#cloud mm

you gotta grow up fast and you gotta deal with it because everyone says they're just jealous because you're the best and you're playing up and that feels pretty good

yknow what doesnt feel pretty good? someone's gum stuck to the back your mcd rookie card that you carry around for good luck. someone's protein shake spilled on the stuffed bunny you've had since a baby and it's gotta roll off your back because why'd you bring it on the roadie anyway? whiny baby, loser, slurs mis isn't even sure he's allowed to say after his first time sucking cock

mis scores a gwg against london and someone turns to sam and says "you know that guy sleeps with a pink little bunny in his bed like some kinda faggot"

sam's different. sam doesn't give a shit. sam reasons with the boys, says it's actually gayer to be so fuckin concerned with what another guy's doing in bed.

when sam and mis start hanging out, the walls start to come down. they're skating on a pond near misa's place over christmas break and he flops down in a pile of snow and does a snow angel. they're driving to practice and stop at mcdonald's to get a black coffee n a breakfast burrito. misa's eyes get bright when he sees the ball pit's empty and dives in. he never got to do this before, never got to have this sliver of childhood without someone chirping him for it

sam wants to give misa everything and if this is part of it, he wants to give that too. got no interest in trampolines but "dude that trampoline park opened near toff's let's go" sees misa's pokemon starter pj set and takes a deep breath, so endeared he could die, then swats misa's hands away and helps him button it up

sam can't judge, he lost the same things in the same way. only difference is he doesn't know how to let himself have them again yet

he hates sam more after, in the tunnel between warmups, when green and white tarped boys are squeezing past each other in opposite directions, dickinson somehow finds room for his massive tennis-ball head. he’s chirping somebody behind him, loud as fuck, then misa appears and sam shifts sideways just enough to bump him.

“dickie,” misa greets him, smiling like sam didn’t manufacture the whole collision. machiavellian piece of shit.

sam grins back. misa keeps walking. sam turns to watch him.

gross.

months later, they’re all in the czech republic for the hlinka gretzky cup, winning gold in ot, temporary camaraderie erasing the fact that some of them aren't actually bro. a photographer is trying to wrangle all the guys into a photographable bunch. misa is in the middle of the pictures with his medal crooked and his mullet sticking out under his hat. malcolm is tucked against him, talking directly into his ear. marty is two spots over, watching misa laugh instead of looking at the camera.

misa, obviously, has no idea that eveyone is revolving around him like he's their own little sun.

then dickinson starts working his way closer.

“this is the big one, eh?” sam says.

misa looks at him, big dark eyes, same dedication to his goals as he's always got. “not yet.”

no shit, there's only one big one and they all know what it is. zayne watches sam’s face light up like misa has said something brilliant instead of the most misa thing possible.

zayne watches him joke with misa, watches misa answer him all earnest and interested, watches sam show his teeth as if making mis laugh is an accomplishment. when the photographer tells them to squeeze in, sam lifts an arm toward misa’s shoulders.

zayne smacks it down.

“keep your hands to yourself, dickinson.”

sam stares at him. “the fuck?”

“you heard me.”

“zayne,” misa says, already laughing.

of course he thinks it’s funny. he thinks everybody is nice. he thinks eveyone is his boy and not trying to do something unnamed but obviously evil.

sam tries again when the flashes start.

ps i'm still stuck on misa graveyard full of dead friends thing. youth hockey caught red-handed

eyebrow emoji anon!! i'm blushing!!! nobody's ever assigned themselves an emoji in my inbox before!! this is so exciting!!

and (taking a big breath here, exhaling, inhaling again) i've also still been thinking about michael misa walking around in his graveyard of dead friends. he’s kinda like the groundskeeper if i think about it too hard, the weird kind who sometimes ignores the bones rattling, and then sometimes digs people up and stares them right in their dead faces and sometimes even checks them into the boards. and it’s not like michael killed them himself. like you said, it’s just the scythe of youth hockey, pulling more and more childhood buddies beyond the veil.

most of the guys still exist in his phone, and they post their end of season highlights, which mis likes and moves on from. memorials, he thinks. some of them send texts that make it through the fog, usually in april, because they play on chronically bottom 8 teams. they say “bro we gotta catch up" and they probably mean it and mike also means it, if he remembers to text back. and this is all possible because they aren’t really dead, they’re in michigan and philly and ugh, calgary.

despite all this grief, misa doesn’t have abandonment issues. not anymore at least. hardly hurts to see these guys when they pop their heads outta the dirt because misa has his routines, and if you're not in them, you're not really... y'know. he’s usually got one guy at a time, is all. one guy who drives him around, who knows how to make his favorite smoothie, who texts him from the other bed in the hotel room instead of saying the weird thing out loud. and then hockey does what it does, takes the person and keeps the hole they left.

i have to talk about malcom spence. and i'm sorry for that. @castratecapuchin said it best with "malcom spence is the the dead body of all time."

the hole is undoubtedly spence shaped.

spence who knew mike when he was just some kid with a bauer duffle bag bigger than his body.

who liked when mike would rattle off stats to him and show off his hockey card collection.

who mike made out with when making out didn’t even have a name yet.

who knew he was never quite as good, never quite as accurate as misa but called him his best friend anyway.

who misa described as the best player (in the series between saginaw and the otters, 2025 ohl postseason.)

who felt like the world was ending when he got drafted early in the 2nd round to the rangers and misa went 2nd ova to the sharks. who couldn't even celebrate that night, went straight back to his hotel room. went to umich with the hopes that one day he'd be an nhler too.

zayne is different, obviously. he's still there, like a statue at the end of a dark hallway that mike could find, even with his eyes covered. i haven't thought too hard about this one but i will if someone puts a gun to my head.

