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There were no breaks for her during the game, no bench switches to give her a few minutes of down time. No, as goalie, her only place was on the ice, crouching before the small castle that was her goal net, using her body as the last and ultimate shield to protect their team.
“Lightning” Farron had been a cornerstone player of the Nautilus Eidolons for over three full seasons now, and was consistently ranked one of the best goalies in the whole of the professional league.
And as usual, she kept to her own small corner of the currently raucous locker room, her headphones firmly over her ears and her playlist music covering the constant banter of her teammates.
They were up for an intensive chalk talk in a hour, followed by practice, and while the rest of her team took the opportunity to socialize and goof off, Lightning had taken up her usual silent residence in her corner. For her, it was an opportunity to focus. They were mid-season, with three months left before playoffs would hit. From this point onward, Lightning needed to continue pressing forward; the team needed to continue pressing forward. They couldn’t afford the same lapses in their power plays and their offensive strikes that had weakened them during the first half of hockey season, and Lightning couldn’t afford to let in goals. There was work to be done.
As if in karmic mockery of her resolve, the noise in the locker room intensified. Lightning dialed down the volume on her music and turned to see what the ruckus was as their team captain rounded the corner, an unfamiliar athlete in tow with her.
So you’re Fang.
Lightning put a name to the new face even as her teammates swarmed the new woman to introduce themselves.
Through the havoc and bustling of bodies, Lightning performed a critical lookover of the woman that was to be the newest addition to their team. Fang was a mid-season transfer up to their team from the lower, feeder division. She was a forward by background, with some skill—enough at least to pull her up to their fourth string. However, it wasn’t for her hockey skills that management had decided to contract her.
Lightning’s first thought was that she was pretty...far prettier than what she would expect for a known enforcer.
They’d never had a true enforcer while Lightning had been with the Eidolons, but apparently the coach had thought it was high time for them to invest in a player dedicated to brawling. Most other teams in the league had one now, and the increasing physicality of the game alongside the frequency of fights made it a reasonable decision, Lightning supposed.
Still, whatever she had been expecting in their new enforcer, it wasn’t the beautiful woman with the mischievous smile now in the locker room.
As the crowd of teammates around her began to dissipate, Fang’s gaze moved toward where Lightning still steadfastly maintained her corner of solitude, at which point Lightning turned her attention back away and closed her eyes, though the conversation caught her ears nonetheless.
“...So that’s “Lightning” Farron!”
Lightning cracked her eyes open ever so slightly, surreptitiously watching as Lebreau answered. “Yep! Best damn goalie in the league. Know why they call her “Lightning”, though?”
Fang’s sharp green eyes flickered toward the lightning bolt decorated goalie helm, and Light caught a glance of her raising an eyebrow.
“Because of her flair, yeah?” The statement drifted to Lightning’s ears, and she could literally hear the cocky smirk in it, even though she had already closed her eyes again. She reached for her MP3 player, and a moment before she turned the volume up louder and blasted her eardrums with music, she managed to overhear Lebreau’s almost pitying response back to the new enforcer.
“…nah, cause of her reflexes in the net. You’ll see what I mean on the ice…”
The first time she saw Fang fight, it was over her.
The hit was late, well after she had already smothered the puck into her catching glove. It was late, a blatant hard stick shove against her back well after she had clubbed her catching glove over the puck, and it would have been called for a penalty regardless.
That didn’t stop Fang from immediately charging in for retribution, shouting a challenge at the offending forward.
Both of their gloves hit the ice as the opposer accepting Fang's call to a fight, and then the refs backed off, circling the two hockey players as they both dropped their helmets and grabbed a fist full of each other’s jerseys, commencing the fight.
Lightning had seen her fair share of brawls while on the ice, but she had never seen someone fight the way their new enforcer did.
Rather than throwing the heavy-hitting haymakers that were standard in hockey brawls, Fang instead struck with her clenched left fist, the one that was not free, but held the collar of the other woman’s jersey. She lashed out in quick jabs, moving both her knuckles and the loose fitting jersey only a few inches up to strike the face of her target.
It was both unorthodox and effective, though still not without flaws.
Fang took a direct hook on her own cheek, staggering her sideways on the ice for a harrowing moment, but she kept her skates, continuing the barrage of her jabs until the opposing striker began to falter, finally buckling and falling to the ice first, her nose now streaming crimson.
Immediately the refs skated in, though Fang had let go the moment her opponent had fallen, signaling the end to their impromptu bout.
