#mispence

toff can get on a podcast and say that. sam can tell stories about misa asking how the hotel phone works, there can be endless photos of misa getting driven around. none of that is particularly relevant to how you make friends and how you keep them.

spence and misa are born in the GTA, and they play in the GTHL together, and then a little later on the international stage, and they get drafted together (but separately) to the OHL and NHL. spence was the first road roomie, was the guy misa knew he could talk to in any room, because that’s not the case with everyone. it’s a very specific relationship you get to have with someone who has seen you at eleven, and thirteen, and with broken bones, and then again when you’re leaving them behind. because sure they played together when hockey mattered less, and against each other when it started to really matter, and there’s the sharp little divide between college hockey now and playing in the show. and there’s another divide where you have spence, all gta goodness, and zayne, all youth teammate, and sam, all infested string of fate to all important future.

and maybe it’s just because i think misa would do very good with a dead best friend, but spence sort of already has that role. except he keeps coming back to life, playing for UMich an hour away from where misa played for saginaw, but only after he left. it’s sort of funny in that way dying young is. when you are loving someone, because misa certainly loves spence, you don’t expect them to become a footnote of a person. it’s cruel to think that way, so misa doesn’t, and yet it’s inescapable because everyone in every locker has learned not to look, but is perpetually sizing up their temmates as competition. mites, and club, and juniors, and the lesser known nhl in this sense, is all temporary. your teammate becomes a sort of dead friend, or the guy you’re lying to, or the guy you forget took his coffee in a very specific way. or it’s all three, and you still see them in the offseason, on summer break from college, where you get to pretend neither of you are all three.

spence is sam because sam is no longer spence. and neither of them are actually all that special, zayne isn’t either, misa guesses, it’s about being temporary and solid and dead. malcolm spence gets to be malcolm spence again when it’s the offseason and misa looks at him and remembers that spence was his first kiss back when first kisses didn’t matter and girls were gross, that spence was the one with the good snacks, and a fridge in the garage, and a mean uncle, and who lied about knowing wayne gretzky. again, none of it matters except for when it does.

sometimes he thinks he fell out of the sky, other times he wonders if he actually came out of the water. either way he's certain this might be a cruel joke from a careless and bored god. his purpose is unknown, he can't die, he can't leave, he might as well be dead. all he knows is that he has to spend his life on this remote island, waiting for another ship to sail past.

he doesn't know why he does it, the killing. maybe because he believes in demeter's curse, maybe he will actually die if he lets the sailors pass by him unscathed. he just feels the overwhelming instinct to get them closer to him, maybe if he tries hard enough, one day, one of those sailors will survive, stay long enough to keep him company.

he's been forced to live with the rotting remains of his unwilling victims, everywhere he looks on the island there's a reminder of the years of carnage. he keeps a torn scrap of the black and red shirt of his first victim, or maybe that's just as far as he can remember now. the brave sailor, he remembers feeling a kinship with him, he could feel he had been traveling alone for a long time. misa had called him, offered the companionship both of them desperately wanted. but to no avail, in the blink of an eye the boy's body lay cold and stiff on his bloodstained hands.

then it was the traveler from a far away land, he doesn't know how he got there, but he could feel he was searching for something, like he had a greater purpose. maybe, he had thought, maybe he could help misa find out what his purpose was, maybe they could find their purpose together. the gods didn't think that, though. now all he has of the traveller is an old leather bound book in a language he doesn't understand, the pages frayed from flipping through it every day, searching searching searching.

not long after, it was the loud knight. he was traveling with friends, many of them. misa couldn't understand what was different about him compared to all the other ships that had crashed on his island. maybe it was the freedom with which he expressed himself, the joy he had for life. maybe it was the magnetic force that attracted everyone to him, one misa had never felt on anyone but himself. it was decidedly different from misa's, he had control over it, used it for his benefit, it wasn't a pulsion like misa's.

and just like all the other times the ship of knights crashed on his island, it was useless to try and resist his song, the gods made sure of that. but the loud knight wasn't like his peers, three days after (or was it two years? time doesn't really matter to him) he unearthed himself from under the rubble, roaming the island like nothing happened, trailing behind misa.

it wasn't the first time he wished he had a way to communicate with the gods. what was he supposed to do now? no one prepared him for this. were the gods lifting his curse? or was this the next level of it? were they giving him a taste of companionship just to take it away from him when he got too comfortable?

maybe he'll never figure it out. maybe his existence didn't have a purpose and there were no gods. maybe being on this island with the undead blue-eyed knight was what it was all about.

the off season is weird for a lot of reasons. it’s weird because sam and misa are still in the same area but have no obligation to see each other, but gta boys stick together so misa can sit on sam’s family’s couch. it’s also weird because zayne is around, around in the same ways that misa grew up with, can text to hangout and also ignore but still catch him at some mutual friend’s house because the hockey world is tiny.

the weirder part to misa is that spence isn’t here, because summer breaks and off seasons are different. spence is still in michigan which is close enough to be in the same time zone but when misa is curled up on sam’s couch, spence is… studying? still playing hockey? dead? doesn’t matter. the house misa is spending his off season in is sam’s, and his parents, and the place misa rented with zayne which has an open room for spence when he gets here but that just feels like a casket, or a crypt, or an empty bedroom that’s too sterile to ever remember correctly in detail when the season starts up and spence dies again.

sam doesn’t really get it, misa wants to say it’s because he’s better at texting, or is a normal person who doesn’t worry about what it takes to reanimate corpses. we’re getting lost in the metaphors here, i think.

sam is having a good off season, ignoring the devastation in switzerland which is double fold in crushing loss and in being scratched. it’s misa that sam first thinks of when he hears about the ekky trade, not graf, not himself, not the amorphous team. he thinks about misa in the locker room nodding along to ekky’s directions to his apartment, and then about misa with his knees to his chest on sam’s couch asking, do you think about beckett more or less when he’s around?

sam’s never really seen misa’s in the off season before, it’s not like they were friend friends before this which probably makes things less complicated. he’s not sure if it’s normal to see misa blossom and rot on repeat but that sort of seems to be what’s happening. it’s bright, bright, bright and then misa looks over to sam with all his teeth on his display and his eyes melting down the back of his throat to ask, do you think i should send this to spence? sam doesn’t get it because the photo is a stupid looking bird and that seems like a fine thing to send to someone, no need to worry about it. and then it’s the real summer and misa is making lake plans with his friends and sam is getting left on read and sent photos of zayne parekh holding up a bass.