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“Thanks. Matt. Thank you. I—really.”

He didn’t say anything, just looked down again and tried not to think about how badly Aiden was going to break his heart, when the time came. It’d have to be enough that he had him now.

The first roadie that the Royal went on after Aiden got back to Montreal was only to Toronto. An hour plane ride was barely even a road game, particularly when it was a matinee; Matt would be back at the condo by seven p.m.

Functionally, the day wasn’t even really that different from a home game. The second roadie was to Vegas and Utah and St. Louis; Matt would be gone almost three days. Aiden helped him pack, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do.

He visualized the things he would do during the time Matt was gone: reorganize his clothes in Matt’s closet, clean Matt’s condo, rearrange Matt’s entire library, go to the gym almost every day, run, work on getting his bread recipe to rise properly.

He could make this a positive experience. He could be alone with his own brain, and it would be absolutely fine.

Eventually it was time for Matt to leave for the airport. He crowded Aiden against the door, kissing him until the goodbye Aiden had wanted to say was completely forgotten. When Matt pulled away, Aiden looked down at him, his intent dark eyes, his familiar features, and he felt—whatever the feeling was when your heart jumped into your throat and choked you.

“You going to be okay?” Matt asked.

“Oh, yeah. Be nice to have some time alone.”

Matt just looked at him, even-keeled and so kind that Aiden wanted to facewash him. “Good. Hey, I’ll call you when we land, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Aiden said, and took a step back so Matt could actually open the door.

And then it was just him, alone with his thoughts.

It wasn’t so bad, at first.

Aiden killed time watching a movie and throwing together some dough for an overnight rise. Matt actually had a stand mixer, surprisingly. He’d said it was a wedding gift, but Emily never used it and didn’t want to take it with her when she left. Aiden still preferred to knead the dough manually, just because it was calming to force it into shape with only his hands. To feel the roll of his muscles as he pushed it into existence.

His mother texted him to ask how he was doing, and what he was doing, and he guiltily muted their message thread. It was funny: he and his dad had bonded over hockey, and they were able to spend time together in that context, without ever talking about anything beyond those careful parameters. It was as real as anything else, but it was safe. His mom had been different, always eager to talk about his plans for the future and his personal life and how he was feeling . And now he didn’t have hockey and couldn’t talk to his dad about that, and he couldn’t tell his mom anything about how bad that made him feel. Funny indeed.

By that time Matt had landed in Missouri, so that text conversation killed another couple of minutes as the team headed to the hotel before they went to the rink. Once that was done, Aiden made himself dinner.

There was still time to go before the game, so Aiden went out for a long run. He got back in time, aching and exhausted, to flip on the TV and watch the Royal lose in overtime.

“Sorry, Matty,” he said to Matt, sometime around midnight, after Matt had gone through the usual postgame routine of exercise and shower and was safely back in the hotel. His eyes were already drooping, exhausted, and Aiden had a brief, sharp stab of wishing he was there in the hotel room, too.

“Win some, lose some,” Matt said, yawning.

“Okay, you need to sleep. I’ll let you go.”

“G’night,” he mumbled, out almost before Aiden ended the call.

Aiden spent most of that night awake, staring at the ceiling.

The next day was harder. He burned the bottom of the bread in the Dutch oven, and it was a rest day, so he couldn’t even push his body beyond exhaustion at the gym or on a run. By the end of it he felt like he was practically vibrating out of his skin, furious and frustrated with his inability to keep himself occupied, with his inability to ignore the noise in his head.

By the time Matt came through the door, after two a.m., Aiden just happened to be awake, rolling out of bed as soon as he heard the key in the lock. He felt a momentary sense of disgust with himself—waiting for the door, like some kind of eager dog. Another moment after, the bone-deep relief when he went to greet Matt, who dropped his bags to take Aiden in his arms instead.

Disgust aside, he had the first good night of sleep since Matt left. And that had to be enough.

Matt had been playing games at l’Arène for a decade and a half. Even now, he hadn’t gotten tired of it. The routine was the same every time: he got to the rink several hours before the game, worked out with the boys, made sure the rookies were doing what they needed to do and that he was there to answer any questions if they had them, made sure his knee wasn’t going to give out on him in the middle of the game. Even though the equipment managers made sure that his gear was ready for him, he still checked all of it anyway, cut down his sticks the way he liked them, taped them to his specifications.

By the time he was ready to go out onto the ice for warm-ups, he’d been there, focused on hockey, for long enough that it was easy to drown out the rest of the noise in his head. But even with that focus he would always look up at the banners hanging over the ice: the numbers the team had retired, the banners from the twenty-six times the Royal had won the Cup. It was impossible not to play here and feel the weight of history.

He always stayed behind after the team filed off of the ice when they were done, heading back to the room to run through their final pregame routines. Another last moment to take in the atmosphere of l’Arène and the smudgy blur of fans in the stands. Usually he was the last one out here, but he had the little tingle at the back of his neck, the sense of someone behind him.

“Cap?”

“Jack,” Matt said, without turning. “Everything good?”

“Yeah,” Jack Crane said. “I was just thinking about how you always stay out here. I guess I should’ve asked why you do it sooner, huh?”

Matt glanced over his shoulder at the future hope of the Montreal Royal. “Well, you didn’t really need to.”

Jack’s serious brown eyes crinkled a little at the edges. It wasn’t quite a smile. He had made the team out of camp this year after being sent back for another year in juniors last year, but he hadn’t quite gotten used to the major leagues yet, and it showed. “I’m going to need to learn all of the ins and outs eventually.”

Matt looked back out at the stands. He couldn’t see much from this distance, with the glare of the lights in his eyes. “What do you know about the Colisée?”

“I know it was where the Royal played from the beginning, until sometime in the mid-nineties when we moved to l’Arène.”

