SkyGirl5
Cadet
okay... so this fic started out as a one parter... but then it became REALLY REALLY long so i had to split it into four parts...well really its four parts and an epilogue...but whatever
Title: One of the Guys
Genre: S/v ... lil angsty
Summary: short ficlet about Sydney being one of the guys on her hockey team
4 parts + Epilogue
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part One (below) Part Two Part Three Part Four & Epilogue
Part One
All of her life, Sydney Bristow had been just one of the guys.
It all started when she was just seven years old. She never had any interest in collecting Barbie dolls and dressing them up in fashionable pink, sparkling clothing. She never wanted to play with dolls or play “house” despite her mother’s encouragement. She wanted to be outside, playing games or simply running around, doing cartwheels or riding her bike. The problem was that in her quiet suburban neighborhood none of the other girls around her age wanted to do this. They wanted to be inside on their family room floors surrounded by Barbie Dream Houses and Barbie’s pink Corvette. The mere concept of this made Sydney want to gag.
Being an only child, Sydney needed to find other children in her neighborhood to play with unless she wanted to play by herself, of course, which she did not. Due to this need for companionship she was forced to seek out those of the opposite gender. Unfortunately for her, seven-year-old boys were not very keen on playing with girls; to them, girls had cooties and all other sorts of gross things. Sydney did not let this superficial animosity keep her down, though; instead she saw it as a challenge.
One scorching hot June day in her Virginian home town, Sydney walked straight up to a cluster of boys her own age tossing around a football. Her head held high, her chest puffed out, she requested to join their game. Naturally, all the boys laughed immediately.
“You’re a girl; we don’t play with girls,” a carrot-topped boy with dozens of freckles told her with disgust. Prepared for this, Sydney responded with a challenge. She would race one of the boys to the neighbor’s fence and back. If she won, she could participate in their game; if not, she would walk away. The boys chuckled and clustered together, choosing the fastest among them. A moment later, a smug dark-skinned boy stepped out of the pack and accepted the challenge.
If one thing was indisputably true about Sydney, age seven, it was that she was the fastest girl in her elementary school. She had proved that a few weeks earlier at the end of school field races held every year. She was fully confident in the fact that she would win the race with ease and she did.
When she crossed over the makeshift finish line several body lengths ahead of the sputtering boy gasping for breath, the look on the other boys’ faces was priceless. They were stunned that their friend had been beaten by a girl and even more floored that they had to let a girl join their football game. To them, it was a disgrace, but Sydney could not have been prouder.
Later that evening, Sydney went home for dinner covered in grass and mud stains that her mother would never be able to wash out of her clothing. Despite the tongue lashing she received for getting filthy, Sydney could not have been happier. For the first time, she was one of the guys.
As she grew older, Sydney always found it easier to find companionship with males than females. After all, she had much more in common with them. True, the guys were not talking about bras and makeup, but Sydney did not want to talk about those things. She wanted to talk about the latest baseball score or find out who was going to the park to play soccer that weekend. Her life revolved for the most part around sports, most of all ice hockey.
Ice hockey was Sydney’s father’s favorite sport, so she had been watching it ever since she could remember. As a youngster she learned that one of the only ways her father communicated was through sports metaphors, so to understand them she needed to understand sports. Otherwise, she and her father would have hardly spoken a word all day long.
Father and daughter would watch hockey games together either sitting on their couch at home in front of her father’s big screen TV or on rare, special occasions, watching from seats high above the ice rink itself. More than anything, Sydney wanted to play hockey. She wanted to be on the ice, skating, checking and scoring. Sadly for her, there were no girls ice hockey leagues around and it was far too dangerous for her to play on a men’s team (not to mention the fact that she would not have been allowed). She was forced to settle for playing other sports.
Using her speed, which only became perfected with age, she was on the track team and earned several state titles during her high school years. She also played soccer and field hockey, but was not as good at the latter as she was at the former. She went to college on a track scholarship and there continued her love of sports.
By the time her teen years were fading away, Sydney finally realized one of the reasons why half of her male friends were intimidated by her on the soccer field or ice rink; they were attracted to her. Having never worn a stitch of make-up in her life save her high school graduation when her mother practically tied her down and forced some mascara on her, Sydney had never been concentrated on her looks and thus on being attractive. Soon boys who she thought were just her friends were tripping over themselves to ask her out on a date, wanting to have “cool” girlfriend who would watch sports with them while drinking beer and burping.