“Fang...” Lightning spoke without even thinking, and though her words were muffled through her thick mouth guard and mask, they were still heard.
As the refs lead her toward the penalty box, Fang turned and gave Lightning a bloodied smile, both strangely elegant and wild. Through her mask, Lightning smiled back, feeling the surge of adrenaline rush through her, giving both her and her hooting and hollering team around her a second and unexpected wind of euphoria.
Lightning slapped her stick against the ice and hunkered back down into a squat, ready for the next round of play. She smiled against her mouthguard.
It was good to know that Fang had her back.
“Enjoying an extra skate? Practice ended twenty minutes ago, Lightning.”
Lightning skidded to a quick stop on, her blades sending up tiny, snow-like flakes of ice.
“Sometimes it’s nice to just skate on the ice and and actually feel the air.” It was an honest answer. She had deposited her thick pads and protective gear upon going to the locker room with the rest of the team, but had then snuck back out to the rink with her skates in hand immediately afterward, while her fellow hockey players showered and headed home. Except for Fang, it seemed. “What are you doing here?”
Certainly Fang wasn’t back for a casual skate. The enforcer slid out onto the ice toward Lightning wearing only her sneakers, though still maintaining an easy balance on the slick surface.
“Forgot my water bottle at the bench,” she explained. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”
Lightning shrugged, feeling not self conscious so much as acutely aware of Fang and of the woman’s proximity to her. Because Light was still wearing her blades, she was taller. That in combination with the fact that Fang was no longer wearing any gear made the woman seem almost comically small compared to how she normally looked when on the ice. Beneath her natural tan, her cheeks were still flushed from either the earlier exertion or the steam from showering; and without her helmet on, Lightning could discern the undertones of red in her otherwise dark and wet hair.
Aware that she was staring, Lightning turned away to face the empty bleachers of the practice rink, nodding in a silent reply to Fang’s explanation. There was a long period of quiet as she forced herself to study the bleachers, and Lightning was not the one to break it.
“Does it ever bother you?” asked Fang suddenly, looking curious.
Lightning was confused, and turned back toward her teammate. “Does what ever bother me?”
Fang shrugged and nodded with her head toward the currently empty seats around them. “You know, the crowd sometimes...when you’re at an away game, when you aren’t at your best, and they boo and heckle you, hoping you’ll get chased. Does that ever both you at all?”
“Does it ever bother you?” countered Lightning, still uncertain where the question was coming from.
Fang gave a clipped laugh. “Ha. Maybe it did the first time or two. But now it’s music to my ears. When I hear them boo, it’s like a victory cheer to me, because I know that I’ve done well enough to get under their skin.”
Lightning raised an eyebrow at that. What an interesting interpretation to have.
“But that’s me. What about you, Lightning? How do you handle it?”
“I don’t,” she responded automatically. When she saw the questions forming on Fang’s lips, she continued quickly. “I just...I don’t even hear it, really. The booing, the cheers, even the shit talk from the other players...I know it’s there, but I don’t hear it anymore. What does it matter to me? I’ll play how I play. What anyone else says won’t change what I do. Only I will.”
She was greeted with silence as Fang said nothing, but instead simply looked across at her, lips pressed together. Lightning stuck her chin out just the smallest bit at Fang’s scrutiny, feeling almost irrationally defensive. Funny, considering how she had only just told Fang that crowd never got to her.
After the long and silent study, Fang broke eye contact, shaking her head with the smallest of smiles. “You’re a strange lot, you goalies. I’ll never understand what goes on beneath all those pads and layers of protection. Guess that’s why you’re the goalie though.”
Lightning was still bewildered as Fang draped an arm over her shoulders and they began to skate in time back toward the edge of the rink and the locker rooms. “I’m strange? You’re the one who goes around getting into fights!”
Fang threw a quick mock-punch at her, grinning wildly. “And that’s why I’m the enforcer. You stick with catching your pucks, Lightning. And I’ll stick with the beating people up.”
The morning swim was as refreshing as always for Lightning. It was good that they had the two week break between the end of regular season and the beginning of playoffs, if only to give their aching bodies and bruises time to rest from the heavy contact sport.
Lightning finished her last lap and floated by the edge of the pool, waiting for her compatriot to finish behind her.
If today’s swim was cool and refreshing for Lightning, it looked to be utter torture for Fang.
