My parents were in section 112.
My gloves were off before I'd decided to take them off.
I was over the boards before Coach could say anything.
The thing about fighting was I wasn't a fighter. Knox was a fighter. Knox had been an enforcer for years and had the hands to prove it. I was a scorer who occasionally lost his mind, which was a different category entirely, and Decker was bigger than me and had the look of a man who'd done this before, but none of that registered in the way that things stopped registering when something crossed a line I hadn't known I had until it was crossed.
"Say it again," I said.
I was in his face. The linesmen were already moving. The crowd was already louder.
Decker grinned. Up close he was a lot bigger. "Which part? The part where your brother's been carrying you since—"
I threw the first punch.
It wasn't clean. I wasn't trying for clean. I caught him on the shoulder and he got his arm up and then his fist connected with the side of my helmet and the world went white, briefly, something rattling loose, and I staggered but I didn't go down, I didn't go down, I grabbed Decker's jersey because that was the only thing available to grab and I could hear the linesmen and the crowd and Knox at a volume that suggested he was being physically restrained and somewhere underneath all of that I could hear Dylan.
I turned my head.
Dylan was across the ice, being held back by Foster of all people—Foster, three weeks on this team, tattoos and deadpan and apparently willing to wrap his arms around an alternate captain to keep him from charging across the ice—and Dylan's face was doing something I had never seen it do.
He was looking at me.
Not the older brother look. Not theI told you solook. Not any of the looks I had a catalogue of, all the ones he'd been giving me since I was sixteen and running our parents' patience into the ground.
Something else. Something older than all of it. Something that had been there before the resentment and the comparison and the distance that had grown up between us like a thing neither of us had meant to grow.
He was coming for me.
Not to stop me. For me.
Dylan Morrison, who never fought, who processed everything inward, who let things go and kept letting things go because that was the system he'd built for surviving a childhood where he was always the one who held it together—he had been coming across that ice, and Foster had his arms around him, and his face had something on it that I didn't have a word for and was going to need significantly more time to look at directly.
Decker said something else.
I turned back.
I didn't hear what it was. The ringing was too loud, the white still at the edges of my vision, and I registered Decker's mouth moving and I threw another punch that didn't land cleanly and he shoved me and the ice came up fast.
The arena went loud.
I was on the ice.
The lights were doing something. Not off, the lights were on, the game was happening, I could hear the whistle starting somewhere, but different, like someone had turned the brightness up past the point where it helped and into the point where it didn't. The crowd noise had a quality to it I couldn't quite locate, like it was coming from farther away than it should have been.
I knew this. I knew what this was.
I started the inventory anyway because that was the system, because the system was all I had right now.
Head: something. Not nothing. Something that had been something since Decker's fist connected with my helmet and was now significantly more something.
Vision: coming back online. Mostly.
I turned my head and Nathan was already at the boards.
Both hands on the boards, no tablet, and his face—I'd been watching Nathan Cross's face for two years and cataloguing every variation of the nothing he kept on it, and what was on it right now was not nothing, was not the professional wall, was not any version of the managed expression I'd been learning to read.
It was just him.