With this Sydney’s femininity was resurrected ever so slightly. Using the help all too willingly given to her by some of her fellow track runners and soccer players, Sydney discovered the joys of preening. Of course, she was far from spending hours in front of a mirror every day, but she was no longer opposed to wearing some lip gloss or mascara on a fairly regular basis.
Towards the middle of her junior year at college, Sydney found her first long-term boyfriend in the form of Matt Abernathy, a blue-eyed brown-haired starring forward on her school’s ice hockey team. Due to Matt’s sports fixation, he and Sydney hit it off immediately and continued to date well into their senior year. Sydney frequently spent time with Matt and his hockey teammates since she loved hockey and was one of the guys, like always. In doing this, she met Michael Vaughn.
Michael, also a senior and also a forward on the hockey team, was Matt’s best friend. Sydney was immediately physically attracted to the green-eyed blonde boy. Then again, so was every other female within a fifteen mile radius of him. What she was not attracted to was Michael’s personality. She saw him as a cocky and sometimes reckless player who was inferior to her boyfriend. She was cordial with him, though; it was not in her nature to be unkind to anyone.
After graduating, Sydney put her business degree combined with her love for sports to work by managing and doing the book keeping for a local sporting goods distributor. It might have been less pay than an ordinary office job, but it worked perfectly for Sydney since she was surrounded by the relaxed athletic-loving atmosphere she loved.
For a while, she lost touch with her college acquaintances. Just a few days shy of her twenty-fourth birthday, Sydney was manning the register in the shop area due to some staffing problems when, much to her surprise, Michael Vaughn walked into the store. They recognized each other and chatted heartily for over half an hour about their present lives. As it turned out, he had recently moved to the area because of a new job opportunity. Since he did not have many friends, Sydney offered him her phone number and promised he could call her anytime to hang out, play hockey, or whatever.
A few nights later, Michael did just that. He called Sydney up and invited her to the ice rink with him, which she immediately agreed to. While Michael had seen Sydney skate before, he had never seen her pick up a stick and play. He was pleasantly surprised to find that when she did this she was actually very good. She even managed to sneak a few goals past him, despite his best goalie efforts.
When their game was over, Sydney invited Michael to join the pick-up hockey league team sponsored by the store she worked for. Since it was a pick-up league, their regulations were not like that of official hockey teams and violent checking was not allowed. Therefore, Sydney was a participant in the team, though she did not play as much as some of the other men did. Michael agreed to this quickly, needing a weekly hockey fix in his life.
Nearly four and a half years later, Sydney and Michael were still playing together on that pick-up team. In addition to being teammates, they had become practically like best friends, calling each other a few times a week to talk over the phone and double dating with their respective significant others. This caused a few problems in Sydney’s dating life, most notably those from jealous boyfriends who could not tolerate Sydney’s friends-only relationship with another man. That’s the way it was, though; she was just one of the guys, a person who just happened to be Michael’s friend, no different than his male friends. Sydney felt the same way about Michael – that he was just a friend – until something changed, that was.
The day on which her earth-shattering revelation occurred was just another pick-up team practice like all the others on a Sunday morning; nothing at all out of the ordinary. As the guys (plus Sydney) were stripping off their sweaty gear and returning it to their oversized duffle bags, they were discussing marriage of all topics. The reasoning for this was that one of their teammates, a man named Jim, had recently proposed to his girlfriend of several years. With Jim making this commitment, it meant there were only two members of their team left who were not married or engaged: Sydney and Michael. Sydney had no boyfriend at the time and thus escaped the inevitable razzing from the guys; Michael, on the other hand, was not as fortunate.
Michael and his girlfriend, Alice, had been together for over a year. They were not living together nor seemingly over serious in any other ways. Michael was not a self-proclaimed commitment phobic like many of the other men, who were terrified of walking down the aisle. He simply did not bring up the issue at all, until forced to, of course.
“So, Mike, when you go shopping for Alice’s ring let me know, okay? I got a great deal on Jan’s and I’ll get one for you two,” Jim said casually.
