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i was going to do a little deep dive/look back on my quinn4c thoughts but i'm so tired and i feel exceedingly stupid about everything so it's whatever. i think by april he was already the consensus fan favorite and it was inevitable that he'd get appointed/it became a question of when not if so by then i was like ok i'll stop talking about this and in fact i really do not care anymore... but i was really out there in jan/feb writing my daily lil thinkpieces huh

i feeeeeel. insane tbh and i will 100% delete/private this fic at some point just because it's that horrifically bad and strange and off-putting to me, but... idk it's like ultimately i think it was a relief to just get it done at first except now that it's out there i'm like hmmm well i don't like that. so i don't know. also i feel so horribly annoying on tumblr because i do want to post things but i hate being perceived and i feel like i sound so cringe and stupid all the time LMFAO i'm so sorry. what am i even doing. jesus!

it's really so silly like i take a year to write One (1) ridiculous incomprehensible fic and every day i am so tired from life and can barely find the time to like. read fic. read a book. i don't even have the energy to start tv shows anymore... the other day my apple watch got confused and logged me sitting at my desk cubing for 2 hours as 4000 steps............ anyway Things Are Kind Of Bad but it's fine. like fandom is not serious and i really should not care about the fact that i am horrible at every single hobby i engage in but on god... i cannot do a single thing well LOL i am so stupid. regardless at least it's done..... (is what i'm telling myself ;__;)

honestly all media is stupid because there is so often zero balance between straight-up devaluation and then extolling bare-minimum advocacy which is like. ok anyway. but even the thing with >I'm not a defensive liability just strikes me as not even him being combative with media or even necessarily defensive but more like a straight-forward circular "here is me showing my capacity for self-reflection" kind of thing. i don't know how 2 explain... i feel like he offers so much honesty but to no real productive end which is really fascinating, because he goes off-script but rarely in a way that feels like he's "giving in" to any explicit media prompting or losing his temper over it. i said this a month ago but idk

we so often frame his honesty as self-wounding or as a kind of frailness and i definitely don't think that like he's So calculative he always understands exactly what he's imparting (e.g. pearson stuff), but i think there's a level of resignation and also *voluntary participation* in the symbiotic relationship he's tasked with engaging in with the media if that makes sense

^ some old qh43 meta which imo still kind of mostly holds, i think to me the important part of his character is that he is not in fact an eldest daughter or even necessarily that pitiful which makes the aspect of resignation to how he engages with the media so fascinating... because on one hand it never feels like he's being honest against his will but then that honesty is still so apparent and palpable which always gets me more than it should. obviously he bears the weight of responsibility strongly and obviously he's an overly serious person who is constantly experiencing The HorrorsTM, but i still wanted to balance that out for who his character is in practice (>maybe he's the only guy in the whole fucking city who has what it takes) and the grasp he does have on himself and the team and his brothers and the world around him etc. in ways that matter.

this fic really started out as Hmmm what if the devils were better than the nux (>Not too long ago, the New Jersey Devils had been destined for perennial lottery contention, third-string goalie hemorrhaging, and a near-comical rap sheet of man-games lost) and then glass closet petey and the sweden premise and quinn self-discovery etc. and then the unrequited jnorris angle just slowly crept its way in without me noticing. but as i said in the end note 40 & 43 dynamic are just when you think you aren't codependent because you both suck at communication but in reality your relationship is even more fraught and fucked-up and inextricably entwined: the fic

also back when i was conceiving this fic in 2022, the stand-in title was dreams / teeth marks off the national daughters of the soho riots but then apparently an eff one author has a fic with a similar title so i was like whoops. and then i really do think the lyrics of sufjan's latest track are lovely and fitting which is how i settled on man indivisible..... i'm no good at titles so let's move on

trying to pull out excerpts is like shooting myself in the head 20 times because it means i have to actually open the fic ack... ohhhh my god i regret writing this so much. LOL. even sharlfic didn't make me feel this bad i really forgot how much i hate my own writing and think everything i do is objectively horrid 🙃 i keep full-body cringing just remembering my existence these days it's BAD.


wow i found an old post i wrote exactly a year ago and............ truly the more things change the more they stay the same.

regardless. actually i feel like i have nothing to say about this fic anymore it's so self-explanatory lol. the short of it is i had a very specific quinn characterization vision i wanted executed that did not exist so i wrote it over a very long period of time. and i love jack as a slightly unbearable but well-meaning foil to quinn's ~interiority~ and how much orbiting petey in vancouver has changed him in all these little ways he's barely noticed, like jack can get by being wholly incompetent because he's off on the east coast on a team of young guys with Heart and Culture while quinn spent his early 20s stuck under canadian lockdown going stir-crazy in troy from richmond's apartment and was forced to learn how to actually sustain himself. like petey is SO self-sufficient in this fascinating way, his glass closetness is one thing but just his entire media brand, his d-list celeb friends and commitment to appearing as normal as possible while still managing to be the best player on the team, bristling at any questioning of his commitment while also eschewing excuse of injury but also being extremely noncommittal about Leadership and Improving Culture, and then how that contradicts quinn's upbringing and sense of self from being embedded in toronto/michigan youth hockey programs... petey makes everything seem both so much simpler and more complicated than quinn was ever taught to think of and imo that's what makes them interesting. because on one hand there is diplomacy quinn was empathetically taught to embody by his parents growing up that thus implies a level of Authenticity to petey that quinn lacks, but at the same time petey *is* calculating and measured and secretive and quinn is just quinn. what i wanted to peel back i guess was all these layers of tension re: being your true authentic self but also what that even means at the end of the day.

some excerpts:

>quinn characterization ft. jack

Maybe he's the only one in the whole fucking city who has what it takes, and isn't that a sight, a conundrum for them to tease between their teeth. But there's only so far you can push a curve until it flattens out, only so far wanting something ever actually gets you.

