The All Star Game is somehow more fun and also more exhausting than Elliot remembered from the last time he went, but he gets to play with people he’s been looking up to for years, so you won’t find him complaining for a single second. It’s a lot of talking to the media, some of which is about as boring as it is at home, some of which is a great deal more fun. They let him play with puppies, they let a little girl interview him and he somehow makes it home with four sticks signed by other players. One of them is Josh Roy’s. When they swapped sticks, Elliot asked Josh if he could sign a shirt for him, because– He doesn’t really know why. It’s not like he’s going to give it to Blake for his birthday, because they’re not talking, and this long stretch of silence makes it pretty clear where they’re at.
But he takes it home and puts it in the back of his closet, together with some other things that’ll likely stay in there and never come out.
He wishes he could say that the season goes better for the Ravens after the All Star break, but they still only barely manage to hold on to their wildcard spot.
Then Jacob gets injured and the mood in the locker room goes from bad to worse.
Elliot isn’t on the ice when it happens, can barely even see it, just sees one of the Wolves jam his stick between Jacob’s legs and maybe it’s an accident, maybe he didn’t mean to trip him, but Jacob falls and goes hard into the boards.
And then he doesn’t get up.
Elliot is on his feet, along with the rest of the bench, all leaning forward, the guys on the ice hovering close by as one of their trainers is bent over Jacob. He waves for a stretcher.
The arena has never been this silent since Elliot started playing here.
It’s only the beginning of the second so he has to keep it together, no matter how much his hands wants to shake. Adam, white in the face, eyes wide, lets out a shuddering breath as they carefully get Jacob on the stretcher. That’s their captain out there and they don’t even know if he’s conscious, because there’s so many people in the way and Elliot wants to jump over the boards and check on Jacob himself.
It looks like Jacob waves, only the tiniest bit, when they wheel him off the ice and the crowd cheers and Elliot taps his stick against the boards like everyone else, numb, knowing that they’ll have to finish this period, and they won’t have news yet during the intermission, and then they’ll have to make it through the third, and after that someone might be able to tell them what’s going on.
“Elliot, I want you out there with Adam and Kenny.”
Kenny’s usually on Jacob’s wing. Elliot, still rattled when he climbs over the boards, lines up for the face-off. The Wolves don’t give them too much trouble for the rest of the game and the Ravens walk out of it with a 4-2 win, but they don’t celebrate after they return to the locker room.
Nobody goes back out for the three stars of the game, they all gather in the locker room, and the look on Coach Warren’s face doesn’t bode well.
“We don’t know enough yet…” he starts and is interrupted by questions and buts and guys talking over each other until Warren yells at them to shut the fuck up. “As I just said,” he continues on, the before you so rudely interrupted me going unsaid, “we don’t know enough to say how bad it really is, but we’re looking at weeks.”
They’re all smart enough not to ask how many weeks and Coach Warren tells them to hit the showers.
Elliot ends up talking to the media, doesn’t know what to say when they ask him how he felt when he saw Jacob getting injured. He tries to pull out something generic, how it was hard to see that, how it’s always hard when a teammate gets injured, that they hope he’ll be able to come back to them soon. He doesn’t know what his face is doing as he says it, if they can all see that he’s shell-shocked.
They let him go sooner than they might on any other given day and Elliot is pathetically grateful.
The next day, the Ravens announce that Captain Jacob Desjardins will undergo surgery and will be out for four to six months.
#
Blake isn’t a hundred percent sure what’s going on when Evan texts him a fuckton of exclamation points. Blake is at practice when he gets it, so he isn’t exactly quick to reply.
The exclamation points are followed by, aw shit do u hav the day of.
Then, ur asleep aren’t u.
And, THEY CALLED ME UP!! STOP SLEEPING!!!!
And then a few more exclamation points.
I was at practice you dipshit, Blake replies.
Before he can say anything else, Evan is already calling him, which means he must be really excited. “Dude, I just got here,” he says. “You’re not playing tonight, right? Because I am. Can you come?”
“Sure, I’ll–”
“I’ll get you a ticket,” Evan practically shuts. “Elliot said we could do that. So you can pick it up… somewhere.”
Someone mumbles something in the background.
“Oh, do you need more than one? You wanna bring someone? Girlfriend? Teammate?” Evan falls silent for a moment. “It’s probably too late for you to go pick up grandma, right?”
Blake glances at the clock. They had an 11:30 practice and he stayed on the ice as long as he could and then had a few meetings, so it’s the afternoon and it’s definitely too late for him to drive up to Norwalk and pick