Michael laughed as he put on his gold-toed socks. “Yeah, okay,” he said in a sarcastic tone.
“What’s the matter Mikey? No wedding bells for you and Alice? Marriage isn’t as bad as they say you know,” another teammate, Tim, told him.
“Yeah because your wife is smokin’,” Brad laughed. All the other guys howled for a minute while a smug expression crossed Tim’s face. Fortunately for him, his wife had once been a Victoria’s Secret underwear model. Interestingly, no one was quite sure why she had chosen him to be her husband.
“I dunno guys… I don’t think Alice is the one,” Michael sighed.
“‘The one’? What are you a chick?” Brad laughed.
“I’m serious… I dunno I like her and all but… I dunno.”
“Well you’d better figure it out soon,” Jim cautioned. “Girls don’t like to wait around forever and it has been along time. My advice is either show her that you’re committed and take the next step or break-up with her, because you can only live in limbo for so long.”
Michael was silent for a moment before he concluded, “Yeah you’re right. We are kind of in limbo… Maybe I should ask Alice to move in with me…”
“There ya go!” Tim clapped Michael on the back with the palm of his hand.
As the guys’ conversation continued, Sydney could hardly process one word being said; her thoughts were focused internally. Her stomach was twisting painfully, almost as though she had eaten five chili dogs topped off with some garlic breadsticks and cheese curls to seal the deal. Why was she suddenly so nauseous? Okay, so she hated Alice with every fiber of her being and had ever since the moment Michael introduced the two of them, but that wasn’t it… was it?
Only when she heard her name did Sydney snap from her thoughts. “What’s with Bristow? She’s looking spacey…” Tim commented.
“Sorry guys,” Sydney sighed, forcing a smile as she shouldered her bag filled with hockey gear. “I guess I’m just really bloated and I’m getting these terrible cramps that-” She was interrupted by all the guys groaning and throwing things at her, nauseated grimaces on their faces. She, of course, had been teasing them, knowing how much the men hated “female issues.” “See you all later,” she said, throwing them a wave as she went. All she needed was a hot shower and some comfortable sweatpants; that would surely cure her churning gut.
Title: One of the Guys
Genre: S/v ... lil angsty
Summary: short ficlet about Sydney being one of the guys on her hockey team
4 parts + Epilogue
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part One (below) Part Two Part Three Part Four & Epilogue
Part One
All of her life, Sydney Bristow had been just one of the guys.
It all started when she was just seven years old. She never had any interest in collecting Barbie dolls and dressing them up in fashionable pink, sparkling clothing. She never wanted to play with dolls or play “house” despite her mother’s encouragement. She wanted to be outside, playing games or simply running around, doing cartwheels or riding her bike. The problem was that in her quiet suburban neighborhood none of the other girls around her age wanted to do this. They wanted to be inside on their family room floors surrounded by Barbie Dream Houses and Barbie’s pink Corvette. The mere concept of this made Sydney want to gag.
Being an only child, Sydney needed to find other children in her neighborhood to play with unless she wanted to play by herself, of course, which she did not. Due to this need for companionship she was forced to seek out those of the opposite gender. Unfortunately for her, seven-year-old boys were not very keen on playing with girls; to them, girls had cooties and all other sorts of gross things. Sydney did not let this superficial animosity keep her down, though; instead she saw it as a challenge.
One scorching hot June day in her Virginian home town, Sydney walked straight up to a cluster of boys her own age tossing around a football. Her head held high, her chest puffed out, she requested to join their game. Naturally, all the boys laughed immediately.
“You’re a girl; we don’t play with girls,” a carrot-topped boy with dozens of freckles told her with disgust. Prepared for this, Sydney responded with a challenge. She would race one of the boys to the neighbor’s fence and back. If she won, she could participate in their game; if not, she would walk away. The boys chuckled and clustered together, choosing the fastest among them. A moment later, a smug dark-skinned boy stepped out of the pack and accepted the challenge.
If one thing was indisputably true about Sydney, age seven, it was that she was the fastest girl in her elementary school. She had proved that a few weeks earlier at the end of school field races held every year. She was fully confident in the fact that she would win the race with ease and she did.
