At the 2014 Olympics, Russia injected Zhenya with a bond blocker, same as the last two times he'd been to the games. Only this time, it brought him to his knees and left him gasping, feeling like his soul was ripped from his body. As an unbonded omega, the shot should have no effect. It should have only targeted an active bond. Unbeknownst to Zhenya, Sid collapsed on the ice at the same time.

"I think I have to get bonded," Sid said in a hollow voice, cutting off Geno's building outrage. "Wait, what?" Geno asked, mind jumping like a car on a blown tire. "To who?" "Anybody." Sid's eyes were unfocused, staring through the wall in front of him. "I don't know. I just need to bond." "That's a story," Geno scoffed. He had always thought they had good sex education in Canada, but apparently, the rumors persisted there, too. "You don't stop heat if you bond." "Heat?" Sid asked, eyes squinched up curiously. "G—I'm not. You know I'm an alpha, right?" *** Or five times Sid couldn't bond with an omega and one time he did.

You are not your biology. Tyler’s mother had told him that so many times growing up. When he told her he wanted to play hockey but was afraid to go up against so many alphas. You are not your biology. When an alpha triggered his heat during a scrum and Tyler had to be carried off the ice, fever already burning up his bones. You are not your biology. Tyler wishes he could believe her.

“Sid, I’m so—I’m sorry,” Geno said. “My stupid—I’m ruin everything, I—” “Shut up, Geno,” Sidney said, already intensely weary of listening to Geno’s self-recrimination. “You’ve barely even done anything.” Geno’s voice dropped what sounded like an entire octave. “But I want to.”

Tyler is an excellent bro, and he endeavors to provide excellent bro action.

Tipping back in the chair, Sid craned his neck to look up at him. He inhaled through his nose and caught the warm-metal scent of Geno’s post-heat bleed. “I can help you with that, too,” he murmured.

Babies are born because people wish them out of the sky, and Geno doesn't realize he's been wishing that hard. Luckily, his team has his back.

Sid refuses to be jealous of something that's two and a half feet high and can't play hockey. OR: The Pittsburgh Zoo named some penguins after the Penguins, and no one will let Sid forget the one named after him has its shit together, because all his friends are assholes. Also there's pining.

Sid shows up to practice with a hickey. Misunderstandings ensue.

He doesn't want to go back to the minors, or fucking get kicked out all together, so he's got to get this right. He's going to be perfect even if it kills him.

Turning to a witch to save a loved one's life is one of the riskier gambles a person can take, but it's one that's arguably noble and brave. Falling in love with the witch, though—now that's just foolish.

Beau has a good feeling about this season.

The first Zhenya heard about it was an email from Sidney in the middle of August.

Marc was fine with being an omega, and then he went and imprinted on Kris Letang.

Jonny's heat comes early and unexpectedly strong. Pat is there, on the other side of the locked door, to help him through it.

The inside of the car is hot. Someone should crack a window. Instead, Zhenya curls closer to Sid’s side. “Did you hear me?” “Hm?” Zhenya rubs his cheek against Sid’s hair. It’s damp and curling, almost soft. Sid huffs, sending fresh eddies of his scent whirling. “I asked why your heat suppressants stopped working.”

“Sidney comes highly recommended,” Zhenya hears at the edge of his consciousness.

After one scandal too many, Patrick Kane gets traded. Eventually it stops being the worst thing that's ever happened to him.

The first time Sid meets Geno, he isn’t Geno, he’s Evgeni Malkin, and he’s the enemy. Sid is so pumped up for the game he barely notices him. He doesn’t notice anything except hockey, and Malkin’s good, but that’s all he is. He feels a tinge of sadness when Canada wins, but he guesses he just feels bad. Ovechkin’s not the only one crying, and Sid isn’t so unfeeling he doesn’t have some sympathy for how it must suck to lose. He also gets a headache when he flies back home, but he’s just really overtired is all. He doesn’t think anything of it.

