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alchemistc · 3 months ago

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goon | bucktommy | chapter five

check out the hockey glossary here (updated through chapter five)

Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

read Chapter Five on ao3

Eddie pulls into the parking lot still grinning at the recollection of the first time he’d met Evan Buckley, and Tommy can’t help but smile back, all the air in his lungs spent on the breathless laughter he’d expelled on the drive over.

“He actually thought I was there to replace him, or something,” Eddie says, fondly, amusement and affection seeping into his voice, and something clicks, just then. Tommy doesn’t have time to think about it, though, because half a second later Ravi is banging on the passenger window, looking harried.

Tommy rolls it down with one eyebrow raised.

“Closed practice,” Ravi says, with a kind of warning tilt to his expression, and Eddie’s smile evaporates in the drivers seat.

“Shit,” Eddie says, and Ravi nods emphatically.

Tommy’s been here going on three months, and this is the first time he’s even heard a whisper about closed practice. Sure, there are days where fans don’t fill the stands, and days when the media doesn’t seem inclined to make an appearance because there isn’t any story worth telling, but as far as he knows, Bobby Nash hasn’t held a closed practice in at least a few years. Back when he was brand new and fighting an uphill battle for a point or two a week, yeah, he’d definitely heard a few of those stories from guys like McKinley and even a few of the guys who’d been traded, in the following few years, to teams Tommy played for.

But Tommy can’t think of a reason why Nash would want to do that now.

Gerrard had held them for the opportunity to pick on whoever he felt like singling out on a given day, but that’s not Nash’s style.

“He called up four guys from Loveland,” Ravi continues, and next to Tommy, Eddie grimaces.

“Scrimmage?”

Ravi nods forebodingly.

“Shit,” Eddie repeats, and Tommy takes a deep breath, not quite sure if this is actually something to be worried about, or more melodramatics from a bunch of guys who’ve never had to play for the likes of Tortorella or Gerrard. “Does Buck know?”

“Buck’s the one who told me,” Ravi says, and Eddie whistles through his teeth.

“Is he already picking on the Eagles guys?”

“He’s got The List out,” Ravi informs them gravely, and Eddie actually leans forward and knocks his head against the steering wheel, startling Ravi when his forehead hits dead center on the horn.

“What’s the list?” Tommy queries, using the back of his hand to shove Ravi gently out of his way, opening the door before he rolls up the window to allow them to continue this conversation. He’s almost positive this is a late hazing, at this point, but never let it be said that Tommy won’t take any opportunity to let Buck’s team talk about him.

(Fucked, with a capital F.)

“You don’t wanna know about The List,” Ravi tells him ominously, dancing out of the way of the bag Tommy swings out from the back seat before shutting his door behind him.

“Tell me anyway.”

Ravi falls into stride beside him, detailing a nightmarish demon of a man who hazes the new kids and the old hats alike with pop quizzes on regulations and unspoken rules, right before drilling any random passersby with questions about the system they play until he was satisfied they fully understood The Process.

Tommy hasn’t seen a trace of this monstrous demon, but he’s actually kind of looking forward to finding out if this is a real thing Evan Buckley does. It sounds objectively hilarious, and also a little adorable.

It’s been two weeks and Tommy’s gotten a couple texts, a single call, and some heavy looks across a table at team dinner, or the locker room after practie, with no idea what, exactly, he’d said or done to draw Buckley’s ire. He actually thought I was there to replace him, Eddie had said, not five minutes ago, and Tommy takes the rest of the walk (Eddie and Ravi on either side of him looking like they’ve just gotten their marching orders) to reassess the last month or so.

Things had been great, after the All-Star game.

The new guys were still learning the system, which has an admittedly sharp learning curve, and they’d lost a few games, in amongst the grind, but Tommy was skating better, and Buck was pulling off some pretty spectacular shit every night, breaking ankles and running up enough points to throw him into the Norris conversation. McKinley had suggested some line mix-ups that had actually helped the new guys both pick up the pace and start to work within the system as it was designed to work.

