got it. Two heats it is.” Scott is already tapering off his current suppressants. It’s his normal summer routine. This time he’ll have an Alpha in his nest for his July heat before training kicks off. 

Roth continues flipping through Shelly’s binder, making notes in the margins. “The pill still seems like the best option for you. Considering how much you get slammed around I don’t know how much I could trust sticking the hormones in your arm.” He pauses, flipping stacks of pages to compare consecutive years. “Why are you on a pharmaceutical scent blocker? Is that a league standard?” 

“No.” Famously most players don’t block scent, since the ice does it anyway. “Why? Do you think I don’t need it?” 

“Do I think you need a drug that’s going to box your kidneys by the time you’re sixty to do what a corner store stick of deodorant can do?” This guy is kind of a dick. Scott likes him. “No, but if we take you off it and in three months all your teammates are in love with you we can revisit the subject.”  

They touch inevitably on the question of fertility. It’s an issue Scott still feels kind of disconnected to, like he’s asking on behalf of a buddy if it’s hypothetically possible for him to carry a child in his body. 

Still, Scott asks, and Roth hums thoughtfully.

“Anything’s possible. It’s not like there’s anything physically wrong with your equipment. It just hasn’t had a chance to work since you presented. Whether you could conceive and carry to term—” The doctor clicks his tongue against his teeth. “You’re thirty-four and your job’s been pretty rough on your body. If you were in here for a family planning consult I would prepare you to consider alternatives.”

“Alternatives?” 

“Surrogacy?” Roth suggests. “You’ve got the building blocks, assuming that young Alpha in the waiting room is involved. It’s a lot of red tape but you’ve got the money. You could have your own genetic child.” 

“Huh.” Scott shifts, and the paper of the exam table cover crinkles under his weight. “Well, that seems like a conversation to have with my partner, maybe sometime in the next two to three years.” 

Dr. Roth nods. “One step at a time, Mr. Hunter. Now, let me get you those new prescriptions.” 

(They have lunch with Kip’s dad, and Scott doesn’t even panic when a gruff manager shyly slides an Admiral’s pennant onto the table for Scott to sign along with their bill. Scott has the thought, holding Kip’s hand as they walk from the middle of nowhere back to the subway platform, that George Grady would probably love being a grandfather one day.)

Scott has one season to get his house in order. In fifteen years of play he’s delivered too consistently for upper management not to give him that chance. 

If Scott can’t get the Admirals to at least a decent playoff showing then the coming season will be his last. He’ll retire with nothing to be ashamed of, but no cup. No chance to pull a few more bricks out of the wall standing between male Omegas and professional sports. 

He’ll never skate professional ice again. Scott is dealing with that mental reality. 

In the meantime, he dedicates a chunk of his summer not already spent on slow-rolling his public relationship with an Alpha and chemically adjusting to about half the suppressants he’s used to to team politics.

Kip is getting a big queer kick out of playing First Lady to Scott’s hockey president. 

“Can you really tolerate this?” Scott asks honestly, as Kip boxes up his homemade pasta salad for a team picnic at Vaughan’s house in Scarsdale. “I don’t want you to have to be something you’re not.” He’s barefoot in jeans in his own kitchen. He’s been off the scent neutralizers for ten days. He can tell from the way Kip’s eyes keep catching on him that he’s coming back online, so to speak. Scott doesn’t really know what that means for him. For them. He’s smelled like almost nothing since he was nineteen. 

“Can I handle a bunch of straight Omegas fawning over me for two hours?” Kip flutters his eyelashes with no little irony. “Honey, I was born for this.”

Scott slides his arms around his Alpha’s waist. Kisses his neck where the scent is the strongest. “You are so hot.” 

Kip slings a hand behind his head, until he can reach the back of Scott’s neck and scruff him a little. Pull him down so Kip can scent him in return. “I do my best.” 

Kip nips the scent gland in Scott’s throat playfully, and there’s no rush but Scott feels like he knows what it means. Someday. Soon.

(“This is my partner, Kip,” Scott says, faced with Vaughan and his wife and about a dozen of his teammates milling around an Upstate New York backyard with mates and kids. 

Vaughan and most of the offensive line take in Kip, done up in his Art Historian drag with his glasses and linen shirt and tupperware of pasta salad, and they see Scott again in a way they can understand. 

It’s manipulative. It’s diabolical. Kip throws Scott a hot wink as Laura drags him off to meet “the girls” and Vaughny pops the cap off a beer for him.

“Thrilled you guys could make it, Cap.”

Scott drinks his beer, and plays lawn hockey with the kids, and lets them all acclimate to the new normal.) 

Heat has never been good for Scott. It’s more like a bloodletting, all the slick and scent and hormones stampeding out of him in a panic the one time of year they get the chance. 

He did his best to prepare Kip, who swallows down his horror as Scott shivers and aches and throws up bile from the pain of his internal organs rebelling against the chemical manacles Scott forged to fit a certain brand of masculinity. 

“I am going to tell bell hooks on you,” Kip says, stroking the sweaty hair off of Scott’s face when he’s finally over the first ugly peak and they can curl up in his nest where it’s soft and dim. 

“I don’t know who that is.” Scott nuzzles into Kip’s chest, pulling comfort from the scratch of his chest hair against his cheek and the protectiveness steeping in his scent.

Kip kisses Scott’s brow. “I’ll make you a reading list.” 

