Fic: What Fools Are We - Part I

[bratri_ve_zbrani]

Title: What Fools Are We

Author:

Rating: PG-13

Pairings: Blake Wheeler/Vladimir Sobotka

Disclaimer: Never happened

Note: I barely proofread my fics b/c I'm lazy, so feel free to point out any mistakes or areas that just seem terrible. Any tidbit on Wheeler and Sobotka would be appreciated. Trying to stick to facts although my muse will be crushed when Blake Wheeler has his wedding during the off-season (Congratulations!). Inspired in part by this video.

 

 

By the time Vladimir feels comfortable in the dressing room, the up-in-the-air feeling of a new season has long faded. Autumn sky has tilted away into the horizon, and full blown winter is nipping at his heels. At night, winter constellations wheel tirelessly into the empty black space above Boston's skyline.

 

He almost can't believe that he's still here. Since summer, he's been nothing but a bundle of nerves, and for every morning that he wakes up and realizes that it's not just a déjà-vu, he smiles all goofy into the crisp linen of his pillow, flush with warmth and relief.

 

It's an ocean away from where he was half a year ago, and never has he been so glad to recognize less and less of himself. He never wants to return to that fog of post-season depression after having his heart squeezed dry by loss. It didn't help to have July 2nd hanging over his head because he never completely comprehended the appeal of birthdays. He appreciates the gifts, most which not so surprisingly hockey related although less so now that he's gotten older, but the crowd, the cake, the song, it's just excessive.

 

And it's the same every 365 days, wishing he'd been born anytime but summer. Everything about the summer disagrees with him, the humidity, the temperature, the absence of hockey and the gap it leaves, leaving him so lethargic and boneless, he's practically allergic to the season. He can hardly wait to reclaim the rink and winter and everything in between, from the crisp, dry air of autumn to last minute spring frost that marks the commencement of the playoffs.

 

Perhaps this explains why his summers, this one included, remain so vivid in his memories; he spends his time scrutinizing its flaws. The beach, for instance. Why so eager to flock to those salty waters, gritty sand creeping where even daylight shouldn't reach, just to lie uselessly, near comatose on oversize towels? Between him and his brother, he has the lighter skin and burns easier. But he likes the outdoors; his grandfather used to take him and Lukas out hunting in the back forest when they were younger, much younger. They used to play pond hockey for hours on end until the fingers went numb at sunset. It's just the beach he has an aversion to. And what of this business of celebrating age? He could understand celebrating turning thirty during the Middle Ages when you were lucky to turn twenty five. things would have been better if he were born in the spring, January maybe. He would be statistically better off wouldn't he? He'd read some book on it, by some hot shot economist from some hot shot university, about how the majority of NHL players were born in the spring. Should he feel proud that he's beating the odds or betrayed for his rotten luck?

 

These are the stupid, mundane sort of things that go through his head on the eve of birthdays, when sleep is always elusive. He kicks off his sheets at night, ignoring the way the fabric bunches up at the bottom of the bed, and waits for the panic induced palpitations in his chest to settle.

 

It doesn't seem to matter if he's turning nine or sixteen or twenty-two. He just couldn't get his urgency across. His mother holds his hand in attempted sympathy while his brother Lukas laughs good-naturedly when he tries to explain. Of the two, Vladimir has always been the restless one, the younger sibling who couldn't wait to grow up and climb to bigger places, first out of their small town to Prague then outside of the Czech Republic altogether, and now out of Providence to Boston where the number of bodies that pack the stands is overwhelming in the best - and sometime worst - of ways. His wish has been granted to some degree; he has grown up, hasn't he? These rather depressing lines of thoughts are proof positive of that, aren't they?

 

Physically, too, he's hit the ceiling. He grew as tall as he was ever going to get at nineteen - his body literally hasn't given an inch since '07. He will carry his 178 centimeters to the grave, maybe subtract another two to account by the time he keels over. As for his frame, adding a pinch of muscle has been, is, and will always be an arduous task, the proverbial rolling a boulder up a hill only to let it tumble to the bottom. For all the hours he logs with in the weight room and the kilometers combined of sprints, and the easiest but more distasteful, liters of chalky protein shakes, it does nothing but follow the law of diminishing returns. Each pound is more difficult than the last.