He saw the horn poking out from the pony's head, golden and straight and somehow delicate-looking despite the empty tuna can hanging off of it. The unicorn horn. "The fuck," Sidney said out loud, his eye skipping from the horn over the greyish-white body to the graceful gold-toned hooves.

It’s actually his father who suggests it. “Take the rest of the summer for yourself,” he says. “Do something fun.” “Fun,” Sidney repeats blankly.

Merpeople didn’t kill humans except in stories. Merpeople also didn’t talk to humans, or bob up in the water near where a human was fishing from the dock and tell him to throw back anything that wasn’t a lionfish, or kiss humans or look at them the way Sid was looking at Zhenya now, as Zhenya finally stepped out of his trunks. Merpeople kept to themselves. But not Sid.

Sid didn’t introduce himself in the hallway, and he certainly doesn’t assume that people know who he is. So it would only be polite to thank Malkin again, this time more personally. He could write him a letter. An email? No, a letter.

That's the end of the talking for a while, but it's only the beginning of Patrick thinking about it. He does some research, but it turns out that googling "what does it mean that I like getting held down during sex" doesn't provide much helpful information, and he can't bring it up with anyone, so he just – thinks about it, instead. It's probably more thought than he's put into anything before in his life other than hockey, but it leads him to some pretty interesting conclusions.

Jamie accidentally discovers Tyler's profile on JizzHands.com. A situation develops.

Instead of coming back from his concussion right away, Sidney takes some time to have a baby by accident.

It was Sid’s dirty little sneaky plug, buzzing merrily away inside his asshole, and they could hear it.

“Here’s the key,” Gonch said after they got Sidney’s luggage out. “The doorman knows who you are. Are you going to be okay?” “I’ll probably be more than okay,” Sidney admitted. “Forget I asked.” In which Sidney spends his heat in Russia with his long-distance boyfriend, Geno.

Sid is smitten. He was smitten from the start, he thinks. The first time he saw Zhenya's dark eyes and hair and smooth skin. The way his cheeks flush the same color as his mouth with exertion, or passion. Sid knows that people make comments about his own mouth, the way it would be more suited on a childbearing male, but he thinks that they can’t possibly have seen Zhenya's. The perfect, sweet cupid's bow of his upper lip and the plush, fat pout of the bottom one.

Sid peers down at the human who was shoved at him – a young man, as far as he can judge. “What is going on?!” Sid asks, feeling as unmoored as a dragon ever can. The human looks nearly as confused as Sid does. “Uh, you heard the village headman,” he says tentatively. “The crops are… bad. Worse every year. We know you protect the valley, so we figured you must be mad at us if you were letting the crops fail.” “I protect the valley from things I can bite,” Sid huffs, still thoroughly confused. “I don’t know what you expect me to do about… blight, or insects, or poor crop rotation."

“Sid, need you to pay attention to me,” Alex says firmly. “You have bond crisis. You sick, Sid. Very sick. Need somebody to touch you to stop you being sick.” “I didn’t know you could get sick from being lonely,” Crosby mumbles. Zhenya makes a noise that sounds like he’s been punched. “I guess it makes sense, though.”

“What kind of pleasure do you want to offer the Lover?” Sid asks. People usually want sex, of course, but not always – Sid’s had supplicants who just wanted to make out, or cuddle, or flirt… and one memorable supplicant who wanted to give him a massage, which was awesome. She confessed to Sid afterward that she’d gone in intending to have sex, but “when I saw those muscles, I was like, damn, I need to get my hands all over that!”

Zhenya checks everything one last time: the artificial slick goes in the pocket of his jeans, and yes, the bottle of wine for Sid’s collection is nestled in a wood box in the back seat. He’d actually gone out and bought cream cheese to make a cheesecake on autopilot before he’d remembered – food is an alpha’s courting-gift, not an omega's. He'd thrown the cream cheese out, and bought the wine the next day.