With Kip, Scott actually gets somewhere close to feeling good by the end of the second day. The muscle-deep pit of alone is gone, filled up by his Alpha’s scent and his smile and the stupid electrolyte juice boxes Kip keeps shoving under his nose because I’m a good provider, baby, just drink it so I can relax. Scott sleeps and Kip doesn’t, instinct keeping him awake and Scott safe so that when he wakes up, Kip can kiss him until he’s canting up his hips and saying “Please.” 

Kip works two fingers deep inside him, stroking Scott gentle and then hard where he’s swollen and soft. 

“You’re so wet,” Kip murmurs, a rumbling buzz in Scott’s ear as he curls his fingers hard until Scott comes, helplessly baring his throat. 

“It’s yours,” Scott rasps past the blood rushing in his ears. “It’s for you.” 

“I know, baby.” Kip’s mouth finds his neck, and Scott pushes the tender skin between his teeth. Kip nibbles, and kisses, and sucks, and as he feels the blood heat of the bruises pulled to the surface Scott almost says oh hell, just do it. 

I already belong to you.

But they have time. Scott rolls on his side, slack and relieved, and Kip fits his cock in the slick mess between his thighs. He fucks there until he comes, telling Scott in hushed, hot whispers how good he is. How sweet he shows his Alpha his throat. How right they fit together, in their unexpected, beautiful shapes. 

Heats have never been good for Scott, but this is the best he’s ever had. 

Things are changing. 

“Hunter! They let you out of nursing home for visit?” 

“Welcome to my home,” Shane Hollander says loudly over Ilya Rozanov being a dick when Scott shows up with a bottle of wine for dinner after a last-minute scouting mission brought him to Montreal for a weekend. “Glad we could finally make this happen.” 

“Yeah,” Scott says, admittedly distracted by the Boston star center who appeared to be very at home in Shane’s downtown loft. “Thanks for having me.”

“I was kind of planning to do these two conversations separately, but—” 

A curly haired toddler with Hollander’s eyes pokes her head out of Rozanov’s lap, eyeing Scott curiously from where they were both sprawled on the living room carpet.

“That’s Eileen.” Shane says. “My daughter.” 

“Eilushka,” Rozanov murmurs softly to the baby, “Say hello to this old man.” 

Eileen is clearly not really verbal yet. Still a baby, more than a kid. But her face says a lot. The way she leans into Rozanov’s chest, watching Scott with a shy smile that matches her father’s.

“Oh.” Scott might need to reevaluate his relationship to CTE, because it’s like his thoughts are thunking over like a quarter through a gumball machine. “Oh. Holy shit.” 

“Yeah,” Shane confirms, with no little chagrin, “Now you’re in on the secret.” 

“Wow. Who else knows?” 

Shane shrugs. “My parents, a couple of the guys from Boston. Probably two-thirds of the city of Montreal, at this point.” 

Scott raises his eyebrows.

“We asked people not to say anything. It’s been okay so far.” A faint furrow appears between Shane's brows, like he's piecing something together right there in the room. “I think the locals get a kick out of pretending Ilya is my mail-order bride and Boston doesn’t exist.” 

“Huh.” Scott mulls that over, spotting a newspaper clipping on the fridge of Shane with his pup and Ilya fucking Rozanov in a Metros beanie at the 2016 Montreal Christmas tree lighting. “We’ve lived very different lives.” 

“Yeah, no kidding.” 

In the living room, Rozanov hefts his daughter off the ground by her ankles, tossing her over his shoulder with a giant’s roar to peals of delighted giggles. 

It’s pretty fucking cute. 

“If this is secretly a hostage situation,” Scott says to Shane, “Blink twice.” 

“If fucking only,” Shane says, totally besotted. He hefts Scott’s bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. “Let me get this in the fridge.” 

They spend dinner talking shop, putting away a serviceable linguini pesto with the kind of ease that only three professional athletes breaking their diets can. Shane eats with one hand like it’s habit, bouncing his daughter in his lap and deftly scooting his wine glass out of reach when her hands wander. Scott has spent fifteen years as a guest at teammate’s family tables, and the familiarity and strangeness of it phases in and out across this shared meal with his two biggest competitors. 

“How did you do it?” Scott finally asks after the table is cleared and Rozanov disappears to put the baby to bed. They worked through the wine over dinner so Shane pulls a couple of Molsons from the fridge and they step out onto the wide balcony overlooking the downtown skyline. 

“I’m still kind of doing it, I think,” Shane says after a couple of moments. “The Cup takes a lot of the pressure off. It’s, uh, I’m here, you know? The narrative isn’t about whether I’m coming back from maternity leave anymore.” 

“Yeah.” By that line of thinking, Scott was somewhere in his second trimester. “I know exactly what you mean.” 

“But, the whole Omega thing,” Shane shrugs. “I presented at fourteen, and my parents had a hard conversation with me. We made some decisions together and stuck to them.” He laughs, a little flat. A little self-deprecating. “I fucked around and found at the Olympics. My parents and I had a much harder conversation. But, uh, my mom, she promised me we would make it happen. If it was what I wanted, it’s what she would make happen.” He blinks, quickly, looking away. “They bought a place here. When I’m at games Eileen basically lives with them. And, uh, we make it work.”  

Scott doesn’t know what version of himself would be standing there if he’d had his parents when he presented. Maybe exactly the same. It’s a thought that aches. 

“And Rozanov?” 

“The decision wasn’t his. But he’s here now.” Shane’s smile turns warmer. “He’s committed to her, and to me. Everything else is details.” 

“He’s a free agent next year, right?” 

