clach na ben (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
clachnaben) wrote2020-12-02 09:41 am
clachnaben) wrote2020-12-02 09:41 am
Entry tags:
WIP Amnesty December: Caps and Pens de-aging fic
Today's amnesty was a silly funny de-aging fic I was noodling around with the summmer after the Caps won the cup, only wrote 2k of, and then got distracted by other ideas I liked more (and getting really into the Avalanche). It was intended just to be a vehicle for me to write jokes, and maybe work in some emotions about growing up/becoming a parent, but the 2k I wrote is mostly jokes to be completely honest.
I do think "Zhenya and he shared a very special bond, one which mostly involved hating each other and every couple of years crying very manly tears together after Russia inevitably did not win gold." is probably one of the funniest lines I've ever written though, so here's me letting it see the light of day.
It happened literally in the middle of practice. There wasn't a big game coming up or anything so the crowd of watchers was pretty small, and the guys were all having a bit of fun, messing around and chirping each other. Sasha loved these practices. They were good, everyone playing a good game, but no one stressed or freaking out, and everyone relaxed, easy-going. This was when being captain was the best. They were playing keep-away down one end of the rink while the coaches ran drills with the d-men, and he was having fun being a bit of a dick, skating kind of showily and not passing to Kuzya, who was getting more and more frustrated with him. Sasha turned to make a joke at him, skating to a stop, and then flinched back when a deafening scraping sound went off next to his ear. It sounded like someone spraying ice, only way louder, and he looked around to try and figure out where it had come from and then stopped.
“What the fuck,” he said. Everyone was so small. He looked at Kuzya, having to look way further down than normal, and a round-faced child, no more than 8 looked curiously back at him.
“Are we playing hockey?” the child said, in a voice that sounded suspiciously like a lighter Kuzya, and then Sasha realised this was Kuzya and had to lean on his stick in order to stay standing.
Holtby had been down their end of the rink, and he skated over now. He had least seemed perfectly normal-sized and normal-aged, and Sasha looked at him, hoping there'd be some forthcoming explanation.
“Woah,” Holtby said, once he was within easy speaking distance. “This is some wild stuff.”
Some wild stuff indeed. None of the coaches have been affected, and after the initial shock had dissipated, Holtby and Sasha were roped into shepherding all the newly-minted baby Capitals off the ice. Sasha had never been so relieved to see an adult in his life as when Nicky skated over from the other side of the rink, unaffected by the magic.
Between the three of them and all the coaches, they managed to get all the young ones off the ice and sitting in the stands, restless in their tiny uniforms and tiny skates. One of the assistant coaches has to break up a brief wrestling match between Tom and Kuzya, and Sasha watched it happen, feeling like he is stuck in some surreal dream, unable to wake up. Holtby and Nicky came and leaned on the side of the rink with him.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Nicky said, looking at Holtby. Everyone knew the Canadians used magic more than anyone else. Sasha had, like most Russian players, a number of what he considered to be perfectly reasonable anxieties about magic, and always wore the anti-curse charm his mother had given him. He had no evidence it worked, and Nicky teased him about it, since Swedes thought about getting spelled the way most people thought about bee-stings: usually inconvenient, very rarely dangerous, but not exactly something to get worked up about.
Holts shook his head.
“I've seen one or two guys get younger, or time-travel, and stuff,” he said, “but never a whole team at once. That's big hitter stuff.”
Practice was very obviously over, but that still left the organisation with a whole team worth of 8-year-olds, and three guys in their 30s who didn't have a clue. They called the wives and girlfriends in, which was weird and made Sasha feel bad, especially when he had to explain to Kuzy’s wife why her husband was 8 years old. She bitched about Americans and her fool husband who had made her come to this stupid country that thought magic was something everyone should be able to use, but when she saw little Kuzya her face softened and she lifted him into her arms with a smile.
Eventually, every one of the child Caps have been sent to their family or to stay with someone from the team, and the locker room was just the three of them, untying their skates and shedding their pads in the strange emptiness. Normally there would be a lot more noise, with all the rookies and younger guys chirping each other and talking too loudly. Nicky and Holts were both quiet by nature, but Sasha liked to be in the middle of the team, chirping and playing along with the rest of them.
