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Connor can’t get warm.
He’s turned up the heat, dry and itchy on his skin, and the hotel blankets are thick enough to crush the air out of his lungs, but he’s still cold. His tongue is paralyzed on the roof of his mouth so he doesn’t poke around the new landscape of his remaining teeth.
He wants to stop swallowing blood, and he wants a heat pack, and he wants to rewind the last couple hours and redo them a few millimetres to the left, but what he gets is Leon.
Leon’s arrival is unceremonious as always, only announced by the muted beep and click of the lock on the hotel room door, and he greets Connor with a long look that Connor’s too bleary to interpret as pitying or not.
Leon stands in the doorway, asks anyway. “Are you okay?”
It’s a dumb question. Connor knows he looks pretty fucking pitiful, in fetal position in the middle of a mound of bedding, half his day clothes still on and now rumpled beyond redemption, a full glass of water sitting on the bedside table because he’s scared to unclench his teeth. He just slings a look at Leon and lets the angle of his locked jaw speak for itself.
Leon turns off half the lights—which had been blazing, pushing the ceiling higher, flinging the walls farther as Connor disappeared in their emptiness. He sets down a bag, then pushes further into the stillness of the room, intention etched on his face.
“Shit, Con, I—” he says, then Connor shifts, scrapes his cheek against his too-hot too-cold pillow and Leon jerks toward him, for real this time. Connor blinks his eyes closed on an exhale so he feels rather than sees the mattress dip as Leon kneels on the edge, waits for the press of a palm around his jaw, a fit as familiar as a t-shirt.
The touch brushes against his neck instead, Leon’s fingertips tentatively stroking through the hair on his nape, and Connor presses into the warmth of his hand. It’s too little, but he can’t help it.
“How’s it feel?” Leon asks, voice low. Almost too low, and it makes Connor feel stupid. “You don’t have to show me,” Leon says, when Connor opens his eyes.
Just to be contrary, Connor curls his lip up and watches Leon’s gaze land on what’s not there. The look that crosses his face—Connor can’t clear the cool fog in his head to name it.
“Does it hurt? Can I touch it?”
Connor shakes his head to the first, nods to the second. “Doesn’t hurt yet,” he says, jaw creaking open. He can barely push the words between his lips, which feel fat and buzzing from the emergency anaesthesia. He pokes his tongue out to lick at them awkwardly. “Freezing will fade soon. Hopefully I’ll be asleep.”
Leon’s fingers brush against Connor’s cheek, the edge of a thumb dipping into the corner of his mouth, although through the local anaesthetic it’s a weird ghostly touch, only sort of there and too chilled. The rest of his hand still cups Connor’s jaw, the warm familiarity more aching than anything else in the moment. Connor wants more of that. He wants to sink against and into Leon like a bad video game glitch, and just stay there, cocooned inside something right. Wrap himself right in Leon’s skin, and stay there.
“That’s okay? Doesn’t hurt?” Leon asks, oblivious to—all that.
“‘s like ice.”
“So you’re saying,” Leon says, the sharpness around his mouth dissolving, “you can’t feel your face when you’re with me.”
Connor snorts the faintest laugh through his nose. “And I hate it.” The numbness, specifically. He doesn’t hate Leon leaning over him, so he adds: “But s’better than the alternative.”
“No painkillers?”
“No you, I meant, but sure.”
“Wait, no taking that back, I want the compliment,” and then Leon’s smile is turning sweet.
“Thought you would,” Connor murmurs. It feels like his words are slurring together. “How are you here anyway.”
Leon digs the keycard from his pocket and flicks it onto the nightstand. “Stole that out of your bag in the room, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t notice.”
Connor hadn’t.
“Or mind,” Leon tacks on, more of an afterthought than it probably should be.
Connor didn’t.
He lets Leon gently bully him into sitting up, takes the shitty store-brand meal replacement drink when Leon twists the cap off and hands it over, apologizing that’s all they had at the closest drugstore. It’s a little messy when he slops a little of the nasty synthetic strawberry flavour onto his shirt because his whole mouth situation is too numb to know what’s going on. The finger he swipes through the scruff on his chin, to catch the drip, still feels distant through the anaesthesia.
But then his fingers are too cold and stiff to undo the stupid fucking buttons on his rumpled, now-stained dress shirt, and Leon only watches him struggle with two before taking over, leaning in, too far in. Connor lets the flush of embarrassment warm him.
