The Captain's Secret Omega

The Marauders’ defenseman had about four inches and thirty pounds on Aaron, which was exactly why Aaron went straight at him.

Big guys pivoted like barges. Aaron cut inside on his forehand, felt the stick slash across his gloves, ignored it, and roofed the puck over the goalie’s shoulder from a spot that should not have produced a goal.

The horn went off. The glass shook under twenty thousand people losing their minds.

“That’s illegal,” the defenseman told him, disgusted.

“Write your congressman.” Aaron skated through the fist-bump line with his grin cranked to obnoxious.

On the bench, Eric Tran leaned down the boards to shout over the goal song. “That’s going in the group chat. I’ve got fifty bucks on you hitting thirty by the break, Howie. Don’t make me poor.”

“You bet on everything.”

“I bet on winners." Eric aimed his water bottle at him like a scepter. “And on guys having suspiciously hot months. What are you on lately, tell me so I can invest.”

“Clean living.”

“Liar. Nobody scores like that on clean living.”

Aaron laughed it off and squirted water through his cage, and the water tasted faintly of metal, which was new, which he ignored. Eric went back to harassing the equipment manager about his skate sharpening. Third-line center, career eight-minutes-a-night guy, ran the room’s betting pool with the ethics of a riverboat casino. Aaron had lost four hundred dollars to him over the years and still couldn’t prove anything.

Third period, 3–2 Sentinels, and his legs felt like they’d been filled with wet sand since warmups. He’d been dragging for a week. New batch of suppressants, probably. The pharmacy switched manufacturers sometimes and his whole body threw a tantrum about it.

He dropped onto the bench and Scott was there, because Scott was always there, six-three of captain calm at the end of the boards where the defense pairings sat.

“Haas’s line is out next,” Scott said, eyes on the ice. “Stay off the wall on your entries.”

“I know how Haas forechecks.”

“I know you know.”

That was it. That was the whole conversation. To everyone else on the bench it was a captain talking to his winger.

Nobody saw Scott’s glove rest on Aaron’s shoulder for one second longer than hockey required. Nobody ever saw anything. Two years of practice made you good at hiding in a room full of professional observers, and the trick, Aaron had learned, was that observers only found what they were looking for. Twenty-two guys watched for line changes and defensive assignments. Not one of them was watching for the captain’s thumb moving once, small, against a shoulder pad—good shift—in a language with exactly two fluent speakers.

Aaron had invented half the vocabulary himself. The hip tap was his. The plate thing was his. Scott contributed the coffee, the thumb, and an entire dialect of looking away at the correct moment. Between them they’d built a country nobody else had a passport to, and they ran it in plain sight, in arenas, on charter flights, across buffet tables.

Aaron chewed his mouthguard and watched the clock and did not think about how the smell of the bench—sweat, rubber, the sports drink Kozy had spilled in the first—was making his stomach roll like a boat.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

They closed it out 4–2. Aaron got the second assist on the empty-netter, which meant he could be insufferable about a three-point night, which meant he was.

“Three points,” he announced to the room at large, dragging his jersey over his head. “In case anyone missed it. Three.”

“We were all there,” Kieran said from two stalls down, unlacing at the speed of paperwork.

“Some of you were there. Some of you were watching me carry the franchise.”

“You’re twenty-seven. Franchises get carried by guys who backcheck.”

“I backcheck constantly.”

“You backchecked once in October. We framed it.”

The room laughed. Kozy, twenty years old and vibrating on rookie adrenaline, appeared at Aaron’s elbow holding two protein shakes like an offering. “Howie. Howie, that toe drag in the second—”

“Drink one of those yourself, you’re a child.”

“Can you teach me the toe drag.”

“No. It’s genetic.”

Across the room Scott sat in his stall with his gear half off, answering some assistant coach’s question about zone exits, and he stole a look at Aaron in the middle of it. Quick. Warm. Gone before it existed.

Aaron looked away first, because he was the better liar of the two of them and they both knew it.

The team meal after home games was a buffet in the family lounge. Aaron built his plate on autopilot—chicken, rice, double vegetables because his nutritionist had spies everywhere—then sat down across from Scott and Kieran and immediately took the garlic bread off Scott’s plate.

He didn’t ask. He never asked. Scott slid his plate an inch closer to make it easier, which was the kind of tell that would hang them both someday, and kept talking to Kieran about the road trip.

“Two in three nights, then the back-to-back,” Kieran was saying. “Haas’s going to run somebody in that first one. He’s been suspended twice this year and he’s due.”

“He’s due for a career change,” Aaron said around the bread.