“Oh, we know.” Shane’s eyes look bright for a moment in the dark. Excited. “It’s not easy to piece it all together. I mean, I skated for ten weeks after Sochi before I took a pregnancy test. It’s a miracle she’s here at all. That I have this.”

Scott doesn’t know what else to talk about. It’s like, he and Hollander are built from the same material, but they’ve stretched it in such different directions that they aren’t recognizable to each other. It’s not like they’re going to compare birth control brands. 

“You’ve got someone, right?” Shane says into the silence, and maybe they’re more similar than Scott thought. “Not—whatever shape it is. I don’t know anything about your experience, not really. But I know I couldn’t have done this alone. So.” 

Scott thinks of Kip, loving him in his strange shape. Of George, giving him a chance. Of Shelly, trying her best for him for fifteen years. Of Carter and Laura Vaughan, putting in the work to understand this even when it was awkward and difficult. 

Of Shane Hollander, reaching out over and over to try and find what they have in common.

“Yeah,” Scott says, feeling warm in the cool night air. “I’ve got people.”

Chapter End Notes

Next: Finding the net

Chapter 6: Finding the net

Chapter Notes

Writing hockey is hard work. I hope you enjoy!

There’s a weird hostility to the first couple games of the new season. Some of it is on the ice, but plenty in the stands in a way Scott doesn’t know that he expected after this long. It’s like it’s clicking for a certain set that Scott is still there; that having his adolescent CT scans circulating on Twitter against his will didn’t automatically shunt him off the ice and into a retirement community of odd footnotes to MLH history. 

“Have Toronto fans always been this weird?” Vaughan mutters to him during warm-ups. The stadium is like a beehive, humming with an energy almost like violence that Scott worries could spill onto the rink at any time. 

Fuck the Admirals, Scott sees in block letters on a few more signs than usual. Fuck New York. Fuck Scott Hunter. Nobody is saying exactly what’s different but everybody knows. “I think they might have heard a rumor about me.” 

Vaughan barks a laugh, and at least somebody seems to remember this is all just a game. Toronto comes at them with an almost frenetic energy, risking a lot of high sticks and penalty box time to sling shots wildly at the Admirals’ end of the ice. It’s an onslaught, and with their young defense this year there’s only so many blocks even a veteran like Andersson can make in goal. 

(John McAllister is gone, citing family obligations, and they could have fucking used him. What’s done is done.)

Their offense takes a beating. Farmer cracks a rib and has to limp to the bench. It’s vicious, but there’s a manic, fearful edge to the crowd’s cheers. To Toronto’s center forward meeting Scott at the face-offs with the whites practically showing around his eyes. 

“I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on here.” 

They’re in the second intermission, down 4-0 with twenty minutes left to make it clear this is not the shape of their season. Scott is feeling this one in his knees, in the pinch in his lower back and bruises rising along his stick arm where Toronto’s defense had cut off too many shots. The veterans look nervous, the rookies terrified. 

Scott stretches his shoulder until it pops, looking at each man from his place on the center bench.   

“These boys from Toronto have a little crush on us and they don’t know how to show it.”

It’s Farmer, already out of uniform with his broken rib who’s the first to laugh, and the tension cracks down the middle of the room like shearing the face off an iceberg. 

“How’d you like that love tap, Farmer?” Scott asks, loud amid the jeers and boos for Toronto, who think they can bring them all the way out to the frozen North and waste their time. 

“I did not, Cap.” Farmer’s line clusters around him, ruffling his hair and promising vengeance. 

“Are we going to make Andersson slow dance with Dallas Kent all night?” Scott demands from the defense. No, he gets the shout back and he can feel it in his bones as he pulls himself to his feet. “Then no more easy shots. Prom’s over.”    

Scott has the room. He bumps helmets, slaps backs, meets eyes. 

“We’re here to play hockey, guys,” he reminds them as the buzzer calls them back out to the ice. “It’s not fucking rocket science.” 

They don’t catch them in twenty minutes. But they close down their end of the ice and claw it back to a 2-4 loss. 

Scott can live with that. 

Everybody is awake on the plane home, making jokes and talking through adjustments to the lines and grandstanding about their next game in Pittsburgh even with the shadows of exhaustion under their eyes. 

Let the people make their signs, Scott muses as he slides somewhere close to a nap with his young, excited team as the soundtrack. 

“Am I going to be gay enough for your friends?” 

Kip looks at Scott thoughtfully, adjusting the collar of Scott’s turtleneck, then licks the pad of his thumb and smudges a trace of cum out of Scott’s beard. He must have missed it cleaning up after Kip had fucked his mouth on the sofa earlier to celebrate his win against Detroit. 

Kip kisses him in the same spot, with too much affection for it to be really condescending. “Definitely.” 

Scott attends his first industry night at the Kingfisher, and it’s not too weird. He finally meets a lot of the friends that Kip talks about, and some of the other (younger) grad students from Kip’s methods seminar. There seems to be a pre-made agreement among the attendees to pretend “professional hockey player” is a normal job to have, which Scott genuinely isn’t sure if Kip orchestrated. The only lightly weird moment is when they first arrive, Scott’s arm around Kip’s waist, and an Omega that Scott will eventually be introduced to as Shawn looks them both up and down and declares with real mourning: “It’s just not fair.”

Otherwise, it’s just beers and a bunch of people talking shop with a different set of vocabulary than Scott is used to.

“—it’s like, you and what you have going on downstairs is now this synecdoche for your whole team,” A friend of Kip’s from Gender Studies is saying as the subject briefly turns to Scott and his situation. They gesticulate wildly with their nine percent IPA: “Nobody’s going to say it, but scoring goals on you is, like, a necessary phallic act. Otherwise, their framework for understanding what an Alpha even is doesn’t mean anything, because you masked for years and none of them had a clue. The Admirals are, like, an existential threat to masculinity.”

