your #1 guy

I’ve been thinking of getting into keeping invertebrates as pets, and a lot of them are pretty simple to take care of so imagine Misa getting an invertebrate as a pet (I’m thinking a tarantula) and now every time Sam goes to hangout in misa’s room he’s gotta face this tarantula and he wants to be cool but it’s just soo creepy, like Misa keeps asking if he wants to watch it eat and he’s talking about the chelicerae and how the venom works but all Sam can see are the giant fangs and one time he comes in and it’s just sitting on misa’s shoulder while he’s playing games and Sam almost walks right out at that but he pulls himself together for Misa and eventually he comes around to not actively fearing the spider but it’s a battle

(Misa tries to help him overcome his fear by getting blue death feigning beetles for him because they’re just little guys who’s only defense is playing dead, like they’re the least scary bug out there, and Sam actually becomes very fond of them. He’s still a little nervous around the ‘scarier’ invertebrates, but they do help quell his fear for the most part)

i like this idea!! for the fic i’m writing i was playing around with the idea that Misa wasn’t allowed to keep bugs as a child (maybe because his parents didn’t want them in the house) so instead he started collecting specimens. think framed of pinned butterflies and beetles, maybe some posed one in jars.

i think misa would have both, especially once he moves into the toffoli’s place for rookie season.

sam walks into misa’s room for the first time and is immediately face to face with probably a walls worth of taxidermy bug and he just freezes. misa tries to reassure him by saying something like don’t worry dude most of them are dead. most? you mean some of them are alive? fuck that, he turns his ass right back around and leaves.

the next time he’s over, after a weeks worth of begging and convincing on michael’s end, he is trying to be more chill about it. it’s ok they’re dead and they’re behind glass it’s fine, but that’s when misa introduces him to his pet tarantula, it’s probably named something stupid like goal post or peter get it like spider-man? but sam is not fucking having it he threatens to leave again if michael doesn’t put that thing away. reluctantly he does and it’s not like sam doesn’t feel bad, seriously those puppy eyes are taking a toll on him, but that spider is taking years off his life and one is worse than the other.

as sam starts frequenting the toffoli house he gets more used to seeing the spider and all its dead friends. he’s slowly warming up to it with all the fun facts misa has been sharing with him, but one day he walks in, unannounced, and the thing is out of its cage, terrarium, he doesn’t fucking care the point is that it’s out. it’s perched on misa’s shoulder, crawling about his arm and hair and sam just about drops dead right there. he is highly considering just going home and texting misa later but no, he has to be brave. he knocks on the doorframe and misa pulls his headphones off and stands up to greet him and the spider is just fucking sitting there, watching him from his best friend’s shoulder with those too many eyes and ginormous fangs.

like actually being addicted to it, like it's a real issue going into the off season. like ofc they're young men, they like to jerk each other off and shit. but man. there's nothing to them like making out, its like crack.

they know exactly what gets the other going, what gets them hot. Mike likes to bite at Sam's skin, all around his neck and jaw and lips. Sam likes to lick into Misa's mouth, feel at his teeth, grab at his jaw.

They started kissing before they started dating. It was convenient, it was good. Now they do it all the time. In hotel rooms, in Toff's living room, in the kitchen, in every room of sam's apartment, in the car, in the pool, on the ice after practice.. the list goes on and on.

They offer to each other, or just pull each other into it. But since, probably, December, they haven't gone half a day without making out. And I mean making out not just kissing. It's thrumming under their skin at all times.

They're addicted to it. They get moody without it.

malcolm’s in the hotel bar, in sweden. highlights from their win v germany are playing on every screen, even though everybody in the room has spent all day, all week, looking at hockey, which feels like overkill, but nobody in hockey knows when to stop. malcom’s whole life, he’s never stopped.

he and mike are splitting fries, their knees knocking under a table too small for either of them. malcolm’s been mike’s road roommate since before either of them had anything worth asking about, back when he showed up to the sens with a broken wrist and mike made room for him without saying a thing. after that, it was basically years of arriving together: same minor hockey rooms, same canada gear, first and second in the ohl draft. mike first, malcolm right after, close enough that it felt like the same sentence. people keep stopping at the table to talk to mike, and malcolm gets pulled into the pictures because he’s already sitting there. he doesn’t mind it yet. at seventeen, he still thinks being beside someone when they get there means you got there too.

