Chapter Text
“What the hell is this?” Evan Buckley storms into the office without knocking, tossing his phone onto the desk.
Coach Bobby Nash raises an eyebrow. “Your cellphone?”
“No,” Buck rolls his eyes, snatching his phone back up. “The — Oh, it locked, sorry. Hold on. This.” Buck turns the phone in Bobby’s direction, now displaying the LA Kings’ twitter account.
“The LA Kings have signed forward Eddie Diaz (@EDiaz82) to a five year contract” it reads. Buck doesn’t need to see it to know. He’s stared at it long enough already. There’s a graphic of Eddie Diaz and his stupidly pretty face beneath it, in his old Dallas Stars green and white, mouth open as he skates the puck up the ice. He’d looked at the replies, all of the “omg”s and heart-eyes emojis and 280-character amateur analysis of Diaz’s skills. He’d scrolled until he’d hit the inevitable “so when are we trading buckley?” tweets, and then he’d stormed into Bobby’s office without thinking about it twice.
“Management got you a centreman,” Bobby says, perfectly calm. “I thought you would be happy.”
“Well, I’m not,” Buck says. “I don’t need a center. And even if I did, I don’t need Eddie Diaz. I’m better. I’m 100%.”
“I know you are, Buck,” Bobby says. “Your ice-time won’t be affected. They want you out there together.”
“I don’t –”
“Buck,” Bobby says patiently. “I thought we agreed that throwing you out there with Orlov was not working out.”
“Yeah,” Buck says. “That’s why I can center the first line. I know it didn’t exactly click, last season, but you know I’ve been working on my face-offs. I can handle it. And I think that O’Connor kid has real potential.”
“He does,” Bobby says. “I think he’ll look great on Diaz’s wing with you.”
“Bobby.”
“Buck, I don’t know what you want from me.” Bobby puts down whatever paperwork he’d been fussing with to give Buck his full attention. “Even if I agreed with you, the deal is already done.” When Buck doesn’t say anything, Bobby’s voice softens. “You prefer the wing,” he says. “I thought we agreed that getting you back to the wing was a priority.”
“I just need a serviceable center,” Buck says, feeling oddly desperate. “I can make anyone look good.”
“We don’t want you dragging some replacement-level cog,” Bobby says, “c’mon, you know this. Bill got Diaz for you.”
“He wants Diaz to manage me,” Buck realises. “He still thinks I need to be managed.”
Bobby raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”
And that stings. “No.”
“Buck, Diaz has his own stuff going on. He’s a grown man. They brought him in to play hockey, not to babysit you.”
“They’re not getting rid of me, are they?” Buck blurts, and then promptly winces at himself. He hadn’t meant to put that out there, but his whole body is vibrating with the potential scars of being replaced. “I know last season was a down year, but I can be better. I’m going to be better.”
“You know I’m not in charge of those decisions.”
Buck’s heart sinks. “ Bobby —”
“But,” Bobby goes on, “from everything that Bill has said to me, you’re not going anywhere, Buck.”
And that’s all well and good, but Buck doesn’t trust Bill Cross, their General Manager, as far as he can throw him. “Bill hates me,” he frowns. “He’d get rid of me in a heartbeat.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Bobby says patiently. “That whole business from a few years back strained the trust between the two of you, Buck, I’m not going to lie. But Bill is a businessman. And business is better when we’re winning. You’re our cornerstone, you know that. He’s not getting rid of you anytime soon.”
“Diaz could be a cornerstone,” Buck points out. “Bobby, we don’t need two cornerstones.”
“You let us worry about how many cornerstones we need.” It’s a dismissal if Buck has ever heard one, so he lets it go, retreating from Bobby’s office like a dog with its tail between its legs.
The last time that Buck saw Eddie Diaz was also the last time that he’d dropped the gloves in a game. Here’s the thing: Buck gladly owns up to being a pest on the ice. He’s a troublemaker, always has been – he likes getting under his opponents’ skin, likes pushing until he gets a reaction. But he usually doesn’t fight much. And yes, before you ask, he does get called a coward for it from all corners of the old-school hockey world. Don Cherry and all of the middle-aged white uncles from Toronto hate him.
