Ruth Sadelle Alderson

I'm taking tomorrow and Friday off this week and next Friday is a holiday, which means I have a four-day weekend this weekend and three-day weekend next weekend. I'm going to use this time to do what I love to do on long weekends and write prompt snippets.

Leave me a prompt by, say, Saturday morning, and I will write you something by the evening of July 6.

Fine print/guidelines: One per person. Lurkers and anonymous commenters welcome. Generally first come first served, although things may jump the queue depending on inspiration. I will write hockey, but not Patrick Kane or Drew Doughty. I may write other fandoms; feel free to ask if you want something else. I may veer from your prompt. I will take lyric prompts, but be forewarned that I'm not necessarily good at them. I make no promises about length, but in the past prompt snippets have tended to be 300-3000 words.

The title of this story's doc was briouxs1 (Sean has a boyfriend). As that 1 can attest, this was the first Brioux story I started writing. I gave up on it partly because I wasn't sure exactly what should happen next and partly because I realized the timeline doesn't work at all. (At one point, I have a note to self that says, "Crap. This is the Friday night in 24/7.") It is, however, still my ur-Brioux story, and you can see in it a lot of elements I ended up reusing in other stories.


( Story )

The original idea for this was that Danny is a hooker and both Sid and Claude are his clients. Somehow they find out about each other, and then they're forever competing with each other by giving Danny extravagant gifts or large tips or whatever. I only ever wrote the scene where Claude meets Danny's kids and notes about the scene after that. (The alternate version would be that without the structure of hockey, Danny and Sylvie don't get married as early/at all and Danny never has kids.)


( Snippet )

Melodrama: I reread parts of both of the Danny and Claude with a baby girl stories, and now I want a story where Sylvie and her new husband get pregnant, and Danny can't handle it. He's on the road with the Penguins (uh, I really want all the fic about him signing with the Pens, as unlikely as that probably is) and calls Claude. He's been drinking and he spills to Claude that back when things were good, he and Sylvie used to talk about having more kids once the boys were older/Danny got closer to retirement. Now she's having more kids and he isn't, and he loves Misha, but while she's fine with the boys, she's not particularly maternal and doesn't want more kids.

( Snippet )

When this season's schedule came out and there was a Saturday night Habs at Sharks game, I decided I was going. (San Jose is only about a three- or four-hour drive, and by far the closest NHL city to me.) Then lakeeffectgirl decided she was coming to visit and going to the game with me, which made for an awesome week, even above and beyond the game. We went for the expensive tickets and ended up in the ninth row, so we had a pretty good view of things.

I had never been to a professional hockey game before and there are so many things that were fascinating to me about it as an experience. People dress in team gear, and by "people," I mean nearly every person we saw. Most of them were in Sharks gear, a few of them (including us) in bright red Habs gear, and one in an LA Kings Kopitar jersey. (No, we don't know either.) I'm wearing a scarf, so you can't quite see my red Habs shirt, but here we are:

( Picture! )

The guys behind us kept up running commentary on the game, and there was a guy next to us explaining who the Habs players were to his girlfriend. On power plays, the crowd does a shark chomp motion with their arms. During the first fight, everyone stood up. I appreciated it because it made it easier for me not to watch and I was disturbed by the crowd's enthusiasm for violence. I'm going to have to track down some sort of readings on sociological thought about game attendance as ritual. The San Jose police directed traffic outside the arena, which means I'm also curious about the economic costs to municipalities of having an arena. (I'm sure both those things exist; I just have to go looking for them.)

And then there was the game itself. The Habs lost 4-0, but I don't care as much as I care about the fact that I got to watch Danny play hockey. We didn't really realize it was his 900th game until I was reading my Google Alerts the next day, but I was happy to see him play anyway. And by happy, I mean that when he was on the ice, I just watched him instead of the game as a whole. As lakeeffectgirl reported on Twitter, "Danny checks/gets checked, @rsadelle says, 'This is good for me.'" Which, yes, please, Danny getting slammed into boards or walls (without hurting him in a bad way). He also took a quite a few face-offs, including a number on our end of the rink.

Here's one of lakeeffectgirl's pictures of Danny's ass as he prepared to take one of those face-offs:

( Picture! )

My favorite thing about watching Danny play in person is that every time he was near the puck during a stoppage in play, he picked it up with his stick and bounced it around until the refs/linesmen were ready to take it back. I've caught glimpses of him doing that on TV, but the cameras usually cut away or they go to commercial, so I had no idea it was a regular thing he does. I couldn't figure out if he was showing off or if he's like a little kid who can't resist playing with any puck in his vicinity. He was also one of the last people off the ice at the end of warm-ups because he was still shooting pucks at the net.

Other game note: BGally kept taking face-offs against Joe Thornton. We don't know whose plan that was, but we would both also be into BGally getting pushed up against walls. Or Danny and BGally shoving each other into walls. Either of those things. (Did you know? According to their official stats, Danny and BGally are the same height and BGally only weighs six pounds more than Danny.)

We're thinking about seeing the Kings play next year. Maybe the Kings and the Stars if they play each other at a convenient time and place.

The original comment that led to this, way back in August 2012, was, "How terrible a person am I if I would totally read a story where Danny cheated on Sylvie with/left her for Claude? (I'm still thinking about how those Flyers' Dads weekend pictures are from 2009, probably a little before or around the time of the divorce.)" I wrote a few bits and pieces of it, but never finished it. Content warnings for infidelity and Sylvie as a character.


( Story )

At one time, this was going to be a story, but I only wrote a small part of it at the beginning and one scene from the middle.


( Student/Professor Briouxs )

Master Post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

( A Good Education (7/7) )

Master Post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

( A Good Education (5/7) )

Master Post - Part 1 - Part 2

( A Good Education (3/7) )