 

At the very least, his progress on the ice is a bit more encouraging although the itch is always there, like words on the tip of his tongue, the fly he can't see. It's a potential he knows to be true, something he knows with as much certainty as the inevitable fact that he has only a window of time, a window that closes swiftly and without mercy. The last thing he wants is to look back fifteen years from now when he's 'past his prime' and find nothing to show for his career.

 

It's a phobia he literally has nightmares about.

 

In dreams, he wakes to a surreal surprise party, surrounded by people he has known and forgotten and people yet to meet. Their faces are familiar yet changed, sagging with age and decorated by red, clownish noses. They hold a hideous birthday cake over him, dripping wax from candles too many to count and burn in bursts like firecrackers. Then he blinks, the cake, the bed, the party - they're all gone. He wears ill suited, worn down skates now, thin pieces of old leather that offer no support and a helmet with a shattered visor. He can't bend his knees and when a puck slides his way, he whiffs it, panics, and looks at his stick in disbelief. His gloved hand is gripping a crutch. No time to think  through though, a shadow looms toward him and he braces but not quick enough. His head pummels into the plexiglass, eye to eye with a rink side jeering fan. Then he's not skating anymore, his uniform and equipment stripped away. He's been here before, he recognizes the whitewashed walls, the generic landscapes on the wall, the movable curtains, and his ears feel numb under the syncopated beep of machines and urgent voices outside. He's waking up to a broken version of himself,can't move his legs, his arms, his limbs are useless and limp, and before he can demand anything of the nurse in his dream, he's back in the real world. His eyes, fixed to the darkened ceiling of his bedroom, blink rapidly in confusion, and he reaches up to wipe the trickle of sweat sliding down the side of his face.

 

He's terrified he'll wake from these nightmares one day to the ache in his bones and just know that he has maybe one good season left in him.

 

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When his birthdays actually came around, he replied to the well-wishing messages with equal courtesy, and when a former teammate from his Prague team invited him on a trip to Turkey, he jumped on the opportunity, not for any burning desire to see the wonders of Istanbul but for fear that he might slip into a lull of idleness and dissipation.

 

It must have been the right decision, because when he returned, he found it easier to live by what became his mantra for the summer. An ordinary advice from Zdeno. Don't waste the summer, the captain has a habit of speaking to Vladimir in Slovak, which Vladimir doesn't bother to correct because he doesn't really mind, summer is when you can pull ahead. Zdeno went on with some cycling metaphor, which frankly didn't make all that much sense to him, but he's determined to make the most of the hot months if only to spite the weather.

 

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During the first weeks back in America, the disappointment of being relegated back to Providence was almost debilitating, but he's never been one to bow so easily. None of the guys who make to this level were. But how else to put it other than the fact that it's an altogether different feeling to make it up to Boston only to be pulled back. He felt so humiliated then and so unbelievably angry that he pushed himself with a bitter taste on his tongue. For those few weeks, he had a new mantra - I'll prove these sons of bitches wrong.

 

Which he did.

 

And yet strangely enough, he can barely remember the weeks that followed his call-up. Perhaps he was too caught up in the giddy anticipation of being back because those first days in Boston seem to spread into each other like watery acrylic. It's as if he were feverish then, muted senses revving in overdrive, a little drunk with… happiness? Excitement? There is a word for it in Czech - štěstí - for which he could think of no adquate English translation. It meant too many things - like sunshine. And luck, success.

 

It also meant joy.

 

But moments worth keeping are effervescent and cunning, easy to fall away. What followed was no exception. Every week that ended with a disappointing record filled him with a phantom nausea, an oily residue at the pit of his stomach, something he knew to be guilt. He learned long ago that personal success can't without the team, so intrinsic is the good of the team in everything a player should do and feel and be. It's the kind of selflessness extinct in any realistic context, but hockey is hardly a realistic context, is it?

 

It's schizophrenic to be so out of touch - he has this separate reality known as professional hockey, a miniature world where everyone else worth knowing also exist. It's such a strange, strange ecosystem, and as much as he wants to think otherwise, the niche he's carving out just isn't good enough. The admission brings about the worst kind of helplessness and forces him to question his legitimacy. He wants to believe he belongs, that he earned his right to play in the Garden. It's a more pressing need than people might realize.

