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***sköldpaddor*** · 01-05-2022, 09:39 PM

Gold in the Water
Chapter 1 - It All Starts Here

There are so many changes in Lias’s life over the course of his first season in the SMJHL that it would almost be easier to list the things that have stayed the same. From the adjustment of living on his own across the ocean from his family and all the things he’s used to, to the adjustment of playing in a different league with completely different opponents and a higher compete level than he’s used to, right down to all of the little tiny things he didn’t expect to be adjustments, it is a year of learning and growing. He settles in, he learns to love his team, and when Gunnar Söderberg is hired to manage the team at the end of the season, Lias starts to understand that things really do happen for a reason.

And then suddenly, after a season of telling himself to slow down and enjoy each moment as it comes, everything he's been trying to be patient for starts to come together. It’s almost time for the draft, and Lias is getting infinitely more calls from scouts and GMs than he did before the juniors draft, and it’s all incredibly overwhelming. At first, he puts it out of his mind and tries not to think about it because there’s no sense in giving himself anxiety over something that isn’t even happening for weeks.

But it creeps closer, and closer, and then it starts to feel like people have expectations. Like people want him to give them some kind of commitment. And Lias is newly eighteen years old, he barely knows who he is yet, and it’s all just a lot. He comes back to Nevada early, before anything is mandatory, before most people are back in town, let alone out there on the ice, because on the ice is the only place where his mind feels clear. Sometimes, he’ll go out and just skate for hours, no equipment, no stick, just him and the sheet of ice beneath him and the rush of cold air on his face.

It’s on his mind, of course it is. And thank god they aren’t back for anything more than completely optional practices, but even so, Lias doesn’t have his head in it. He knows his coaches can tell, and when Gunnar calls him into his office after practice, Lias is dreading the conversation. He trudges down the hall miserably, running both hands through his hair, still damp from the shower, before knocking on the door, which is ajar.

“Come in,” Gunnar says immediately, and Lias does, closing the door behind him and sinking down into the chair nearest him, prepared to catch hell for showing up for an optional practice and half-assing it. “Do you know what I wanted to talk to you about?”

Lias nods, then shakes his head slowly, then shrugs.

“I guess about practice. I know I wasn’t great out there.”

“No,” Gunnar says, “you weren’t, but I know that’ll pass. It’s more the why I wanted to talk about.”

“Oh,” Lias says, and suddenly he wishes it were the first thing, the one he was dreading a moment earlier. “I guess, uh, you know, I’m just trying to get back to a strong start but-“

“It’s pretty normal to be anxious about the draft,” Gunnar says, cutting right to the heart of it with no further preamble. Lias swallows hard, and reaches up to tug at his hair again. The reason he’s so anxious is because of the overwhelming volume of conflicting thoughts racing through his brain; he can’t even settle on which one to angst over first.

“Yeah,” he says, because he’s not sure what else to say.

“Hey,” Gunnar leans on the desk between them, like he’s about to share something confidential. “I made myself sick worrying, every day, for three or four days before my draft. I’ve been there.”

Lias raises his eyebrows, because he wouldn’t have called that.

“What were you freaking out about?”

“A little of everything,” Gunnar admits. “It’s a huge step. Gives you a trajectory, even if it’s not the one you expect at the time. And it’s a lot of conversations with a lot of people who have a lot of expectations of you.”

Lias draws his feet up into the chair, bending his knees and wrapping his arms around them loosely, as if somehow if he makes himself feel a little smaller, the immensity of the situation might make a little more sense in comparison.

“I don’t want to let anyone down,” he says, his voice a little rougher than he’d like.

“Hey,” Gunnar says, shaking his head. “That’s not on you. You do your best. You answer things as honestly as you’re comfortable with. The rest of it…that’ll come together.”

Lias chews on his lower lip, trying to figure out how to phrase the things that are worrying him.

“I think I might go like, really high in this draft,” he says. “But then also I keep thinking…why am getting all these calls? I didn’t get this many calls before the J draft, and that was…you know, before I had an incredibly disappointing rookie season. So like, why now? Are people fucking with me?”

“It wasn’t an incredibly disappointing season,” Gunnar tells him. “Listen to me. This is one of the hardest adjustments you’ll ever have to make. It was harder for me going from back home to juniors here than it was going from juniors to the SHL. This is the longest and farthest from home you’ve been. It’s indefinite. And you don’t know what to expect. Not putting up fifty points your rookie season isn’t a disappointment, it’s the norm.”

“I don’t want to be normal,” Lias makes a face. “I want to be the best.”

“I know you do,” Gunnar nods. “And I’m confident you will. But that doesn’t mean you need to be so hard on yourself that you let it discourage you.”