That wasn’t to say that every swim was like this for the enforcer. Fang had long since joined in on what used to be Lightning’s solitary Sunday recovery swims, but they were also intended for recovery from a week of games, not from a night of heavy drinking.
When Fang finally finished up her set of laps, her breathing was heaving, and her face was tight with an unspoken headache. She still looked hungover and miserable, but no where near as bad as when she had first dragged herself into the pool, nearly fifteen minutes late from when they were supposed to have started.
The enforcer had clearly emerged from last night in far worse wear than Lightning, which was no big surprise. With the large break between games, it was predictable that there would be a party or two held within the team. Lightning hadn’t been keen on attending last night’s get-together at the captain’s apartment, but Fang had begged and wheedled and practically harassed her until she at last gave in, agreeing to go if only for a little while.
No one had been surprised to see Fang show up at the door with Lightning in tow—the two had become the odd pair of close friends lately—but Lightning had been surprised to find herself enjoying the festive atmosphere more than she expected, at least until the night had begun to wear on.
Jo was always a bit more than just a flirt when plied with alcohol, and Fang revealed herself to be no different. When it became clear where the course of the night was going to end for the two of them, unlike her laughing teammates, Lightning had felt her lips tighten with unexpected jealousy, and she had quickly and silently taken her leave from the party.
It was just a stupid hook-up, she knew. That kind of thing happened all the time—on their team and others. She had no right to feel angered by it, no right to—
“Light, what is it?”
It was perhaps because they had become more than just morning workout buddies in the past few months; they had become friends, and Lightning should have known that Fang would pick up on her moods, even while hungover. She sighed. If she tried to defer, Fang would doubtlessly dog her on the issue, so she decided to to simply cut to the chase.
“You slept with Jo last night.” Lightning tried her hardest not to make it sound like an accusation, but based on the way Fang’s eyes widened and then narrowed, she had failed.
“Yeah? And what of it?” The response was audibly defensive.
Lightning fumbled over her words. “Just...what were you thinking?”
“Huh? We were drunk. It’s not exactly like there was any particular thinking involved. I mean, come on...don’t tell me you haven’t done as much,” whined Fang, looking pointedly at Lightning.
Now it was Lightning’s turn to look away. This was not supposed to be about her.
“I-I...just not with teammates. No team incest. It’s a rule of thumb, and for a reason.” Fang was giving her the strangest of looks now, a mix of intent curiosity and something else that seemed like disappointment. Lightning hurried to finish explaining, almost wishing she hadn’t even brought up the initial subject with her teammate and friend. “I’ve played hockey long enough, Fang. It always gets messy and then it always spills over. We have enough to contend with as it stands. No need to add intra-team drama into the fire.”
“It’s just...ack!” Fang sputtered and threw herself back underwater, resurfacing only a moment later and shaking the sheets of water from her face. “God...it was just a fling, Lightning. We were both drunk, is all. It doesn’t mean anything going into playoffs.”
Fang swam in closer to her, until the enforcer was a only a scant few feet away, her eyes intense and as genuinely concerned as Lightning could ever remember. “I know how much this team means to you, Light, and believe me, I feel the same. You know I wouldn’t risk fucking things up with team dynamic when we’ve got so much going for us. It was a casual fling...nothing more.”
She paddled even closer, close enough to grab one of Lightning’s stray hands.
“Okay?”
Lightning nodded, trying not to squirm as Fang pinned her gaze. Finally, the woman smiled, lightening the heavy atmosphere. She nodded back at Lightning.
“Good.”
This was the deciding game. If they won this, they were on to the cup. If they lost, they were knocked out. With such high stakes, the pressure was sky high, but Lightning felt none of it.
Here on the ice, she was at home, defending her castle and blocking shots with a speed and ease that put her on the road to smashing records.
She leaned to and fro on the ice, eyes tracing the path of the current line of opposing forwards while they sprinted down the ice and passed the puck, looking for a chance to score on her.
She perceived the play a split second before it occurred, and was already diving toward the right post of the goal, blocking the bullet of a shot with her body as she hit the ice. The puck ricocheted off of her pads, spinning back out onto the ice and the mess of bodies. Lightning was ripping at her abdominal muscles to get upright as she tracked the struggle for possession of the puck. And then it was bouncing off the skate of one of her defenders, and an opposing forward had a clip on it.
She threw herself up and to the left, twisting and straining as she reached out toward the puck at a nearly impossible angle for anyone else, but she had it. She had the save.
