Chapter Eight
Mark Tungsten [off-screen]: In your opinion, what aspect of the Firecrackers’ play needs the most work?
Ketchup: Oh, the forecheck, probably.
Denisov: Also the backcheck.
Ketchup: Special teams.
Denisov: Really, everything but goaltending. We’re still in a wildcard spot because of our goalie tandem. Petterson and Henderson are both so good.
Mark Tungsten: Ouch, harsh words for your team there.
Denisov: We all know last season was a disappointment, and we all want to do better. It’s hard to go out there and keep giving it your best when things aren’t going great, but if we can laugh about it, we can keep the mood in the room up and keep trying to improve.
Ketchup: And that’s Denny talking. He never laughs.
Top comments:
firecrackers_spark: as a fan: brutal. also as a fan: they’re not wrong.
sauceittome: love ketchup. Go on king, give us nothing.
Jefferson Howard: In my day, players had respect for their teams. This is shameful! I would have thought a man of faith like Denisov would know better!
(From pregame media availability, Chicago Firecrackers @ Carolina Twisters, 11/30/2025)
Damir skated onto the ice, his stick gripped tight in his gloves.
Both teams had gotten one goal and one miss in the first two rounds of the shootout. The Twisters had missed their third shot, and it was down to him.
As always.
The Firecrackers desperately needed more depth.
Lissy’s prime had ended a good five years ago.
These days, he could finish off someone else’s play with a tip-in, but he struggled for the speed and power he needed as a second-line center.
The less said about Ketchup, oscillating between the second and third lines as if he had any business being there, the better.
Damir started slowly, picking up momentum as he deked the puck this way and that. He tried not to think too hard and strategize too much or he’d give himself away.
In the last yards before the arbitrary point he’d chosen to shoot from, Damir faked left and notched the puck in right, top shelf.
The goal light went on.
The crowd cheered.
Relief overwhelmed him. Not joy, not pride, just relief that they wouldn’t bring home another loss.
His teammates crowded off the bench, jostling his shoulders and patting his butt in celebration. (Again, why did straight men think that was acceptable?)
Coach called out, “Nice one, Denny!” over the din of the crowd.
Afterward came the interminable sequence of postgame media, showering, changing, and piling into the bus to the hotel. Curfew was suspended because they weren’t doing anything besides traveling tomorrow, which meant Lissy spent the whole bus ride shouting out suggestions for bars they could hit up.
Everything in Damir tensed. A loud, crowded bar full of fired-up hockey players getting drunk and hitting on local women—two things Damir had no interest whatsoever in doing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Friday, and inventing some fake religious reason to avoid socializing would make him feel guilty.
“I know that face,” Ketchup said. “Don’t you dare. You’re coming with us. You won us the game, bro! You gotta celebrate!”
“I don’t drink,” Damir reminded him.
“Yo, Lissy,” Ketchup shouted right beside Damir’s ear, causing him to flinch away. “We need a bar with, like, mocktails. Or smoothies. Our star’s gotta party too!”
“Pretentious hipster bar. On it!” Lissy called back.
Damir sighed and sank deeper into his seat. He stuck one earphone in so he could feign ignorance of whatever other awful plans the team agreed upon for the night.
He pulled out his phone and thumbed open Instagram.
A bad habit, but it was only reinforced when he saw a message from Kilian.
The words “sound on” preceded a clip of Damir skating up for the goal in the shootout, set to the theme of “The Pink Panther.” It made the corner of his mouth quirk up.
He turned the volume back off and reacted with the crying-laughing emoji.
ddenisov88: the internet works fast
howza68: not as fast as id be on my knees to suck u off if i was on ur team
Damir straightened in his seat, shifting to hide the sudden interest his cock had taken in those words.
ddenisov88: are you drunk?
howza68: lil bit relax it’s a night off
ddenisov88: out clubbing?
howza68: y
ddenisov88: so why are you texting me?
howza68: idk clubbing sucks no one here can fuck me as good as u
Heat rushed through Damir’s body so fast it felt as though he’d been clubbed over the head by a hockey stick. His head swam for a long moment, and when he came to his senses, he found he’d typed out and sent a message.
ddenisov88: be a good girl for me and fuck yourself on your fingers in the bathroom
Kilian responded with several of the red, sweating emojis.
Damir stuffed his phone into his pocket before he could get too carried away. He was on the team bus; since when was he so careless?
