Rating:

General Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Kip Grady/Scott Hunter, Scott Hunter & His Aunt Kathy (OC)

Characters:

Scott Hunter, Original Characters, Kip Grady

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Deaf Character, CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) Character

Language:

English

Collections:

Across the Skip-Vers(e)

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-04 Words: 3,777 Chapters: 1/1

Your Voice and Your Ghost

Summary

Scott Hunter is in an all-time slump after the 2014 season ends. The Olympics were a bust, the playoffs ended badly, he misses his parents, still, forever, and he hasn’t signed in years. He is, perhaps, lonelier than he has ever been.

Notes

Yooooo so apparently my only contribution to this fandom is getting obsessed with other peoples’ ideas and spinning wildly out of control. So glad we’re all in this sandbox together.

Signing Space is an AU where Scott Hunter’s parents were Deaf, and Scott hasn’t really signed since they passed and he was cut off from the Deaf community due to custody arrangements. Kip is Deaf, and when Scott finds him in Straw+Berry, it opens up a part of him he thought he’d lost. In addition to, you know, the big gay romance they’re having.
ANYWAY in yesterday’s update, Scott reconnects with his mom’s best friend, his Aunt Kathy, and at one point she says, “There’s so many great people in New York. I should give you my friend George’s email, he has a son your age—” and the idea for this alternate meeting possessed me entirely! The plus side of working weekends is I can spend an entire Wednesday afternoon writing fanfic and not even feel bad about it.

Quick formatting note—any dialogue in this fic is ASL, unless indicated otherwise.

I am not a member of the Deaf community, but I approached this as respectfully as I could!

• Inspired by Signing Space by mtothedestiel

The Admirals get knocked out of the playoffs in the first round, and Scott dreads the long summer stretching out before him. The Olympics were a grinding struggle with no reward, and the Admirals are, again, not quite good enough to go the distance. He considers extending his typical European vacation in August out from two weeks to three; it’s not like anything else is happening to him. He knows, he knows, that he has so much, but he feels deeply lonely in a way he isn’t sure can be fixed. Not as long as he still plays hockey, which he hopes is quite a while longer. The loneliness is an acceptable trade for the game, for now.

That's what he tells himself, staring at his penthouse ceiling, but he's not sure he believes it anymore.

So when Eric Bennett invites him out last minute during the first week of May to go see an opera, Scott agrees. He might as well. Benny and his wife have season tickets to the Met, but she is apparently sick, and the season is ending this week, so it’s his only chance to see the show. Benny doesn’t particularly care about I Puritani, but he likes the soprano singing Elvira, and he doesn’t want to miss it. So Scott goes. A little culture on a Wednesday can’t hurt him.

Later that night, watching the trio of ASL interpreters on the side of the stage performing for the duration of the opera, Scott realizes that was a stupid thing to think.

He’s not sure when the last time he even signed was, and he wishes with a deep ache that he had earplugs so that he could just watch them, experience the opera only through them. He wishes he could forget what it feels like to hear, just for the duration of this opera. He finds himself twitching with the urge to recreate some of the more interesting signs, the ones expressing ideas he’d never had a chance to get fully comfortable with in his first language.

Eric, sitting next to him, probably doesn’t even know Scott knows ASL. Maybe he learned it as a factoid at one point—Scott Hunter is a CODA and was fluent in ASL from early childhood—but he’s never seen Scott sign, and Scott never talks about it.

After the show, as they walk out of the theatre, Benny says something about how remarkable it was that the man playing one of the leads switched between the first and second acts, how unusual it is to see that kind of mid-show substitution. Scott has to hum a non-committal agreement because he didn’t even realise it had happened, too caught up in watching the ASL interpreters to pay such close attention to the actors’ faces. The way they had moved, interpreting what the music sounded like from the first beat of the overture, the way they interacted to show how the music informed the performance of the singers, the way they spoke together so seamlessly, letting the Deaf audience into the world of the opera.

Scott keeps an eye out in the lobby, to see anyone else signing. As he and Eric wait for their car, he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a couple signing together. He is in raptures about the music, and she is rolling her eyes fondly. Past them, a couple with two teenage children all sign. Scott can’t really see them through the crowd, but he thinks it’s about where they’re going for dessert. His hands twitch restlessly at his sides as he tries not to stare too obviously. He remembers feeling weird when people stared in public, even if there was a certain satisfaction in knowing they couldn’t really eavesdrop.

As he gets ready for bed that night, he finds himself seriously considering trying to find the Deaf community in the city. He’s never tried, but obviously there are Deaf people in a city the size of New York. There must be events, or groups, or… god, he doesn’t even know, mixers?