malcolm’s in the locker room, in erie. the speakers are clipping because the otters have just scored nine and are up three-one on saginaw, and everybody’s throwing their gloves in the air and yelling like the series is already over. two nights from now they’ll finish it in saginaw, four games to one, erie’s first series win since 2017. malcolm has already scored twice in game one and dragged game three into overtime with thirteen seconds left, which should make this feel good and uncomplicated. for once, schaef is in street clothes, mike is on the wrong side, and malcolm is the one still moving forward. except every question after the game is about what it means to do this against misa, the scoring champ, the probable top-two pick, his buddy since they were kids.

malcolm knows exactly what mike’s face looks like when he thinks he’s failed everybody. he wants to text sorry, which would be insulting, or four-one 😉, which would at least be honest. he settles on you good? and stares at the screen until the room has gone quiet around him.

malcolm’s in liminal space, in buffalo. some guy is measuring his wingspan: six-foot-six, which is pretty cool, he guesses. the combine is everything awful packed into one hellish week, though, just guys touching you and saying weird shit, as if the arch of your foot or the forward flex of your thumb is something you can control. he’s basically absent at the jump station, mostly thinking about misa and schaefer — his buddies, but also the two guys everyone expects to go first and second at the draft.

even though he’s rooming with mike, it feels like they’ve hardly seen each other at all, since mike’s always being herded away to do some press thing. that’s not anything to be greedy about, malcolm knows; there’s nothing fun about it aside from the knowledge of what’ll come after. still, it’s a kick in the shin that nobody’s really asking him anything, except for some weird question about which kitchen utensil he’d reach for during the zombie apocalypse. he wonders, bitter and trying not to show it, if that’s really the kind of information they need to figure out whether he’d be good on the team.

malcolm’s in his hotel room, in la. he’s spent six hours sitting straight up in his chair, tie annoyingly tight around his neck, and still nobody’s called his name. his world is ending, but schaef went first and mike went second, exactly like everybody said they would. malcolm stood up for both of them, hugged them, smiled for the pictures, and meant every bit of it, which was probably the hardest part. there wasn’t anyone useful to be angry at.

after that, the names kept coming until all thirty-two were gone, each one another piece of proof that somebody had looked at malcom and decided not yet. his family keeps saying tomorrow like it’s comforting. his phone is full of people telling him they’re proud, which has started to sound suspiciously like they knew this would happen. proud of him for what? not walking into the sea and never returning?

it’s fucked, because malcom should be out celebrating with the boys, but he can’t, because it feels impossible to shape his face into something that can be seen in public. tomorrow, he’ll have to do it, so that the rangers can take him forty-third, their first pick. he’ll smile, say he’s gonna produce because of that chip on his shoulder, lie about how it doesn’t feel like a consolation prize. but tonight, he just fucking can’t. tonight, the chip is more like an open wound that’s bleeding all over the bedsheets.

malcolm’s in his dorm room, in michigan. his academic portal says undeclared in a way that confirms he never meant to be here. hockey is going well — really well, technically. a big ten title, a frozen four run, good minutes, good points, good college puck. good, he’s learning, is another word people use when they mean not yet. he’s just finished doing a zoom interview with schaef, his buddy, his old roommate, first overall, already on the islanders, who says he hates losing and is looking forward to beating the rangers every time they play. malcolm laughs because it is objectively funny, and because the camera is still on, and because schaef would chirp him into the ground if he knew it landed any other way.

after he'd hung up, the room was too fucking quiet except for the mini-fridge whirring and some kid yelling in the hall. malcolm has a half-finished history 101 discussion post open beside a text from rangers development. mike and schaef have both become proof that the whole thing, the whole of his childhood spent on the ice, gets you where you want to go.

and twenty dollars are twenty dollars until a guy is talking misa up at some bar they’re not supposed to be at anyway so sam has to go rescue misa because he’s getting that glazed look in his eyes sam seems to be the only one to notice and his hand feels like a brand when it slips around misa’s waist and sam is the perfect amount of polite when he tells the guy to kick rocks

and then misa is running his tongue over his teeth and sam is almost positive he can already taste the shirley temple misa had when he turns to him and tilts his head as says: “wanna make out in the bathroom?”