Work Text:
The season is over.
Danton spends the trip home in a daze, fighting to keep herself going long enough to collapse on her own terms. It doesn’t feel real. It feels entirely too real, like glass about to shatter. The season is over, and she doesn’t know for certain where she’ll be next year, and if she thinks about that for any longer than a second, she will crumble into a million pieces that are impossible to put together again.
She curls into Teddy on the plane. The cold stillness of Teddy’s skin shouldn’t be comforting or grounding or anything like that, but it is. It wouldn’t have been, before—back when she was still a Bruin, back when she didn’t know what fire in her lungs felt like, back when she hadn’t met worse monsters face to face, before—
Something broke in Anaheim.
She can’t remember what.
Teddy’s hands are smooth. Her grip is steady, her fingers curling around Danton’s, reassuring and possessive. She’s not going anywhere; she stays rock-solid at Danton’s side as the plane lands, as the team disperses miserably to their cars, as the two of them make their way to Danton’s apartment.
Danton doesn’t need to officially invite Teddy in anymore; she gave Teddy blanket permission months ago, when Teddy’s jaw was broken and she needed help feeding herself. She does so anyway, mumbling a tired “come in” as she pushes the door open. She tugs Teddy over to the sofa and collapses, dropping her head backwards and baring her neck.
“You’re hungry. Eat.”
Teddy sits down next to her, tucking her feet up and catching Danton’s wrist to press fingers against her pulse point. Her breath (cold, but warmer than her hands) puffs against Danton’s throat. “Are you sure?”
Danton nods. Her eyes close. “Please.”
It’s familiar by now: the pinpoint prick on the side of her neck, the dizzying rush of suction, the soothing sting of Teddy’s tongue licking over the the wounds. Her mind goes quiet and staticky, her limbs heavy and floating at the same time. It is surrender. It is bliss.
Teddy grabs a bandaid from the box on the coffee table—not necessary with how fast Danton heals, but the ritual is comforting. She curls up against the arm of the sofa and pulls Danton sideways, down into her lap. Danton doesn’t resist. The cool balm of Teddy’s hands in her hair unknots something in her chest, and she buries her face in Teddy’s stomach as the tears roll down.
“It’ll be okay,” Teddy whispers, rubbing at Danton’s shoulders. “The team likes you here. You’ll get next year.”
Danton shudders. She needs next year. She’s still glueing her jagged shards together, and if she doesn’t get next year here in Pittsburgh, where she can be safe, she might shatter all over again.
It hits her all at once. Bitterness. Longing. She wants to go back to Boston, wants so bad that her eyes ache with it. She wants to go back to how things used to be, to set aside the blanks in her memory that she tore out herself, that she can’t let herself remember. She wants to not just patch up the holes but get rid of them completely, so that they never existed in the first place. She wants to never have been traded. She wants before.
She can’t go back. Not in any way that matters.
(She hasn’t told any of them about the scales, not even Sean—
No. Don’t think about that. Don’t think about it. Not now.)
She pushes herself up, fighting through the lightheadedness to get her mouth on Teddy’s. She can taste her own blood faintly, an iron tang on Teddy’s tongue, and it cuts through the hollowness like a knife. If she were a different person, she would be angry or desperate right now, but all she can manage is a quiet resigned fear. She doesn’t want to break again. She doesn’t want to lose the new home she’s found like she lost the last one, but all she can do now to keep it is kiss this one part that she can reach.
Teddy wipes the tears from her cheeks, icy fingers soothing against reddened eyelids. She kisses Danton deeper, a promise and an affirmation. There’s no intent behind it except for the reminder of presence, of love, of protection.
For now, it’s enough.
They stay like that for a while, pressed together on the sofa, trading solemn kisses. Danton slumps against Teddy’s cold chest and imagines burrowing her way in there, making a home for herself in that icy flesh. She didn’t used to run hot, not like she does now, and sometimes it seems that only Teddy can cool her down.
Teddy says sometimes that she didn’t think she’d ever feel warm again until she touched Danton for the first time.
“Shower?” Teddy asks eventually.
Danton groans wordlessly in protest.
Teddy lets out an amused huff. “You’re shedding again,” she reminds her. “If you don’t, you’re gonna be all grumpy and itchy in the morning.”