It feels like a sign, when, the next afternoon, he gets an email back from Angie, his PA. Somehow, she had been able to get access back to the email account he’d lost as a teenager, and he now has a PDF of all the conversations he had with his Aunt Kathy over the years. He’ll have to look through the account later to see his conversations with his friends, but for now he scrolls through the PDF Angie put together of his emails with Aunt Kathy, watching as his replies get sparser and sparser and stop entirely when he’s about sixteen. Kathy keeps emailing though, a few times every year, and the last one was after the Olympics, just a few months ago.

I watched all of Team USA’s games. You worked so hard out there, I’m proud of you!

No one had said anything like that to him, at the time, or in the months since. Finishing fourth felt somehow like the worst outcome in the tournament: good enough to make it, but not enough to get on the podium. Who knew if he’d still be playing next Olympics; who knew if the MLH would be allowed.

Scott takes a deep breath, and opens a draft.

The draft taunts him for the next week. He fiddles with it every day, sometimes multiple times. How much should he say, would Kathy even want to hear from him, what’s not enough.

Finally, he sends an email to thank her for writing, even when he didn’t respond, and to ask if he can visit, any time this summer.

Kathy replies quickly, and they find a weekend early in June that works for both their schedules. Scott books a hotel and rents a car, and wonders on the drive up to Rochester if Aunt Kathy has moved or if the guest room is still the one he used to sleep in sometimes. She’s married now, with a step-daughter and a grandbaby she adores, and Scott is supposed to meet all of them this weekend. Scott had tried to set up their first meeting in a cafe or something, but Kathy had insisted he come to hers instead, so it’s early on Saturday afternoon when he parks the car in her driveway. She hasn’t moved, but the house seems smaller than he remembers it.

It’s been twenty years and the tree in the front yard is tall and broad now, and Scott remembers his mom and Kathy digging the hole to plant it, way back when Scott was little. The tree had been about the same size as him. He wants to tuck a leaf in his pocket and take it back into the city with him. Maybe he will, if this meeting with Aunt Kathy for some reason goes poorly. He hasn’t seen her in twenty years, either.

He knocks on the door and waits, shuffling his weight awkwardly between his feet. Kathy opens the door and she looks like he remembers, but with gray in her hair now, and more wrinkles on her face.

“Oh, Scott!” She signs with glistening eyes, and Scott chokes up at the shape of his name in her hands, the click-tap of the S on the forehead and the T on the chin mimicking the way his name feels when spoken. “I’m so happy you're here, please come in.” He does, and it’s as he’s bending down to take off his shoes that she speaks in English in the same familiar tones from his childhood, “Or did you want to talk?”

“No,” Scott straightens up with a smile, hands already moving. “I came to sign.”

Kathy grins and ushers him through the house to her cozy kitchen table, where a pitcher of lemonade and a loaf of some sort of sweet bread is sitting. Scott wants to linger in the hallway, where the faces of his parents and his childhood friends look back at him from the photos, but instead he follows her.

It’s awkward, at first. Scott hasn’t signed in so long, but Kathy is one of the people who taught him how, and she is patient when he needs to search for a word, or resort to fingerspelling. She gives him a few signs as well, and it makes him feel six years old again, in the best possible way. They drink the lemonade, but Scott can’t make himself stop signing long enough to eat any of the bread. It feels silly, but his muscles start to ache, unused to moving in this way. They reminisce about his parents and catch each other up on their lives, and by the time her husband Paul arrives for dinner, Scott has finally stopped wanting to cry.

Dinner is lively—Paul is witty and dry in a way that suits Kathy perfectly, and Scott is charmed by the rhythm they settle into, signing around the meal, the way he did with his parents for his whole childhood. After dinner, Scott asks, “Can I go look at the pictures?”

Kathy’s eyes soften as she agrees, then follows Scott into the hall. He’s content to look for a while, then points at a picture of himself with his parents. They are both grinning but he’s grumpy as he’s ever seen himself. "What is this?"

“That’s after your first day ice skating,” Kathy grins as wide as his parents as she explains, “You were mad you had to stop. I wish I could have taken pictures while you skated,” and her expression of remorse is dramatic in the way she always does when she means to be silly, “but I wasn’t good enough with the camera then.”

“And,” Scott has to fingerspell, “F-I-L-M was expensive.” He remembers his parents saying it, but the sign has escaped him.

Kathy laughs, full and broad, “Film was expensive, yeah.” Scott mimics the word back at her, to have it in his hands again.

Eventually, Kathy sends Scott off with a firm hug, and they confirm his plans to come back the next day to meet her step-daughter Janine, and her new baby.

The hotel is just a hotel, just like and unlike every other hotel he’s ever been in, but the view out the window is the landscape of his youth, and Scott sleeps better than he has in months.