“Okay,” Lias nods. It’s not so much that he’s beating himself up over how he played; he was getting third line minutes, which made complete sense as a rookie. It’s just that by his estimation, the numbers he put up this season do not deserve the kind of attention he’s getting in scouting. “I didn’t mean to go off on like, a self-pity tangent or anything. I just don’t know why people suddenly care now.”

“A lot of it’s visibility,” Gunnar shrugs. “People know who you are now. People know how to put a rookie year into context.”

“I guess so,” Lias sighs. “It’s just…I mean, when I got drafted here, when I went as low as I did in the J draft, I thought like, this is bullshit, I’m better than that, I’m going to go out there and prove them all wrong. And I don’t feel like I really did that this year, but now I’m getting all the calls anyway, and people are being, like…I don’t know. I feel like they expect things from me, they want me to commit to something, or say things to other teams, and I just…”

“You can’t listen to that,” Gunnar shakes his head. “This is something that’s like, one of the hardest lessons to learn, and I know because I’ve been there, I’ve had to learn this myself, but…look, you are the only person you will ever be able to count on to have your own best interests at heart. That’s not to say nobody else ever will. You have some good people in your corner - me, Johnny, your family. But at the end of the day, you have to answer to yourself first, and you have to look out for yourself more than you can count on anybody else to do it.”

“What if I don’t know what’s best for me?” This is all a rare moment of open uncertainty for Lias, who has always been a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of person. People have been doubting him long enough that he’s learned to just be his own loudest fan even when he’s uncertain.

Gunnar smiles, and there’s something gentle and wistful about it, something that makes Lias feel incredibly seen and leaves him with little doubt that Gunnar is speaking from a place of experience.

“That’ll happen,” he says. “All I’ve ever learned to do is follow my gut. Do you want to talk about it?”

Lias hesitates. He does want to talk about it, but what he’s afraid to say is that he’s just as afraid of letting Gunnar down as anybody else, maybe even more. Gunnar has been maybe the single most impactful influence - hockey-wise, anyway - in his life, and that holds a lot of weight.

“It’s a lot,” he says slowly. “Like, there are teams that I don’t want to play for, and some of it is for personal reasons, like I don’t want to play somewhere that’s going to be a bad situation for me personally and I already know it. You know, like…I wouldn’t want to play somewhere they weren’t cool about…” Lias glances to the side, near the edge of the desk, where Gunnar has a framed photo of himself and his fiancé. He doesn’t finish the sentence, because there are some things he hasn’t really said out loud yet, things he has thus far just let people assume he mainly cares about due to his family situation.

“That’s completely understandable,” Gunnar says, and he doesn’t pry, which is another thing Lias has always appreciated about his mentoring methods. “So you can rule out those teams.”

“And teams that won’t give me a commitment that they won’t be that kind of team in the future,” Lias adds, and Gunnar nods. “But that still leaves a lot of teams. I’ve talked to a lot of people, and it’s not just…what do I want out of a team, it’s also the role I’m expected to play there and…you know, the way that’s going to, I don’t know, shape me as a person and all that.”

“You’re definitely already thinking a lot more in-depth about this than I did.” Gunnar laughs, and Lias smiles slightly. “But these are all completely valid things to consider. Do you have a short list?”

“Yeah,” Lias nods. “But it’s not very short. And all the teams that aren’t on it aren’t necessarily like, teams I won’t play for, if something happened. I also just keep thinking I’m tricking myself into thinking I have anywhere near as much of a say in this as it feels like I do.”

“No, you do.” Gunnar assures him. “People don’t want to draft someone who doesn’t want to play for them. Even if they don’t care about your preferences, it’s a bad business decision to waste a valuable pick on someone they already know isn’t going to pan out for them.”

“That’s true,” Lias admits. “Am I allowed to tell you? The short list, I mean?”

“You’re allowed to tell whoever you want, but I can keep it to myself if you want me to.”

“Yeah, please.” Lias nods. “So um, I don’t think I’m falling further than third. Winnipeg was like, the first team to say they were interested in me, and I didn’t know how I felt about it at first, but it seems like…you know, they’re really young. They’re not good right now, but it’s a situation I can grow with and not into, you know? And they’ve told me a lot of stuff about the kind of locker room culture they’re trying to build, and they’ve listened to me when I’ve told them the stuff that’s important to me, and I think I trust them to honor that.”

Gunnar nods, but he doesn’t say anything, so Lias continues.

“So like, I don’t want to play in Tampa. I thought about it a lot, and I thought, it’d be cool to be picked first, you know, who doesn’t dream of that, but I don’t…I don’t like the…vibe, I guess, I got from them when I talked to them. They didn’t seem like…excited to be talking to me, which is fine, I know they have a lot of people to talk to. But something in my gut just feels off.”

“Sounds like you’ve already made your mind up on that one, then,” Gunnar says.