When he looked up, he found several teammates crowded in the aisle around Ketchup, who was holding his phone. Any of them could have seen what Damir had written, but thankfully, whatever they were watching kept them occupied.
“What have you got there?” he asked, nodding toward Ketchup’s phone.
“Oh, it’s my boy Howie.” Ketchup paused the video and tilted the screen so Damir could see too.
There was Kilian, his red hair curling almost out of frame, full lips parted mid-speech.
Damir’s pulse quickened at the thought of what he was doing in a dingy bathroom stall in a nightclub in San Francisco.
Ketchup pressed play on the video.
“So anyway, if you really believe hockey is for everyone, next time you hear someone call a player weak, or a…um…a bad word for women’s parts, when they don’t wanna fight, say something.
When you see people giving Denisov grief for his religion, tell them it isn’t cool.
When you hear people talking about a player of color disrespectfully, ask them if they’d say the same thing if he was white.
I’m gonna. It’s not enough to say we welcome everyone in this sport; we have to actually do it. ”
The video ended, and Ketchup clicked back to his front page. “He means it too. Check this out.”
On a post by the official NHL account showing a legal check Damir had executed in the game before last, every single comment calling Damir a terrorist or a goon now had a comment of its own by Kilian that read, “anyone can play hockey, bro.”
“Wow,” Damir said thickly.
“Yeah,” Ketchup agreed. “He’s a cool dude.”
He wasn’t a cool dude, Damir wanted to argue.
He was an insecure, scared young man barely out of his first season who so desperately needed someone to stand up for people like him that he had done it himself.
His word choice might have been clumsy and juvenile, but his intentions were so sweet.
Kilian had made a choice to be the person Damir never had a chance to be, to set the example Damir had always wished existed in hockey, and it both touched and insulted Damir that a man six years his junior felt the need to defend him.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and though he knew he shouldn’t, Damir pulled it out.
He angled it away from Ketchup and the other teammates and clicked the notification.
A voice message.
He fumbled for the volume control, turning it up again before clicking play.
At first, he could barely hear anything besides muffled thumping. After a few seconds, he placed it as the bass line of some obnoxious club remix of a pop song he recognized.
Then the moaning started.
It wasn’t loud, not as loud as Damir knew Kilian could be, but it was unmistakable—rhythmic sounds of pleasure, interspersed by panting breaths.
He squirmed in his seat, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from reacting visibly.
On the recording, he heard more breathless moans and then one drawn-out “Ah!”
Then there was nothing but silence in Damir’s ear.
Fuck.
Ketchup asked him something. Damir grunted noncommittally in response, unable to parse words or thoughts or anything but the knowledge that he’d just listened to Kilian come after following Damir’s instructions to the letter.
Kilian, who had gone on the internet specifically to defend Damir multiple times.
Kilian, who at all of twenty already felt responsible for the kids coming after him.
Kilian, funny and goofy and insecure and needy and perfect in bed.
Damir was in way over his head.
Ketchup said something else, a question, and Damir hummed in agreement, hoping no one would notice he’d checked out of the conversation.
A cheer went up around him.
“Nice, man, I didn’t think you’d agree!” Ketchup slapped Damir on the back.
“Huh?”
“Boys! We’re headed to the club, and Denny’s buying the first round!”
Perfect. Exactly what Damir didn’t need tonight.
“I will buy you all mineral water,” Damir threatened, but they didn’t seem to care.
It was probably good to show his face at this sort of team event every once in a while, regardless of how disinterested the prospect left him.
Damir let himself be dragged from the hotel to a ludicrously pricey gin bar with enough strobe lights and free floor space to double as a nightclub.
He even paid for a round of shots provided by a robot arm that drove up the wall of bottles behind the bar, collecting drinks from different gin bottles at an alarmingly slow pace.
Three rounds later, and Damir still eyed it with distaste.
What a dumb gimmick. Of course, three separate guys filmed it for Instagram. With a sigh, Damir ordered himself another nice, big glass of water.
His quads were sore. He’d played twenty-three minutes and should have spent some time in an ice bath after the game.
But he didn’t like asking for complicated, time-consuming treatment during away games.
Being in other teams’ arenas made his bones itch under his skin.
If he had to go through the torture of an ice bath, he wanted it to be under the low ceilings of the Alliance Arena with the limescale in the showers and the outdated version of the team’s logo on the carpet in the cooldown room.