He spends most of Sunday with Kathy’s family, and she invites a few old friends of Scott’s around for dinner that night, and they leave him with contact information for people he had long-since thought he would never see again. They had emailed as teenagers, but now there are video calls and social media, and Scott doesn’t have to go years without seeing them, ever again. Kathy convinces him to ditch his hotel and stay with them before he drives back to the city the next day; it’s not a hard sell.

Monday morning, Scott gets up to make eggs and toast and coffee, and Kathy reads the paper while Paul is still sleeping. She sets the paper aside to eat with Scott, and they chat as they eat. She asks about his summer plans, and he promises them Admirals tickets any time they want them. “We’ve never missed a game you played here in Buffalo,” Kathy says, her signs comfortable and slow in the morning stillness. All these years, and he never even knew he could have looked up into the stands and seen his family there. Scott runs a hand over his face, suddenly overcome with emotion. Buffalo is almost a two hour drive from Rochester. Kathy rubs his shoulder gently, then pulls her hand away to sign again, “I don’t want to overstep, but…” Scott waits out her hesitation, and she goes on, “Will you be signing more back in the city, too?”

Scott nods and nods, then signs, “I want to, but I don’t even know where to start.”

“Well, you’re in luck.” Kathy says. “My friend George”—the name sign is a circle made of the letter G next to her face, and she says the name aloud as well—“he lives in Brooklyn, but he’s got a son about your age, Kip.” Kip is a K pressed against the corner of her eye, and Scott wonders if the smile is part of it too. “He’s in the city all the time, and he’s super connected to everything. I could put you in touch?”

At their wedding, Eric Bennett will claim that it’s all thanks to him that they met, since he took Scott to I Puritani when they had ASL translators. Aunt Kathy will say it’s her, since she gave Kip’s number to Scott that day in June. George Grady will say it’s him, since his always bragging about Kip is why Kathy knew to do that. Scott thinks maybe it’s something a little more like fate. He had, after all, considered stopping at Straw+Berry many times. He would have met Kip eventually.

But when he finally meets Kip Grady, at the beginning of July, after several weeks of half-stilted texting, Scott doesn’t know any of that. He just knows that he’s going to meet a Deaf man who lives in New York City, and hopefully become friends with him, and then… for the first time, connect with the Deaf community in the city he has loved for a decade. He has half-formed daydreams of getting the Admirals’ media team to record a serious clip of him in uniform making his name sign and putting it into the intro reel they play for him every game.

Kip had sent a selfie grinning and making a thumbs-up sign and Scott had sent something similar back, so they would know who they were looking for at this cafe. And Scott had thought Kip was good-looking, but he is not prepared for the way he feels when he sees him standing at the counter, staring at the menu.

His arms are gorgeous and his shorts stop mid-thigh and Scott cannot be staring at another man’s thighs at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and yet. He watches Kip type his order up on his phone then show it to the employee, and finally approaches before he can feel too much like a creep. He angles his way into Kip’s line of sight, then waves. When Kip looks at him, Scott has to remind himself to breathe as he says, “Hi, I’m Scott.” The movement comes easy as ever to him, after weeks of regular video calls with Aunt Kathy.

Kip grins back at him, “Hi Scott, I’m Kip.”

Scott wants to see his name in Kip’s hands every day for the rest of his life, so he echoes Kip’s name back to him, “Hi Kip.” Scott remembers the first time he saw Kathy say his name, and thinks that the smile is definitely part of it.

He stares at Kip sort of stupidly for several seconds, and Kip laughs a little, shoulders shaking more than he makes sound. “Did you want to,” he gestures to the counter.

Scott nods, stepping up to place his own order. A few minutes more and they both have coffees and a table on the patio in the shade, which feels like absurdly good luck. Scott thinks meeting Kip at all is absurdly good luck. He is funny and easy to talk to, and if signing means that Scott has an excuse to stare at a gorgeous man’s lips and chin and wrists and hands, he will take it. There are far worse ways to spend his afternoon.

Kip signs fast, but he says that’s normal in the city. Scott, apparently, signs slow, with pauses in his rhythm that everyone from Rochester has. After all these years, he’s still carrying his parents in his hands, and the thought settles soft into his chest, a treasure he will keep.

Kip spends the rest of July introducing Scott to Deaf New York. They go to comedy shows and poetry slams and Scott meets Kip’s whole friend group one at a time. By August, Scott is as comfortable using ASL as he ever has been in his whole life, and also, for the first time in his adult life, has friends that don’t have anything to do with hockey. Kip and his friends, who are Scott’s friends now too, all know what he does, but they don’t care any more or less than they do about Elena’s corporate job or Kyle’s bartending.

