Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Kip Grady/Scott Hunter

Characters:

Kip Grady, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Carter Vaughn, Eric Bennett

Additional Tags:

Kip Grady loves Scott Hunter, Scott Hunter Loves Kip Grady, Scott Hunter Needs a Hug (Game Changers), Major Character Injury, Permanent Injury, Retirement, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Friendship, Therapy, Suicidal Thoughts, (briefly) - Freeform, Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Spoilers for Common Goal, POV Scott Hunter (Game Changers)

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-28 Words: 5,247 Chapters: 1/1

if you knew it was the end of the world (would you like to stay a while?)

Summary

It happens six months after their wedding.

Scott has never been happier in his entire life. Things were amazing for a little while there, so picture-perfect in all areas of his life that it felt almost too good to be true. Too easy. The kind of happiness where you wake up every day asking yourself if it’s actually real, if you can really have this, just like that.

Turns out you can’t.

-
Scott is injured during a game and has to deal with the fallout.

Notes

For the Sixty-Six Days of Skip prompt hurt. Please note the tags and decide whether this is going to make you feel good if you read it, or maybe not so much.

Title from The End by Halsey

It happens six months after their wedding.

Scott has never been happier in his entire life. Things were amazing for a little while there, so picture-perfect in all areas of his life that it felt almost too good to be true. Too easy. The kind of happiness where you wake up every day asking yourself if it’s actually real, if you can really have this, just like that.

Turns out you can’t.

And maybe that’s the reason. Maybe he was too happy, flew too close to the sun. Maybe he was foolish thinking it could last, that he could really have it all – a career, love, his friends. A real life.

Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed for more. He’s been lucky in his life, so lucky. To have the kind of talent that he has, to have it be supported and nurtured. To make it to the Admirals.

It should have been enough, but he was greedy. He wanted the Cup, and most of all he wanted Kip. And then he just went and let himself have it, both at the same time even.

All that control, all the years of being so damn careful, gone in an instant. Collapsing like a house of cards he blew on too hard. Well, maybe one of those cards was a load-bearing wall he shouldn’t have knocked over so carelessly.

-

It’s incredibly stupid, too, the way it all goes down.

They’re a couple of points behind against Detroit and one of the new rookies loses his nerve, pushes a guy against the boards too hard. It becomes a scuffle, a whole thing suddenly, a sea of white and red jerseys pushing at each other. Scott gets caught in the middle and then he’s not sure what happens, but he’s knocked into the boards and he falls wrong, then someone trips over him, he’s buried under a heap of padding and helmets crashing together and his knee is on fire, white-hot agony everywhere.

It’s so fucking stupid.

-

He’s on a stretcher before he knows it, and he’s not the only one.

It’s all a bit of a blur and he can’t think, first because of the screaming pain and then because of the fog of the medication he’s given as soon as the paramedic gets the IV started.

Kip, is all his brain gives him, Kip saw that on TV.

He tries to tell everyone around him to call his husband, but he’s not sure they even hear him, let alone know who that is.

Let Kip know I’m okay. It’s fine, I’ll pick him up from the airport tomorrow.

He’s on a trip for work, meeting some up-and-coming artist at his studio in Virginia. Kip always wanted to work at a museum, not entirely comfortable with how snobby some of the galleries can be. But he found a little place in Chelsea that dedicates itself to promoting art by marginalized groups, empowering underrepresented voices, or something like that. Scott doesn’t always know the right language to express these things correctly. But Kip is happy, telling Scott every day about all the amazing art he finds and the people he gets to meet.

It’s hard to keep track of what’s going on now, but there’s talk of emergency surgery and Scott pretends to understand any of what is happening when he signs the consent forms.

A nurse tells him they reached his husband and that he’s on his way.   

Scott does not get to pick Kip up from the airport.

-

He also doesn’t get to see Kip before his surgery, but he’s there when Scott wakes up.

He’s half asleep in one of the horrible plastic chairs that’s been dragged close to Scott’s bed, a brown paper cup of coffee on the bedside table next to him.

It makes Scott inordinately happy for a moment, because it reminds him of when they first met. How cute he thought Kip was, how endearing, dozing against the counter with his silly little hat on.

Kip doesn’t look silly now, he just looks exhausted.