“It was, and it was more than that. There was a history in the Colisée that you could feel. It wasn’t just the building itself, it was on the ice, too. Teams used to say that when you played in the Colisée, you weren’t just playing the men on the ice, you were playing the crowd, and the ghosts of all of those who’d come before them.”

“Yeah?” Jack asked, skeptical, as he stared up at the lights. “More than here ?”

“It wasn’t just atmosphere or vibes, you know? They used to say that it was almost magic. A stick lift when you really needed it. That extra bit of a push when you were rushing for the puck. The referee’s eye turned at just the right moment. It was the ghosts, giving that last small extra bit that they had, for us.” Matt exhaled. Even now, talking about it, he got the little shivery chill, the joy of that history and the part he’d played in it. Not everyone got the opportunity to play in Montreal, and he had done it for so long.

“I didn’t know you were so superstitious, Cap.”

“It’s hard not to be when you play here long enough. You see enough shit that it really...sinks in.”

“So—the Colisée? The ghosts?”

“Right. The Colisée, and the history. So they say that when the Colisée shut down, got converted to shops and a theater and we moved to the new facilities, the ghosts didn’t come with us.”

“I heard about the curse. I never put much stock into it.”

“The curse isn’t just about the building—it was moving from the Colisée, trading Belanger out of Montreal, too—but they used to say that we’d never win a Cup until things were made right, one way or another. Either we made peace with him, or we brought the ghosts to l’Arène again with us somehow.”

Around them, the bustle of the pregame routine: some of the guys were coming back out into the tunnel to work through their exercises; the equipment staff were rushing back and forth to handle problems and requests; the coaches were deep in conversation outside of their office. Above them, the hum of the crowd as people streamed toward their seats from outside and from below, where they’d been watching the team warm up at the glass.

“But you won a Cup,” Jack said. “You won two . So what does that mean—the ghosts, the curse? It wasn’t real after all?”

“I don’t know. Before that season, it had been decades since the Royal had won a Cup. Since any Canadian team had won a Cup. I think... I don’t know. I think about it sometimes. Was that enough? Are the ghosts still restless, or will they finally follow us home? Did I do enough to cement my legacy here? Did I do enough for the city, when I’m gone...?”

It wasn’t a thought that he could articulate well. Matt had thought about this, obsessively, over the years. The Royal weren’t just a team, they were a history, a religion. The captains who had come before him hadn’t just won one Cup or two Cups, some of them had won ten. The captains who had come before him were legends , men who’d made the sport what it was, men whose nicknames were still household names in Montreal. Matt had won the Cups, but it was just a drop in the ocean of history that made up the Royal’s bloodline. He was reminded of it every time he went into the dressing room and looked up at their pictures above the stalls. He was reminded of it every time he walked through the halls of the arena or stood by the statues outside. He’d brought the Cup home, but what did it mean for the city, really ? What did it even mean for him?

He’d always felt like he could or should do more. But he was running out of time.

Jack slanted a sideways look at him. He was slight for a hockey player, young enough that he was still growing into his lanky body, with the kind of posture that said “recalcitrant teenager” more than “superstar hockey player in the making.” The posture didn’t go with his attitude at all, serious and solemn like he knew what it meant that Matt was taking the time to talk about it with him. “This is the shit you have going through your head every time you’re standing out here looking at the lights?”

“Sometimes. Not exactly this. But I think about legacy a lot. The history of the team and what that means to the city. And what I’ve built here, and what I’m leaving behind when I’m gone.”

“You’ve built a good culture, at least.” Jack’s arms crossed over his chest, like he was shielding himself from the fans. “Even I could tell that, just coming in. And you had the Cup.”

“It’s important. The culture, I mean. Not just what you’re doing with the team, and with the boys. But knowing about the men who came before you. The history of it. It matters to the city and to the fans, the same way that working at your French will take you a long way. I’m always...conscious of it, to some extent. It’s a heavy weight. But it’s an honor, Jack.”

“You sound like you’re trying to, uh, set up a will or something.”

Matt exhaled again. He was conscious of the weight again, on his shoulders, on his knee. “I’m not going to be here forever. You and the rest of the rookies are going to have to carry the torch, you know?”

“But you’re not...you’re not retiring?”

“No. Not yet. I just don’t know what the trade deadline’s going to bring. That’s something else you’ll learn the longer you play. That a no-move clause is worth negotiating. Or you never really know your future.”

“It’s really hard to imagine you playing anywhere else,” Jack said, with another one of those sideways looks.

“It’s hard to imagine playing anywhere else,” Matt admitted. “I’ve been here my whole career. I really thought I’d retire here.”

“Well. You’re not retiring yet, Cap. We need you out there on the ice.”

Matt rubbed the back of his neck, looking again at the white stretch of ice, the blur of red and blue and white in the stands, the glare of the lights. He dreamed that image, sometimes, he’d seen it so many times. “Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t.”

But he couldn’t afford to be melancholy: it was time for the game.

Even this early in the season, Aiden was still punched in the face repeatedly by reminders that neither of them was getting younger. Every time Matt came home from a game, favoring his left leg, Aiden worried about it. Every time Matt mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d had an injection either during or before a game, Aiden worried about it. Every time Matt brushed off his concern, Aiden was only determined to figure out exactly what the hell was going on with him.

He remembered that Matt, like Aiden himself had during his playing years, tended to downplay his own discomfort. The knee was part of another series of injuries Aiden had missed over the decade of their separation. First a sprained MCL, then a tear, then a surgical repair. And then Matt pushing himself to get back on the ice a little too fast.

Aiden and his own shitty right knee could relate.

One night, Matt came home and winced when he sat down on the bed, not quite ready to fall asleep, body still amped up from the game.