Nicky reached over and put a hand on Sasha’s knee, stopping it. He hadn't realised that he's been jiggling it.
“It'll be fine,” he said. Sasha pulled his shirt on and shrugged.
“I'm not worried,” he said defensively, and Nicky rolled his eyes.
“Guys,” said Holts, and flicked his eyes up at the door. One of the assistant coaches was in the doorway, his hands in his pockets.
“Hey guys,” he said, “Trotz said team meeting.”
&&&
Team meeting turned out to be the three of them and the entire coaching staff.
Matt, the perfectly nice arcane assistant coach who Sasha had never needed to interact with before, did a bunch of tests on them while Trotz quizzed them on everything the team had done in the last week. Sasha didn't really get why the team dinner was important, but answered all the questions, even when Matt was wrist deep in his aura, which stung like a motherfucker. Holtby lit up like a bunch of fireworks when Matt stuck his hand in his aura, and hissed loudly. Served him right for using magic too much, Sasha thought, and then felt bad for thinking mean thoughts about his goalie.
Nicky’s aura barely twitched when Matt tested him, and shrugged. They both knew Sasha and him were about as magical as a pair of rocks. It came in handy on the ice, which dampened magical senses, but it didn't really affect their lives. Until now. Sasha supposed 20 odd years of a hockey career without truly ever getting spelled until now was about as lucky as he'd ever gotten. Sid Crosby got a spell thrown at him at least once a game, and some of them stuck. Zhenya Malkin had been turned into a bird that one time, which had been hilarious and inspired several very funny pranks at the Olympics.
Matt withdrew his hand from Nicky’s aura, and Nicky barely even reacted.
“You can't think of anything else that would have insulated you from a curse?” Matt asked the three of them, sounding a bit frustrated, but they all just shrugged and shook their heads. No idea.
Trotz’ phone started ringing, and it was so distracting that Sasha nearly missed that his own phone was vibrating. He stepped to the side of the room to answer, but stayed within sight of Braden and Nicky. He wasn't letting any of his currently-adult teammates out of his sight until someone could reassure him they wouldn't turn into children as well.
“Hello?” he said, and then Zhenya Malkin said “oh thank god,” in Russian on the other end of the line.
“What do you want?” Sasha asked, switching to Russian, his mood getting worse. Zhenya and he weren't phone buddies and he didn't need any more bullshit in this already bullshit-laden day.
“All my teammates turned into children!” Zhenya said. “What did you do?”
“What did I do?” he shot back, extremely offended. “You're the witch, you probably did this!” Except he didn’t say witch, he said a very uncomplimentary Russian word about magic users that had the added bonus of insulting the mother of the lumpy-headed hellspawn Zhenya Malkin. A thought occurred to him while Zhenya spluttered. “Wait does this mean Crosby is little? I thought he was never a child, he just popped fully formed out of Mario Lemieux's sick imagination.”
“What did you say about my mother?” Zhenya finally managed, but there was a lot of background noise, so Sasha elected to ignore it. Zhenya and he shared a very special bond, one which mostly involved hating each other and every couple of years crying very manly tears together after Russia inevitably did not win gold. Then in the background he heard a familiar voice say “Who are you on the phone with? Geno, is that Gonch?” and his dreams of concocting some sort of childhood themed insult for Crosby were dashed.
“No, is not Gonch. Is Ovi. Caps have magic?” Zhenya said in English, kind of muffled.
“Ovi? Wait, you're on the phone with Ovechkin? Did you ask him about the Caps?”
God, this was worse than trying to talk to Nastya while she was on instagram.
“Sid,” he heard Zhenya whine, and then he came back at full volume. “Has something happened to your team?” he asked.
“Yes!” Sasha said. “They all turned into children during practice. Except for Nicke and Holtby.”
Nicky looked up at his name, the only word he was ever able to reliably identify in Russian.
