Rating:

General Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, (background)

Characters:

Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Farah Jalali, Grigori Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Shane Hollander Gets Outed, Texting, Texting Fic, Good Parent Yuna Hollander, Good Parent David Hollander, Good Parents David Hollander/Yuna Hollander, Good Parent Grigori Rozanov, we are the first to ever use this tag lmao, Episode: s01e01 Rookies (Heated Rivalry), Rookie Year, set after the CCM shoot but before the 2011 All-Stars game, Momager Yuna Hollander, Public Relations, pre-situationship era, Yuna Hollander-centric, Protective Yuna Hollander, Supportive David Hollander and Yuna Hollander, POV Yuna Hollander, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of baby shane’s big night out

Collections:

ritualist_conflict

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-27 Completed: 2026-07-06 Words: 9,017 Chapters: 2/2

Image Management

Summary

During his rookie year, Shane goes to a Halloween party at a Montreal gay bar to confirm some suspicions about himself. Unfortunately, it’s 2010, so the official photographer uploads a few hundred photos to the bar’s Facebook page.

Yuna gives real thought to finding Mark Zuckerberg and strangling him with his own hoodie strings. Probably this particular thought spiral suggests it’s time for her to step away from the PC, but the thought of taking a break – of leaving the burning fuse that could blow up her baby’s life at any moment unattended – makes her stomach churn.

Notes

So funny story: ritualist and 409_conflict started chatting about fic, as you do, and discovered that ritualist had moved to 409_conflict’s city that very week. Several coffee dates later, we are pleased to present the first ritualist_conflict collaboration.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

This chapter goes out to everyone who had a deeply unflattering picture of themselves made available on a Facebook page by a nightclub photographer in the 2010s.

2 November 2010

Yuna gives real thought to finding Mark Zuckerberg and strangling him with his own hoodie strings. Does he really wear hoodies all the time or did they make that up for that movie? Is she just thinking of Jesse Eisenberg?

Probably this particular thought spiral suggests it’s time for her to step away from the PC, but the thought of taking a break – of leaving the burning fuse that could blow up her baby’s life at any moment unattended – makes her stomach churn.

“David. What do we do?”

There is a document on her computer that lists all the advice she received about parenting a professional athlete: some useful, some laughably pathetic (“You don’t need to watch all the games, just the big ones,” Sylvie Couillard, with a son in the previous year’s draft, had told her, with all the unearned sagacity of a baby-faced missionary, “otherwise you’ll get bored”). That’s towards the end of the document, prefaced by more pertinent advice from sports managers and college coaches, war stories from nightmare families ruining their son’s potential.

Oddly, no one has mentioned what to do when one of Montreal’s premiere gay clubs uploads two hundred professionally taken photos, complete with watermarks, of last weekend’s Halloween bash, and your precious, sensitive, rookie son is standing in the background of shot seventy-two.

“Where is he? Right now?”

“Columbus.” She could keep going, if she needs to. In a normal year, she could recite the next half dozen games on the schedule for Montreal. This isn’t a normal year, it’s the year her baby is making his rookie debut for Montreal. Columbus, Buffalo, Ottawa at home, Vancouver at home, Boston, Carolina at home, Philly at home, Nashville at home, Toronto at home, Philly, LA at home …

“Honey, I think we should get him home.”

“We could fly there?”

“I’m not sure he’d appreciate that.”

David’s right, he won’t. But he won’t appreciate being pulled out to Ottawa on the two-day break between games either.

Whatever her face is doing, David knows how to read it. “He hasn’t even come out to us. If he’s going to fall apart, it should be at home,” he says.

Implicit between them is the understanding that an apartment leased for five months in a new city does not a home make. In particular if the lessee is a nineteen-year-old boy who splits his time evenly between rinks, varied forms of transportation, and a mattress. The Ottawa house is still home, at least for a while.

Because she’s greedy, she steals as much of David’s ballast as she can before she has to cede it to Shane. She leans into his chest and lets the physicality of his sturdiness settle her. “Will he be okay?”

“Well, obviously,” David says, into her hair. “He has you.”

Dutch Canadians

2 Nov 2010 at 6:17PM

Yuna Hollander

Hey Shane! Your dad’s off work tomorrow, and we’re making a big pot of pho. Can we kidnap you and have you around for lunch?

David Hollander

Typically a kidnapping doesn’t involve a question mark.

