Prologue #2
He was quiet for a second. Then he smiled.
“Freshman year. You were so fucking serious all the time, like you had to prove you belonged on varsity even though everyone already knew you were good. And you moved on the ice like a chess piece. All straight lines, no wasted motion.” He paused. “Rook just fit.”
“Chess piece,” I repeated.
“That, and you were impossible to move once you'd decided on a position. Stubborn as hell.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Still are.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“I'm not stubborn, I'm persistent. There's a difference.”
“There really isn't.”
He laughed again, and for a minute it was good. It was us. The rhythm we'd had since freshman year, the shorthand we'd built without meaning to. And then, without any announcement, Soren shifted, tipped sideways, and rested his head on my shoulder.
I went still.
Not because it was strange. We'd been in each other's space for three years, elbows and shoulders and crashing into each other on the ice. But this was different.
I didn't move. Didn't say anything. Just let him stay there and stared at the sky and tried to act like my heart wasn't doing something complicated behind my ribs.
“That one's Orion,” Soren said after a while, lifting one hand to point vaguely upward. “The three stars in a row.”
“I know what Orion is.”
“Just checking. You were a hockey player, not an astronomer.”
“Those aren't mutually exclusive.”
“Name another one, then.” He sounded almost sleepy, voice loose and low in a way I didn't hear from him often.
Usually Soren was in motion — talking, deflecting, filling silence with noise.
But right now he was still, weight settled against me, and something about it felt like a gift I hadn't been offered before.
I scanned the sky, found what I was looking for. “Cassiopeia. The W shape, up and to the left.”
Soren was quiet for a second. “Huh. Okay, you actually know things.”
“Told you.”
“My dad used to do this thing when I was little. He'd drag me out to the backyard late at night, past when I was supposed to be in bed, and he'd point out all the constellations and make up stories about them. Not the real myths. His own ones. Usually involved a lot of dragons.”
“Did the dragons ever win?” I asked.
“In his version, yeah. Always.” A short exhale, not quite a laugh. “He said the dragons were misunderstood. Just big and loud and bad at being gentle.”
I sat with that.
Soren shifted slightly, getting more comfortable, and I felt him let out a slow breath against my shoulder. Above us, the stars were doing what they always did — staying exactly where they were, indifferent and permanent and weirdly reassuring for it.
“You ever feel like—” He stopped. Started again. “Like you're looking at all of it and you can see exactly how it's supposed to go. The whole picture. And then you look at your actual life and the two things just don't match up at all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that feeling.”
“Yeah.” He said it quietly. “I figured you did.”
We went still again, and I could hear the wind moving through the tree line at the edge of the clearing, and somewhere down in the valley a dog was barking at something that wasn't there.
Then a shooting star crossed overhead. Fast, clean, gone in about a second — a bright scratch across the dark and then nothing.
“Oh—” Soren lifted his head just enough to track it, then dropped back down. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you make a wish?”
“No.”
He made a noise of genuine offense. “Rook. You're supposed to make a wish.”
“It was already gone by the time I processed it.”
“That's not how it works. You make the wish retroactively.” He tilted his face up, close enough that I could have looked directly at him without moving much. I kept my eyes on the sky. “What would you have wished for if you'd been faster?”
I thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, which wasn't something I usually did with questions like that. “That the people I care about end up okay,” I said finally. “The actual kind of okay, not just the version they tell me about.”
Soren was quiet for long enough that I started to wonder if I'd said the wrong thing. Then he settled back against my shoulder, heavier than before, and said, “That's a good wish.”
“What would you have wished for?”
He didn't answer right away.
“More time,” he said finally, and his voice was so level I almost didn't catch it.
I turned my head then. He was still looking up at the sky, face tipped back, jaw tight in a way he usually only got when he was holding himself somewhere between calm and not. The starlight caught the line of his cheekbone and the curve of his mouth.
“You ever wonder which ones are already dead?” he asked, after another minute. “Like the light takes so long to reach us that some of them probably burned out centuries ago. We're just seeing the echo.”
“Yeah.”
“Bit depressing, honestly.”
“Or the opposite,” I said. “Means something can be gone and still leave a mark that long.”