“Huh,” Scott says. 

“Is that how you pronounce synecdoche?” somebody asks. 

“I have no idea, I’ve only ever read it.”

Scott hums thoughtfully along with the rest of the group, and when the conversation moves on he types that word very slowly into his phone. 

Synecdoche. He skims the definition, Kip’s thumb drawing circles in the small of his back. 

Huh. 

Ilya Rozanov meets Scott at center-ice for the first face off against Boston like Scott never watched him rock a two-year-old to sleep. 

“Don’t worry, Hunter,” he says, the same old smirk on his stupid face. “I’ll fuck you gentle. Is what you’re built for, yes?” 

“Funny.” Scott grins, thrilled to hear somebody finally fucking say it. “That’s what I said to your mother.” 

Rozanov tsks as his eyes flash. “She’s a little young for you.”

Two orphans with secrets, they can claw at each other until the blood spatters the ice. They both know the rules, and it’s an uncomplicated rush as the ref prepares to drop the puck.  

“They’re gonna enjoy this in Montreal,” Scott promises, and with the last word he scoops the puck out from under Rozanov’s stick and the Admirals start the game with possession. 

It’s a bloody game. It’s great hockey. The Admirals are skating, moving the puck and finding the openings. They slam into Boston’s defense until they find the cracks, and Rozanov bludgeons the net in return until a couple inevitably slip through. Vaughan goes down on a dirty check and when Scott drops his gloves Rozanov is there, barehanded with a shit-eating grin and there’s no Alpha and Omega to getting a good clean hit on the guy who makes a hobby out of pissing you off. 

The lines swap out, Scott calls the next move, and they’re playing the game they showed up for.

The crowd can feel it, signs falling slack in hands as they go from twenty thousand people with opinions to a single surging organism following the puck with a shouted voice and held breath. It’s going to be the kind of tape they show to rookies. The stuff that gets clipped into the commercials and the ticket that fans keep tacked to their corkboards in the garage.   

The passes finally connect and Scott sees the net eight minutes into overtime for the Admirals to take it home, 3-2. The roar in the stadium takes forever to die down—jeers and cheers in equal measure like it should be—and when they finally file off the ice Scott catches Rozanov’s eye along the boards. Chest heaving steam out into the cold air, a bruise rising on his cheekbone, Rozanov jerks his chin up in acknowledgement. Scott nods back, and follows his team into the locker room. 

They’re good here. 

Scott doesn’t get cocky, but this is a turn in the season, and the whole locker room knows it. 

If they can pull it off in Boston, they can do it anywhere.

They're wrapping up a respectable win against Columbus when the video tears through the locker room. 

Scott watches over Breezey’s shoulder as Shane Hollander takes the hit. 

It feels like the whole team is bunched around a four inch screen, waiting for Montreal’s captain to get back up. 

“Shit,” Vaughan mutters when the medics arrive with the stretcher. Scott watches Ilya Rozanov, still on the ice with a ref pulling him away from his mate’s crumpled body. Ilya’s eyes hook briefly into the camera and Scott feels it like a punch to the stomach as the medics stabilize Shane’s neck and work on getting him out of the rink. 

“Sorry, Cap,” Breezy says when the footage cuts to commercial, like it’s the same as saying it to Hollander. Like Shane is both of them. All of them. 

Synecdoche. 

It’s daylight again before there’s any point in calling. Scott’s been through enough of his own imaging to know how long it takes. How the morphine makes the time pass in hour-long blinks while the rest of the world holds its breath for days waiting to hear results. 

Scott paces his kitchen while Kip is in his afternoon seminar, the call tone ringing callously in his ear for too long before it finally connects and Scott hears a low woman’s voice give an uncertain, “Hello?” 

“I—uh, Mrs. Hollander,” Scott guesses. “Sorry to disturb you. I was just calling to see if—” 

“Scott Hunter.” Clearly she’s heard of him. Scott has no idea if Shane’s mother knows about his attempts at Omega-to-Omega networking, but he can’t imagine it’s a secret. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I heard what happened, and I—you don’t have to tell me anything private. But is he…?” 

“Concussion,” Yuna says, with a forced edge of dispassion. “Grade one.” A pause “…Grade one and a half, if we’re being honest. And a broken collarbone. But he’s sleeping now.” 

Sleeping, as opposed to unconscious. Those were good signs. “Okay. And Rozanov is there?” 

There’s another beat, like now she’s really surprised. “He is. …I didn’t know you and Shane were so close.”     

“We’re not.” Scott isn’t sure how true that is anymore. “Not really. But let him know we’re thinking about him in New York, yeah?” 

“I will.” 

Shane is out for the playoffs. With a broken bone there’s no way. Montreal is out. 

“It looks like it’s your year, Scott,” Yuna Hollander says to him in the same vein of thought, with the kind of certainty Scott has never felt in his life. 

“Maybe.” Scott had been looking forward to seeing Shane on the ice. To putting their different lives to the test. “It’s not how I wanted to do it.” 

“If it has to be anyone, he’ll want it to be you.”

“Not Boston?” 

A hard scoff. “God, no.” In the background, Scott can hear Eileen babbling contentedly. “Make it worth the trouble, will you?” 

“Yes ma’am.”

Scott drifts through his apartment for the rest of the day like a ghost. Hollander is going to be fine. Scott doesn’t know why he doesn’t feel better about it.