Eddie had been making a point to pull Tommy in, inviting him out to places with the team, and sharing his sparse father-son time with Tommy, spending a few extra minutes out on the ice with him on practice days to try to give him some tips on his movement, his edgework, his stick handling skills.

For two and a half weeks Tommy had spent his nights stretching out sore muscles, icing aches and pains, and watching game film on mute, listening to Evan Buckley talk to him on speaker about the perils of simple carbohydrates while he shoveled two-day old shrimp fried rice into his mouth.

And then he’d been left on read for three minutes and barely spoken to him since.

In hindsight, it makes plenty of sense. Hell, he’d joked a million times to himself that Buckley and Diaz lived out of each others pockets; of course, of course Buckley would be upset by the perception that Eddie Diaz could in any way attempt to replace Evan Buckley.

Tommy will talk to him after practice. Maybe take him up on the beer he’d promised to buy Tommy in exchange for a few lessons on keeping his blades planted during a bout. (Nash and Hen don’t need to know he’s giving their star defenseman fighting tips.)

It’s as good a saying shutout with twenty minutes still left in a game.

Tommy isn’t actually paying attention, when it happens. He’s mostly trying to remember what he knows about their penalty kill, how it functions, which point of the diamond he’s supposed to maintain a five foot radius around while the power play unit hammers them with shots towards the net.

He is very firmly not thinking about how flustered he’d felt, walking into the lockers to find a half-dressed Evan Buckley wielding an actual clipboard, going through equipment checks with four Eagles players like Buck hadn’t previously played a game or two with all but one of them. Like the Eagles don’t closely follow the same system the Avs play. Like they’re not fucking professionals, themselves. Nothing about it should have done a single fucking thing for Tommy, and yet, while Buck made his way down the checklist and Wagner and Ivan elbowed each other in amusement as the fresh-faced kid who’d yet to be called up until today seemed to waffle between consternation and the need to prove himself.

Tommy doesn’t have a praise kink. Or a degradation kink, come to think of it.

But he’d suddenly realized he absolutely had a thing for Evan Buckley leaning into the obsessive perfectionism. (He’d had the irrational desire to see what his Google calendar looks like, and had to stuff that away immediately while Wagner waved at him from across the room and received an icy glare from Buck for daring to interrupt.)

He doesn’t see it, is the point he’s trying to make. From the left of his goalie, Tommy takes a puck to the bucket and watches Buckley circle back up to the top of the zone while he blinks away the dull gong-like ringing in his ears, watches Ivan shovel the puck back to Buck and Buck slide left, right, barely keeping it in the zone when he spins away from a poke check, and then Wagner skates right through Tommy’s line of vision, and by the time Tommy repositions himself, Buck is chasing after Eddie, who has the puck and a clean sheet of ice straight to Chim.

Tommy keeps up with Wagner down the ice, Buck chasing ahead of them, and with just the team and coaches in here, Tommy can hear a lot more than he usually can, even in a practice setting— the sound of the guys on the bench chattering away, taking notes on how a PK is actually supposed to function; the slice of eleven sets of blades gliding over the ice; the chirping from Eddie as he taunts Buck, five feet behind him, and Buck’s loud, loud guttural shout a moment before he catches a burst of speed and extends his knee just as Eddie winds back to shoot the puck.

Eddie goes down with a groan of pain, and they all slow, the momentum of the chase propelling them most of the way as Eddie curses, a loud mix of English and Spanish while Buck drops his stick to his knees and sucks in a few steady breaths.

Hen is out on the ice about fifteen seconds later, and things devolve from there.

Eddie flops into the seat next to Tommy, ten minutes into their flight, and Tommy raises a curious brow, eyes darting up from his book when Eddie just sighs. Six rows up, Buckley is making friends with the d-man they’d called up from Loveland, just in case Eddie’s knee acted up and he had to be scratched from the lineup.

It’s the first time in three months that Tommy has seen them sit in separate rows on a flight.