“I know this is weird, considering like, all the stuff I said about being mad about how far I fell in the J draft,” Lias goes on, “but this is bigger than that. If I’m committing my future to a team, it being the right team is more important to me than when I get drafted, you know?”

“As it should be,” Gunnar agrees.

“And I just don’t think Tampa or Manhattan is that for me. So you’d think, you know, Winnipeg is it, obviously, but…”

“But the trade picture.” Gunnar finishes, and Lias nods.

“I don’t know who might trade up, and obviously nobody can really give me a straight answer about that because that would be tipping their hand, but…you know, it could happen.”

“And you don’t want it to?”

“It’s not…there’s teams I’d be excited to play for if that happened. But I know I have no control over it.”

“So let me ask you this,” Gunnar folds his hands on the desk, and meets Lias’s eyes. “If you could just hand that pick to anyone, who would it be?”

“I don’t want to have to make that choice,” Lias shakes his head. “I mean, I can tell people I don’t want to go there. But…that’s not my job, picking who picks me.”

Gunnar smiles, and Lias realizes he’s made the point Gunnar was trying to illustrate.

“Oh,” he says, grinning. “I get you. And I know that, I just feel like I owe people-“

“You don’t owe anyone anything,” Gunnar says. “Not SHL GMs, not me, not anyone.”

“You’re not uh,” Lias swallows hard. “You’re not going to be disappointed with me if I don’t get drafted by Chicago?”

“This is not about me,” Gunnar says, “But no. This is your life, Lias. Not mine.”

“Yeah, but…” I want to make you proud, is what Lias is thinking, but he doesn’t say it, because that’s a little too bare-your-soul for his current state of mind.

“No matter what happens,” Gunnar tells him, “I’m going to have your back, alright?”

“Thanks,” Lias says quietly. “I just have to…I guess I need to sort out which things I’m worried about because they’re what I want, and which things are keeping me awake at night because they’re what I think other people want for me.”

“It’s okay if there’s overlap, and it’s okay if there’s not. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, Lias. I know people who have made ultimatums because they know there’s only one place they’ll be happy. And I know people who have stayed open to new things and have been happier than they ever thought in places they didn’t know they would.”

Lias raises an eyebrow.

“You’re both of those people, aren’t you?”

Gunnar laughs, a full, surprised laugh that shakes his shoulders.

“Nothing gets past you, huh?”

Lias smiles slightly, and drops his feet back down to the floor, leaning forward onto the desk a little.

“I watched like, your whole career,” he points out. “And you write about a lot of it. So it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

“Fair enough,” Gunnar concedes. There’s a moment of comfortable silence, then he adds. “So are you ready?”

“For the draft? I mean, yeah. I’m…it’s this thing I’ve been looking forward to my whole life, it’s just the details that are weird right now. I’m ready. I really am.”

“Good.” Gunnar smiles. “Go get ‘em, kid.”

————

Three days later, the Winnipeg Aurora trade up to that number one spot in the draft, and even though they make it very clear to Lias that he’s the reason why, there’s part of him that still doesn’t know whether he can trust it until it’s done.

He doesn’t have time to tackle the reasons he can’t trust in things, the reasons there are only about five people in the world whose word he completely takes at face value anymore. He’s too young for that kind of pessimism, he knows, but he doesn’t have time to dig into the things that have happened to leave him with that outlook.

So in the end, Lias goes into the draft knowing that all of it is out of his hands, he hands it all over to destiny, and he has his eyes closed when the pick is announced. It’s not a big deal, he tells himself, if they don’t pick him, if he ends up somewhere else, it’ll be fine, because he really is trying to be open to anything, he just wants to know, he's tired of not knowing. And as he’s sitting there, a sudden rush of clarity settles over him. This uncertainty is entirely in his own mind. Winnipeg have been nothing but forthcoming with him, they’ve made their intentions clear from the start, and they’ve never given him any reason to doubt that they’re telling him the truth.

And damn it, it’s what he deserves. He has worked for this. He's good at this. Maybe he didn't have the numbers last season, but Gunnar is right, it was his rookie season in a completely new league,

Everything slows down a little there, right before he hears his own name, and then it’s as if someone pushes fast forward, because it seems like the words are still echoing in the room as he’s being ushered out of his seat, pulling his moms and his sister in to hold them all close for a hug that, despite being nationally televised, feels like a moment just between the four of them.

“I’m gonna make you proud,” he says, and then he’s being urged downward, down to the stage, to shake hands and say hurried thank-yous, to put on a jersey that already has his name on it.

He doesn’t have any idea what’s in store for him, whether his gut instincts will end up leading him true, but for a moment, his heart is light from throwing off the weight of this particular unknown. He stops bracing himself for some terrible outcome he hasn’t even thought of yet, he lets himself smile, and he looks to the future.