“Fuck,” Danton grumbles, but it’s true. Shedding is a bitch. “Alright. Fine. But only if you come with.”
“Oh, I’ll come with,” Teddy winks. She stands in one fluid motion, holding Danton up with hardly any effort, and carries her through the apartment to the bathroom.
Somehow, getting undressed brings the end-of-season melancholy right back. It’s easy to remember the bruised and battered skin of teammates in the locker room, but neither of them have anything to show for the brutal series just finished. Teddy doesn’t have the blood in her body to bruise, and Danton heals too fast for marks to stick around, her skin unblemished except for the scaly parts halfway through sloughing off.
Teddy plucks a loose scale off of Danton’s shoulder and spins it between her fingers. It’s one of the largest scales, about the size of a large chicken egg, and its normal fiery red-orange-gold has started to pale and go pearlescent in the way of shedding. It glints like a tear in Teddy’s hand.
Danton waits. When a minute passes and Teddy doesn’t move, she reaches out and takes the scale back, placing it on the counter. Teddy blinks and then looks away, her jaw clenching.
She steps into the shower and turns the water on—scalding hot, a temperature that would be uncomfortable for a normal human, but not for either of them. Danton follows her in, letting the spray block out the rest of the world. She focuses on the routine of a shedding wash, letting water soak into the peeling patches of loose scale-leather, and soon Teddy’s hands come up to coax the old skin off of her body.
Teddy starts with the places that are hardest for Danton to reach herself—her spine, her shoulderblades, the backs of her thighs. Last time, when Danton had shed in November, that touch had led places—to hands wandering elsewhere, to frantic wet passion shared eagerly between them. Danton doesn’t expect that tonight, not with their current glum exhaustion.
“Fuck,” Teddy sighs, dropping her forehead onto Danton’s shoulder halfway through. “I—fuck, I really thought we had it.”
A surge of possessive protectiveness rises up in Danton’s throat. Even after a a year and a half, it’s still an unfamiliar, new feeling, something from a nature that was not part of her before. It is greed and anger—her teammates are hers. No one should dare to hurt them.
“We did,” she says, and she can’t quite keep the threatening inhuman rumble out of her voice, even as it raises alarms in her brain. “We would’ve if they hadn’t been allowed to get away with killing us.”
Teddy shakes her head, the bridge of her nose rubbing against Danton’s collarbone. “Feels like I should’ve done more. Something. Made them pay.”
The words lodge between Danton’s ribs like a knife to the heart. Her chest tightens, constricting with uncomfortable memories. “I—it scares me,” she confesses. “How close I got to snapping. To giving in.”
Teddy’s head jerks up, her eyes wide. “That… would’ve been bad,” she says. It’s the understatement of the century.
Danton grimaces. “Yeah. I know.” She may not remember, but she still knows.
Teddy nods, and then shrugs. “Well, you didn’t,” she says, blunt and practical, “and I didn’t either, and no one’s dead, and…” She lets out another gusty sigh. “There’s always next year. C’mon, lift your arm up, let me finish.”
The sloughed-off scales make a glittery mess on the floor of the shower. Despite the melancholy mood, Danton’s body still responds to the feeling of Teddy’s hands on the scales over her right breast. She’s flushed and dry-mouthed by the time Teddy scrubs the last loose scale off of her hip, and Teddy looks at her softly, waits for a nod, and then slips her hand between Danton’s legs.
Teddy’s hands always feel colder when her fingers are curled inside Danton and the heel of her palm is rubbing against Danton’s clit. It makes everything more intense, ice-bright and perfect, and she leans back against the tiles for support as her legs start to tremble. She’s still a little lightheaded from the feeding, and it combines with the pleasure in the best way, a dizzying deliciousness all over. Her new skin, freshly revealed from under the now-discarded sheddings, is highly sensitive, and Teddy knows exactly how to touch the still-soft scales to build her up and draw her out—a cold thumb running across her hip, nimble fingers caressing her chest.
She wraps her arms around Teddy and kisses her again—deep, heady, full of everything she can’t quite say—and Teddy holds her there, pressing lips to lips as she coaxes Danton over the edge.
It feels scarily like a goodbye.
As Danton kneels down under the hot shower spray to get her mouth on Teddy, she sends up a quick prayer: Let it only be goodbye to the season.
Let it be no more than that.