“Ovi say Caps also babies now.” Zhenya said, in English. Sasha rolled his eyes. He had made the effort to learn English, and yes, maybe that effort had not stuck that well, and perhaps had not really been that much effort, but at least he didn’t sound like a Siberian hick like Zhenya. There was some chattering in English in the background of the call, which was very trying to Sasha’s patience. He was going to hang up on Zhenya any moment now, as soon as he learned what had happened to the Penguins.
After ten minutes of very frustrating conversation, with Sid and Geno passing the phone back and forth, and a lot of both his and Geno’s mangled English, it became clear that the Penguins had also turned into children at practice, and according to the Sidney who had been contacted by the gaggle of Canadian youths who worshipped him, so had the rest of the league.
Why did they have to be so young? Sasha would have been fine if they have been teenage boys. He would be a great dad to teenage boys obsessed with hockey. Sasha privately regarded his teenage years as some of his best, though he said this nowhere that Nicky or Nastya could hear him. He was obviously happy now, but 16 had been a great year for him. He’d been good-looking (Sasha still thought he was good-looking, but his inner sense of fairness forced him to acknowledge he had slightly less teeth and a lot more grey now), and hockey taught you to follow instruction well. Men and women liked that, and back then he’d had the energy and enthusiasm to have a lot of sex, and the competitiveness to be very good at it. He could teach some great lessons to a 16-year-old TJ Oshie, who he strongly suspected had not nearly been as successful with women as Sasha had been.
Unfortunately, Oshie was currently 8, not 16, and Sasha was entirely lost. Teenagers were basically just very stupid adults, but 8-year-olds were completely children and they needed constant monitoring and care. He kept worrying he was going to knock one of them over, or they were going to hurt themselves, or, as the tiny Vrana did, start crying without any warning. Everything he did seemed wrong.
Nicky and Holts, on the other hand, seemed perfectly happy. Braden had patiently sat in the kitchen chopping oranges into slices and putting them in ziplock bags before practice, and him and Nicky seemed to know the exact moment when they needed to intervene with snacks. Holtby’s oldest was only six, but that seemed about Vrana and the other rookies ages now, so that explained why Braden was so good at this, but it didn’t account for Nicky, whose kids were still too young to need orange slices. They were too young for hockey skates! In Sasha’s eyes that made them basically not a person yet.
I do think "Zhenya and he shared a very special bond, one which mostly involved hating each other and every couple of years crying very manly tears together after Russia inevitably did not win gold." is probably one of the funniest lines I've ever written though, so here's me letting it see the light of day.
It happened literally in the middle of practice. There wasn't a big game coming up or anything so the crowd of watchers was pretty small, and the guys were all having a bit of fun, messing around and chirping each other. Sasha loved these practices. They were good, everyone playing a good game, but no one stressed or freaking out, and everyone relaxed, easy-going. This was when being captain was the best. They were playing keep-away down one end of the rink while the coaches ran drills with the d-men, and he was having fun being a bit of a dick, skating kind of showily and not passing to Kuzya, who was getting more and more frustrated with him. Sasha turned to make a joke at him, skating to a stop, and then flinched back when a deafening scraping sound went off next to his ear. It sounded like someone spraying ice, only way louder, and he looked around to try and figure out where it had come from and then stopped.
“What the fuck,” he said. Everyone was so small. He looked at Kuzya, having to look way further down than normal, and a round-faced child, no more than 8 looked curiously back at him.
“Are we playing hockey?” the child said, in a voice that sounded suspiciously like a lighter Kuzya, and then Sasha realised this was Kuzya and had to lean on his stick in order to stay standing.
Holtby had been down their end of the rink, and he skated over now. He had least seemed perfectly normal-sized and normal-aged, and Sasha looked at him, hoping there'd be some forthcoming explanation.
“Woah,” Holtby said, once he was within easy speaking distance. “This is some wild stuff.”
Some wild stuff indeed. None of the coaches have been affected, and after the initial shock had dissipated, Holtby and Sasha were roped into shepherding all the newly-minted baby Capitals off the ice. Sasha had never been so relieved to see an adult in his life as when Nicky skated over from the other side of the rink, unaffected by the magic.
