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A somewhat strange (M/M) slash story about Scott Thornton and Darcy Tucker during their time in the Montreal Canadiens together. Not much character development, but not exactly PWP (Plot? What plot?) either. I guess this fits into the "drunken philosophy" genre.
Oh yeah, this story lives in its own pocket universe. This isn't the Scott Thornton from Edelweiss, this isn't the Darcy Tucker from Long December (an amazing story by Flannery you absolutely have to read if you haven't yet - and if you have, you might feel like reading it again).
How this story came about: There was an off-handed mention of Scott Thornton having a thing for Darcy Tucker in Iris part 4, meant more as a shout-out to Flannery than anything else. Then I found out they were in the Canadiens together for a little over a year from 96-98. Plot bunny materialized out of thin air. Sorry I didn't do much research on this one - couldn't find much info from back then. Hopefully, gratuitous flashing of my artistic license gets me through this story!
This story was written after 3 AM August 20, 2002.
Read the disclaimer before you read the story.
Warning! This story contains profanity and some sexual situations. If it were a movie, it would probably be rated R.
SUPERNOVA
Supernova: A rare celestial phenomenon involving the explosion of most of the material in a star, resulting in an extremely bright, short-lived object that emits vast amounts of energy.
(January, 1998)
"Darcy?" Scott's voice pulls me back from the brink of sleep.
"What?" I grumble, irritated, worn down and just plain tired.
"I hate you. I've always hated you. I'm happy you're getting traded to Tampa Bay and I won't have to see your fucking face every day. I'd be happier if I never had to see you again in my life." He's starting to mumble. He has to be tired as I am.
"I hate you too Scott. I wish I was going to the Kings instead so we wouldn't be in the same conference. Then I could see you even less." This is starting to fucking keep me awake. Asshole can't even go to sleep without pissing me off. At least this will be the last time it ever happens.
"Darcy?"
"What?"
"Want to go again?"
*****
(April, 1997)
Reincarnation.
That's how all of this started.
Reincarnation. And beer.
We had just lost to the Devils in the first round of the playoffs in '97. So the most fucked up, pissed off and downright obnoxious guys on the team decided to go to a bar to drown our sorrows. Of course Scott Thornton and I were there.
Let me just tell you that New Jersey fucking sucks. There's a reason it's called the armpit of America. Let me also tell you that when you say these things, loudly, in a bar in New Jersey, suddenly furniture, knuckles and noses get broken.
Sitting peacefully in the midst of the carnage were me and Scott Thornton. It's not that we were averse to fighting, what with fighting being part of our job and all. It's just that we were so fucking drunk that all we were aware of at the time was our deep, philosophical conversation. I'm sure if one of our teammates had bothered to tap us on the shoulder and say "Fight's on, guys!" or one of the New Jersey bar frequenters had bothered to throw an unfriendly fist or piece of furniture at us, we would probably have stepped out of the placid eye of the storm and into the swirling maelstrom of broken furniture, knuckles and noses.
Sadly enough, that didn't happen.
"Reincarnation," Scott mumbled in drunkspeak. "It's a law of the universe."
"Reincarnation is a bunch of bullshit." I replied, in the same language.
"Darcy," he said, after a long pause as he tried to remember my name. "People have always been the same, all through history. It's the same fucking people living the same fucking lives over and over again. We're all being cosmically recycled."
"Fuck you." I responded thoughtfully. "There's a fucking heaven, and a fucking hell. People die, and their souls go to one or the other. End of fucking story."
"That makes no fucking sense, man." Scott lowered his head to slurp up some beer, having decided that would be easier than raising the mug to his face. He thus avoided having a chair leg smashed into his skull as it whizzed through the spot his head had previously occupied.
He raised his head and smacked his lips happily, oblivious to his narrow escape, and continued. "For one thing, both places would get unpleasantly overcrowded. For another, let's say you, Darcy, were even in plus/minus, as far as good deeds and sins were concerned."
"Haha, plus/minus. That's funny." I contributed.
"Now, let's say you then decided to fuck my wife-"
"You're not married, fuckhead." I interrupted him, pleased that I had completely discredited his argument.
"Well, I'm going to be fucking married at some point, and you're probably going to live long enough to have the opportunity to fuck her. So as I was saying, if you fucked her, you'd be minus one, and then you'd be headed straight for hell. Just for fucking my wife. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't go to hell, especially since it was my wife you fucked, but I'd think you'd be pretty fucking upset about it." He seemed to have spent quite a bit of beer on his little speech, and proceeded to replenish it from his mostly empty mug.
"Hell yeah I would. Especially since your wife would be a fucking ugly-ass bitch." I started laughing hysterically.
"It just doesn't make sense that it's how it would work. Because the universe makes sense, and life is part of the universe." Scott kept trying to drink out of his empty mug, then finally gave up, and stared miserably at me.
"But that doesn't mean your bullshit reincarnation theory is right." I declared proudly.
"It makes a lot more fucking sense. And there's shit like deja vu. And people who remember their past lives and shit." He looked like he was trying desperately to think of more evidence, but he was out of beer, and hence out of ideas.
"So fucking what if reincarnation is real? Why the fuck should I care?" I, on the other hand, still had a quarter of a pint left, and I was making good use of it.