So how’s this: We’ll meet you at YUL and drive you over, and back to Montreal later on.

Shane Hollander

lol okay, sounds good!

3 November 2010

In all her plans to get her boy home to Ottawa before they addressed the issue, all her scheming to ensure his comfort in a deeply uncomfortable moment, she had foolishly failed to account for Shane checking Facebook in the backseat of their car as they pass through Bois-de-Liesse. They divert to Shane’s apartment, and once the door is shut, there’s no question of getting back on the road.

Yuna paces and texts Farah. David has the honour of being allowed into Shane’s nervous breakdown; she can hear his low gentle voice through the bedroom door. She doesn’t think anyone else could coax Shane out of the silent, tear-stained hunch he has maintained since Yuna had asked him about the photos from Halloween. She can only make out a few words, here and there.

“… nothing wrong with you, buddy…”

“I just wanted to know, before…”

“…think you know now?”

Yuna presses her ear to the door in time to hear Shane laugh, wetly and without humour. “I have a pretty good idea, yeah.”

She goes back to pacing.

The part of her that can only be muted, not switched off, puts Shane in a Deep-South-appropriate ten-gallon hat and pairs it with the booty shorts he’d worn by the pool on the roof of Complexe Sky. Cologne, perhaps? Or some kind of obscenely expensive men’s leather boots – was it Prada that did that sort of thing? Pity that they were already boxed into Reebok.

“Let home be a safe harbor. At home he’s not a pro, just your kid.” Fuck, she was going to have to buy Sylvie a bottle of wine, wasn’t she. Yuna takes a moment to be grateful Montreal had the second draft pick. If Shane had been sent somewhere in the American South – well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

David is handling the emotional side of things for now. Shane is in no state to take on the practicalities. Yuna had messaged Shane’s middle school classmate asking them to un-tag the photo, of course, but they were only the first and for all they know it’s already been reposted on one of the hyper-local news sites or a gay gossip blog with aspirations of book deals.

Yuna bites her lip.

On Shane’s coffee table, the second hand on his brand new Rolex is ticking.

Because it’s a Halloween party, one’s eyes are naturally drawn to the tableau of costumes and flesh on display, plus Shane’s face is partially obscured (Yuna is not going to ask any questions about the young gentleman doing the obscuring until the current crisis is past, but after that – well). It won’t hold up to anyone who knows him, but it might allow a plausible public denial – no. No, she can’t let Shane put himself back in the closet, not if there’s another path open to him. Unless that’s what he wants? Should she support him in that, or would that be homophobic?

Shit. The hockey moms are useless here. She needs to talk to the GSA moms. Probably she still has their phone numbers somewhere. Yuna is nothing if not an incorrigible networker. She never loses a number.

“Mom, can you get off your fucking phone?” Shane snaps, as she tries to compose a message to Geneviève that sounds both urgent and unpanicked. She hadn’t heard the door open, but when she looks up, he’s there, David behind him. He still looks wrecked, but the initial panic has been replaced by anger, if she’s any judge.

There’s nothing wrong with anger. And Yuna prefers this sort of outburst to the ones that have him turning his rage against himself. When he was seven he’d let it out by banging his head against the corner of the bathroom sink.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting. She feels the same fresh burn that she felt facing the nurse in urgent care twelve years ago: I’m trying my best, okay?

“Sorry, honey,” she says. She has to tell him that Farah is coming over tomorrow; she has to tell him that she’ll kill anyone who so much as sneers at him; she has to tell him that legally, the league can’t do a fucking thing to him, even though they both know the law is a paper tiger at best.

But she can do that later. For now she opens her arms and embraces her son.

4 November 2010

Yuna thinks that if Farah were a man, she’d be scratching her beard in this moment of rapid calculation. “Well, there are worse ways it could have happened.”

“Yippee,” Shane says flatly.

She has to remind herself that his prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed to stop herself from kicking him, and that he’s – conventionally, if not biologically – considered an adult to stop herself from scolding him. That’s probably a faux pas at any age, considering she and Farah are guests in his apartment.

“There are lots of ways to downplay it, if that’s what you want,” Farah offers. “But … it’s also … look, times are changing.”

“I was just thinking that,” Yuna says. “I mean, Calvin Klein had a whole rainbow campaign over the summer. And Jaguar just dumped a brand ambassador over a homophobic tweet. Actually, that might be a good place to start—”

“Before we get into all that,” Farah says, “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Shane?”