Eddie shrugs half-heartedly when Tommy tilts his head in question.

There’s enough chatter going on that Tommy doesn’t feel the need to pull out his phone and have this conversation through his fucking notes app, but he keeps his voice low, regardless.

“How’s your knee?” he starts, because despite how close they’ve become, he’s under no illusion that he can just dive straight into the “we made your best friend mad, how do we fix it” conversation without some small-talk to ease them into it.

Or maybe they can. “Recovering from Buck’s possessive streak pretty well, actually,” Eddie says with a breathy snort. “Wish his ego would get on the same page as my knee.”

Tommy bites down on the urge to defend him, of all things, but a moment later Eddie sighs.

“That wasn’t fair. Buck is — he gets a little weird, sometimes, about the people that are important to him.” He pauses, fingers tapping against his thigh as he shoots a careful look at Tommy. “I feel kinda bad. All he ever wants is to feel like he’s being included.”

“You’re allowed to have more than one friend,” Tommy intones, and then feels for a moment like walking it back at the lofty tilt of Eddie’s head, his pursed lips, his deadpan expression.

“Buck has about five million attachment issues and three people he trusts implicitly, and one of them has been inadvertently icing him out since he left for the All Star game. He’s second guessing six years of friendship because he didn’t realize dating wasn’t the only thing that could take my attention away from him for more than five minutes at a time.”

Tommy thinks that’s probably an oversimplification, but he gets the gist. “Have you talked to him?”

“Not successfully,” Eddie intones, with a nod towards the back of Buck’s head.

“I’ll talk to him.” Eddie gives him a grateful tap, two knuckles to Tommy’s knee, and shifts back into his seat, stretching his leg out into the aisle. “Maybe wait until after the game. Dallas is only six points behind us and I’d much rather he take a run at Duchene than you, if he doesn’t like what you have to say.”

The chuckle that escapes containment is a little self-deprecating, but Tommy tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and pretends to get some shuteye while he ponders what the hell he’s actually going to say to Buck. After the game.

Letting Buck stay mad is either gonna make or break this game. Tommy hasn’t decided yet, but it’s a running concern, as they go up one, then Dallas ties, then Dallas captures the lead in the closing minutes of the first. Buck is agitated down the tunnel, agitated through intermission, agitated as he lines up for the opening puck drop of the second period, agitated as Dallas mucks things up in the neutral zone, agitated as the refs miss an interference call that he’s been penalized for at least three times in the calendar year, so far.

He’s agitated as he gets smashed into the boards behind Dallas’ net, and agitated as Diaz misses his pass and the puck trickles out of Dallas’ zone, and agitated when Dallas takes advantage and nearly goes up another goal, the puck clanging off the iron before Chimney can scramble from one side of his crease to the other.

Dallas plays a shitty, boring game of keep away, jamming up every play they try to make in the neutral zone, and with two minutes left in the second, Buck takes another nasty hit against the glass, sandwiched between Benn and Hintz with the puck no where close to him. The no call is probably his last straw, when he comes away bleeding with Hintz’s stick still stuck in the padding of his helmet.

Back on the bench, Buck washes out his mouth with water, grimaces as Hen dabs at the cut just to the side of his eyebrow, an uncanny match to the birthmark on the other side of his face, and proceeds to argue with Nash for thirty seconds as the clock ticks down and Nash keeps him on the bench.

Nash has a rule, in these scenarios. They play for the next five minutes, every time, no game too far out of reach because they’re just setting up for the next five, but the important piece is handing off the last five. Whatever happened, whatever will happen, once the previous five are up, they’re done. There’s no changing them, only learning from them.

And Buck is clearly not ready to hand it the fuck off.

With twenty-seven seconds left and the puck once again stuck in the middle of the ice, Buckley and Diaz replace Manson and Girard, and Buck takes about half a second to assess the run Duchene is making towards their zone before he seems to make a decision.