Of course Tyler knows that intense hockey makes a sub more susceptible to going under, but he hadn't really experienced it much before. Now, when he’s on his knees on the ice drinking beer out of the Worlds trophy that Sidney Fucking Crosby is holding to his mouth, he can recognize the signs. He can feel a haze settling around the edges of his mind, and he’s spent enough time subbing, and drunk, and subbing while drunk, to know which one of those this is.

RainyForecast)

Zhenya is re-looping the hair elastic around Alina's braid when he becomes aware there’s someone standing in the doorway. He glances up, and his hands freeze in place. Sidney fucking Crosby is standing there, looking hesitant, with a half-empty water bottle dangling from one hand.

They make a point of it, always, telling Zhenya how beautiful Sidney is.

“They asked me, today, in an interview with Sid right next to me, about that thing I said last year. About leaving the Penguins, being a big star somewhere else.” “And you’re, what? Afraid he’s going to be angry with you?” Zhenya squirms. He feels hot and prickly, his emotions a soupy mess he can’t grasp in order to make sense of. “I think… I think I’m afraid he won’t be.”

The entire building is decked out for Christmas. Sparkling lights, the rich, glowing reds and greens of masses and masses of poinsettia flowers. It’s not hard to realize what’s going on. It feels like every titled, unmarried man between the ages of 20 and 40 who likes other men is here. Unbelievable. They’re marrying the King off with a fucking Cinderella-style ball.

Magnitogorsk is a city of iron, and so is Metallurg’s will. They will not be thwarted, they do not let go of what is theirs. So when one of their own, born, bred, and molded, tries to run? To spit in the face of all that they’ve given him? Metallurg does not give up what it owns.

Geno ends up with red, white and blue hair after the Caps game, so he’s the first person sent to the new cursebreaker when they make it back to Pittsburgh. Sid is in the lounge when Geno comes back out. “I’m know her,” Geno says despondently. “She’s cursebreaker on staff for media at Sochi.”

“So I’ve noticed something,” Sid says, and Zhenya makes a face. Sid is using his Serious Captain Voice and he is using Personal Discussion Introductory Phrase No. 3. Fuck’s sake.

The first time he catches Malkin’s scent after he makes his way to the United States at last, Sid's almost bowled over by it.

Alex Ovechkin talks dirty to Sidney Crosby, and then gives Zhenya some much-needed advice. Because he’s a nice guy like that.

It had started at a promotional event for the Pens at a sporting goods store. A little boy with bright eyes had handed his new skates over to be autographed and said, very politely, “Will you please sign it? It’ll be super lucky if you do, and I can skate really fast and score a bunch of goals like you.”

The only place he doesn’t feel alone is the moment after a goal at home. The rest of the time, all Zhenya can seem to feel is the ways he’s disconnected from everything else, English a yammering cadence he fishes scraps of meaning from like an exhausted prospector. I’m smart in Russian, he wants to tell them. I’m funny, in Russian. I’m all kinds of things.

King Evgeni has a problem. A very, very big problem, because the new guardsman from the Outer Islands is driving him to absolute distraction.

The new second officer is cute, alright? Geno can’t be blamed for taking one look at him across the crew’s mess, and deciding then and there that he was going to get to know Commander Crosby.

Magnitogorsk doesn’t hold much for him. He stares down the barrel of his future there: toiling away at a factory job, living and dying streets away from where he was born. He rubs the water-smoothed stone in his pocket, and thinks of the thunder of the waves. He knows that staying here will kill some essential part of himself. And so, he leaves. For PatriciaKoiFish, I hope very much that you like it :)

Flower is looking out at the balcony, and he’s got a wrinkle of concern between his eyebrows. “Are you on your pills, Sid?” “Bud. I’ve been on the pills since I was twenty years old, of course I am. Also, still really, really single.” “Maybe,” Flower says slowly. “Maybe you should have been upping your doses.” “What—” Sid says, before following Flower’s gaze to the balcony. And his heart stops.