“There’s gonna be a time after hockey,” he murmurs in bed that night. It’s like he’s just realizing it himself, right now. He’s turning thirty-five in four months. 

Even if he does everything right, the time is going to come. 

Kip strokes his thumb through the grain of Scott’s beard. 

“When the time comes,” Scott says, and it feels so obvious, but it’s still the most serious promise he’s ever made. “I want your mark on my throat. …I want to give you kids.” 

Kip nods in the dark. In their nest. In their den. 

“It’s a date.”

Chapter End Notes

Next: Goals

Chapter 7: Goals

Chapter Notes

Ok, ngl I'm nervous about this chapter. but it IS HEA and I want so much to hear what you think about this conclusion to Scott's journey (for now). I love these characters so much and I want them to have all the complexity and happiness that they deserve.

2017

Yuna Hollander is right. It’s his year. His turn. They dig fucking deep and the Admirals take the cup from Colorado, 2-1. 

Scott goes through the motions of accepting the trophy and shaking hands, almost numb until the families burst onto the ice. Because then Kip is there, and George, and the friends who had filled up all of Scott’s reserved tickets, mixing their cheers and congratulations in with the mates and girlfriends and kids. Kip doesn’t even get there first, because after Scott escapes the backslaps from twenty-two Alphas he didn’t know would ever be able to even look at him again he’s suddenly in a hug and it’s his fucking Omega father-in-law.  

I’m proud of you, son. 

Jesus. “Thank you,” he says, throat tight, and George squeezes with all the strength he must have passed onto his son, because it feels impossibly familiar. Scott is piled on quickly by half a dozen friends from the Kingfisher with no boundaries until there’s a cry of oh my god, give her room. Then it’s Scott’s Alpha, here, glowing among the MAGs in his adorable Sherpa jean jacket, number twenty-one emblazoned on his chest. 

“Sorry about all this,” Kip shouts over the roaring of the crowd as Scott pulls him in close.  

“Fuck. Don’t be,” Scott says, beaming, “I love you so much.” 

“I love you too,” Kip promises, and when Scott kisses him, it’s not a surprise to anyone that matters.  

The press scrum is madness. Scott Hunter had accomplished the impossible. He’d delivered on everything he’d promised. 

“Mr. Hunter,” calls a reporter after two or three questions about actual game content, and a dozen more about the O-word, “We noticed you had some loved ones on the ice tonight, and clearly someone special. Any comments?"

“Yeah,” Scott says, cup gleaming beside him on the table. “That was my mate.” He laughs. “That was my family.” 

Things keep changing. 

They have to.

2019

Scott gets two more good years. But hockey is a game of statistics. Probabilities. 

He takes the wrong check, and his heel catches the wrong divot in the ice. 

Scott goes down hard, with a crunch and pop that has a 230 pound bruiser white as a sheet behind the ref bent over him, gasping out Jesus fuck. Hunter. I didn’t even mean to hit him that hard.

Abstractly, Scott is pretty sure he’s torn his ACL. But torn ligaments don’t leave a pool of blood in the rink. 

(It’s the fractured tibia that does that, breaking the skin.)  

The pain whites him out and one minute Scott is leading the Admirals 2-1 against Pittsburgh and the next he’s strapped to a gurney from the waist down an ambulance, Shelly shoving a phone under his ear so he can hear Kip promising that he’s already in a car, that he’ll be there with him in the emergency room. 

“Just stay awake, baby,” Kip pleads over the line. “Don’t close your eyes, I’ll be there soon.” 

Scott wishes he fucking could. He’s wide awake through every turn and pothole it takes to pull into the emergency bay at Mt. Sinai West. 

(The irony is not lost on him.)

Kip meets him from the parking lot, taking Shelly’s place beside the stretcher as they pass into the harsh lights of the private emergency entrance with a lot of words like full rupture and lower right limb ischemia getting tossed around. He’s panicking, clearly, scent sharp and acrid in the hall like Scott has never seen before, and it’s several moments of missed communication as they have to move him from one stretcher to another and the pain flashes like white lightning from his knee up his spine but eventually Scott finds Kip’s hand and pulls it to his face. 

“Look at me,” he orders, pressing Kip’s trembling fingers to his mouth, his eyes, the print of teeth long scarred on Scott’s neck. “Don’t look down there. Look here. Look at my eyes.” 

Scott is in so much fucking pain, but he tells him in his hoarse voice, again and again, until his Alpha understands, pressing their faces together with a relieved sob. 

It’s not his brain. It’s not his neck. Scott is still here and he’s in agony but at the end of the day it’s just muscle and bone. His eyes are clear. 

Hockey isn’t going to steal him away from the man he loves at the last second.

“This was always going to happen,” He says into Kip’s hair before the medical team finally pulls him away. “It’s just my turn. It’ll be alright.”

Scott takes one last deep drag of his mate’s scent and lets the team wheel him into surgery.

Scott is done. He knows before he sees the x-rays. He’s just too old, and he knows he isn’t coming back when he’s laid out now with titanium pins holding his knee together. 

“You’ll walk,” the doctor tells him with certainty.  “With the right rehab, you’ll probably get full mobility back. You’ll be able to run, exercise—”

“But not skate,” Scott guesses. The doctor shakes his head. He has an Admiral’s pennant on the wall behind his desk. He’s not the guy who wants to give this news.

“Not professionally. I’m sorry.” 

All at once, Scott Hunter isn’t a hockey player anymore. He squeezes Kip’s hand where they’re tangled together in his lap. 