In that exact second, there was a terrible popping sensation in her knee, followed by a blinding white-hot pain, the likes of which she had never felt before. She collapsed to the ice, the puck still firmly nestled in her glove, as she gritted her teeth and choked back the tears and nausea alike, and voices swirled in and out of her hearing.
And then her coach was crouched over her, his face pale and worried, and the trainer at his side as they pulled off her goalie mask from her face.
She clutched vainly at her leg, or tried to. Her thick catcher and blocker gloves prevented any clear motions with her hands.
“What is it? Where is it?” Amodar spoke urgently, concerned.
She swallowed convulsively. “It’s my knee.”
“Alright. What happened? What did it feel like?” That was the trainer, now delicately pressing his fingers over her left knee, as if he could actually feel anything beneath all the layers of protective padding.
The pain was receding even now, a shadow of what it had been in the moment of the injury.
She swallowed a second time, and then explained what happened, trying to ignore the way that both Coach Amodar and the trainer’s faces paled at her account. There was a glimpse of orange behind them, and she recognized the mobile stretcher, at which point she struggled up, able to get to her feet only when the trainer reached out to steady her. Her teammates watched from both the ice and the bench, faces shadowed and anxious beneath their helmets.
“I don’t need a stretcher, Coach.”
As if sensing the next impending protest, Amodar cut her off with a firm glare.
“This is not a negotiation, Lightning. You have an injury. I’m pulling you. We have a backup goalie for a reason.”
In the end, she managed to glide off of the rink, a trainer on each side supporting her weight so that she need not put any on her bad leg. A loud applause by the fans heralded her exit, but Lightning couldn’t even bring herself to raise her head for the tears of frustration that clouded her eyes.
At the hospital, their best doctors were on her the moment she entered the ER, frantically taking as many images and tests as they could while her knee steadily swelled and distended until it was larger than a grapefruit and she couldn’t bear to look at it. Worse yet than her knee was the dead silence on the game. Lightning had been pulled, taken to the hospital without her phone in hand, and there were no televisions or radios to give her any updates—and the medical personnel were far more interested in their new patient than in the course of a hockey game.
So instead she was forced to lay in her outpatient bed, grinding her teeth and waiting for a small eternity until the radiologist entered her room again, this time with Amodar a half-step behind him.
Lightning jolted forward, eager to ask for the details of the game, but Amodar had the first word, turning toward the doctor.
“Well, what’s the prognosis?”
Her stomach dropped as the attention was turned back toward her knee, and she braced herself for the verdict that, deep down, she already knew.
“It’s your ACL,” said the radiologist, not bothering to mince his words, though his eyes were sympathetic behind his glasses. “Even with how much your knee’s already swollen, we were able to get a clean enough image. You’ll need surgery in a month or so in order to correct it.”
Lightning closed her eyes and leaned backward into her pillow, and heard the doctor leave the room as Amodar approached her.
“I’m sorry, Farron. There’s no dancing about it—it’s shit. But you know that we’re standing behind you, and I’ll be here for whatever you need, surgery, PT...everything. You can get back from this. We know you can.”
Though her mind could recognize the truth of his words, Lightning still needed a very long moment to compose herself, because she wouldn’t cry. Not here. Not now.
A silent count to ten and a few breaths later, and she found enough strength to reopen her eyes and face Amodar, moving on to the other thought that clouded her mind.
“And the game?” She asked hopefully, but she could already see the shadows in his eyes.
“We lost. 2-3 in the third period. That’s season.”
Lightning gradually found her way out of a haze of grogginess. She had the feeling that she had been awake for some time, but was only just now beginning to feel lucid. Looking around, she saw that she was in a hospital bed, an IV in one arm and a machine rhythmically beeping out her stats next to her. Her knee was bandaged and elevated on a pillow, and all around the foot of her bed were flowers and cards, piled up from teammates and other well-wishers.
What caught her newly opened eyes the most, though, was the figure that was firmly seated by the door, casually reading through the latest sports magazine. Even while only half awake, it sent a pleasant warmth through Lightning’s chest to see that one face waiting for her above any others that could have been in her stead.
“Hey, Fang.” Her voice sounded like gravel and dust.
Fang looked up, seeming not at all surprised, and put her magazine down. “Hey there, tiger. How are you feeling now?”
Lightning looked down at her knee, wrapped in a thick, protective bandage. The doctors would have her starting PT movements with it by the end of the day, and the protective cloud of morphine that numbed it now would be of no use then. But for the moment...