“What,” Shane mumbles. He’s chewing on his hoodie strings again. Yuna resists the urge to yank them out of his mouth.

“Plenty of people experiment at your age. I don’t want to assume it says anything about you.” Farah steeples her fingers. “But I can’t make good decisions without good information.”

Shane groans and folds forward, resting his forehead on the desk.

Farah gives Yuna a sympathetic look. It’s well-intentioned, but thoroughly unhelpful.

What Yuna would like, most of all, is for the population of the planet, all seven billion and counting, to agree that a picture of her baby boy at a gay bar, dressed up like a beefy aerobics instructor from 1983, is not newsworthy or notable in the slightest.

Failing that, she’d settle for the chance to take a tour of Shane’s skull, and determine whether he really doesn’t know what he wants, or whether he’s unsure what The Right Thing To Do is. They don’t teach this in parenting books (and they really should): if your teenager never rebels, they’ll never learn that your parents will love you even if you don’t choose The Right Thing.

Right before Yuna is going to guide Shane upstairs, to his old bedroom, and attempt the store-brand version of the magic David’s able to perform whenever Shane retreats into himself, he mumbles into his sleeve: “idonwnagstrngle.”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t want to, like, guest star on Glee.”

“I think we can accommodate that,” Farah says, very wryly. Then, gently, she adds, “Would it be easier if your mom stepped away for a minute?”

Shane takes a deep breath – the yoga is really paying dividends for his lung capacity – and unfolds himself. “No, it’s fine. Um.”

Yuna folds her hands together so she can’t drum her fingernails on the dining room table while she waits.

“A guy – came onto me.” Shane has his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his shoulders around his ears. “Over the summer. And I – didn’t hate it. But. He – I mean – I wanted – I wasn’t sure—“

Yuna looks away, blinking hard.

“I just wanted to know,” Shane says miserably. “People always says Montreal is the gayest city in Canada, and I wanted – before people started to recognize me.”

“That’s very reasonable,” Farah says, while Yuna is still biting down her first three unhelpful impulses.

Shane says nothing else.

Yuna sniffs once and clears her throat. “And how was it, honey?”

“Mom.”

“Well, you’ve had a girlfriend. And now you’ve had —” she stops, noting that Shane is making the same involuntary motions he does when he’s about to retch, and pivots: “— a little … experience with men. Did it clear anything up? For you?”

“I — that, um … well. It’s like …”

Fuck, she wishes David was here. Yuna places her hand on top of Shane’s, stilling where he’s worrying a hangnail. “Sweetie, it doesn’t need to be embarrassing. I promise you: both Farah and I have had bad sex before.”

“Oh, yes,” Farah nods enthusiastically. “Awful.”

And, whatever other psychic damage she’s just inflicted, at least it acts as a circuit breaker. “Jesus Christ. Mom. I think I might be gay, okay? Please stop talking about sex now. Please.”

“Thank you for telling us, Shane,” Farah says warmly. “I know that wasn’t easy, but it’s important to know so we can strategize. Now, there’s a few options.”

Yuna jots down notes as Farah speaks. Broadly, their options are: deny it (not recommended, likely to backfire); say nothing (high risk, high reward); wait until it comes up, then confirm (suboptimal)l; or try to get out ahead of it.

“If you were any other rookie under other circumstances, I would recommend saying nothing, especially since no one has really picked it up yet,” Farah says. “Unfortunately, the league has decided to make your rivalry with Rozanov the centrepiece of the upcoming All Stars game. They’re already trying to line you up to shoot some promotions, and they haven’t even announced the rest of the roster yet. Under those circumstances, I don’t think we can rely on these staying low profile.”

Shane sighs, both hands clasping the back of his neck.

Yuna waits until she’s sure Shane has nothing to say, then adds, “It’s your decision, sweetie, but – well. I know you don’t want to talk about it. Would it be better to talk about it on your own terms, or wait until they ambush you in a media scrum?”

It’s only after the words are out that she realizes she’s framing her preferred option as the best one in a way that might not be fair. After all, Shane can prepare for an ambush. He’s handled all sorts of bullshit questions about his race even when they’ve been asked at wildly inappropriate times. Some aspiring podcaster had even shoved a microphone into his face in the Bell Centre parking lot, asking if Shane’s heritage gave him a genetic advantage over white players. (That aspiring podcast is having a very hard time getting players to appear as guests lately, because no agent worth their salt is is inclined to let that behaviour go unchecked, especially not when Farah has had a word with them.)