Scott closes his eyes and drifts back into a drugged-up haze of unconsciousness. They could probably both use some more rest.

-

The next time he wakes up, Kip is talking to a doctor in hushed tones.

Scott picks up some words here and there, but none of them make sense to him.

He goes back to sleep.

-

“You’re done,” Doctor Ramón tells him very bluntly, later that day.

“You’re going to do a lot of physical therapy. If you’re smart, you keep at it and regain enough function so that you can still walk and do most everyday activities unassisted, maybe even something like a hike at one point. If you’re stupid, you do just enough PT to get back on your feet, let someone shoot you up to play a couple more games, and completely shred what’s left of your knee in the process.”

Kip looks terrified but nods along, like any of that makes any sense at all.

“Either way, you’re done.”

-

When Scott comes home from the hospital a few days later, he’s in a knee brace, on crutches, and doesn’t recognize any aspect of his life anymore.

His apartment feels too big and too small at the same time, the shape of it feels wrong. The air suffocates him. Everything is wrong.

He hates using the crutches and he hates leaning on Kip even more.  

He can’t put any of it into words, so he mostly says nothing. The quiet between them is unusual, uneasy. And it’s not fair to Kip, who tries to be there for him, to make idle conversation to distract him from his pain, but Scott just – can’t.

He holds him extra tight when they go to sleep at night and pretends that’s for Kip’s benefit. But really, he feels like he might break apart at the seams and Kip is the only thing holding him together. He wishes he could tell him, but the words aren’t coming.

-

Surely Doctor Ramón just made a mistake. A miscalculation. A deliberately bleak prognosis so as not to give him too much hope and have him slack off on PT. It’s probably just some sort of mind game, to make him commit to his recovery more.

Well, Scott is committed. He’ll be back on the ice in no time.

-

He gets a second opinion from another doctor. He gets a third opinion.

They all say the same thing. He’s lucky he’s on his feet at all.

He skips his painkillers for a day and gets very drunk.

He wakes up hungover and in agony. Reality hasn’t changed.

-

Kip has the patience of a saint with Scott, but even he has his limits.

He tolerated Scott’s denial for a couple of weeks, and he didn’t say anything when Scott saw doctor after doctor, told every reporter that called that he’d be back to playing in a few weeks.

Then, he tolerated Scott completely icing him out, even more so than before, while he was trying to process that maybe, maybe, the doctors are right and he’s wrong. And Scott did not do well at processing that at all.

Now, when Scott shouts at him over something completely irrelevant, actually shouts, loud and angry, which he never does – Kip doesn’t say a word, just gets up and walks into the bedroom, door firmly shut behind him.

The silent ten or fifteen minutes that follow are enough to make Scott feel despicable, like the biggest piece of trash in the entire world.

When Kip comes out, looking blotchy and red-eyed and miserable, Scott is absolutely terrified for a moment that he’s pushed too far, lashed out too much in his pain.

“I love you and I’m here for you. But I’m not going to be treated like this.”

-

He hires an assistant after that.

Kip has been taking way too much time off work to come with Scott to his many medical appointments and generally help him around the apartment a little bit, and Scott has been abysmal company.

He’s grateful for Kip’s help, but he resents that he needs it. He’s in a foul mood most of the time and Kip is right: he doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.

Nick is built like a tank and almost aggressively cheery. He has Scott’s physical therapist show him all the exercises so he can torture Scott at home, relentless and progressively happier the more Scott suffers.

He takes every bit of anger that Scott hurls at him in stride, laughing like it’s the funniest thing in the world.

Scott hates him. (Not really.)

-

A few weeks in, he can’t sleep anymore. At first, it’s probably just his body having too much energy, despite the PT and how exhausting even just getting around the apartment can be sometimes. But he’s used to a lot more exertion than this.

Whatever he can’t let out through his body collects in his brain, buzzing away in his head, his racing thoughts so loud he could swear he’s screaming them at himself. Spiral after spiral after spiral.

Three AM seems to be a perfect time for an existential crisis, according to his sleep-deprived brain.

He’s been trying so hard to block it all out.

Denial, at first. It worked until it didn’t.