Buck wears that like a badge of honour. Why would he get himself thrown in the sin bin for bruising his knuckles on some dude’s face when he can goad them into taking stupid penalties instead?
Buck pretty much only fights when he’s feeling like shit. When he feels like he deserves the bruises. And he already gets plenty of those, really, with the way he plays, he doesn’t really need to go out begging for them. But sometimes he craves the pain of fists on skin, bruised knuckles and black eyes. It’s probably fucked up of him, but he grew up in locker rooms, and he had a pretty messed up childhood, so what can you do. (Look, he’s never claimed not to be fucked in the head.)
And last time they played the Dallas Stars… It was a bad game. It had been a bad season, but this had been a very bad game. Abby had just up and left him, he hadn’t scored in a while, and he’d spent two hours before the game doom-scrolling through the wealth of articles calling for the Kings to use him as trade bait.
And then there was Diaz facing off against him, all stoic brows and thick shoulders. Playing against him is kind of like throwing yourself against a brick wall, over and over, and getting nowhere. It was really starting to piss Buck off. This was in the middle of the failed experiment of putting Buck at center between Eriksson and Abrams, and Buck was frustrated enough without getting stopped at every turn by Diaz’s bland intensity.
“Yo, Diaz,” he’d yelled, shoving him as they battled in front of the net. “Who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?” Because Diaz was looking more thunderous than usual – which was usually good news for Buck. Guys were so easy to rile up when they were pissed off.
But Diaz had just looked him dead in the face and said, “I don’t buy cornflakes,” with so much scorn it almost made Buck laugh, and then skated away to chase down the puck and take off up the ice, leaving Buck three strides behind.
Infuriating.
It had been a bad game from Buck from the start – he was trying to throw himself into it, forget about Abby and everything else, but it wasn’t working the way it used to. Nothing was going quite right, passes going awry, hits missing the mark. Shots going wide. His knee was aching, a low-level constant haze of pain in his peripherals. It hadn’t helped that he was being line-matched against Diaz, who looked more and more pissed off as the game went on but was still giving him absolutely jack shit to work with.
It was halfway through the third and the Kings were down by three when Buck got his shoulder into Diaz’s midsection, shoving towards the boards, fishing the puck out from between his skates and whipping it back in Chim’s direction. “Weak,” he’d chirped at Diaz, spinning his mouthguard between his teeth. “What is this, your kids’ league?”
(At least, that’s what he’s been told he said, later. He genuinely doesn’t remember if he said your kid or a kid. It was just shit, you know? Buck says a hundred different things in a game. He doesn’t remember half of them.)
Buck had gotten a glimpse of Diaz’s dark eyes flashing before he was suddenly slammed into the boards hard. “Shut the fuck up,” Diaz hissed. He had one hand fisted in the collar of Buck’s jersey, and he gave him another hard shove.
“Touchy!” Buck managed to say before Diaz was shoving him again.
“You think you’re funny, huh?” Diaz snarled. “You think that you’re a real big man?”
Buck lowered his eyelashes as much as he could manage, pressed up against the boards. “I am pretty big,” he said. “Most people can’t handle it.” As far as chirps go, it was definitely one of his weakest, but, well. Buck hadn’t exactly been at his best.
“Come on,” Diaz had yelled, stick dropping, shaking the glove off his free hand. “Let’s go, come on!”
Yes. Buck had thrown his gloves off in a heartbeat. A fight felt exactly like what he’d been craving, what he needed. He managed to get his hands into Diaz’s jersey just in time to take a glancing right hook to the jaw. The refs had torn them apart before Buck managed to properly get Diaz back for that.
The media made a whole thing of it, afterwards, cutting together clips of them chirping at each other all game, Buck shoving at Diaz and getting in his space and pissing him off. There were a couple of shots of Diaz on the bench, eyebrows drawn together, looking murderous. The headlines and tweets were all appropriately focused on their scrap, of course: New Rivalry Brewing? and the Diaz-Buckley fireworks were the highlight of that game. It doesn’t help that Diaz was asked about Buck in the post-game, and he looked so utterly unaffected, all of that fire gone from his eyes. “It was just a fight,” he told reporters. “It’s hockey. It had nothing to do with Buckley. We play them, what, 3 or 4 times a year? I don’t think about him much at all.”
