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Chapter 73: The Parade
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-07-19 20:22:40
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Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 74: The Offseason Question
Two days after the parade, the city had quieted slightly, the team had dispersed for the summer in every direction, and my apartment felt large and still in a way it hadn't felt in months.I'd gotten used to the noise. Practice schedules, road trips, the constant low hum of a season in progress. The silence now felt less like rest and more like absence, a space that had been filled with specific sounds for so long that its current emptiness registered as its own kind of presence.Jax showed up on the third evening with a bag."What's this," I said, opening the door."A bag.""I can see it's a bag. What's in the bag.""Clothes. A few books. The basics." He stood in the doorway, not quite asking the question directly, the way he sometimes approached things sideways when he wasn't entirely certain of his footing. "I thought you might want company for the week. If you wanted that.""Yes," I said, before he'd finished the sentence.He looked slightly surprised by the speed of the answer. "
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 73: The Parade
The Cup parade went through the city on an open-top bus, the Cup itself moving from player to player at a pace nobody had actually planned in advance, just happening organically as the mood shifted."Your turn," Reyes said, passing it to me somewhere around the second block, both hands extended carefully like he was handing over something fragile despite the Cup being made of solid silver and weighing considerably more than fragile things usually weighed."I had it ten minutes ago.""Doesn't matter. Turn's a turn. Hold it again."I held it again.The city was one continuous sound for six blocks in every direction, no gaps, no quiet pockets, just an unbroken wall of noise that started somewhere behind us and rolled forward with the bus, picking up new voices every block and never losing the ones it had already collected.Torres, beside me, said: "I keep waiting for it to feel normal. It hasn't yet.""Maybe it's not supposed to.""Maybe," he said. "Feels like it should, eventually. Like
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 72: After the Ice
The locker room after a Stanley Cup is the loudest room I had ever been in. It was also the most specific. The joy belonged only to the people inside it, dense and complete, nothing held back for cameras or reporters waiting outside."You good to stand?" Reyes asked, his hand still on my shoulder from the celebration on the ice."I'll find out.""Test it now. Less embarrassing than finding out on the Cup presentation."I tested it. The knee held, barely, enough to stand without obvious favoring, which was all I needed for the next several minutes.Miller came through briefly, shaking hands, saying something to every player he passed. To me he said: "You played the smartest twenty-two minutes of hockey I've seen all year. Smarter than full shifts would've been.""I didn't have a choice about the twenty-two minutes.""Doesn't matter. You still made the most of what you had. That's the skill that doesn't show up in highlight reels."He moved on before I could respond.Outside the locker
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 71: The Goal
The puck went in.The building became a single sound that was not describable as noise. It was something physical, something that got inside the chest and stayed there, a roar so complete it stopped feeling like sound and started feeling like weather, like pressure, like the building itself had decided to express an emotion through every speaker and every throat at once.For a moment after the puck crossed the line, everything in the building seemed to happen at once and yet somehow also stretched out, the way significant seconds sometimes did, slow enough to notice every individual detail and fast enough that all of them blurred together by the time you tried to describe them later.Torres stood at the spot where he'd shot from, arms raised, his stick already abandoned on the ice behind him. The goaltender on the other end sat back against his own net, head down, the specific posture of a man absorbing a loss he could not have prevented.Somewhere in the chaos, the public address sys
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 70: Game Six, The Cup
In the locker room before warmups, Miller had kept his pregame speech short. "Six games. One left to play tonight or one more after this, depending how it goes," he said. "Either way, you've already proven what kind of team this is. Tonight just proves it on the scoreboard.""What if it goes to game seven?" Torres asked."Then we play a game seven, and we win that too," Miller said, like the outcome was already decided and the game itself was just a formality to confirm it."You sound very confident," Reyes said."I am very confident," Miller said. "I've watched you all season. I know what this room is capable of."Home ice. One win from the Stanley Cup. I was taped from hip to ankle, the trainer's most thorough wrap job of the season, and I warmed up like nothing was wrong while my knee told me, with every push off the ice, that something very much was."How's it feel," the trainer asked, watching me skate a slow lap during warmups."Functional.""That's the same word you gave me bef
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 69: Game Five Without Leo
I sat in the players' box in full gear and watched my team play game five knowing I could not join them, and it turned out to matter in a way I found difficult to explain even to myself.I was not in uniform for any tactical reason. I could not skate a single shift. But Miller had agreed without argument when I made the request, and the equipment staff had set me up at the glass with full gear, including my jersey, exactly where the bench could see me between shifts."You good back there?" Reyes asked, skating past during a stoppage, glancing up at the box."I'm good," I said. "Go play.""Just checking.""Check less. Play more."He grinned and skated off.Brodsky, on his way past the box before warmups, stopped to bump fists through the gap in the glass. "Good to see you up here instead of in some sky box with the sponsors," he said."That was the plan.""It's a small thing. Doesn't seem like it should matter.""It matters," I said. "I don't know how to explain why.""You don't have t
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 2: The First Crack
Five a.m. was an ungodly hour for anyone, but for a professional athlete, it was a sacred ritual. The ice was empty, the air crisp and cold, smelling of Zamboni fluid and potential. It was my church. Until today.Today, my church had been desecrated by a six-foot-three devil with a god complex."Ag
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 1: The Scent of War
(Leo POV)The scent of a hundred Alphas should have been overwhelming. It was a maelstrom of aggression, sweat, and cheap deodorant that clung to the walls of the Vipers' locker room. But the only one that mattered was the one standing in front of the door, blocking his exit. Jax "The Ice King" Th
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 29: His Kitchen at Night
His house at night felt different when I arrived wanting to be there rather than required to be. Same rooms, same clean geometry, same city light pressing soft through the tall windows. But I moved through it as someone who had been invited rather than directed, which changed the quality of every s
Claimed by the Ice Captain Chapter 24: Before the Game
We won that night. We won the next three games after it. The streak had a quality of inevitability about it, not arrogance, but the surer feeling of a team that has located something true about itself and is operating from that location.I was playing the best hockey of my life.I understood, now,
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