When she crossed over the makeshift finish line several body lengths ahead of the sputtering boy gasping for breath, the look on the other boys’ faces was priceless. They were stunned that their friend had been beaten by a girl and even more floored that they had to let a girl join their football game. To them, it was a disgrace, but Sydney could not have been prouder.
Later that evening, Sydney went home for dinner covered in grass and mud stains that her mother would never be able to wash out of her clothing. Despite the tongue lashing she received for getting filthy, Sydney could not have been happier. For the first time, she was one of the guys.
As she grew older, Sydney always found it easier to find companionship with males than females. After all, she had much more in common with them. True, the guys were not talking about bras and makeup, but Sydney did not want to talk about those things. She wanted to talk about the latest baseball score or find out who was going to the park to play soccer that weekend. Her life revolved for the most part around sports, most of all ice hockey.
Ice hockey was Sydney’s father’s favorite sport, so she had been watching it ever since she could remember. As a youngster she learned that one of the only ways her father communicated was through sports metaphors, so to understand them she needed to understand sports. Otherwise, she and her father would have hardly spoken a word all day long.
Father and daughter would watch hockey games together either sitting on their couch at home in front of her father’s big screen TV or on rare, special occasions, watching from seats high above the ice rink itself. More than anything, Sydney wanted to play hockey. She wanted to be on the ice, skating, checking and scoring. Sadly for her, there were no girls ice hockey leagues around and it was far too dangerous for her to play on a men’s team (not to mention the fact that she would not have been allowed). She was forced to settle for playing other sports.
Using her speed, which only became perfected with age, she was on the track team and earned several state titles during her high school years. She also played soccer and field hockey, but was not as good at the latter as she was at the former. She went to college on a track scholarship and there continued her love of sports.
By the time her teen years were fading away, Sydney finally realized one of the reasons why half of her male friends were intimidated by her on the soccer field or ice rink; they were attracted to her. Having never worn a stitch of make-up in her life save her high school graduation when her mother practically tied her down and forced some mascara on her, Sydney had never been concentrated on her looks and thus on being attractive. Soon boys who she thought were just her friends were tripping over themselves to ask her out on a date, wanting to have “cool” girlfriend who would watch sports with them while drinking beer and burping.
With this Sydney’s femininity was resurrected ever so slightly. Using the help all too willingly given to her by some of her fellow track runners and soccer players, Sydney discovered the joys of preening. Of course, she was far from spending hours in front of a mirror every day, but she was no longer opposed to wearing some lip gloss or mascara on a fairly regular basis.
Towards the middle of her junior year at college, Sydney found her first long-term boyfriend in the form of Matt Abernathy, a blue-eyed brown-haired starring forward on her school’s ice hockey team. Due to Matt’s sports fixation, he and Sydney hit it off immediately and continued to date well into their senior year. Sydney frequently spent time with Matt and his hockey teammates since she loved hockey and was one of the guys, like always. In doing this, she met Michael Vaughn.
Michael, also a senior and also a forward on the hockey team, was Matt’s best friend. Sydney was immediately physically attracted to the green-eyed blonde boy. Then again, so was every other female within a fifteen mile radius of him. What she was not attracted to was Michael’s personality. She saw him as a cocky and sometimes reckless player who was inferior to her boyfriend. She was cordial with him, though; it was not in her nature to be unkind to anyone.
After graduating, Sydney put her business degree combined with her love for sports to work by managing and doing the book keeping for a local sporting goods distributor. It might have been less pay than an ordinary office job, but it worked perfectly for Sydney since she was surrounded by the relaxed athletic-loving atmosphere she loved.
For a while, she lost touch with her college acquaintances. Just a few days shy of her twenty-fourth birthday, Sydney was manning the register in the shop area due to some staffing problems when, much to her surprise, Michael Vaughn walked into the store. They recognized each other and chatted heartily for over half an hour about their present lives. As it turned out, he had recently moved to the area because of a new job opportunity. Since he did not have many friends, Sydney offered him her phone number and promised he could call her anytime to hang out, play hockey, or whatever.