Soren went very quiet. I felt his shoulders drop slightly, like something in him unclenched.
He didn't say anything for a while, and neither did I, and we just stayed there with the cold settling slowly through both of us and the valley lights blinking below and the stars above doing whatever stars did at the end of things.
Eventually the cold won. It always did.
I felt him sit up, and the warmth of his weight against my shoulder disappeared, and without it the night felt noticeably colder.
“Better get you home before your mom sends out a search party,” he said.
“Probably.”
He drove me back to the school lot without turning the radio on. His fingers drummed against the wheel in that restless pattern he fell into when his brain was running too fast to sit still. I watched it out of the corner of my eye and tried to think of the right thing to say and didn't find it.
He pulled up next to my car and left the engine running.
“See you at graduation,” I said.
“Yeah. See you there, Rook.”
The days between the championship and graduation were quiet in a way that should have been a warning.
Soren was present. He showed up to school, made his jokes, gave me the same grin he always had.
We ate lunch on the steps outside the gym on Tuesday and he talked for twenty minutes straight about some band he'd found, playing a clip on his phone and watching my face to see when I'd admit it was actually good.
He looked fine. He sounded fine. And because I wanted him to be fine, I let myself believe it.
Thursday afternoon I found him at his locker, clearing out the last of his textbooks with the kind of cheerful disregard for school property that only made sense on your last day of real classes.
“Tell me you're not going to the after-party at Jensen's,” he said, not looking up.
“Why would I go to Jensen's party?”
“Because you feel obligated to show face. Because you're the captain.” He shoved a textbook into his bag and finally looked at me. “I'm giving you permission to skip it. You can use my name if you want.”
“I wasn't going.”
“Good.” He zipped the bag. “So graduation, then the rink. I still need to clear my gear out of the locker room, and you probably have about forty years of tape residue and stick wax to deal with.”
“I'm not cleaning out your locker.”
“You absolutely are. It's the last act of captaincy.” He swung the bag onto his shoulder and pointed at me. “Four o'clock. Don't make me wait.”
He made it about three steps down the hallway before I called after him.
“Hey.”
He stopped and turned, bag still on his shoulder, eyebrows up.
“You actually going to show up this time? Because I seem to remember you telling me you'd be at the bus at six thirty for the Brampton game and I stood in the parking lot for forty minutes.”
“That was one time.”
“Forty minutes, Soren.”
“It was twenty and you know it.” He pointed at me again. “Four o'clock. I'll be there before you.”
“You've never been early for anything in your life.”
“Championship game. I was dressed and on the ice before you even laced up.”
“That's because you couldn't sleep.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and then laughed, low and a little reluctant, the way he did when he didn't want to admit I was right. “Okay. Fair. But I'll be there at four.”
I leaned against the locker next to his. The hallway was emptying out around us, the last-day-of-classes energy pulling everyone in different directions, and neither of us moved.
“You know Jensen's going to try and make a speech at the grad party,” I said.
“Of course he is.”
“He's been practicing. I can tell.”
Soren's face went through something brilliant. “How do you know when Jensen's been practicing a speech?”
“He keeps starting sentences and then stopping like he's editing himself.”
“That's just Jensen having a thought he can't finish.” He shook his head slowly. “God. Four years with that guy. You'd think it would get easier.”
“It really didn't.”
“No.” He smiled at the floor for a second. “It really didn't.”
“Hey,” Soren said, quieter now. “Four years of you as my center. I couldn't have played it with anyone else.”
It wasn't the kind of thing either of us said out loud. We didn't do that. We communicated it through a shoulder check on the ice or a chirp that had too much warmth in it, but not like this. Not straight out.
“Yeah,” I said, because I didn't trust myself with more than that. “Same.”
He nodded, once, like that settled something. Then the easy grin came back up and he pointed at me one last time. “Four o'clock. Don't be weird about it.”
He turned and walked away, and I watched him go, and I thought about calling after him again but didn’t.
Graduation morning settled wrong in my chest before my alarm went off. I lay there for a minute staring at the ceiling, trying to identify the source of it and coming up empty, and then I got up and got dressed.