i don't think about mistone very often because porter martone isn't dead at all, he texts misa at 11:30pm whenever the sharks play the flyers, and randomly throughout the summer, only at night time though. u up? misa ignores it, has better dick on speed dial. sometimes he sends marty pictures of sam, probably sam, dark buzzed hair, between his thighs and marty gets bricked up but refuses to reply. not because he's mad misa's fucking a knight, he'd Very Obviously cross that line too. he's just jealous, gotta find something vaugely misa-like to jerk off to. (i'm sorry if anyone was harmed by my characterization of porter martone. i don't know what to tell you)

don't ask me about how william eklund fits into all this. i'm not ready to talk about it. come back in a few months.

sam isn't a replacement for some dead friend. he's the final girl, impossible to bury. he makes himself big and fits into that spence shaped hole, stretches it even, makes room for himself to get comfy. force of nature. guy who gets kicked out of the london knights group chat enough to know everything is temporary until you decide that it isn't. he fucks with michael's schedule and then somehow becomes the schedule. keeps coming back loud and alive and irritating. it feels like every time mike tries to turn him into a future memory, sam is already there in the present tense going, “what's wrong with your face? did you take your vitamins? eat something.”

Do you think Michael would seek that kind of attention from someone else if Sam wasn’t willing to give it to him? I don’t mean as punishment or an attempt to make Sam jealous. Michael might simply take Sam’s refusal at face value and ask someone he trusts instead. Most of the harem probably wouldn’t be realistic options, but Porter feels plausible: safe, familiar, and already a little enamored with him. I’m curious whether Michael’s interest is specifically tied to Sam, or whether Sam has mistaken being the person Michael asks for being the only person Michael could ask.

cursory info: i've talked a bit about sam not knowing or caring about kink until misa, and misa [2, kinda] not knowing about kink until it naturally came out in his relationship with sam, but having always wondered if there was something better than sex.

overall, i have a hard time imagining pain being something mis wants from anyone other than sam. he trusts sam because he holds the vulnerability mis shoves at him like a cat protecting an egg, or some other, better metaphor. he doesn't get that sam's dumb puppy brain is fraught thoughts about how he's defiling misa's innocence and slipping into some feral state he can't return from. mis just thinks sam is considerate, circumspect, wouldn't ever wanna hurt him in a real way. a mean way.

marty is the only one i can see him going to that would actually partake, but his heart wouldn't be in it. he'd know that mis only wants it because he's trying to replace what he had going on with sam, and that'd make him a little queasy.

schaef just wouldn't be into it, and i don't think misa would wanna burden him with the knowledge that he kinda craves something that feels deviant. lardis would misunderstand the ache for hurt as a sign of some violation and kill sam, so mis couldn't tell him. z would tell misa to get a fucking grip, because he's better than whatever sam's been putting him through.

i can see misa turning to some insidious app on his phone, just to see if it feels the same when it's with anyone else, just to feel torn up and consigned to the memory of what it was like with sam after. this is something that's just for them. you don't trust a stranger or a guy you haven't talked to in 2 years (iykwim) to bite down on the skin around your jugular and not tear you open in a way that can't be sewn back up.

the glass is salted nearly opaque around the bottom. there hasn’t been any new snow for days, just the old stuff gone slushy and grey along the shoulder and a dirty mist kicking off the highway whenever the bus passes a transport truck. cam has a two-six from the lcbo wedged between his boots in a black plastic bag, the neck clicking against the metal seat frame every time they hit a pothole.

“614 after curfew,” cam confirms to the guy beside him, then leans across the aisle and passes it on in a whisper.

michael waits for cam to hook an arm over the seatback and include him in the relay, kind of wondering why they don’t just put stuff like this in the groupchat, but cam settles back into his seat. the rejection has already started needling beneath michael’s ribs when he turns around anyway, chin braced against the vinyl.

“everybody?”

cam looks at him. there’s a pause, brief but unmistakable, where the easy look on his face rearranges itself around the answer.

“not you, mikey.” he’s almost laughing, like michael has made a funny little mistake by assuming the words spoken six inches behind his head might include him. “you’re a kid.”

it sounds like bullshit, because he’s fifteen, sure, but he hardly feels like a kid when some guy with fifty pounds on him catches him admiring a pass through the middle and folds him into the boards, and the only useful thing anyone has to say afterward is keep your head up next time. he doesn’t feel like a kid when somebody asks in front of the whole room whether he’s finally gotten laid, then looks delighted when the answer rises red and helpless across his face. he definitely doesn’t feel like a kid when the team needs him to put up at least a point a game, live out of one duffel bag, remember his own wake-up calls and perform every night in front of several thousand people who feel entitled to have an opinion about his body.

michael learns pretty quick that being uncomfortable with all of this is childish and reacting is worse. he learns they’ll keep going if he gets red and go harder if he gets mad, but if he laughs first and tells them to fuck off like none of it can reach him, eventually somebody else will show their neck and the attention will move on.

he learns to sit there while men old enough to buy beer inventory his body, his voice, the girls he may or may not like, every scrap of innocence he failed to hide before walking into the rink. he learns that nothing belongs to him once somebody else finds it funny.

but now cam is looking at him like his age is something delicate. something everybody has been responsibly keeping track of instead of dragging behind the bus all winter until it’s grey with road salt and split open at the seams.

being a kid hasn’t protected michael from anything they wanted from him. it only matters now because cam needs a reason that sounds kinder than we don’t want you there.

WOW, thank you

i am unfortunately plagued with thoughts about how everyone wanting to kiss misa messes with his confidence and understanding of romantic relationships (why is my girlfriend always mad when i kiss my bros? is it cheating if your buddy wants to slip in a little tongue as part of an intricate superstitious pre-grame ritual? why do girls always wanna kiss me but never wanna hop on fortnite? and many more burning questions)