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

They knew this day would come.

Scott gets a lot of visitors in the long week he’s in the private wing of the hospital. The whole team is there, in fits and starts, like they’re at a funeral. 

(“You’re going to have to pick up the slack, finally,” he says to Carter, giving his blessing the only way he knows how. Vaughan finds a reason to make a joke, but Laura is crying in Kip’s arms in the hallway.) 

He gets a call from Shane, and flowers from Yuna. He gets a text from an unlisted number. It’s a photo of an old man in a walker with about five hundred question marks. He just texts back, Fuck off, Rozanov. Text bubbles appear and vanish for two minutes before his response just gets a red heart emoji. 

Three days in, Scott comes out of the dead sleep of the heavily medicated to the thunk of a Genesee tallboy being placed on his bedside table. John McAllister looks like shit. Like he’s been drinking for a while, and like he drank a lot last night. 

He stands before Scott and a nervous Kip for a long minute before he wipes a hand over his face, and says hoarsely, “I should have been there.” He says, with red rimmed eyes: “I wouldn’t have let this happen.” 

“Yeah.” Scott finds the laugh. He hears the I’m sorry. “We all get our cards punched eventually, right?”

“If you’re man enough to stick it out, yeah,” John says, knowing which one of them went down on the ice and who quit. “Take care, Cap. Really.” 

“You too.” 

He goes, and Scott finds Kip’s hand at the edge of his bed. 

He’s not a hockey player anymore, but he has no regrets. 

Scott spends a month in a wheelchair, then two on crutches, then six with a cane. 

(The process of choosing a cane is a lengthy and indulgent aesthetic choice. “You’re queer, sweetheart,” Kip says, as they look over wood finishes and inlays. “You deserve this.”) 

He learns to walk again. He learns to want again, the same things he’s been wanting since he first caught a scent in a random coffee shop in Tribeca. Without the lure of a Cup pulling him away, Scott is focused. His desires are sharper. His goals are new, and old, and clear. 

Scott’s cast becomes a full leg brace, and then a slip of Neoprene that holds him together while he slowly and steadily ups the pace on the treadmill. 

Scott gets cleared for sex. He gets cleared to go off suppressants, for the last time in his life. 

Knowing he has a heat coming in two weeks, he walks Kip through the Met. Scott’s cane clicks on the floor as they take in the Egyptian temple Kip has seen a million times, and spend five minutes in front of each painting in the Lehman Wing that’s brand new. 

Scott loves him. He wants him. He wants to carry some piece of his mate forever. 

“Can we try?” he finally asks after, taking a break on a bench in Central Park. They’re perfectly anonymous among a thousand other families making the most of a Sunday afternoon in Manhattan. There are pairs here queerer than them, and straighter. There are pups here with older parents, and younger. They’re all different, and all alike in the ways that count.  

“If it’s not meant to be—we can move on,” Scott says, honestly. “But I just want to understand it. I want to know if it’s something that can still fit in with the rest of me.” 

Kip touches Scott under the chin. “I’ll always choose you—your health—over a hypothetical,” he says, making his position clear. “But baby, I’ll try anything that lets me show the world more of what you mean to me.” 

Scott kisses his mate, and it doesn’t matter who sees. “Okay.” 

(It takes two heats. It takes—ah—the last of the pain leaving Scott’s body as he finally forgives himself for being born wrong and starts looking toward the future. Realizing as Kip pins him down and fucks him sweet that thirty-seven—fuck—is just the beginning of life, actually. That they have whole decades together still, and it’s going to be a day at a time figuring out what that looks like. 

Kip bit him after the Cup. That was just the start of the promises they were going to make to each other.)

2020

The Admirals host a family skate before the All-Star game for the guys who are in New York. Scott laces up behind the boards, flexing his knee in its brace with the extra weight for the first time since he blew it out. Kip’s hand is a warm weight on the back of his neck. The cold muffles scent, as always, but Scott knows what he’s thinking.  

“I’m not gonna fall,” he promises for possibly the hundredth time. He’s more likely to eat shit in his Nikes on a flat sidewalk than on the ice.

Kip hums, rocking on his own rented blades. “I know.” 

Scott stands. Tests his weight. Skates on rubber always made him feel like a stork. Now he just feels like he’s the right height for the first time in a year. 

Kip’s free hand creeps around his hips. Slips under his hoodie and thermal to press little circles into the barely there possibility behind Scott’s navel. Scott dips down the inch between their new heights and kisses his mate, slipping his hand into the front pocket of his hoodie to catch Kip’s hand and hold it there, just for a moment.  

“No sudden moves,” he promises with a wink, and Kip’s eyes brighten with the happiness of their shared secret. 

They’re taking it one day at a time. 

Every day is a new way to understand each other. 

“Hunter!” Ilya Rozanov calls from the ice in his Centaurs hoodie. Shane is there, leading four-year-old Eileen through simple coke bottles and turns in her tiny figure skates. Vaughan is still on the other side of the boards, holding his new baby while Laura struggles through doing up her laces. 

“Get down here! We saved you a penguin to keep your balance.” 

Scott doesn’t say fuck you, because there are pups in earshot. He opens the gate, instead of hopping the boards, and helps Kip out onto the ice. 

Scott doesn’t even realize he’s touched down. It’s muscle memory, as thoughtless as breathing, to glide backwards into the throng of friends and families. Scott moves effortlessly, back at home, and puts his hands in Kip’s less steady ones. 

“I’ve got you,” he promises.

Kip, brave as always, pushes forward to stay by his side.

