#i am always here for hippie jonny learning how tf to chill in his old ripe age of 34 🥰

[nebulein]

omg your collar snippet was SO GOOD!!! i am desperate to know more! had jonny ever tried to wear a collar before pat? i'm guessing he hasn't explained all of the internal angst to pat, so for pat it's just a little quirk of jonny's, and he doesn't really mind? but for jonny it's this huge foundational thing that is crushing him in self-doubt and loathing 😭😭😭

when pat realizes what this means to jonny will he:

a) come hell or high water find a collar or collar substitute that jonny can wear

or

b) make it his personal mission to disabuse jonny of the notion that there could ever be anything wrong with him and show him how little the collar matters to him

or both!

Aw, thank you so much 😊

I don't think Jonny tried wearing a collar before Pat, or he wouldn't have been so surprised at his own violent reaction to it. Then again a lot of his reaction is colored by what he went through his rookie years, constantly feeling nauseous and his body essentially giving out on him in the playoffs (I get very emotional when I remember that it's canon 🥲). So I think at most he's tried one on maybe when he was young, like in his teens, just to see what it was like, horsing around with friends, and it was fine. It didn't mean anything. But with Pat, whoo boy, hell yeah it means something.

Jonny's also someone who doesn't share when he's feeling crappy (the bigger the thing the less words he'll lose about it), so I think Pat doesn't realize the extent of what's wrong until he really makes Jonny sit down and talk to him about it.

We've discussed a couple of the collar alternatives in the the other posts, so let's say in this verse Pat tries to offer some suggestions for alternatives but they all get rejected by Jonny. If he can't wear a collar, he doesn't want a substitute bracelet. It's not the same thing, Pat, and Jonny's not in the habit for settling for second best. If he can't have a collar, he'll tough it out without one.

Which means of course that Pat will have to make it his personal mission to get it into Jonny's thick (omg so thick 😂) skull that he loves Jonny no matter what and ffs Jonny is not 'failing at being an omega' (that's admittedly the tougher one of the two). I think that'll probably take a lot of reassurances, both verbal and physical, not just from Pat but also from Seabs and Sharpy and Jonny's family, maybe even some therapy on Jonny's side, working through those issues on the road to accepting himself.

And it's not always gonna be smooth sailing. There's gonna be the patches where Jonny's hung up on something like wearing a tie for a photoshoot and Pat's like "not this again", where they snap at each other over the kitchen counter and go to bed angry, their patience with each other thoroughly exhausted. There's gonna be setbacks, even years down the road, like Jonny seeing Dylan collar his girlfriend and leaving the ceremony because he suddenly needs some fresh air. But eventually Jonny's bare collar stops being a story and he's still the captain of the Hawks and Pat's his alpha, no matter what anyone else says. And you know what? I think they'll be okay.

Also, as a friend of mine pointed out: have they considered perhaps wedding rings instead

Which LMAO d'uhhhhh yeah okay maybe they'll just go that route, once it occurs to them. Maybe they, too, like me, need a friend to point it out first. Idiots (all of us) 😂

#no collar round my bones #maybe at some point some juniors omega comes up to Jonny and quietly tells him 'thanks for making it okay to not wear a collar' #and that's when jonny realizes he's not alone - and if he could make some baby hockey's life a little easier then that's worth something #i think seeing how he inadvertently affected others and helped them would be a big step in jonny's healing #together with copious trips to sedona and costa rica and probably some weed or shrooms or whatever the fuck #i am always here for hippie jonny learning how tf to chill in his old ripe age of 34 🥰 #also i need you to know i wrote all this with a crab keeping me company 💜 #1988 #neb writes #dixie12 #hockey baby