A few nights later, Michael did just that. He called Sydney up and invited her to the ice rink with him, which she immediately agreed to. While Michael had seen Sydney skate before, he had never seen her pick up a stick and play. He was pleasantly surprised to find that when she did this she was actually very good. She even managed to sneak a few goals past him, despite his best goalie efforts.
When their game was over, Sydney invited Michael to join the pick-up hockey league team sponsored by the store she worked for. Since it was a pick-up league, their regulations were not like that of official hockey teams and violent checking was not allowed. Therefore, Sydney was a participant in the team, though she did not play as much as some of the other men did. Michael agreed to this quickly, needing a weekly hockey fix in his life.
Nearly four and a half years later, Sydney and Michael were still playing together on that pick-up team. In addition to being teammates, they had become practically like best friends, calling each other a few times a week to talk over the phone and double dating with their respective significant others. This caused a few problems in Sydney’s dating life, most notably those from jealous boyfriends who could not tolerate Sydney’s friends-only relationship with another man. That’s the way it was, though; she was just one of the guys, a person who just happened to be Michael’s friend, no different than his male friends. Sydney felt the same way about Michael – that he was just a friend – until something changed, that was.
The day on which her earth-shattering revelation occurred was just another pick-up team practice like all the others on a Sunday morning; nothing at all out of the ordinary. As the guys (plus Sydney) were stripping off their sweaty gear and returning it to their oversized duffle bags, they were discussing marriage of all topics. The reasoning for this was that one of their teammates, a man named Jim, had recently proposed to his girlfriend of several years. With Jim making this commitment, it meant there were only two members of their team left who were not married or engaged: Sydney and Michael. Sydney had no boyfriend at the time and thus escaped the inevitable razzing from the guys; Michael, on the other hand, was not as fortunate.
Michael and his girlfriend, Alice, had been together for over a year. They were not living together nor seemingly over serious in any other ways. Michael was not a self-proclaimed commitment phobic like many of the other men, who were terrified of walking down the aisle. He simply did not bring up the issue at all, until forced to, of course.
“So, Mike, when you go shopping for Alice’s ring let me know, okay? I got a great deal on Jan’s and I’ll get one for you two,” Jim said casually.
Michael laughed as he put on his gold-toed socks. “Yeah, okay,” he said in a sarcastic tone.
“What’s the matter Mikey? No wedding bells for you and Alice? Marriage isn’t as bad as they say you know,” another teammate, Tim, told him.
“Yeah because your wife is smokin’,” Brad laughed. All the other guys howled for a minute while a smug expression crossed Tim’s face. Fortunately for him, his wife had once been a Victoria’s Secret underwear model. Interestingly, no one was quite sure why she had chosen him to be her husband.
“I dunno guys… I don’t think Alice is the one,” Michael sighed.
“‘The one’? What are you a chick?” Brad laughed.
“I’m serious… I dunno I like her and all but… I dunno.”
“Well you’d better figure it out soon,” Jim cautioned. “Girls don’t like to wait around forever and it has been along time. My advice is either show her that you’re committed and take the next step or break-up with her, because you can only live in limbo for so long.”
Michael was silent for a moment before he concluded, “Yeah you’re right. We are kind of in limbo… Maybe I should ask Alice to move in with me…”
“There ya go!” Tim clapped Michael on the back with the palm of his hand.
As the guys’ conversation continued, Sydney could hardly process one word being said; her thoughts were focused internally. Her stomach was twisting painfully, almost as though she had eaten five chili dogs topped off with some garlic breadsticks and cheese curls to seal the deal. Why was she suddenly so nauseous? Okay, so she hated Alice with every fiber of her being and had ever since the moment Michael introduced the two of them, but that wasn’t it… was it?
Only when she heard her name did Sydney snap from her thoughts. “What’s with Bristow? She’s looking spacey…” Tim commented.
“Sorry guys,” Sydney sighed, forcing a smile as she shouldered her bag filled with hockey gear. “I guess I’m just really bloated and I’m getting these terrible cramps that-” She was interrupted by all the guys groaning and throwing things at her, nauseated grimaces on their faces. She, of course, had been teasing them, knowing how much the men hated “female issues.” “See you all later,” she said, throwing them a wave as she went. All she needed was a hot shower and some comfortable sweatpants; that would surely cure her churning gut.