Between the three of them and all the coaches, they managed to get all the young ones off the ice and sitting in the stands, restless in their tiny uniforms and tiny skates. One of the assistant coaches has to break up a brief wrestling match between Tom and Kuzya, and Sasha watched it happen, feeling like he is stuck in some surreal dream, unable to wake up. Holtby and Nicky came and leaned on the side of the rink with him.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Nicky said, looking at Holtby. Everyone knew the Canadians used magic more than anyone else. Sasha had, like most Russian players, a number of what he considered to be perfectly reasonable anxieties about magic, and always wore the anti-curse charm his mother had given him. He had no evidence it worked, and Nicky teased him about it, since Swedes thought about getting spelled the way most people thought about bee-stings: usually inconvenient, very rarely dangerous, but not exactly something to get worked up about.
Holts shook his head.
“I've seen one or two guys get younger, or time-travel, and stuff,” he said, “but never a whole team at once. That's big hitter stuff.”
Practice was very obviously over, but that still left the organisation with a whole team worth of 8-year-olds, and three guys in their 30s who didn't have a clue. They called the wives and girlfriends in, which was weird and made Sasha feel bad, especially when he had to explain to Kuzy’s wife why her husband was 8 years old. She bitched about Americans and her fool husband who had made her come to this stupid country that thought magic was something everyone should be able to use, but when she saw little Kuzya her face softened and she lifted him into her arms with a smile.
Eventually, every one of the child Caps have been sent to their family or to stay with someone from the team, and the locker room was just the three of them, untying their skates and shedding their pads in the strange emptiness. Normally there would be a lot more noise, with all the rookies and younger guys chirping each other and talking too loudly. Nicky and Holts were both quiet by nature, but Sasha liked to be in the middle of the team, chirping and playing along with the rest of them.
Nicky reached over and put a hand on Sasha’s knee, stopping it. He hadn't realised that he's been jiggling it.
“It'll be fine,” he said. Sasha pulled his shirt on and shrugged.
“I'm not worried,” he said defensively, and Nicky rolled his eyes.
“Guys,” said Holts, and flicked his eyes up at the door. One of the assistant coaches was in the doorway, his hands in his pockets.
“Hey guys,” he said, “Trotz said team meeting.”
&&&
Team meeting turned out to be the three of them and the entire coaching staff.
Matt, the perfectly nice arcane assistant coach who Sasha had never needed to interact with before, did a bunch of tests on them while Trotz quizzed them on everything the team had done in the last week. Sasha didn't really get why the team dinner was important, but answered all the questions, even when Matt was wrist deep in his aura, which stung like a motherfucker. Holtby lit up like a bunch of fireworks when Matt stuck his hand in his aura, and hissed loudly. Served him right for using magic too much, Sasha thought, and then felt bad for thinking mean thoughts about his goalie.
Nicky’s aura barely twitched when Matt tested him, and shrugged. They both knew Sasha and him were about as magical as a pair of rocks. It came in handy on the ice, which dampened magical senses, but it didn't really affect their lives. Until now. Sasha supposed 20 odd years of a hockey career without truly ever getting spelled until now was about as lucky as he'd ever gotten. Sid Crosby got a spell thrown at him at least once a game, and some of them stuck. Zhenya Malkin had been turned into a bird that one time, which had been hilarious and inspired several very funny pranks at the Olympics.
Matt withdrew his hand from Nicky’s aura, and Nicky barely even reacted.
“You can't think of anything else that would have insulated you from a curse?” Matt asked the three of them, sounding a bit frustrated, but they all just shrugged and shook their heads. No idea.
Trotz’ phone started ringing, and it was so distracting that Sasha nearly missed that his own phone was vibrating. He stepped to the side of the room to answer, but stayed within sight of Braden and Nicky. He wasn't letting any of his currently-adult teammates out of his sight until someone could reassure him they wouldn't turn into children as well.