Twitter takes that last comment as some kind of scorching, devastating burn. Buck has to hear it parroted back at him for months. He doesn’t even know the guy, so it shouldn’t really sting; somehow it still does.
And now Eddie Diaz is coming to LA. Where he and Buck are expected to be on the same line together.
Buck is pretty damn certain that this is going to be a fucking disaster.
*****
When Eddie Diaz gets the call from the Dallas Stars front office to tell him that the trade went through, the first thing he feels, shittily enough, is relief. Relief that they’re dumping him in LA, at least, where he has family – his abuela , and his Tia Pepa. (And Shannon, a voice in the back of his head whispers. If she’s even still there, these days.) At least in LA, Christopher is not going to be completely stranded. He’s been having nightmares ever since the rumours started circulating that Dallas was shopping him – nightmares about ending up on one of the Canadian teams, needing to uproot Christopher to a whole new country where neither of them had a single lick of support. If he was really unlucky, he might have ended up in Montreal, where he doesn’t even know the language. (Eddie has painful memories of failing tenth grade French. Madame Daufin was not his biggest fan.)
In comparison, LA is good. LA is great. They’re not exactly the top of the standings, but then again, neither were the Stars. At least Eddie has a support system that isn’t composed of the suffocating guilt-tripping of his parents’ house. And in LA, they want him to center their young superstar winger.
Evan Buckley.
Taken fourth overall in the draft a few years ago, Evan Buckley is advertised as the new face of West Coast hockey. He’s a media magnet – it seems like Eddie can’t go a week without seeing his pretty face somewhere – ESPN, Instagram. That app the Stars social media team kept trying to get him on, TikTok or whatever it’s called. (Eddie is only a few years older than Buckley, but sometimes he feels like one of the old vets already. He’s not dancing to some repetitive song on the internet. It’s just not happening.) The league is leaning into trying to better market their young guys and their “personalities”, or whatever, trying to shake their reputation as the least popular of the major sports leagues, and Buckley is one of their favourite scapegoats. And on top of all that social media stuff, Buckley keeps getting in controversies. He’s been scratched on two separate occasions for off-ice reasons – the media talked around the reason, but there was a not-so-quiet rumour going around that the Kings management made him go to therapy for sex addiction. Not that Eddie necessarily trusts the NHL rumour mill one bit, but, well, something happened there.
And then there was the on-ice stuff. Eddie is well-familiar with that, considering the fact that the last time he faced off against the LA Kings, Buckley’s smug face had become acquainted with Eddie’s fist. And, look, Eddie’s past that whole thing. It had been a bad time for him – Shannon had just officially filed for divorce, he was worried about keeping custody of Christopher, and Buckley had caught him in his worst moment, when he was spiralling out. He’s pretty sure, in retrospect, that Buckley hadn’t meant anything specific when he’d lobbied a comment about a kid’s league. But Eddie’s head had been filled with Shannon and Christopher, and Buckley had been all over him all game, and he heard a comment about a kid and the emotions just took over. He keeps Christopher out of the public eye as best he can: Buckley probably hadn’t even known he existed. That was easy to see in the aftermath. Hopefully Buckley isn’t too sore about that – Eddie is not that concerned about playing with him at all, even after the fight. This is hockey, after all. Eddie’s not much of a fighter, usually, but he’s fought guys before, and he’s played with them after. You have to learn to let things go, not to take things personally.
After all, it’s a game, in the end. They may get paid exorbitant amounts of money to play it, but it’s just a game.
Anyways, Evan Buckley is a pest on the ice and Eddie still doesn’t entirely trust that he’s not a piece of shit, based on reputation alone, but he’s insanely talented. He’s got filthy fucking hands, and led the league in assists, last season. As soon as he starts shooting the damn puck, Eddie is sure that he’s going to be winning some scoring trophies, too. Playing with him isn’t going to be a hardship, basically. He just hopes that whole sex addiction nonsense isn’t going to be an issue. But, hey: Eddie’s not going to be Captain. If Evan Buckley wants to flush his career down the toilet, that’s not Eddie’s problem. Han and Coach Nash can deal with all of that.
Eddie has got enough of his own shit to worry about. He’s just here to play hockey.