“I can’t even feel it, really. I suppose that’s for the better. Otherwise, I feel kind of...of fuzzy.”
That earned her raised eyebrows and a flash of white teeth. “ ‘Fuzzy’, huh? Guess that’s an improvement from earlier, though.”
“Earlier? What do you mean earlier?”
“Oh, you’ve been talking on and off for the last hour since the wheeled you out of the OR,” confirmed Fang. “Just wasn’t quite the most sensical stuff I’ve ever heard coming from you. I was waiting for when you’d get your head back on your shoulders again, which it sounds like you have.”
Oh. A quick dive back into her memory banks revealed nothing from right before she went under for surgery. Just what had she been going on about for the past hour? Did she even want to know?
“I didn’t...say anything, ah, strange did I?”
Fang rested her chin atop one hand, smiling. “All depends on what you mean by strange.”
Well that wasn’t even remotely comforting, and the way that Fang’s smile grew as Lightning glared at her helped nothing.
“Thirsty?”
It was an abrupt and unexpected change in topics, but thinking on the question, Lightning realized that she felt parched. “Uh...actually, yes. Very.”
Fang nodded matter-of-factly. “Nurse said that when you came to fully that you’d probably be.”
Then she got up to pour a glass of water from the bedside table, leaving Lightning back to her own worried thoughts for a minute.
Normally, she was not one to worry about what words might come out of her mouth, but Fang’s smile had her sweating a bit now. What if she had said something wholly inappropriate while in her drug-induced haze? What if she slurred out a confession of how much she terribly admired Fang, and in more than just a purely platonic manner.
But even worse...what if she had said something, and Fang had just as quickly dismissed her words, certain that they were the inane ramblings of a delirious post-op patient? Something that Fang could light-heartedly laugh about at a later occasion. That suddenly felt even worse to her than anything else she could imagine.
“It’ll be okay, you know.”
Lightning startled, having been lost in her own thoughts. “What?!”
Fang frowned for a moment at her sharp response, and then continued, gesturing toward Lightning’s bandaged and blown up knee with one hand before giving Lightning the cup of water. “You’ll be okay. You’ll get beyond this injury; you’ll do your PT and recover and you’ll be back, good as new, when next season rolls around.”
Lightning buried her face into the water, glad for a reprieve. Here she was, coming out of post-op, and she was barely even thinking about her injury or the next steps forward. Instead, her mind was wholly focused on a very different problem that was right in front of her—a problem that had clearly been tugging on her thoughts for too long now. She wetted her lips, pulling forth the resolve to speak her mind.
“I like you,” said Lightning at last, the words coming out with surprising clarity and ease.
Fang looked at her immediately, alarm and confusion apparent on her face. “Light...?”
She needed to explain. She owed the woman who had fast become her best friend that much. “I’ve liked you for a while now. I suppose...I suppose I never said anything before because I was afraid of changing the team dynamic...and because I was afraid of how it would change our friendship.”
There was no immediate response.
Rather, Fang took the now-emptied cup from Lightning and replaced it on nightstand before sitting down on the side of narrow hospital bed, giving Lightning the full attention of her serious but unreadable face. It was nerve-wracking, but whether it was from the drugs or the catharsis, Lightning felt relieved. She had held the words and thoughts and feelings inside of her for too long, and though she had been afraid, she was glad to have finally spoken.
“Fang?”
The woman shook her head and looked down, and a low chuckle reached Lightning’s ears.
“Well, fuck, Light...you just can’t make this shit up.” She ran one hand across her face and through her hair, and her clipped laugh sounded more of amazement than humor.
“Fang?” asked Lightning again, still confused but suddenly hopeful.
Fang shook her head a second time, and then braced one hand on the far side of Lightning’s torso, coming in closer. “You are an absolutely ridiculous woman, you hear me?”
There was no room to respond back. As Fang continued to lean in, Lightning leaned up, meeting halfway to kiss her and then marvel at the softness of her lips even through the persistent fog of painkillers.
Fang pulled back after a long moment, a trickster’s grin now on her face. “One thing...how do I know this isn’t the morphine speaking right now?”
Lightning glared as imperiously as she could manage, considering she was bedridden and forced to look up at Fang’s smug, if still achingly beautiful, face. “Shut it.”
And then she pressed the palm of her hand to the soft skin on the back of Fang’s neck, forcing her head back down so that Lightning could catch her lips again.
She supposed she now had something to look forward to over off-season.