Scott has also gone out to a few meet-ups for adult CODAs specifically, and it’s been nice to talk to other people who were mad when they had to learn English, to laugh about the pranks you can pull on parents who can’t hear you coming, to sign across a park at your parent and have the other kids stare. He's never spoken to someone else who has experienced adjusting to a world where you can opt in or out of signing, and what that means. Tiffany and Jamal, a married couple, become some of Scott’s favourite people to talk to. They invite him out for dinner, and suddenly he realises he’s made friends on his own, too. It’s something he can do, separate from Kip’s gregarious personality, separate from hockey.

Scott is halfway through August when he leaves for Greece. The hook-ups aren’t as satisfying this year, although the men are hot and the sex is good. A week into his trip, he stays up later than he should, on a video call with Kip, while Kip tells him about everything he is missing in the friend group this week. Maria is hooking up with an ex they all wish she wouldn’t, Shawn is seeing someone new, Elena’s boss is being stupid again. Scott laughs and wishes he were in the same place as Kip and signs “Kip” by his eye as many times as he can get away with, hoping that Kip will sign the click-tap of “Scott” back at him just as often.

Scott gets home from Greece and the next day, invites Kip over to his apartment for the first time. He is practically shaking with nerves, but he manages to keep his hands still to sign with Kip as he pokes around the apartment, teasing Scott about how boring all the decor is.

Scott knows; he had a designer do it and he’s never really bothered to adjust it.

Kip is at the bookshelf when Scott approaches him, and Kip turns to sign his next question, bringing them too close together. Scott resists his impulse to take a step back, and instead lets his eyes flicker across Kip’s lips as Kip changes tack partway through his question. “Scott,” he says instead, “Why did you invite me over today?”

Scott shrugs. Intensely, helplessly honest, he signs, “I missed you.”

Kip leans in a little closer and the way he says, “Yeah?” with half-lidded eyes makes Scott’s heart skip a beat in his chest.

Scott Hunter kisses Kip Grady for the first time on a Thursday in August with the terrifying, wonderful feeling that he might not ever want to kiss anyone else again in his life.

Kip gets Scott up against the bookshelf and a thigh between his legs and heat builds in Scott faster than it has in a long time. Eventually, he pushes Kip away just to get enough space for his hands to say, “Bedroom?” Kip nods and kisses him again, and eventually Scott gives up on the bedroom and settles for the couch. Kip above him in the warm afternoon sunlight in his apartment might be the best thing Scott has ever seen.

After, Kip is sitting at the kitchen counter, hands wrapped around a glass of water. Scott is making dinner and he’s annoyed every time he has to turn his back on Kip and their conversation falls into silence. Kip can speak English, sure, but he doesn’t like to, and he shouldn’t have to. Not with Scott.

He’s also pleased every time he turns around again and the conversation picks back up, easy as anything. They’re both a little giggly and unsure, but Scott is pretty sure they’ll go for round two after dinner, and he wants to ask Kip to stay over.

He doesn’t want this to just be a one-time thing, a perfect golden afternoon where he got one moment of closeness with Kip that he’ll think about sometimes in the future, bittersweetly. If this goes the way he’s hoping, he wants this to be the rest of his life.

Kip beats him to it, while they’re eating. “So, this has been fun, but…”

He trails off, and Scott waits a beat before signing back, “But what?”

Kip looks out the window, then back at Scott. “But is that all?”

“I hope not,” Scott sighs, and his signs probably look as mushy as he feels. “I hope you’ll stay tonight, and we can do this all again tomorrow and next week, and…”

“Okay,” Kip grins, and Scott wants to kiss him again. He shoves another bite of food in his mouth instead. “But how will this work? You’re not out, right?”

“No,” Scott says, and the word lands like a stone in his own stomach. “And I can’t come out,” and the way he pushes the sign away from himself feels almost violent, but he can’t help it. “Not right now, at least. I just, I know I want you.”

Kip takes a moment to think, looking away again, busying his hands with his own meal. Scott lets him, lets the pause sit. He’s asking a lot of Kip, to consider something with him. Kip, who has been out since he was eighteen. Kip who is brilliant and vibrant and knows probably all of Deaf New York and definitely all of Deaf&Gay New York, and probably most of Hearing Gay New York as well. There is a reason Scott has never had a boyfriend before, has kept this part of him concealed in his daily life, saved all his desire for beaches in countries he’ll never see again. But Kip makes him want to try.

Kip sets down his fork and Scott’s eyes shoot to his hands, his face. Kip meets his gaze with a cute little shrug. “Okay, let’s try. We’ll need to… we need to talk about it more, but I want you, too.”

The next morning, when Scott wakes up to Kip sleeping next to him, and he feels like he's looking at forever.