Then, aggressively living in the moment, which was really just a watered-down version of denial. Sure, the course of his entire life has just been changed, but it’s not true until it actually happens. And it hasn’t happened yet. Right now, he’s still in recovery. And who knows, by the time he has to decide about playing again, maybe a magical cure for shitty knees has been invented. It could happen.

But now, alone with his thoughts in the middle of the night, after days of only getting two or three fitful hours of sleep, if any, he knows none of that is helping him. That none of it is true.

He’s done. He really is.

And that feels so massive, so unbelievably and terrifyingly huge, that he doesn’t understand why the world hasn’t stopped turning yet.

Surely the entire city, at least, should have reacted somehow? Because nothing makes sense anymore if Scott Hunter isn’t Captain of the New York Admirals.

And yet, everyone is going about their lives like nothing happened.

Even Kip, asleep next to him, his head a warm and usually comforting weight on Scott’s chest, just gets to go on with his life.

While Scott’s entire world has stopped.

-

The insomnia is almost worse than the pain. He tries everything, and the meds the doctor gives him to help him sleep do their job, a little bit. But Scott’s anxious brain is a force to be reckoned with and will not be silenced so easily.

It seems absurd, suddenly, that he’s even still here, even still alive, when he has no purpose anymore.

There was exactly one thing he was good at, and now that’s gone.

And then he feels guilty about even thinking that, because his purpose is so much bigger now than being an athlete; he has Kip, they have a life, and how could he ever pretend like that means nothing?

Kip wakes up one night, when Scott is in the middle of one of his spirals. He kisses him and strokes his face and whispers sweet little things until Scott stops trembling.

“If this happened ten years ago,” Scott says, “if I didn’t have you. I’d be dead by now.”

It only strikes him after it comes out of his mouth, what a horrible thing that actually is to say to someone.

Kip takes a wet, shaky breath and holds Scott close, squeezes him so hard that it almost hurts.

“You have me,” he says after a moment, his voice rough. “Don’t you fucking forget that.”

-

Kip starts seeing a therapist.

Scott’s first, instinctual response to that – which doesn’t even make sense to him – is blind rage.

How dare he. How dare he, when Scott is the one that this is happening to. When he’s the one who’s losing his entire life, his entire identity, becoming this useless waste of space in Kip’s life and everyone else’s – and Kip is in therapy for it?

He doesn’t say a word all day. He barely grunts at Nick and Nick makes a joke out of that too. “Ohh, we’re having a caveman day! Are you hiding a mammoth here somewhere? I always wanted to cuddle one of the woolly ones.”

He really hates Nick.

-

It takes Scott three days to figure out why it upsets him so much.

Because Kip is so easily allowing himself something that Scott hasn’t even considered. That he’s been advised to do, of course – a life-changing injury, especially as a high-profile athlete, of course there’s going to be emotional fallout. Every single medical professional he’s seen has been telling him to get some sort of mental health support.

He just – didn’t.

It seemed stupid, because what could a therapist even do? He needs someone to fix his knee, not his brain. He just needs his life back and he’ll be absolutely fine. Can the therapist make that happen? No. So what’s the point?

If he’s being honest with himself, he knows that’s not how it works though.

He watches Kip over the next few weeks and listens carefully to anything he tells him about his sessions. It was a touchy subject at first, but they got over it – well, Scott got over himself, mostly.

Vanessa, Kip’s counselor (who is not a psychotherapist in the traditional sense), has been helping him figure out how to communicate with Scott better. How to offer support to him without emotionally burning himself out. Kip says she’s weatherproofing him, so they can make it through this storm together and not get torn apart in the process.

It makes complete sense, once Scott hears about it. Thank God Kip is so smart.

-

Another thing that probably isn’t helping is that Scott barely leaves the apartment. It’s not that he can’t. He goes to his doctor’s appointments and to PT. He has Nick and he has a driver; it’s a bit of a hassle to get around sometimes, but it’s perfectly manageable.

But he doesn’t go out in public much. He hates people seeing him with his crutches and the stupid knee brace. He needs more room to maneuver now, and he hates taking up so much space everywhere, being such an obstacle. Being looked at so much.

“I really want a cortado from that weird hipster place in Williamsburg.”

“If you go in with that beard, the hipsters will adopt you as one of their own. I can give you a very fashion-forward tote bag to blend in.”