“He’s due to take your head off, is what he’s due for. You embarrassed him in October.”

“I embarrass a lot of people. I can’t track them all.”

“Haas tracks his,” Kieran said. “That’s my whole point. He keeps a list and you’re laminated.”

Eric dropped into the seat beside Kieran with two desserts and zero shame. “Who’s laminated?”

“Howie. On Haas’s list.”

“Oh, for sure.” Eric forked into the first dessert. “I’ll set a line on it. Haas takes a run at him Friday, minus one-fifty. Clean game, plus two hundred. Kozy, you want in?”

Kozy, hovering with his tray like the seating chart was a final exam, looked genuinely horrified. “You can’t bet on Howie getting hurt."

“I’m not betting on hurt, I’m betting on attempted. There’s a whole moral difference. Sit down, you’re making the buffet nervous.”

Kozy sat. Directly across from Aaron, obviously, because the duckling program was year-round.

Scott’s coffee arrived because one of the staff had learned his order years ago, and Aaron watched him doctor it—one sugar, splash of cream, stirred exactly twice—and thought about how he knew that recipe better than he knew his own social security number. Scott made him one every morning at the house. Wrong house, officially. Aaron’s condo was across the river, listed on every team document, and contained three shirts and a fridge with milk from a previous geological era.

The chicken smelled wrong.

He noticed it mid-bite. Not spoiled, nothing anyone else would flag, just—off, chemical at the edges, like his nose had gotten a firmware update nobody asked for. He put the fork down and pushed rice around and drank water and rode it out.

“You good?” Kieran asked.

“Peaked in the second period. It’s all downhill.”

“Tragic.”

Scott didn’t say anything. Scott was watching him over the coffee cup with an expression the rest of the table would read as captain-assessing-his-winger, and Aaron gave him the tiny headshake that meant later, not here, and Scott went back to his conversation like a man reholstering a weapon.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

They left separately. They always left separately.

Aaron did his media first, towel around his neck, cameras in a half-circle. “Talk about that goal,” said the beat writer who opened with talk about every night of his life.

“Team effort,” Aaron said, with a face so straight it could’ve called icing. “Kozy drove the middle, opened the lane. I just put it where the goalie wasn’t.”

“You’ve got points in eight straight—”

“Has it been eight?” It had been eight. He’d counted at the morning skate. “I don’t track that stuff. Ask Eric, he’s got money on it.”

Laughter, clips gathered, cameras off. Two stalls down, Scott gave his own scrum four minutes of complete sentences about structure and forechecks, the media equivalent of a trap game. Nobody left with anything and everybody left satisfied. They were both good at this. They’d better be.

Aaron signed a kid’s jersey in the tunnel and drove out of the players’ lot at 11:04. Scott would follow around 11:25, after captain things—there were always captain things—and take the long way past the river because he was constitutionally incapable of driving directly home when there was a scenic option.

Aaron beat him there. He always beat him there.

He sat in the truck in the garage for a minute first, engine ticking, and dug the suppressant bottle out of the side pocket of his bag. Rattled it. Held it up to the dome light like the pills might confess.

Same little blue ovals they’d always been. He’d taken one this morning at 7:15, same as every morning since he was seventeen, an alarm labeled VITAMINS in a phone that had never once contained a vitamin. The routine was older than his driver’s license. The routine was the most reliable teammate he’d ever had.

“New batch,” he told the bottle, and put it away, and went inside.

He dumped his bag by the washer and stood in Scott’s kitchen with the lights off for a minute, which was not a thing he did. The house did its quiet house sounds around him. His body ached in the usual places and a few unusual ones, and there was a headache building behind his eyes with real ambition.

He got the milk out—current decade, this fridge—and drank it from the carton specifically because Scott hated it, and the milk tasted strange too. He checked the date twice.

Fine. It was fine. New suppressant batch. He’d call the pharmacy Monday, get the old manufacturer, spend a week recalibrating, done. He’d been managing his own biochemistry since he was seventeen years old. He was better at it than most doctors.

Headlights swept the front window at 11:31.

The garage door rumbled, and Aaron arranged himself against the counter with the carton, posed for a dairy commercial, ready with a line about scenic routes and old men who drove them.

Scott came in still in his game suit, tie already loose, and the line died in Aaron’s mouth, because Scott stopped two steps inside the door.

He didn’t say hello. He didn’t put his keys in the bowl, and Scott always put his keys in the bowl.

He was looking at Aaron with his head tipped slightly, nostrils working once, the exact focus he got reading a two-on-one, and when he spoke his voice was very quiet and very level.

“Your scent changed.”