“Thank you,” is all he says, because that’s what the sorry stuck in his throat means anyway. Sorry for breaking into little bloody pieces. Sorry for getting frozen, and losing, and freezing. Thank you for unbuttoning my shirt. Thank you for letting me let you.
“You’ll figure it out.”
Connor’s buried in the depths of his warmest hoodie now but Leon finds his gaze anyway, and when Connor settles back into the mess of his bedding he pulls Leon in, too. Maybe Leon can’t stay, but he’ll take what he can get for the moment. “Get in here,” he mumbles, presses an arm across Leon’s chest, rests against his body for a moment to soak in the warmth. He doesn’t trust his aim right now so when he leans in, he compromises and drops a kiss onto Leon’s forehead, a gesture that’s all thanks, no sorry, a little please, and something else neither will speak.
Leon makes a noise, muffled into Connor’s sweater where hood meets shoulder, and he pulls away, the look on his face critically fond. “I thought I’m the one playing caretaker,” he says, shoving Connor over—gently—and yanking at the duvet until it’s straight, smoothing it out.
“Got to rest my pretty face, yeah,” Connor says, closing his eyes.
Leon pats him on the chest, pulls him closer. “Sure,” he laughs for both of them, and then he’s brushing a kiss on the pink of Connor’s cheekbone, where he’s still warm and he can feel it. Where he’s real. “Sounds about right to me.”
***
Connor thinks about it, later. Tries to put his thoughts in order, tries to colour in the blank space.
The impact met his mouth met blackout rage, shattered instantly by a bone deep, disturbingly primal fear, hot and cold, hot and cold, sweat and shivers clashing like blood on dull white ice.
He recalls nothing about leaving the ice. He recalls a weird gnawing feeling of dread. The game is chopping pieces off of him, and he let it. He’s letting it.
When they pried open Connor’s hand he looked down at the red-sticky teeth in his glove. Those were supposed to be in his mouth, he had thought dazedly, and then he blinked his eyes shut, grimaced through four shots of lidocaine, and let the needling of adrenaline carry him back to the ice, where he could focus on everything but the tang of blood between his molars.
Then the panic filtered out, the numbness set in, and then he was just—cold.
Or maybe he’s just being dramatic.
And then there was Leon.
***
And then there was Leon.
***
“What the fuck,” he mouths down the bench at Leon, five games later, the first time Leon bares his teeth and it’s Connor’s turn to see what isn’t there, and what now is: a neatly chipped gap courtesy of the Washington Capitals. It’s not like Connor’s car crash mouth—it’s tidy.
Leon’s chewing on his mouthguard like it’s normal.
Connor runs his tongue over his own, unconsciously then suddenly way too consciously, and forces himself to look away.
***
“I promise I didn’t jinx you,” he says to Leon, solemn, as soon as he gets the chance. They’re dressing after post-game showers, and Connor is doing up his own buttons this time, thank you very much.
“Don’t think it works like that, bud.” Leon replies just as solemnly. “This was all me.” He bares his teeth and runs his tongue over them, slotting it into the new gap.
It would be stupid to ask if it hurts, of course it hurts, but the words stick on Connor’s tongue when he thinks about asking how to touch it.
Connor knows it’s just the way Leon’s face is squinched up, but there’s a stupid look around Leon’s eyes that almost makes him look—proud of it. Like he went and took a stick to the mouth on purpose in a revolutionary act of cosmic solidarity. A shitty one, but still. And he’s acting fucking normal about it.
And Connor’s too quiet about it for a second—the idea of Leon’s misplaced compulsion to share is surely insanely narcissistic but also so believable Connor is tripping and falling into it—that Leon notices, bumps a knee against his before leaning down to lace his shoes.
“You always do it bigger and better, eh?”
“Sure,” Connor says to the back of Leon’s head, “I sulked harder in my room about it. I haven’t even heard a sniffle from you yet.”
“Saving my tears for another day,” Leon retorts, then turns his newly-rugged grin on Connor as he straightens up.
“What’s up with the Weeknd references anyway.”
“Haven’t you seen the album cover?”
Connor has no idea what he’s talking about.
Leon’s saying something sarcastic about real Torontonians and hometown heroes but—
“Drake wears my jersey,” Connor interrupts, absentminded, because every time he blinks his mind flips back to the satisfaction in Leon’s face, the way he hasn’t flinched yet and probably never will, as long as they move in tandem. Connor can’t even break his teeth on his own.
He should probably resent the thought, then—Leon turns to him and reaches out, undoes the top button on his shirt, just because he can—and Connor knows maybe he’s selfish, but he likes it this way.