#birdiethoughts

not jackie, not shane, not anyone. he has completely cut himself off from his family and despite the church's many attempts to contact him (a common tactic of mormon churches if they have you in the records. evangelism and all), the moment he had enough money he had a lawyer send a cease and desist. he has not spoken to his family in years, and the sibling relationship he has with shane? it's sort of all he has. he never tells anyone about this. why? because he is so fucking scared. he grew up scared, he's only ever known fear, and when he finally got out, he literally couldn't even speak about growing up without being drowned by it. that fear. the fear that it's not over and he's not safe and actually everyone was right and he'll never be safe. myhayden suggests therapy to shane because he started therapy himself because he knew he needed to do something because every time one of the guys on the bench would mumble some kind of prayer he would nearly throw up.

He has one photo of his family. one single photo of him from the ages of 0-18 that he took with him. he's 14 in the photo, the family took a group picture before sending his older brother (he was the youngest of eight) on his mission. he can't look at it, but he has it. His family was exceptionally devout. it is so ingrained in his psyche that he doesn't pick up on his latent bisexual tendencies and when jackie makes a joke about it he laughs and then has to hide in the bathroom and weep while jackie, ilya, and shane sit on the couch in the living room drinking wine. he had never been able to put words to the suffocation. could never explain why he needed to leave.

it's myhaydens initial driving force behind his dislike of ilya. because ilya had only ever spoken negatively about him and it was chirping to ilya but it accidentally hit on every bruise left by the hands of the church. you are not good. you are not capable. you are not enough.

and they get past it, obviously, myhayden is a hollanov diehard. eventually, it's Ilya who notices how hayden flinches at mentions of religion. how he has no childhood photos. how he has never told a story that occurred before he was 18. he knows what jackie said, that hayden's relationship with his parents was pretty much nonexistent and he hated talking about it. so he wonders. and ilya likes knowing things. so he asks shane and shane says the same and he knows neither of them are lying but now he's starting to realize that they've sort of been lied to, or at least not told the whole truth, and he wants to know now more than ever.

it happens one night looking at baby photos. ilya and hayden were flipping through photo albums when jackie and shane had left to pick up the girls. and ilya, after seeing a thousand photos of the kids, turns and asks, "do you think they look more like you or like jackie as kids." and hayden looks at him and ilya's eyes have that knowing behind it and hayden caves. jackie and shane aren't pushers but ilya is and hayden is at a point where he thinks he can say at least something without bursting into flames. so he tells ilya. not the whole thing, but just that he doesn't remember what he looked like as a baby. and ilya, of course, asks about pictures. and hayden says he only has one. and hayden, shockingly (to both himself and ilya) walks to his room, pulls down a box from a high closet shelf, and pulls out a single photograph. and ilya looks down at all that hayden has lost and it kicks the air from his lungs.

harris replies to a few comments like "he does! just not a hockey player, so the guys are essentially arguing over who his best hockey player friend is" and some of the comments are a little bewildered like you're with these guys every day how is one of THEM not ur bestie also who's luca's best friend

the journal pippa works for DOES have a social media presence and their socials manager is an evil, evil bastard. he stitches that video with a tik tok about "unlikely animal friendships" and it's pippa and luca in various moment just interacting with one another.

like if it's racism? kill that guy. we don't exactly have an example of that in canon, just some pretty gross homophobic remarks. and perhaps this is a Birdie Issue but like...... people are like "he for sure called shane the f slur before and shane would never forgive that," and i just don't.... see that. like he grew up in hockey culture. a hockey player will call you a fag about ANYTHINGGGGG, and it gets thrown around a lot more than you'd expect, in any traditional sports situation. and maybe this is a personal deficiency on my part and i'm projecting my blasé exterior about these things onto shane but like. i really couldn't give less of a fuck when someone calls me a fag. i KNOW for shane it was like his worst nightmare, but these guys are calling anyone a fag for anyyyyy reason.

whats up hookers it seems a vast many of you have expressed interest in MyHayden and if you'd like him to become OurHayden i would be absolutely, utterly, overjoyed. reminder, this is not canon! this is a version of hayden I Made The Fuck Up. My Source, Senator? My Beautiful Mind. If you haven't read my brief previous rambling on MyHayden, you can read that here! Im starting off with just his rookie year but if yall want me to continue let me know lmaooo

Right. Lets get down to business.