“Hello?” he said, and then Zhenya Malkin said “oh thank god,” in Russian on the other end of the line.
“What do you want?” Sasha asked, switching to Russian, his mood getting worse. Zhenya and he weren't phone buddies and he didn't need any more bullshit in this already bullshit-laden day.
“All my teammates turned into children!” Zhenya said. “What did you do?”
“What did I do?” he shot back, extremely offended. “You're the witch, you probably did this!” Except he didn’t say witch, he said a very uncomplimentary Russian word about magic users that had the added bonus of insulting the mother of the lumpy-headed hellspawn Zhenya Malkin. A thought occurred to him while Zhenya spluttered. “Wait does this mean Crosby is little? I thought he was never a child, he just popped fully formed out of Mario Lemieux's sick imagination.”
“What did you say about my mother?” Zhenya finally managed, but there was a lot of background noise, so Sasha elected to ignore it. Zhenya and he shared a very special bond, one which mostly involved hating each other and every couple of years crying very manly tears together after Russia inevitably did not win gold. Then in the background he heard a familiar voice say “Who are you on the phone with? Geno, is that Gonch?” and his dreams of concocting some sort of childhood themed insult for Crosby were dashed.
“No, is not Gonch. Is Ovi. Caps have magic?” Zhenya said in English, kind of muffled.
“Ovi? Wait, you're on the phone with Ovechkin? Did you ask him about the Caps?”
God, this was worse than trying to talk to Nastya while she was on instagram.
“Sid,” he heard Zhenya whine, and then he came back at full volume. “Has something happened to your team?” he asked.
“Yes!” Sasha said. “They all turned into children during practice. Except for Nicke and Holtby.”
Nicky looked up at his name, the only word he was ever able to reliably identify in Russian.
“Ovi say Caps also babies now.” Zhenya said, in English. Sasha rolled his eyes. He had made the effort to learn English, and yes, maybe that effort had not stuck that well, and perhaps had not really been that much effort, but at least he didn’t sound like a Siberian hick like Zhenya. There was some chattering in English in the background of the call, which was very trying to Sasha’s patience. He was going to hang up on Zhenya any moment now, as soon as he learned what had happened to the Penguins.
After ten minutes of very frustrating conversation, with Sid and Geno passing the phone back and forth, and a lot of both his and Geno’s mangled English, it became clear that the Penguins had also turned into children at practice, and according to the Sidney who had been contacted by the gaggle of Canadian youths who worshipped him, so had the rest of the league.
Why did they have to be so young? Sasha would have been fine if they have been teenage boys. He would be a great dad to teenage boys obsessed with hockey. Sasha privately regarded his teenage years as some of his best, though he said this nowhere that Nicky or Nastya could hear him. He was obviously happy now, but 16 had been a great year for him. He’d been good-looking (Sasha still thought he was good-looking, but his inner sense of fairness forced him to acknowledge he had slightly less teeth and a lot more grey now), and hockey taught you to follow instruction well. Men and women liked that, and back then he’d had the energy and enthusiasm to have a lot of sex, and the competitiveness to be very good at it. He could teach some great lessons to a 16-year-old TJ Oshie, who he strongly suspected had not nearly been as successful with women as Sasha had been.
Unfortunately, Oshie was currently 8, not 16, and Sasha was entirely lost. Teenagers were basically just very stupid adults, but 8-year-olds were completely children and they needed constant monitoring and care. He kept worrying he was going to knock one of them over, or they were going to hurt themselves, or, as the tiny Vrana did, start crying without any warning. Everything he did seemed wrong.
Nicky and Holts, on the other hand, seemed perfectly happy. Braden had patiently sat in the kitchen chopping oranges into slices and putting them in ziplock bags before practice, and him and Nicky seemed to know the exact moment when they needed to intervene with snacks. Holtby’s oldest was only six, but that seemed about Vrana and the other rookies ages now, so that explained why Braden was so good at this, but it didn’t account for Nicky, whose kids were still too young to need orange slices. They were too young for hockey skates! In Sasha’s eyes that made them basically not a person yet.