"I know." 

Chapter End Notes

<3

Chapter 8: Privacy

Chapter Notes

Secret bonus chapter?? (Just kidding, it's not secret. Please tell everyone you know)
I took a few days away from this fic and found that I wasn't quite finished. I still had more that I wanted to understand. This chapter deals in more depth with mpreg but nothing is particularly explicit. I hope you enjoy!

Scott learns, in fits and starts, the difference between hiding and being able to choose things to keep for himself. 

He’d stopped keeping things for himself at thirteen, because that was what it took for hockey to become a family and not an after-school hobby. Scott was good enough, so his coach signed the foster care paperwork and Scott spent weekends and holidays at the dinner table with Mark and Joann’s real kids who had gotten tired of the long drives to games and early morning practices. Scott never got tired of the long drives, or early practices, because he never got tired of sitting at that table.

Scott fit himself into the right shapes to stay wanted. 

When he presented wrong, he made that fit, too. 

He brings Kip home after the Cup, and Scott doesn’t have to make anything fit. They flex around each other perfectly as Kip presses him into the wall beside the front door and asks with all the lights off and nothing but their scent and sound filling up their den: “What do you want, baby? You can have anything.” 

“You know what I want,” Scott is exhausted enough to drop, and they catch each other’s weight sliding down the wall. “You know. You know.”

With a gorgeous rumble Kip pulls Scott free of his clothes. He lays him out across the entryway of their home. He makes him his. 

Scott thinks, as Kip’s teeth sink into his throat, that maybe it was this Alpha who first put the word want in Scott’s mouth. Kip gave him a place to put the desire that had bled out of him, uselessly, until finally someone caught hold of Scott’s twisted up, grasping hands and reeled him in. Scott caught a scent and it started his body talking to him again for the first time in a decade.

Kip scars the proof of it into Scott’s skin, and he thinks, This is mine. No one can take it from me. 

The summer is one long press tour, and Scott wears a high collar compression top through it all. He’ll be damned if one person gets to see what Kip has given him that Scott doesn’t decide. 

2019

Scott is of sound mind, if not body, just off the serious painkillers when Marcelle stops by and starts using words like transitions and optics. Kip is maybe the closest to prowling Scott has ever seen him, on tenterhooks hoping to be able to throw this person out of his mate’s hospital room. But Scott knows the game. He knows this matters, and in the way she can Marcelle is trying to give him some power over how this gets put out in the world. 

“I’m done,” Scott says, when she’s finished. He’s done being the mouthpiece for team. He’s done with the kind of sponsorships that put eyes on his private body in public. “This is it. So let’s talk, because whatever we do to announce this, it’s the last thing.” 

There’s a press release. It’s short and keeps to the facts. Scott thanks the fans for their years of support and asks for privacy for himself and his loved ones. In the meantime, Marcelle puts some soft feelers out to his oldest sponsors. They all salivate over the proposal, but Marcelle keeps her promise and in the end it’s one thing, a series of black and white photos for print: 

Scott from the waist up in the physical therapy room, breathing through putting weight on his leg for the first time. The strain of bracing his weight with his arms and chest pulls against his compression top with Kip’s hand just in frame, clasped over his shoulder; 

Scott holding a tight plank, sweat beading on his brow. His knee is contained in his neoprene brace. His cane is a dark parallel line on the ground beside him;

Scott in a thermal at the Admirals’ stadium, grinning at someone off camera while he pulls on his skates, just one sharp figure in an anonymous crowd there to enjoy public time on the ice.

All three photos reveal Scott’s mating mark for the first time, a long-healed silvery trace peeking out of his crew necks. They show the truth of his body, exactly as much of it as he wants. They show the brand tagline: the only way is through. 

Under Armour does what they do best, and the campaign ends up the first ad in the next Sports Illustrated. It becomes an instant collector’s item, Scott’s wordless announcement: He isn’t coming back, and these are the images he wants to leave behind. The work he’s doing now is for himself. 

For his family. 

2020

Scott grabs the wrong exercise top from the back of a drawer and suddenly he’s seeing himself in pieces in the mirror. It’s 2014 and he doesn’t fit into that body anymore. It’s 2019 and his legs have lost some of their muscle, the surgery scars on his knee ugly and asymmetrical. It’s 2020 and he’s different across the hips, the pale gray lycra pulling across the experiment he was selfish enough to force on the body he built to take checks and score goals. 

“Scott? You just went all oversteeped. Are you—oh, honey.” 

Scott experiences the next ten minutes in stops and starts. Disassociating, he thinks, with a strange objectivity as Kip puts his hands on him, one piece at a time. He pulls him out of the worn out compression top and folds him into their nest. He sets himself Scott’s lap so he can hold him down with his heavy thighs and tug layer after layer over their heads until the harsh light is muffled to something secret and hidden.  

Kip puts his face in Scott’s throat, mouth catching on the scar where he marked him. He presses his palm to the now noticeable swell where he gave Scott a pup to carry. He holds him there, in the dim dark warm, until Scott falls back in his body. Until all his jarring pieces can at least sit together with their rough edges and he’s the same blood, muscle, and bone he’s carried his whole life. Until Scott is pulling back, his arms tight around his Alpha and fisting in the back of his shirt. 

“I’m changing.” Scott doesn’t know if Kip can hear the words he mutters into breath-damp skin. Half of him hopes he doesn’t. “I’m changing right in front of you. How can you stand it?” 