So.

Twelve games. Quinn is there for seven.

His mouth twisted as he spoke, the way it always did when he forced himself into emotional proximity that frayed at his self-tolerance; he was capable of caring, it just embarrassed him to make it known, and so he spat his next words out like he was tugging on a decaying tooth, I love you, man.

Yeah. Quinn knew this, accepted it. Everything in life was about accommodation, after all. About trying, trying. Unveiling new and unfamiliar kindnesses.

Maybe he'd never stopped to truly consider himself in the fourth dimension because he loathed the skin-deep itch of being inert, because there was no greater blunder a defenseman could commit than allowing their feet to go still, waiting, reacting not to the play that would happen but to the one already unfolding in front of him. Running a step behind was a death knell.

>petey characterization

It was a strange proposition in that Elias rarely ever spoke about going home, or at least he didn't to Quinn. Not when he had Hogs to talk to and not when he spent so much time pretending that he'd acclimated himself to the pace and comforts of Vancouver living, when he was a proud person by nature and this meant by definition a clear-eyed commitment to the art of assimilation. There was nothing more he hated than failing the checklist of native appearances.

>40&43 dynamic

There was some humor to this whole song and dance, if you were willing to go there with it.

Really—they could laugh about it. It wasn't hard, in fact, and alleviation was good for the soul. They had jokes; here was one. What was blue and green and emotionally cancerous and on-track to miss the playoffs for a second-straight season?

No? Okay.

Regardless, what's funny to Quinn is that despite all his years spent microdosing on Petey's particularities, he didn't actually find out until 2022. A long time to know someone and then realize you don't actually know them at all; to decide that the knowing isn't so important, really, to measure the depth of its apparent unimportance to such extreme degree the prefix eventually full-circled back to being supernumerary.

In one, two, five, however many years, Quinn still won't be able to say with confidence how Petey ever felt about him. He'll wonder within the unremarkable confines of their friendship how much was pity and how much was understanding, whether these things might even be the same. Maybe being the way they were simply forced the existence of empathy. Maybe in this sport empathy could only ever be pity, there was no other way about it; maybe they'd long lacerated any possibility of reciprocal emotion and in the aftermath was only this unilateral sort of derivation, the fact of sorriness for another man's vulnerability. Whatever Elias saw in him, or whatever he saw in himself, he felt bad for.

"But it's easier for you, I think," Elias says, and it isn't bitter. Just factual. "That's a good thing, you know. That you can—you still have the option."

This was the closest he'd ever come to implicating himself. There were deceptive tells in life, when you had a secret you needed to share but the word itself was forbidden, it was something Elias had in fact been the first to show him. Fingers curled around an elbow, tentative and searching. The way his hands never roamed around girls on the dancefloor, how his face had tethered itself inches from his friend's in the kitchen, space both granted and stolen. Defense was all about this space, after all, about angles and taking the right lanes and timing your covers; Quinn understood such closeness intimately. Petey's greatest strength was that he was particularly adept at evading it. That he knew just when to open himself up for the slot pass, knew how to slam the puck home before compromising the anticipatory threat of his positioning.

Last year, when Elias had come down to Michigan during their contract limbo to train with him and Brady for what was left of the preseason, Quinn remembers Brady throwing him a furtive glance and going, Petey's pretty interesting, eh? like Quinn was supposed to know what that meant, these layers of innuendo he was constantly being tasked with unraveling. It'd been surreal, though, to have Petey standing around some approximation of his childhood home, skating in his own rink and on deeply familiar ice, walking through the same lived-in hallways Quinn used to measure himself against when he was still shaped by sharp undersized teenage determination. Adapt or die, all of his obligatory belief. The marker lines he drew tip-toeing on the balls of his feet whenever he convinced himself his growth plates could still yet encounter tectonic movement, shift themselves into another order of Richter magnitude.

He returns sometime later with a bottle in hand. Quinn has managed to squat down now, and his brain is pounding. He groans, extending the vowels for as long as possible, "Jeeesuuus."

"Nope, I'm Petey," Elias jokes, because he's an insufferable cunt who possesses the inspiring wit of a thirteen year old with mic access in Fortnite. He does hand over the water, though, which is nice.

"Sick," Quinn says.

"Don't choke when you drink," Petey warns, sounding specifically old and tired, sitting back as Quinn struggles to get the cap off.

Quinn doesn't really remember much else of that night.

ok that's all. what if i died................. i'll delete it later probably but for now it is truly the longest fic i've ever written in my life and For What. the world will never know


life as of late: