Chapter Two
Mark Tungsten [off-screen]: Damir, what do you say to people calling your recent hit on Kilian Howard dirty?
Denisov: How do you mean, dirty?
Mark Tungsten: As in an illegal hit, something that should have been a major penalty.
Denisov: Are people saying so?
Mark Tungsten: Olivia Starling recently published an article calling for your suspension.
Denisov: As you can see, I am not suspended.
Top comments:
sealions4lyfe: I’m no Howie fan, but this guy is straight up evil. Look at him, pretending he’d never heard the term “dirty hit” before. Dude’s been playing in America since he was 16.
Clions2010: No clue what the league expected when they drafted someone like him first round.
[Comment deleted]
[Comment deleted]
Chicago_Firecrackers: We respect all of our players’ rich backgrounds and cultural heritages and will be deleting hate speech in all forms from our comment section.
(From pregame interview, Carolina Twisters @ Chicago Firecrackers, 11/3/2025)
Damir winced involuntarily as he scrolled through the Reddit thread on r/hockey about his hit on Howard.
He should never have gone for the full-body check in the first place, should have let bygones be bygones, maybe ended his shift early and switched out for a player who didn’t have a history with Howard.
But he hadn’t seen Howard since the time they’d fucked savagely in Damir’s hotel room in San Francisco last year.
Damir had missed the third and final game against the Sea Lions last season with a sprained ankle.
He was unprepared for the sense memory of Howard’s red curls buried in the sheets as he begged for Damir’s dick, and he reacted with as much grace as any playground bully.
Damir had been lucky the refs had ruled it a two-minute minor for charging.
If Howard hadn’t had the presence of mind to shield his head on impact with the boards and remain safe from concussion, it might have been another matter.
Damir also hadn’t shrouded himself with glory in the aftermath, following Howard around the ice for the remainder of the game, fucking up the team’s penalty kill, and giving up more than a few scoring chances while he was at it.
Coach Simmons had chewed him out afterward in the locker room in front of the team, and Damir couldn’t pretend he’d been wrong.
He’d done his best to get over it by scoring six in the next five games with an additional three assists, earning him second star of the week from the NHL.
And yet, the denizens of r/hockey still occupied themselves debating whether he ought to be traded or kicked out of the league for his sins.
Couldn’t someone crash into a goalie and not get penalized so they’d have something else to debate?
Only a few of the comments explicitly blamed his lack of moral fiber on being a Muslim.
They did get downvoted or removed, but plenty seemingly innocuous ones dealt in stereotypes, calling him violent or misogynistic.
The proof of the latter, to Damir’s continued chagrin, was the godforsaken carpet munching comment. The internet was forever.
And then there were the “just kidding” ones.
Denisov is a terrorist on the ice. JK don’t @ me SJWs.
Denny suicide bombing Chi-town’s chances at a cup lol.
“Denny,” Ketchup said, elbowing Damir so sharply his phone dropped out of his hand and onto his bag. “You gotta get off the internet.”
Steve Heinz, otherwise known as Ketchup, was Damir’s seatmate in the locker room and his roommate at home.
Buffalo traded him to Chicago midway through last season for a couple lower-round picks.
Damir, as one of the team’s alternates who also happened to have no wife and twelve screaming children taking up space in his penthouse, was the natural person to offer up his guest room.
Ketchup never got around to finding his own place.
Unfortunately, Ketchup had made an executive decision that this qualified them as friends, thereby allowing him to have opinions on Damir’s screen time.
Ketchup’s own internet habits oscillated between playing point-and-click hidden object puzzles with a buddy on Discord.
He’d then go offline for weeks at a time in the summer to fish at some remote cabin in Canada, making him totally unfit to judge.
Though Damir had to admit not knowing about TikTok sounded nice.
Not out loud though. It would do terrible things to Ketchup’s ego if Damir told him he was probably right about getting off the internet. Instead of saying anything, he grunted in response.
“Cap,” Ketchup called. “Denny’s reading his own press again.”
From the other side of the room, Captain Jacques “Lissy” Valisse glared. “Denny, put the phone away.”
“Practice is over,” Damir said. “You’re not the boss of me anymore.”
“I am always the boss of you.”
Damir wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like how that sounds.”
Ketchup grimaced in agreement. “I think it’s the accent.”
“Insubordination.” Lissy sniffed. “I cannot work under these circumstances. I tender my resignation, effective immediately. Rocky is in charge now.”
Willy “Rocky” Stone, the other alternate, a defenseman who lived up to the nickname in that he was as dumb as rocks, rolled his eyes and stomped off toward the showers.
“Um.” One of the rookies glanced between them all with wide eyes.
“Lissy threatens to quit two or three times a month,” Henderson, the backup goalie, told him with a gentle pat to his shoulder. “I wouldn’t take it too seriously.”
“You will see. When I am traded to Alaska, you will all miss me.”
“Mm-hm. And which Alaskan hockey team will you be going to exactly?” Damir unbuckled his chest protector, getting ready to hit the showers.
He knew checking his phone right after practice was a bad habit.
For one, the internet was full of people who wanted him off the team and out of the country, and for another, it prolonged how long he spent sitting in his stall in rank, sweaty hockey gear.
His hair dripped with cold sweat, and he shuddered in revulsion.
Lissy sauntered over, naked except for the towel slung around his waist. Wiry hair covered his chest and trailed down his thick torso.
His beard was immaculately cared for, and his dark, wavy hair fell almost to his shoulders.
During their annual posing for the Chicago Firecrackers charity calendar, Lissy went shirtless.
He could pull it off, but Damir wasn’t into bears.
“What are you reading this time, Denny?”
Damir sighed. “Reddit.”
“You know only cave trolls and armchair coaches go on Reddit. Are you an armchair coach?”
“No.”
“Then you must be a cave troll, eh?”
“Fuck off.”
“Stop reading what idiots think of you, then. You are an all right hockey player.”
“All right, am I?” Damir got to his feet, towel thrown over his shoulder, and pushed his compression leggings off.
Lissy put a hand to his own chest in mock solemnity. “I apologize. You are the best hockey player in the world and the savior of Chicago hockey. Without you, we would be lost.”
Damir threw his gross, damp leggings at Lissy’s head.
He walked off toward the showers, ignoring Lissy’s calls of undying devotion behind him.
Ketchup caught up to him a minute later, taking the next showerhead over. “Lissy’s a goof, but he’s not wrong. You are our best player, no matter what some jerk-offs online think.”
Damir looked up, watching the spray of water from the tiny metal head.
The bathrooms at the Alliance Arena needed someone who knew how to clean limescale.
It was getting into the nozzle, blocking off some sections and making the water spurt out wildly in others.
The all-purpose cleaner Damir bought (because it looked like the one his mother used) did a decent job even if it smelled strange. Maybe he could recommend it to someone.
“My ego is not so fragile,” he said eventually, lying through his teeth.
The Firecrackers had drafted him first overall six years ago, and since then, the team had only made the playoffs twice.
They’d lost in the first round both times.
He understood fans’ disappointment in him because he disappointed himself.
“I’m just sick of people calling me a—a terrorist or an ISIS member. ”
“Oh, shit.”
Damir glanced over.
Ketchup had frozen halfway through shampooing his floppy dirty-blond hair, right at the part where he shaped it into a Mohawk in the middle of his head. “People say that?”
“All the time.”
“Well…shit. That blows. But you can’t let it get to you.” Ketchup dunked his water under the spray, missing Damir rolling his eyes.
What groundbreaking advice—not letting it get to him.
He would take that wisdom into account, alongside such pearls as “get pucks in deep” and “don’t mind the unlucky bounces.
” Being a straight white man, not part of any religious or ethnic group that Western media routinely shit on, must be so nice.
Damir finished his shower still grumpy. He should know better than to read his own media, yes, but surely it wasn’t too much to ask for people not to be assholes.
And Damir liked Reddit, certainly more than Facebook or Twitter or any of the other million social networking sites he didn’t use. Reddit didn’t like him.
He made it all the way to player parking on a series of nonverbal grunts before Ketchup forced him to talk again.
“Hey, so, Howie didn’t say anything awful, did he?”
“Hm?”
“Howie? Redhead, second-line center for the Sea Lions? The reason you bodied him into the boards as if he was made of rubber last time we played? It wasn’t racist shit, right?”
“Oh.” Damir huffed a laugh. “No, nothing like that.”
“Oh, thank God. ’Cause I know Howie’s not always the most sensitive guy. But everyone on our Bantam team had this phase where we thought slurs were, like, the funniest shit. You hope people grow out of it, or whatever, but you never know.”