Kip holds Scott in his body, but Scott can feel the soft furrow in his brow and he can tell this is one of those terrors Kip doesn’t understand, not really. That he could never come home the wrong shape and find the door closed to him. 

“You have to change, sweetheart." Kip says it like it's beautiful. Like it's something he treasures. "You’re alive.”

Jesus, it’s awful. Scott lured an Alpha into his nest under false pretenses and here he still was, loving him. It’s terrible, and Scott drinks it in, a dry sponge for Kip’s endless, malleable tenderness. 

“Do you have any idea,” Scott says, into the secret air between them, “how safe you make me feel?” 

Kip chuffs into Scott’s throat, his scent proud and happy, and when Scott nuzzles in for a kiss Kip uses it to brush the damp salt out from under Scott’s eyes. Scott’s knee throbs and something that might be a pup one day flutters behind his navel. The unexpected pieces are sticking out of him and it’s okay. 

Scott can be here, changing, as long as he’s safe with Kip.  

Twenty-four weeks is a mental watershed, maybe for both of them. Definitely for Scott, who is no longer asking can I even do this and is instead looking at the sonogram tacked to their fridge. Whether or not his body is capable of seeing this through, that’s a life, one that Scott chose to carry. She’ll be part of him forever. 

On an impulse, Scott snaps a photo of the fridge and pulls open his sparse text chain with Shane. 

It’s still private for right now, is the text he sends along with the picture. 

Shane’s message bubbles appear and disappear several times before, finally: 

:)

At twenty-eight weeks, Scott gets a package postmarked with customs from Montreal.

It’s a smallish box, not overwhelming, and when Scott peels away the tape and pulls open the flaps he finds a stack of gently used infant onesies and the little blankets that go over your shoulder after feeding a pup. They’re curated in soft neutral blues and greens and yellows, dotted with little embroidered flowers or prints of clouds and raindrops. Underneath is a briefly confusing length of stretchy jersey with velcro straps that Scott realizes must be a sling, the kind that keeps the baby snug against your chest, close enough to scent. Stuffed inside, like someone had to sneak it in, is a tiny Centaurs beanie.

Scott pulls loose one of the snap-bottom onesies. It’s green, with little ducks marching across the chest. It barely falls past the stretch of his fingers. A new pup must have worn it. Eileen. 

And Shane had given it to him. Rozanov, too, had given away this piece of his daughter’s infancy that he probably only had scraps of to keep for himself. 

Scott hasn’t bought a thing for the baby. He can’t bring himself to move the treadmill out of the office and start saying the word nursery. He has to keep his pup safe right now, and safe means keeping her close to his beating heart. Safe means whispers in the nest with Kip and knowing smiles from George.

Safe is a note tucked into Shane’s gift: 

Just in case you need a couple things :)

“Did you know,” Scott says later, very casually while they’re watching some true crime doc about the Isabella Stewart Gardner robbery, “that they make these little bassinets you can hook onto the edge of your nest? So, um, you can keep a pup close by when you sleep?”  

“Yeah,” Kip replies softly, slouched under Scott’s arm. Carefully: “Is that something you’d like?”

“Yeah. I think so.” Scott is ready, maybe, just for this one thing. “Do you think your dad would have a suggestion? For a good one?” 

“I know he would.” Kip smiles, eyes bright. “I bet he has the one he used for me kicking around somewhere.” 

Scott kisses the top of Kip’s head. “That is exactly what I want.”

2021

Kip wakes up from a dead sleep when the bed shifts beside him. He can feel in his body that it must be the darkest hour of early morning, but the warm cocoon of light from their bedside lamp glows against his eyelids. He breathes in, deep and slow, measuring the scent in the room. 

They’re okay. They’re safe. All three of them. 

It’s their first night home. Less than three days ago, they’d been watching some rookie tape that Scott was consulting on when he’d gone perfectly still on the couch and said Um… and now they were here, with a pup in the bassinet at the edge of their nest. 

It had been a whirlwind forty-eight hours even after the screaming and pushing and blood were a distant chemical memory. (Scott, still an athlete in his bones, had gone through labor like he was running drills on a sloppy defensive line.) There had been health checks and visitors and a million first times of keeping their gorgeous squalling little girl alive. 

Elena had sent him a whole album of photos marked private, priceless images of Scott holding their pup for the first time. The three of them, together, sharing scent and comfort and the promise of all the love they were going to pour into this family. Kip’s dad, holding him and then Millie, beaming and tear streaked. 

Through it all, Scott had been quiet, broadcasting his happiness through his scent and his eyes following Kip and Millie around the room. Now, the bedding rustles, and Millie coos, close by. Close enough to touch, always. Close enough for Scott to pull her into his arms and hold her right against his heart.

Hi, sweetheart.

Kip keeps his eyes closed and lies still. This is something just for Scott to have. Something precious that he doesn’t have to share with anyone, not even his mate. 

We made it, didn’t we? Scott murmurs to their pup. His scent—the scent he kept hidden for so long, that Kip treasures every twist and flutter of—is bright. Nervous and happy. 

You are so beautiful. You’re going to change so much. 

Millie coos, and rustles, and Scott laughs, sweet and private. He chuffs, soft breaths of scent into their pup’s soft skin and downy hair. He makes his lovely in-between sounds of happiness for only Millie to hear. 

I can’t wait, sweetheart. You’re going to have so many choices.

Kip keeps his eyes closed and falls back asleep to the sounds of Scott bonding with their pup.

They’re finding another new shape to be in—one that’s only theirs, and it’s perfect. 

Chapter End Notes

(the baby is Melissa, after Scott's mom) <3