 

This punishing sport he's dedicated his life to can be so mercurial. Under the right circumstances, self doubt cuts the best of players; it happens that more often than not. It might not be entirely clear from the spectator point of view. If not for penalties, hockey is essentially a non-stop, full-contact sport fueled by relentless pace and unforgiving blows. It demands nothing short of pure conviction from the men who play it. Greater men have fallen to this vicious cycle, sparked by a blink of hesitation.

 

He hasn't even got off the floor yet; he feels like he's barely on his knees now. Could he really afford another setback? There are dreams he wants to touch, the cup, the medals. Questions of uncertainty plague him, make siege on his mind, and at night, he shuts his eyes tight, and in the hopes that he can banish the thunder that he cast over himself, whispers:

 

Vítězství, vítězství, vítězství .

 

Victory.

 

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The guys in the locker room are for the most part accommodating. By now, Vladimir is old enough to expect some degree of solitude; it gets better and easier as he gets older. It's not that he doesn't get along with his teammates, he really does. He has this preference though for keeping his heart close, locked in a cage of bones, where it functions best. He has nothing against people who prefer to "wear it on their sleeve", as the English idiom goes, he admires them just a little bit, for their boldness, but his method, duly inherited from his former coach is Prague, makes for less... heartbreak.

 

Lately, however, this hasn't kept him from reaching out to his teammates more often these days, less likely to jump at their unexpected touch and generous friendliness. He's been burned before, once by a not-so-nice guy and the second time by a guy who wore the perfect mask, who played so well, so sweetly, to the fresh wounds on Vladimir.

 

Sometime between October and December it seems, however, he's started thinking of these guys as friends rather than just a mismatched ensemble who wear the same uniform and take instruction from the same man.

 

He didn't realize how much he missed this sort of camaraderie until he had it again.

 

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His English is probably the worst on the team. Tuukka is practically Canadian right down to the way he says "you know?" all the time with that second syllable raised and stressed. The older Europeans have been around long enough to pick up the language, and Krejci had a head start in juniors.

 

Somewhere along the way, he's become the unofficial team project.

 

It's really only around his age peers that his language inadequacy hits home. Marsh has known him long enough to make sense of his convoluted syntax, and David understands him in the way that mutual foreigners will understand hybrid forms of a language, an makeshift Esperanto with no discernible structure. The others, however, keep asking David what he's trying to say, and it might be petty but Vladimir really, really hates to be a rely on someone like that.

 

One guy who makes a concerted effort of figuring out what he's saying is Blake, Marsh's roommate on the road.

 

It takes him by surprise. Blake is the team's undisputed golden boy. He has that aw-shucks smile and Minnesota accent spoken with a deep voice that belies his age. Vladiamir finds all of this a bit endearing, so how can he not notice the way Blake stands out wherever he goes. He manages to look casual even as he towers over everybody with both his sheer height and impossibly broad shoulders. He also has the face with bold profiles of a variety that Vladimir used to see in those subtitled American movies while in Prague.

 

Despite this, Blake is modest to a fault. He's learned to how to say 'pass' in Czech and uses it during practice, shouting nahrát, nahrát as he taps his blade while skating up the ice. In the dressing room, he asks Vladimir to teach him stupid, vulgar things so he can go taunt David.

 

But he also asks him how to say mundane things like 'hello' and 'how are you' and 'good' in Czech, and some days, when he's picking up Vladimir from his apartment, he says Dobrý den - hello - as Vladimir climbs into the passenger seat. He'll say it with an awkward accent and a sheepish grin and follow it with "did I say that right?"

 

Moments like these make Vladimir forget the twinge of homesickness.

 

Then Blake asks how to say 'I love you,' and Vladimir knows that these words aren't meant for him. They're for the pretty girl Blake has been dating since high school, a pretty girl that he's now engaged to, the last Vladimir heard. He shook hands with her at a golf event, felt the warm band of metal press against his palm; he never thought he would look back at such an inconsequential moment with such regret.

 

But he can stand to have his heart cracked, he thinks. This is how it goes, he reminds himself, it's not the first time he's been through this. He's always come out on the other side a bit more scarred, a lot more lonely, but intact all the time. He can produce a smile, a sincere one because being friends means fulfilling certain obligations like being happy for Blake because he's in love and happy for it.

 

He can nod obligingly while listening his teammate talk about the wedding planned in July and it won't be fancy but would he like to come?