It’s a legal hit, technically speaking. He catches Duchene with his head down, but Buck has both speed and a build up of negative emotion just leaking from his pores, at this point, so when they meet in the middle and Buck locks his elbow, the crash ends up looking more like an explosion of momentum, from Buck’s extended mitt, through Duchene’s chest. Buck stays standing and Duchene goes ass over tea-kettle, legs going out from under him and the puck trickling off his stick right into the space behind Buckley, where Diaz skates over to scoop it up and send it careening through a free patch of ice towards McKinley.

Duchene doesn’t snap back to his skates, right away, and Tommy can’t hear it over the noise of the crowd, but in the moment before Buck follows the puck on it’s way towards Oettinger, he bends to say something that has Duchene seeing fucking red.

Christ.

Tommy supposes he can add another player to the list of people who are gonna throw a fucking target on the number 18.

McKinley ties it up with seven seconds left in the period, but on the skate back to the benches Duchene decides to get chirpy. Buck gets through the glove taps just in time to have his stick snaked out from it’s loose hold by a smirking Duchene, and the shoving match the commences almost gets their entire first line thrown in the box for the start of the third, but it’s Buck that puts them all on notice as they skate back to their own benches.

“You’re a fucking joke, man!” Buck yells, still half-hanging off the sideboards, skate firmly tucked beneath the bench to give him leverage to lean back out and make direct eye contact with Duchene. “Your career is a joke, and you’re an embarrassment to the league. How’s that ring chasing going, Matty? I fucking lit you up, asshole, and I’ll do it again!”

Tommy makes the mistake of staring through the glass towards the Stars bench, where Dumba is staring directly at him. So. There’s that.

Whatever Duchene shouts back is lost to the final whistle and a battle for the puck that Stankoven ends up shoveling into his own zone just to kill off the last few seconds on the clock.

The ire hasn’t left Buck, once they’re in the room. They can all feel it, attitude fucking rolling off of him as they listen to Bobby walk them through his strategy to get rid of this congested mess of a game and get through to the net.

Tommy spends his twenty minutes trying to remember his last fight with Dumba.

It’s a tie game. There’s an edge to be had to winning a territorial fight like this — momentum can swing based entirely on whether or not Tommy’s fist makes contact enough times to fire up his team. The problem is the one player who’s been fired up the entire game isn’t doing shit to generate the kind of momentum they need to break out of this slog of a game and build some fucking offense.

There’s another option. They’re all pissed at the refs, and have been all game, and Tommy’s the locker room guy, the one they look to when their stars have said their piece and the coach has left them to their own devices. If the refs toss him, they’re gonna be amped the fuck up.

Nash would be pissed he’s even thinking about it. Buck might actually pick a fight he can’t win, if Tommy doesn’t play it right. Fighting Dumba won’t work, for this, so he’s gonna have to suck it up and play the villain, ignore the heavyweight fight and go for something gritty and fucking rude.

Benn, then.

It’s been a while since Tommy’s laid out Jamie Benn.

Both benches get warnings from the refs before the start of the third, and Buck blatantly ignores them the moment he’s on the ice, chirping every single black-and-neon green sweater that has a chance of hearing him, missing setups because he’s too busy laying reverse hits and generally being a pest.

Tommy absolutely shouldn’t find anything about this remotely amusing, because if he keeps it up, Dumba is absolutely gonna find a way to challenge Tommy, and everyone else is too frustrated with this new and unimproved Buckley. The problem is, Evan Buckley the pest is fucking hilarious, and the few insults Tommy has managed to catch are not only fantastically amusing, they’re also bitingly specific. Buck’s putting his stats and lore knowledge to good (evil) use.

He’s pretty sure he even catches a slyly worded allusion to cunnilingus that Benn very clearly does not like one bit, but Benn doesn’t have time for retaliation because Buck takes his momentary lapse to pick his pocket and spin into the Stars zone with three Avs on his heels.

The puck pings off the crossbar five different times before the Stars get possession again, and with fifteen minutes left in the game, Dadanov snipes one past Chim into the net.