MyHayden's first complex emotion was fear. Before he could remember being anything, he remembers being afraid. He remembers being four years old and being terrified every year on his birthday because that made him one year closer to sin. When he turned eight, there were two weeks between his birthday and his baptism and one of his most formative childhood memories was being terrified during those two weeks. He has never been more scared in his life. He remembers Marnie, his older sister by almost eight years, desperately trying to calm him every night when he would wake up terrified. By the time he got baptized his relief was so palpable, he was certain it must be the holy spirit (and not the sheer force emotional manipulation can have on an 8 year old).

Every single one of his siblings went on a mission - even his sisters. His father was a bishop and each of them was more devoted than the last. His mother and father weren't unkind, but they were strict about their rules. They were staunch mormons who followed the good book to the letter. Every step out of line felt like leaping from a cliff to hayden. His most prominent childhood emotion was fear. Fear of not being good enough, holy enough, obedient enough. When he was younger, it was fear of the divine, but as he got older, it became more of a fear of others. Of his father and mother and older siblings. Of his community. Of what they would do when they found out he wasn't quite right. When they found out his thoughts strayed from how he was taught to think. How he was never going to be good enough, holy enough, obedient enough, to be with the rest of his family. His older siblings set perfect examples. They were all good, so what was wrong with him? why couldn't he believe? why couldn't he be enough? why wouldn't his God love him?

He was probably fifteen when he realized that the church wasn't just hurting him, it was killing him. He was going to end up dead, either drowned under the weight of his inherent failure or by his own hand. He couldn't breathe. He had played hockey for fun mostly, but that was the age he started to push himself. Here was something he could be good enough at. He was seventeen when he realized he might just be good enough at it to get out. He was eighteen when he ran from home in the middle of the night, after saving from after school jobs for two years. He ran two days before the draft, knowing his mission call was sitting in the mailbox. His relief at being drafted, especially to somewhere as far away as Montreal was from Utah, was the first time he felt an emotion stronger than fear.

He moves to montreal and he meets shane and suddenly there's another person who doesn't feel quite "right" in his environment. Shane never expresses it outloud, and he's certainly "right" when it comes to the hockey itself, but hayden can tell he feels like he stands on the edges of the locker room. He's quiet and inherently kind and decidedly not white and so hayden makes a promise to himself that they'll be friends. And for years, Shane always thinks that Hayden befriended him because he was a good guy, and he saw that shane needed a friend. The reality of it was that hayden befriended shane because he needed a friend. He desperately needed someone to tether him to this new life, to be some kind of tangible reminder that he got out. Someone who didn't know anything about him and wouldn't push. Shane was always grateful for haydens friendship, and hayden always expressed that he was grateful for shanes. hayden may have saved shane from a lonely locker room, but shane saved hayden from himself.

Hayden is also 18 when he gets a back tattoo. EVERYONE makes fun of him for it, they think it's either impulsive (shane) or ridiculous (everyone else). Hayden probably doesn't help his case by telling people he got it because he "thought it looked cool." But he was worried that people would ask about the now permenant lines across his back. not super noticable upon first glace, but years of leather hitting the same spot over and over, for every failure of his, for every falter, for every step out of line, had unfortunately left marks that no longer faded with time. The lines were white and thin and even though no one had noticed yet, hayden wasn't taking chances. So he got a mountian range tattooed and told everyone it was just some cool mountians, not the Uinta's, the only part of home he could think about without all of it coming crashing down on top of him.