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chapter one: a princess and a jester

a/n:

i missed them so much you guys don't understand.

tw(s) -- brief descriptions of poor parenting, anxiety symptoms, a decent amount of goldberg slander, and rory's wealth makes people standoffish (understandably)

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In retrospect, Lorelei should've known that accepting Don Tibbles' offer, like every other attempt she's made to earn her father's pride, would come back to bite her eventually.

There's something about the formula she just doesn't have down pat her. Despite a life of being groomed for corporate success (being sent to the top boarding schools, entrusted to the most qualified coaches, and allowed to hang off her father's arm as he mingled at every event so he could whisper about the people around them and she could learn from the best), she can never read her father well enough. Oliver always seems to be several steps ahead of her -- every word out of her mouth is something he knows she is going to say, and everything she does is a thing he expected her to do. He's planned out her entire life in some color-coded book that's locked away in his bedside table and, no matter how hard she tries, she can't stray from the path he's set her on.

She only signed up for this competition because she knew he'd do it anyway. The daughter of Hendrix's biggest rival coming to play for a team sponsored by them? It would make things look civil, put to bed any rumors of Myrtle Enterprises buying them out in the near future, and show off the poise and skill of a legend's granddaughter all at once.

And her reward for seeking her father's approval like a dog at the door? Finding him and his personal assistant (see also: really young girlfriend) Krystal rooting through her closet the night before she was set to leave.

"What's going on?" She asked, slightly miffed at the invasion of her privacy, and crossed her arms over her chest.

Oliver, stood in the center of her bedroom, looked up from the cufflink he had been fiddling with and said as if she were two feet tall, "We're going through your clothing, darling."

Her gaze flitted back to the blonde yanking hangers out of the closet and scrutinizing them before it returned to her father. His lips lifted up into a smirk at her poor attempt to hide a scowl.

"I can see that. But, why?"

"What about this one?" They were interrupted by the flourish of Krystal pulling a baby-pink Prada from the depths of the closet.

It was Oliver's turn to scowl. "No. Not that. The pink makes her look like a child."

The indignant sound that came from Lorelei's throat went ignored.

"Hm... I suppose you won't want the green, either. It's supposed to hug her curves. She doesn't have the chest for it."

Before Lorelei could have even processed what had been said, her father jumped on the opportunity. "And neither did you before the saline. Mind your tongue when speaking about my daughter, Krystal."

The women in the room shared a look that went ignored by Oliver. Get used to it, the expression on Lorelei's face had said, he'll always pick family in the end.

"You never answered my question." She said, her gaze set back on her father as Krystal shrunk down and returned to her duties. "Why do I need so many dresses for a hockey competition?"

"We've agreed on a public relations time schedule." Oliver, the resident socialite, hadn't missed a beat. His words made the teenager blink up at him, completely lost on what that meant. "I've arranged three or four outings for you, Lola. A big dinner with your teammates, a brunch with a family friend, and, if all goes well, an interview or two with magazines -- "

Lorelei just stared at him.

"What?"

"Of course, you'll need more dresses for the interviews -- "

The world stilled for a moment as Lorelei processed what her father had just said.

"You arranged?"

"Yes, I did." He didn't even shrug.

"Magazines?"

"I've been in contact with both Sports Illustrated and People, to be exact."

She just looked at him, lost for words.

A very frequent but nonetheless painful situation.

Lorelei's life had always been structured. Laid out for her. But, naively, she'd figured that being over two-thousand miles away from him would mean that she'd have a little control over things.

Her hands had balled into fists at her sides.

"This is completely unfair."

Oliver had pinned her under his gaze, then, and said in a monotone. "Life is unfair, Lola. Kill yourself, or get over it."

He didn't bother to get out of bed to see her off the next morning, either. Lorelei lingered in the hallway for a few minutes longer than she was supposed to -- the butler brought her suitcases down to the car, and then her bag of hockey gear, and then came back to get her, only to find her still standing in front of her father's closed bedroom door with this sour expression on her face.

"Tell him I'm sorry. I shouldn't have questioned him." She'd said in a whisper, her voice just audible over the murmur of the morning rush. "Oh, and that I'll call him when I get settled in."

The butler nodded. "Of course, ma'am."

Eli came with them. The near-centenarian sat beside her in the back of the car and let her rest her head on his shoulder the whole way to the airport.

Before she got on the plane (the family's private jet, the one that shares a name with her late grandmother), Eli grabbed Lorelei by the face and smiled a warm smile that's always been reserved for her.

"You go be great, my Rory." He rasped. It was a speech she'd heard many times before. "I'm so proud of you. No matter what."

And then she was sent off to Minneapolis with Don Tibbles, the next few weeks of her life laid out for her and a sinking feeling in her guts.

Standing in front of a rink in Minneapolis, Minnesota, her gear bag handing off her shoulder and her eyes squinting up at the building, Lorelei realizes that she's been doomed to face a fate that's worse than death.

Her grandfather's words play through her mind on a loop. Be great. I'm proud of you. It's a reworking of the things he'd tell her when she was younger and learning how to play chess at his feet. You're going to be so great, my Rory, he'd say as she moved his pieces for him, you're going to make papa so proud no matter what. The words used to make her feel warm -- to know that someone was in her corner during an adolescence that was void of affection -- but now it's like she's still there in the worst way. She can feel the weight of the pieces in her hands and the warmth of his hands as he pat her head, and almost smell the hint of his cologne on the wind that whips past her face.

Lorelei blinks a few times to get through the daze. What used to comfort her serves to frighten her more than it grounds her.

She's never gotten along with other kids like her, let alone with kids from entirely different backgrounds. Will being great get her resented in the end? Will they be able to look at her and see anything but some snob?

(Kill yourself or get over it. What a nice thing to say. Perhaps, in a sense, he was right.)

(She'd rather be dead right now than here, that's for sure.)

"Hey, are you lost or something?"

Lorelei shakes the thoughts from her head (she is a Myrtle, for Christ's sake) and tears her eyes off the building to look at whoever spoke. A few feet away, wearing a confused expression on a face she recognizes, is a boy holding a bag bigger than he is.

"Oh, uh, no-- I'm just psyching myself up." She gnaws on the inside of her cheek as he steps toward her. Automatically, her hand sticks out toward him. "My name is Lorelei. Lorelei Myrtle-Carrington."

For a brief moment, she pauses, waiting for him to burst into one of four questions that most hockey enthusiasts ask immediately upon meeting her. The questions never come, though.

The boy, with a shy grin on his face, shakes her hand. "I'm Ken Wu, but I go by Kenny. It's nice to meet you, Lorelei."

"Rory." Her mouth corrects before she can even stop it. "I prefer Rory."

Kenny's smile never wavers.

"Alright, Rory."

Rory cringes a little. How rude of her. "It's nice to meet you, too. Really."

The Junior Olympics. That's where she knows him from. He was a figure skater, and he did well from what she remembers. Rory tries to keep her face as neutral as possible to give him the same treatment he gave her. Together, they stand there and stare up at the building.

"We're going to have to go in eventually."

"Yeah. We are."

Courteously, Kenny stands there with her for a few minutes. He babbles to fill up the silence and, thus, allows her not to think about it.

I've made a friend, Rory thinks, a thrum of glee shooting through her, this is easy. I've made a friend.

Crossing the threshold feels a lot less daunting now that she's got someone on her side.

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" -- We put a stick in his hands and nobody's been able to touch him since."

The first few introductions were a little painful. Luis Mendoza, a nice boy from Miami, went careening into the boards seconds into his routine, and Dwayne Robertson, this sweetheart from Austin, was openly mocked by their teammates. Julie Gaffney, a star goalie from Bangor, seemed to be doing good until Gordon Bombay completely undermined her abilities in favor of Greg Goldberg, who in turn made a fool of himself, too. (It was a little hard to watch.)

No one seems to have anything to say about Kenny, though. He does an axle as Don Tibbles' introduction ends and Rory watches him spin with wide eyes, getting vicariously dizzy.

Tibbles then turns to her with a smile that is half encouraging and half demanding. She puts her helmet on.

"This is Lorelei Myrtle-Carrington from Detroit, Michigan. She's a big award winner, too -- divisional, state, hell, nationals, even. A quick skater, Lorelei's steady on her feet and is a goal scorer if I've ever seen one."

Rory skates around to demonstrate, her skin bristling with the feeling of eyes on her. She knocks three pucks past Goldberg, who still hasn't stopped gloating despite his previous failure, without much effort, and then comes to a perfect stop.

"Wait-- Myrtle as in?-- "

"As in Eli and Oliver Myrtle of the Detroit Redwings and, more recently, Myrtle Enterprises? Yes."

Whispers erupt from her peers as she removes her helmet and she skates through the peers that surround her to stand in front of her new coach.

"Oliver's my dad." She explains lamely. "Eli's my grandpa. I would be the heiress to the company, I guess."

"Well, it's very nice to have you on the team." He says, shaking her hand.

His grip is unsettlingly firm.

"It's nice to be on the team, sir."

As she turns on her heel and skates back to the rest, Rory winces. I would be the heiress to the company, she mocks herself internally, it's nice to be on the team, sir. (A very good job at not making everyone hate you, Lorelei.) Kenny gives her a thumbs up anyway and Luis, who she'd helped lift off the floor when he fell, claps her on the shoulder even as she sighs defeatedly.

The staring only gets worse as the team intermingles even more, and then it happens -- two of the Ducks bridge the gap. A boy with curly brown hair and a redhead with glasses.

Neither of them seems interested in Kenny nor Luis, though.

"Hi?"

"Hi." The brunet echoes, eyes slightly wide and pupils dilated. "Are you really?-- Do you ever?-- You're a-- You're a Myrtle. You're hockey royalty."

There it is. Noticing the way her face falls, the redhead rolls his eyes at his dumbstruck friend and butts his way into the conversation.

"Nice going, Germaine. I'm pretty sure she already knows what she is." He turns to her, grinning. He gazes at her in a softer way than any boy ever has. "Hi. Lester Averman, but my friends call me Averman. I'm your very own court jester, ma'am."

Averman then bows deeply with a flourish of his hand and Rory can't help but tilt her head at him, a small smile breaking way to her face as she snorts a laugh. How odd. How endearingly peculiar. The evidence of her amusement only spurns him on, and he stands back up with this wide, goofy grin.

"I'm Lorelei -- Rory -- but you already knew that."

"Rory." He hums, almost tasting her name. "That's a nice name. A nice name for a nice girl. It'll be nice to have a nice rich person around."

Rory's eyebrows furrow. "You interact with a lot of mean rich people?"

"Yes. Well, no. We used to. We have Banksie and he's basically a sad wet cat, but you've got him beat in the riches department, m'lady."

"M'lady?" Her amusement gargles the word.

"Mhm. M'lady, Lorelei Myrtle-Carrington, the realm's delight."

She opens her mouth to respond to that but gets cut off by the last new recruit's dramatic entrance.

"It's showtime!"

"That guy's a teenager?" Bombay is visibly startled as the hulking Dean Portman gets out onto the ice.

Rory hesitantly stares at the large boy as he shoves right through Conway and Banks, knocking the former over in the process.

"Uh. Yeah. Hormones."

"He's a goon."

A goon indeed. (Rory would never have the gall to say that to his face -- too consumed by the fear that he would break her like Bane broke Batman.) He pushes Averman over as he skates by and her gratefulness that he ignored her is short-lived.

She extends a hand to the redhead as he moves on to pick on a terrified Dwayne. Averman takes it.

"Thanks." He huffs slightly, rubbing the ice shavings from his pants.

Rory spares him another small smile. "You're welcome-- your glasses are falling off, by the way."

He goes cross-eyed in an attempt to look at his own nose to confirm her words, before he blinks and pushes his glasses up with one of his fingers.

"Who does this guy think he is?"

"Uh oh." Averman groans, ignoring the confused girl beside him. "Here we go, everybody. Big dick contest."

The Ducks and the new recruits meet in some big amalgamation of shouting kids, and Rory finds herself frowning.

(Not because of the fighting, but because she was enjoying the company of Lester Averman.)

The Duck in front of her tries to pick a fight with her by shouting (what she assumes to be) some sort of insult about rich kids in her face, but she thinks it must be a local thing because she doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, and she simply takes a step back and tries to deescalate without doing anything. After all, she didn't do anything to this kid -- in fact, he and the goon from Chicago were the only two who were really antagonizing anyone.

After a few useless attempts to shout over them, Bombay blows his whistle.

"Everybody freeze! Now, we didn't come here to fight, we came here to play hockey! We're team USA, you represent your country-- "

I came here for my father's pride, Rory thinks acerbically, and I'm representing our company.

She's heard many variations of this, but maybe it sounds nicer coming from the lips of Gordon Bombay than it does from her father or her real coach. Refreshing, at least, because his vocabulary is different and she hasn't learned to tune out his voice yet.

"That's right!"

Everyone glances in Tibbles' direction.

"Now, I want you to be-- "

The best that you can be, she finishes the sentence in her head, shifting her weight from one skate to the other.

"All that you can be, right?" Tibbles cuts him off again, excited. "Ya gotta raise yourself up, guys! Ya got-- "

When he makes eye contact with their coach, he stops talking. Rory wonders silently why her father ever bothered to associate with the bumbling man as her teammates laugh around her.

"Alright, now. Let's start with a scrimmage."

Tibbles blows his whistle and, once again, tries to speak over the coach. A single look from Bombay silences him. He starts to leave, prattling off about an appointment he has, and Bombay makes him come back to give him the whistle; reluctantly, the shorter man gives it up, retreating to the sound of the kids' laughter.

Rory, who watched him pace up and down the aisle of her family's jet for the entire flight, almost pities him.

"Alright, Ducks! Show 'em what you got! Let's scrimmage!"

As everyone skates into their positions, Rory turns to Averman.

"See you from across enemy lines, Lester the Jester."

He smiles almost dreamily and licks his teeth. She appears to have rendered him speechless.

Luis cocks an eyebrow at her as they get into place.

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The Ducks, especially Banks and Germaine (who shouts an apology for his earlier behavior at her), prove to be good players even if their goalie isn't nearly as good as Julie. After a dog pile against the boards and a whole lot of checking on Dean's part, Fulton Reed gets the puck and starts to wind back to make a shot.

"Look out!"

All of the Ducks scramble out from their defensive positions in front of the goal, and someone grabs Rory to drag her out of the way before she can think to move on her own. She makes a startled sound as she turns to look at the person whose arm is hooked around her waist. Averman looks back at her, smiling nervously at her from under the shield of her helmet.

"You're going to thank me in a moment, trust me."

The long-haired boy hits what might just be the craziest slapshot she's ever seen. Both Rory and Averman duck down as it ricochets off the goalpost and starts to bounce about the room.

It's stopped by Don Tibbles' forehead.

"Oh, man!" Fulton, eyes wide, puts his hands on his head as the team abandons the game to swarm the unconscious man.

The woman he was walking in with starts to give instructions and Rory, who's had her fair share of unconscious men, finds the first aid kit for her as quickly as she can in the unfamiliar territory. The woman thanks her kindly.

"Shouldn't he be rolled on his side?" Rory tries not to speak too loudly but it's so quiet in the room that she's heard.

The woman turns to her immediately and tilts her head. "Hm?"

"We should roll him on his side." She says a little louder, swallowing. "So he doesn't choke or stop breathing? That's a first aid rule, isn't it?"

Fulton makes another panicked sound as the woman contemplates her words. Rory's blood pressure goes back down when Don Tibbles gets turned on his side like she suggested.

"He's probably fine, though." Rory tacks on, more for Fulton than anything. "Right?"

The woman nods with a smile, waving smelling salts under Tibbles' nose. Don wakes up then and rolls over again with a groan.

"Oh, Mr. Tibbles, are you alright?"

Tibbles blinks twice and glances around absently. "Oh, uh, I-I'll have the cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake."

Her teammates laugh and Rory shakes her head fondly.

"Are you okay, Don?" She echoes the woman's question.

Don just stares at her. She doesn't think he knows where he is, or who she is.

"I think he'll be okay. We'll keep an eye on him." The woman stands and brushes her hands on her skirt. "Oh! I'm Michelle MacKay, their tutor."

Kenny turns to Rory with furrowed brows and she shrugs. When she looks at Luis, he doesn't seem to know either.

Bombay shakes MacKay's hand. "Hi, I'm Coach Bombay. Their coach."

Adam volunteers himself to voice their outrage: "Who said we need a tutor?"

The team all starts to talk at once. They do that an awful lot. Her attention flickers from person to person trying to make sense of it all, and she wonders if it's always going to be this way. Never homogeneous, never working as a single unit.

Constantly fighting.

"However, should you not attend, you will not be eligible to play."

MacKay is met with more whines and groans of complaint but she ignores them with a sweet smile.

Rory is simply indifferent. She's had private tutors before (learning languages comes easy to her but math doesn't), so she isn't going in blindly, and Michelle MacKay looks nicer than any of the crooks that her father has ever hired. While she isn't happy about having to do this again, Rory is very thankful that she'll get to think about something other than hockey or her father these next few weeks.

Bombay tells them to suck it up and get a move on, and that practice starts early tomorrow morning.

With a quick wave to Averman through the masses, Rory starts walking back to their locker room with Kenny and Luis.

"How do you get this far but not know how to stop?" Her face scrunches in confusion as she looks up at the speedster.

It must come off meaner than she meant it to because he purses his lips. "I don't know. Ask Tibbles."

Panic spikes through her.

"I can teach you if you'd like." Rory tries to smooth over the situation. "We can."

Kenny's face falls flat as he's involuntarily brought into this.

"How?"

"I don't know." She admits and lifts her shoulders. "You just-- you have to rotate your hips and bend your knees."

Luis pulls a face and Kenny leans around him to look at her.

"It's fine! He'll get it eventually." Kenny pats him on the back. "We can practice. Practice makes perfect."

A few feet behind them, Dean Portman scares Lester Averman and then speeds up to join them. Kenny and Luis both look at the floor immediately to avoid contact, but Rory meets his gaze with slightly narrowed eyes.

"God, can you believe we're stuck with these twerps?" He snorts, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

"They're not too bad-- not all of them, at least." Rory shrugs his arm off her. "It wouldn't kill you to try and play nice."

He looks down at her with his eyebrows at his hairline but she offers him no further explanation.

"Thanks for the input, your highness." He sucks his teeth. "Shouldn't have put it past a rich kid to turncoat."

She's left glaring after him as he pushes past her. The reminder of her alienation stings ever so slightly, but she refuses to back down.

Rory stands by her statement: Dean Portman is a dick, and there's at least one Duck who comes to mind that isn't that bad at all.

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a/n:

oliver myrtle (i am pointing a gun to his head and forcing him to sign his parental rights to rory away)

comments and votes are super appreciated! they let me know that you guys like my writing and I cannot stress how much they motivate me to continue! thank you