Tommy can feel the bench deflate.

Dallas shaves another three and a half off the clock by clogging up the neutral zone before Tommy gets an opportunity on the ice with Benn’s line, and he doesn’t waste any time — down a goal with eleven and change left in the game, he doesn’t see a whole lot of other options, and he doesn’t really give Benn the opportunity to not engage.

It takes a bit of maneuvering.

Stripes haven’t called shit all game, from either side, so it’s a risk, either way, and Tommy’s goal isn’t to actually injure Benn, just make the hit look bad enough and blatant enough that they’ve got no choice but to call it. He waits until the puck has been off Benn’s stick for a hot second before he slams him into the boards, and the crowd gets loud.

The whistle blows, and just for the hell of it, Tommy wraps both hands around his stick and shoves it into the middle of Benn’s back when he tries to get back to his feet.

Johnston gets an arm around his neck half a second later, and both linesmen come careening in to break it up.

He’s assessed with five minutes, which isn’t ideal, when that shaves off half their time left in the game, but a minute and a half into the penalty kill Heiskanen takes a chop at Ravi when he manages to get the puck down past the red line, and suddenly they’re four-on-four for at least the middle portion of Tommy’s gamble.

Dallas’ special teams aren’t as good as theirs — not when they’re evenly matched — and when McKinley finds Panikkar with a stretch pass there’s no one in the lane to intercept.

Tie game, with a minute and a half left in Tommy’s major, back to being shorthanded, but there’s signs of life on the bench, and Buck seems to have finally fucking cooled his jets (Tommy spends forty seconds wondering which one of them convinced Bobby to force a Honey Stinger into his hands).

In typical fashion, the moment Tommy’s out of the box, Dallas returns to slowing the game right down, well aware that it’s the easiest way to neutralize the Avs offense, and the minutes chip away while Tommy watches the clock.

On a flyby, Duchene chirps at Buck and Diaz both on the bench, which is ultimately the Stars fucking downfall, even if they don’t know it.

With forty-seven seconds left on the clock, Diaz skates through traffic and gets a saucer pass down the ice to O’Connor, and Lundkvist blows a tire in his attempt to defend him.

The puck sails in right under Oettinger’s blocker.

In the locker room, ten minutes later, Tommy catches Nash’s eye and does his best not to look guilty, but Tommy has studied Nash’s career, and they both know exactly where he’d gotten his ham handed idea from. The expression on Nash’s face tells him everything he needs to know about how quickly he’ll end up a healthy scratch if he tries it again.

Tommy’s still working through his wording, five hours later, when he settles into his room in Boston. Tomorrow’s a rest day, nothing but a coaches meeting on the books, so regardless of how things go with Buck, he’s at least got the advantage of a full day where they’re not required to speak to each other, once Tommy’s said his piece. He’ll give Buck the night, let him sleep off whatever agitation had had him so hot all day, knock on his door in the morning and apologize, maybe convince him to grab another coffee, if the apology goes decently.

And if not, he’ll have the day to lick his wounds and remind himself that he’d absolutely known he was setting himself up to hurt his own feelings.

He’s eternally grateful his trade had happened so early, because he’d heard rumblings on the plane ride over that the Altitude team was planning a half-day of get-to-know-the-new-guys coverage, and he’s already done his thirty-minute sit down with Keefe.

The knock on his door startles him out of his reverie, and when he swings the door open, he doesn’t know exactly what he’s expecting, but it sure as hell isn’t the chagrined, lopsided smile of Evan Buckley, leaning against the door frame and looking contrite.

“Buck. Hi.”

Buck’s chest rises with the deep breath he takes.

“Hi,” he says, and in the dim hallway light, with his shoulders turned in on themselves, he looks suddenly vulnerable and tired. “Can we talk?”

#bucktommy #bucktommy fic #tevan fic #bucktommy hockey au #dallas fans your stars are getting all my vitriol this chapter #actually i'm blaming jamie benn specifically for me losing the first draft of this chapter

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