Kip doesn’t seem to grasp the problem.

“Do you think they’ll deliver?”

Kip kisses him, firm and steady and sweet. “You can go out to get a coffee. I know you don’t want to. But you can.”

Or maybe he understands the problem too well.

They go together on the weekend. People look at him and it makes him uncomfortable and sweaty and tense. But he does get his coffee, and it tastes fantastic, which feels like a small win that he somehow desperately needed.

-

He can’t watch the Admirals play anymore. Well, he can, and he does. But it is the most awful feeling, seeing his team on TV and knowing he’ll never get to be there with them again.

He suffers through it, though not as stoically as he thinks, because Kip takes the remote out of Scott’s white-knuckled grip halfway through the first period and changes the channel. They silently watch a nature documentary about elephants for a few minutes, until Scott lets out a huge breath and leans into Kip’s side, letting himself be held and comforted.

“You’re not letting them down just because you don’t watch, you know.”

True. But he’s already let them down in every way that counts, so it feels like the least he can do. Maybe the only thing he can still do. And he doesn’t even manage that.

-

The insomnia somehow progresses into panic attacks.

The first time, he thinks he might actually be dying. His heart is pounding hard in his chest, he’s covered in cold sweat, and it feels like he can’t breathe at all, like someone is sitting on his chest and holding him down. It feels like a heart attack.

He gets out of bed, because all his bullshit sleeplessness has been costing Kip his rest, too, and he’s not going to inconvenience him by fucking dying in the middle of the night next to him.

(Scott’s brain maybe isn’t fully online when he has that particular thought.)

It gets better when he paces, if his hobbling around the room with one crutch can be called that. It gets better with distractions, a rerun of Rizzoli & Isles on TV. So it’s probably not a heart attack.

-

His brand-new therapist prescribes him something for the panic attacks, once they become more frequent occurrences.

Great. More meds. Scott’s bathroom cabinet looks like a pharmacy already. He is offered all kinds of other things to try, to see if he feels like it might improve his quality of life. Mood stabilizers. Anti-depressants.

The thought is tempting, because in his imagination it just means popping benzos until his brain completely leaves the building and he gets to experience a single minute of peace, maybe.

He tells his therapist that he’ll think about it.

-

They haven’t had sex in weeks. It doesn’t even occur to Scott at first, because he’s had so much on his mind lately, and none of it is in any way conducive to getting in the mood.

Kip must have felt the same way, but he seems very happy and receptive now, when Scott drags his boxer briefs down his legs and has him sit up against the headboard so he can suck him off.

He can’t exactly kneel on the floor for it anymore, which annoys him.

It’s all well and good until Kip tries to return the favor and – nothing.

Maybe he’s just stressed, or one of the many medications he’s on is giving him side effects. Maybe it’s a one-off and they just need to get back into the swing of things.

(It’s not a one-off.)

-

The sex thing feels like the last straw for Scott.

What does he have to offer Kip anymore, if he can’t even do that?

He’s about to be unemployed, injured; still terrible company most of the time, grouchy and abrasive. And now he can’t even get hard.

It’s not even so much about not being able to get off, he couldn’t care less about that right now. It’s the principle of the matter. Just one more thing he can’t do.

Damaged, his brain screams at him, as it likes to. Broken. Dead weight.

-

It takes Scott a surprisingly long time to panic about money. But once the thought occurs, he does. He really does.

He can see Kip is only barely holding back from rolling his eyes, but to his credit, all he says to Scott is, “Call Phil, babe.”

Phil, Scott’s finance guy, sends an email every quarter that informs him of the state of his investments. They talk on the phone maybe once a year and that usually just consists of Scott asking whether he could live off his money for the rest of his life if he got hit by a bus tomorrow and Phil telling him, “Absolutely, but please don’t get hit by a bus.”

Phil, Scott messages him now, kinda got hit by a bus (sorry). Any financial advice on all that?

Phil has a lot of advice. They rebalance his portfolio towards a slightly lower risk profile and Scott pretends he knows what any of that even means.

He has enough money, is the bottom line of it all. Even with no income, everything is going to be fine.

“Sorry for freaking out,” he says to Kip later, after realizing how ridiculous it must have seemed, especially to Kip. And how incredibly dismissive of Kip’s job and the contributions he makes. It might not objectively be much compared to whatever is going on in Scott’s portfolio, but Kip could be putting their food on the table, if need be, and he’s proud of it, as he should be.

-

Scott stops speaking to his friends right when he’s in the thick of it all, and it’s definitely one of the poorer decisions he’s made lately.

But he just doesn’t know how to talk to people anymore. It’s been better with Kip lately, thank God, because the silence was killing them both. It’s different with his friends though. They usually talk about hockey so much, even with Eric, despite his own retirement. And he doesn’t want to talk about hockey.

“Please call Carter back,” Kip says one evening. “He keeps texting me because he thinks you’re dead.”

“I don’t know what to say to him,” Scott says quietly and Kip sighs and wraps his arms around him, pressing a kiss to his temple.

“That man can talk for five people, I don’t think you have to say anything.”

Kip makes a good point and Scott begrudgingly answers the texts from Eric and Carter that have been sitting in his inbox for way too long.

“Fuck, look at you,” Carter says when he comes over a few days later and takes in Scott’s – general everything. The sweatpants he’s been wearing for days. The t-shirt with toothpaste stains on it. His scruffy face, the beard more unkempt than it’s ever been even during playoffs. The little nest he’s made for himself on the couch, empty mugs and water bottles everywhere, a couple of paperbacks on the floor.

“Taking the whole letting yourself go after you get married thing a little far, bro.”  

There’s a tense moment between them when Carter isn’t entirely sure whether his joke landed or not, a flash of something almost fearful in his eyes that maybe it was too much, too soon.

Scott huffs out a laugh and punches his shoulder.

“You better hope Kip doesn’t just love me for my body, or this mess is coming to your couch next.”

They talk about stupid shit for a while, just settling back into normal even though nothing is normal anymore. Carter looks very serious and sincere when puts a hand on Scott’s forearm and says, “You know you didn’t let us down, right? I know you’re thinking it, but it’s not true.”

Scott sighs and looks away. He doesn’t know what’s worse – for him to have let them down, for the team to crumble without him, or for them to be fine, like they never even needed him at all.

-

“What am I gonna do now?” Scott asks Kip one night. “I’m not good at anything but hockey.”

“I think you don’t even know what you’re good at, because you’ve never done anything but hockey.”

Scott shrugs. Surely if he had any hidden talents in him, he would have discovered them at some point. Also – not every talent is actually useful. He doesn’t just want to do anything; he doesn’t just want a hobby. He wants a purpose. He wants a job.

“No, I really think that’s it. There’s just the one thing I’m good at. Was good at.”

“You’re still good at being a partner. A friend. You know that at least, right?”

Scott huffs. It sounds like a consolation prize. “Anyone can be a good partner.”

“Oh sweetheart,” Kip sighs. “You don’t even know how wrong you are.”

-

“You should write a book,” Kip says one day and Scott frowns at him.

“About what?”

“Your life.”

He dismisses it at first. It feels like a money grab. Telling a sob story to cash in on people’s sympathy while they still remember seeing him all banged up on TV. He doesn’t want anyone’s sympathy and, according to Phil, he doesn’t need anyone’s money.

But it keeps bouncing around his head, now that Kip has planted the idea. He got a ton of messages after first coming out, from people who told him they were inspired by him and how his story made them feel seen and understood and brave in their own lives.

“Do you think I could do it? I’ve never written anything.”

“Well, you can hire someone to help with the technical stuff and show you how to pace it right. Or even write it for you. I just think it would be good to get your story out there. A lot of people would be interested.”

-

Even though he doesn’t technically want a hobby, Scott recognizes that he has to fill his days with something that isn’t just PT or ruminating about everything he’s lost.

He tries golf, because that seems like the thing to do in retirement. He is not good at golf.

He lets Eric drag him to yoga, where he can only do half of the exercises with his current range of mobility. He doesn’t hate it, but he also isn’t good at it.

With a heavy heart and mostly to show Kip he is still committed to getting out of the house every now and then, Scott also goes to a beginner’s art class. It’s held by Jerôme, one of the artists that Kip’s gallery represents.

The painting he produces looks absolutely nothing like it’s supposed to, but Kip puts it up on the fridge like a child’s drawing, telling Scott it’s a lot more about the process than the result. Scott doubts this.