But first, he’s got some people to break the news to.
***
“LA, Eddie, really?” Shannon says on the phone. “You didn’t do this on purpose, did you?”
Eddie thumbs tiredly at his eyes, feeling the burn against his eye sockets. “Of course I didn’t,” he snaps. “You’ve seen my contract with the Stars, you know that’s not how it works.”
She laughs bitterly in his ear, tinny and canned over the phone line. “I know,” she says. “It’s just ironic, isn’t it? That you’re finally going to be here, just…”
“Just a year too late,” he finishes. “I know. But… it could be good, right? Christopher misses you. It’ll be good to be closer.” It comes out more like a question, because Shannon hasn’t seen Christopher for a year. Eddie honestly hadn’t been sure if she would even pick up the phone today, when he called.
“I don’t know, Eddie,” his ex-wife says. She sounds tired. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
Eddie sighs. “I’m not asking you to take him full-time, okay? He’s going to be with me, and I have Abuela and Pepa to help me out, too. But just… think about it?”
“Okay,” she says. And then there’s nothing left to say.
Eddie gives himself a breather, after that. He takes a couple of sticks out to the shooting pad in the backyard and hits some slapshots until his shoulders are aching, and then he pours an entire bottle of water over his head.
As hard as that conversation was, the next one has the potential to be worse.
Christopher is still ensconced in his video game when Eddie makes his way inside, the loud electronic noises a familiar sound ringing out across the living room of their cozy Dallas house. Eddie should probably consider whether he should put it on the market, or just lease it out, keep it on for the summers.
“Hey buddy,” he says, settling next to his son on the couch. He’s getting so big – sometimes Eddie forgets that he isn’t the little baby he first held anymore. He misses too much, with his job – sometimes he comes home from a road trip and swears Christopher has grown three inches since he last saw him. “Do you want to pause the game for a minute? I have to talk to you about something.”
“Okay,” Chris says easily.
“So,” Eddie says. “You know how you stay with Grandma and Abuelo when I’m travelling with the team?” Eddie has a lot of thoughts about that arrangement, and not many of them are positive. It makes the most sense, with Shannon gone, and Eddie with a job that takes him out of the state more often than not. But he hated visiting his kid at his parents house like a guest, like the act of raising his own kid was out of his hands completely.
“Yeah,” Chris says, blinking at him from behind his glasses. “Why?”
“Well, we’re not going to do that anymore.”
“Really?” Chris grins. “Do I get to come with you and the team?”
Shit, he’s doing this all wrong. He probably should have started with the trade. “No, bud,” he says. “Because I’m not going to be with the Stars anymore.”
“You’re not?”
“No,” Eddie says softly. Christopher doesn’t exactly look disappointed, just confused. “The team traded me, so we’re going to be moving.”
“Where are we moving to?”
“Well, buddy, do you remember last summer when we went to visit your abuelita in California?”
Christopher lights up. “Yeah!” he says, very loudly, right in Eddie’s face. Eddie loves him so much it hurts. “Are we going to live with abuelita ?”
Eddie laughs. “No, we’ll get our own house. But you can stay with her, sometimes, when I’m on road trips, how about that?”
“Okay!” Christopher says, and it’s like a weight has lifted off Eddie’s chest. He’s sure that Christopher won’t be so happy when they have to face down the realities of picking up and moving across the country, but at least he’s excited. Eddie doesn’t know what he would do if his kid was genuinely upset about the move. It’s not like he can call up the Stars front office and beg them to take him back, even if he wanted to.
But Christopher is chattering excitedly about getting to see Abuela, and asking Eddie what gaming system they’re going to get for the new house, so everything is okay.
There’s still a lot to get together. He has to decide what to do with his Dallas house, has to find a place in LA. Has to call his parents and break the news that he’s packing up their grandson and moving him several states away. He’ll need to find a new school for Christopher, and talk to his family in LA to see what their schedules are going to be like, so he can work out childcare. On top of all that, he has a message from Coach Bobby Nash of the LA Kings in his phone that he should probably answer, and another one from Howard Han, his new captain. But it’s still summer, and he has months until he needs to be in LA for camp. They’ve got time. As long as Christopher is okay, Eddie is okay.
LA, here they come.