Work Text:
Mo and Lucas meet before every practice to warm up together. Nothing fancy or formal; just skating laps to stretch their legs out before the rest of the team comes out of the room. Side-by-side, up the long side, around the end, down the long side, around the end.
The sounds of their skates on the ice, cutting through the perfect surface: sscrrrch, sscrrrch, sscrrrch.
It’s funny, the two of them in the room together this year. The rookies, the kids, the babies. They sit and watch their older teammates and how they move around with assurance and experience and just… familiarity. Knowing what to do.
Not that the way locker rooms work is so different in the NHL than the leagues they’ve both played in before. They could do this just fine if there was no one else to watch at all. But the others are here, and they’re interesting. Mo and Lucas compare notes on them while they skate, murmuring back and forth in English and a little bit of Swedish—Mo learned all the relevant words when he was with Rögle.
Sscrrrch, sscrrrch, sscrrrch
Larkin seems right at the edge of crawling out of his skin or bursting into screams half the time. The weight of the C is heavy here, and the years of failure are more pounds on top of it. They both want to make him grin, make him tear across the ice and throw his arms out for them to jump into, make him swagger around the locker room and sing along with whatever’s playing.
Bert is harder to get a read on, always in motion, always cursing and laughing and talking fast. He’s like that on the ice, too, a hundred feet away and then suddenly right there, throwing hits, dishing the puck, flying into a fight for any one of them.
Danny and Staalsy and the Czechs and the goalies and Vlad and the rest. Baffling and funny and their teammates, their real teammates, backing them up and pushing them forward and all of it.
Sscrrrch, sscrrrch, sscrrrch
They swing by the benches again and Coach is standing there, watching them with his twisted-mouth smile. “Morning, boys.”
“Coach,” they say in unison, and nod at him, and that’s in unison too just from how their bodies are drifting in synch around the ice, it’s not on purpose.
Coach bursts out laughing, the sound echoing across the rink. “The new Euro Twins.”
Gustav would be more Lucas’ twin than Mo, but it’s fine, it’s just a joke anyway, one that ties them in with the history and tradition that no one ever stops talking about here.
They agree in low voices as they round the far end again that they can’t wait to make their own history, do something that hasn’t been done before, and make the old men stop talking for just a minute. Not that they aren’t glad to be here, they are, just… sometimes! It would be nice to hear about something else!
Sscrrrch, sscrrrch, sscrrrch
The rest of the boys stomp out from the room, jump at the rink’s edge, glide out over the ice. The crunch and hiss of their skates drown out the sound of Mo and Lucas’, and they trade a smile and shoulder-bump before they turn in unison and go to join the team.