"Well, you know all that shit about how there's only one person out there in the world who's truly right for you? That true love shit? People have been writing about that crap for fucking centuries, so there's got to be something to it. Reincarnation means that it's the same pair of souls, meant for each other, from the beginning of time. I mean, doesn't that fucking blow your mind?" Apparently Scott got great mileage out of beer.
"I think you're full of crap." My head was starting to fucking hurt, listening to all of his bullshit.
"And those two souls could be anywhere, in any body. It could be an eighteen year old boy and a fifty-five year old woman. It could be a princess and a beggar. It could be a priest and a whore. It could be you and me." He ended his exposition, finally winding down for the night.
"Jesus fucking Christ!" I screamed, chugging the rest of my beer. "Did you just fucking make a pass at me?"
He didn't answer and dug into his pocket for some bills to throw on the table. We both stood up and amazingly managed to stumble through the blizzard of violence around our table unscathed.
Then we went back to our hotel and fucked all night long.
*****
The next day was the worst day I'd had in my entire life. Worse days would come, but at that point, that day was it. I was so fucking hung over that the sound of my thoughts hurt me. And I was so fucking sore I could barely walk. But I also had the strangest feeling that the soreness was completely worth it, for what I'd experienced the night before.
Scott wasn't much better off, if at all. He got up, took one look me, and shuffled off to the toilet to puke his guts out. Unbelievably, the rest of the day got even worse.
We had missed our fucking flight out of New Jersey. We had missed a fucking 7PM flight, that's how late we got up that day. We couldn't get another flight until the next morning so we were stuck in fucking New Jersey for another night. With each other.
We had somehow managed to not have a real conversation with each other all day, but as soon as we got into the hotel room, I had to open my big fucking mouth.
"So how long have you been a fucking faggot?" I asked, in what I perceived as a neutral manner.
Scott responded with a vicious left hook that caught me above my right eye, opening up a gash that started pouring salty, metallic blood.
"Don't you ever fucking call me that again!" he screamed, picking me up and slamming me against the wall.
"Okay!" I managed to choke out, and he removed his hands from my throat.
We fucked all night long again, this time more gently.
*****
The prospect of staying in New Jersey for another night had struck the fear of God in us, and we managed to make it to the airport in time for our flight. We didn't talk the entire cab ride there, or the entire flight back to Montreal. We slept on each other's shoulders in the plane.
We went and did our own shit for the rest of the summer and didn't call or see each other. I bought a book on reincarnation and never read it.
I didn't look forward to training camp.
*****
(October, 1997)
The '97-'98 regular season started and I knew it was going to suck. Not the hockey part of it. That was awesome, even if I didn't get to play as much as I wanted to.
It was the Scott Thornton part of it that sucked.
We were roommates for road trips that season. We wanted to switch, and we had a good reason to. Namely, we fucked like rabbits every time we spent the night in a hotel room together. But we could hardly have told anyone that. In hindsight, there were probably a million excuses we could have made to avoid rooming with each other, but I don't think either of us thought particularly hard about the problem.
In a desk in one of the rooms, we found a bottle of a glorious invention called lubricant. That made rooming with Scott suck a whole lot less. This was something we could have easily picked up at any drugstore in America, except perhaps in the Bible belt. But it wasn't something that either of us wanted to do, because it would have meant accepting something that we didn't want to admit.
You see, the problem was that it wasn't what either of us wanted. We hadn't been brought up to deal with whatever the fuck was going on. We were brought up to play hockey, get married, and have two children - one boy and one girl. At the same time, our bodies told us that we wanted something else.
We started to hate each other.
It was only natural. When people's lives turn to shit, the first thing they do is fuck over the people closest to them. And Scott was the one person who I'd been closest to in my entire life.
When Shayne Corson barged into our hotel room with the busted lock in Ottawa while I was sucking Scott off, I sprang back and Scott pulled the covers up quickly enough that Shayne didn't see anything. I was fucking freaked out and I made Scott pay for it the rest of the night by telling him what a shit he was and how much I hated what he was doing to me while I fucked him.
We were both fucking homophobes and it certainly put a damper on things. Because whether we wanted to admit it or not, that meant we hated ourselves when we were with each other.
*****
(December, 1997)
Instead of spending Christmas with our families, we ran off to Vermont, without telling anybody that we were together, of course. We sat in front of a cheery fireplace and sipped eggnog and opened the presents we had picked out for each other. For the first time, we actually hugged and kissed and showed any real affection towards each other. We forgot all the fucked up shit we'd done to each over the past year and talked until the moon was high, and fucked lovingly until the sun came up.
It was the best day of my entire fucking life, and it will probably always be the best day of my life. It was the closest to heaven that I'll ever be.
We left each other, kissing, crying, telling each other how much we loved each other.
And then the next time we saw each other, we hated each other even more than we had before.
*****
(January, 1998)
I finish and then he does, for the second time tonight, the last night our two bodies will ever spend together.
He immediately rolls over, and five seconds later, is snoring.
"Scott?" Now it's my turn to wake him up.
"What?" His turn to be irritated.
"See you in the next life."
THE END
A/N: Believe it or not, I hadn't heard the following song before I wrote Supernova ... (Thanks to Flannery for telling me about this!)
And then you had to bring up reincarnation