One good thing about going to the art class though: He meets Maya. Maya looks like she must be in her early twenties and uses a wheelchair. She gives Scott a little nod when she sees his crutches and the way he stretches out his leg under the table. It feels like she’s saying hey, I’m glad we both made it here today.

They get coffee together after and Scott feels horrible suddenly – he’s been spiraling for weeks because he can’t play hockey anymore and this young girl, with her whole life ahead of her, can’t even walk –

“It’s not the Suffering Olympics, dude. Even if that’d be more your speed. But you don’t need to be the best at everything.”

Scott gapes at her, at the way this girl he met an hour ago just completely took his psyche apart with one sentence.

“I’ve been where you are now. It sucks, I get it. But you adjust. To anything. What else are you gonna do?”

-

Scott decides to give the whole book thing a try.

He looks up the writer that did his first interview with him after coming out. She was with Sports Illustrated then, but is now an independent journalist with a focus on professional sports. Perfect.

Three days and several phone calls later, Margot sits at his dining room table with her laptop open and her phone recording their conversation. 

He engrosses himself in the project to the point of becoming completely obsessed. He’s up writing half the night now, and it gives him something to do when he can’t sleep. Which is thankfully becoming a somewhat rarer occurrence these days.

More importantly, it gives his brain something to gnaw on. Digging up his past for the book is in no way easy, but there are some happy memories that he actually likes to relive, and that start feeling less bittersweet the more he rolls them around his head. He thinks about how to word certain events, which parts he can try to write by himself and what he’s going to give to Margot instead.

Once he gets started, he finds he actually has a lot to say. And it’s terrifying, thinking about how one day someone might read all that and know all of his innermost thoughts, but at the same time – what does he have to lose, now?

-

Eric drags him out to do more things together. It seems stupid to Scott now, that he wasn’t the first person he turned to. He’s literally just gone through this: the transition into retirement, all the changes that come with it. The emotional toll it takes.

Even if it was a choice, in his case, and not an unexpected medical necessity, he understands a lot of the things that have been on Scott’s mind.

Scott gradually gets a little better at yoga.

-

He eventually gets to ditch most of his pills, one by one.

He still needs painkillers sometimes. He still takes sleeping pills, every now and then, if he really can’t settle down. But it isn’t an every day thing anymore and Scott as well as his stomach lining are eternally grateful for that.

Going off the medication for the panic attacks feels a little scary (because panic attacks are a little scary, to put it mildly). He has to taper off slowly, and works on some healthier ways to make his brain scream at him less.

(He feels very accomplished when his therapist suggests yoga as one of the possible options on the long list they make, because he gets to be ahead of the game there. Which feels great.)

-

One thing that Scott definitely doesn’t miss about his meds are the side effects. The first time he actually has an orgasm again, he feels like the heavens have opened up and the sun is shining right on his face. He wants to make an announcement to the press. He wants to give a speech and thank all his supporters (Kip).

It doesn’t work too well the second and third time they try, and he briefly thinks maybe it was just a lucky one-time thing. Thankfully, that’s not the case. He just has to accept it as one more area of his body not being as reliable and predictable as it used to be.

-

When Game Changer: The Scott Hunter Story comes out, Scott goes on an actual, real-life book tour for it. Which is genuinely the last thing he ever thought he’d do. He drags Margot along, because she’s not a ghostwriter, she’s a co-author, and also because he needs some moral support.

He still has to use a cane some days. When he’s been walking too much, when the weather is…doing anything, really. He hates the way people look at him, or maybe just the way he imagines they look at him. And he dreads being looked at so much.

But it’s worth it when he sees Kip sitting in the front row for his first signing event at Barnes & Noble in New York, beaming with pride. It’s worth it for the people who come up to him and tell him how much it has meant to them, hearing his story.

-

He gets involved in a lot of charity work after publishing the book. He’s dabbled here and there before, but was always too busy with hockey to really commit to anything. But they want him to speak at events now. He’s told that he has a voice, a platform, and is shown ways and given opportunities to use it.

There’s an article online that calls him an activist, and he really likes that.

Sometimes, his schedule is so busy that he completely forgets to feel useless.