Shane closes his eyes. “Okay. We get out ahead of it. How do we do that, exactly?”

“Unfortunately, my first idea was to guest star on Glee,” Farah notes wryly, making a show of crossing out a line on her notepad. It makes Shane snort, and Yuna feels colossally grateful. Every hour, every phone call, every ‘first date’ coffee shop introduction, every frat-boy-gone-to-seed she’d suffered through, the Excel spreadsheet with weighted rankings and a heat map, they had all led to settling on Farah as the best agent for Shane, and, though she hadn’t expected it be to quite so apparent quite so soon, there’s clearly no one better for him in a crisis.

“But, honestly, it’s up to you, Shane. I would suggest we – quietly – reach out to some brands that will line up with the … image you have of yourself.”

Farah’s doing the right thing, of course. Letting Shane decide what that image should be. But Yuna feels like she won’t ever be able to breathe again, if her Shane has to walk into a locker room knowing that ‘pansy’ has a ring of truth.

“We should lean into the – his masculinity,” Yuna declares. She’ll be the bad guy. She’ll do it for him.

“If I may,” Farah says slowly, when Shane just keeps on staring at the table, “your CCM shoot with Rozanov—“

“What about it?” Shane snaps.

“It played very well,” Farah says evenly. “Putting you next to him makes audiences perceive you as more Canadian.”

Under the table, Yuna opens the contacts on her phone. Near the top, her eye lands on Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord).

“More white, you mean,” Shane says.

“Yes.” Farah spreads her hands. “European masculinity, even Slavic masculinity, is very different from North American conceptions. If we get you two some more joint campaigns – sponsorships, or even just magazine features – a little bit of strategic direction will make you look comparatively mainstream, even if the audience is aware of your sexuality.”

“He’ll make me look less like a faggot,” Shane says bluntly. “Because audiences think he’s fruity.”

“Shane,” Yuna says, “I understand this is frustrating, but it’s a pragmatic solution. You seemed to get along with him well enough at CCM—“

Shane groans and digs his knuckles into his eyes. “Yeah, he was – fine. Good, even.”

Yuna remembers Shane’s words – a guy hit on me over summer – and wonders if the groan is because the guy was on the CCM shoot. One of the photographers or a makeup artist. Or is she stereotyping?

Shit. What if Rozanov was homophobic? Europe is usually ahead of North America about these things, but Russia isn’t exactly typical.

“He didn’t seem homophobic when you met him, did he? I remember one of the PAs was wearing pride pins – he seemed normal talking to them, right?”

Shane laughs. “No, not homophobic.” He drags his hands down his face. “Yeah. Okay. Pair me up with Rozanov. Why not. I’m going to take a walk.”

He shoves away from the table. Yuna watches him go, chewing her lip. It’s not uncommon for Shane to step away and return when he’s feeling settled, but under the circumstances, she’s not sure he’ll be able to settle down.

Yuna waits until the front door slams before asking: “It’s the right approach, isn’t it?”

“It’s the only approach, as far as I’m concerned,” Farah agrees. “Not Rozanov, necessarily, but the whole … hyper-masculine thing. Thanks for broaching it.”

“He can’t fire his mother,” but even as she says it, she thinks of all the other ways she could lose him. “If there’s things that you can’t say, I’ll say them.”

Farah leans back in her chair, looking down the hallway as if to ensure that Shane had really gone. “Yuna. Getting out ahead of it, playing him up as a manly guy, it’s the best approach. But I can’t promise what’s going to happen. We can position him to the world. We can do our best to get him all the support that’s out there. But we can’t control the locker room.”

The roar that’s been in Yuna’s ears, the one she forces herself to turn down whenever Shane’s in her presence, roils up, insisting on itself. There’d been an article on CBC this morning, about the criminal investigation into the firebombing of that gay couple’s house on P.E.I. Should she be looking into private security? How would she broach that with Shane?

Across the table, Farah reaches for Yuna’s wrist. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to frighten you. But there’s no precedent here. Not in the NHL. Not the NBA, or NFL, either. You and I, we need to be clear about this. For Shane.”

It’s not like a bodyguard would be allowed into the locker room anyway. It’s not like Shane would accept that. In a flash, she remembers how adorable he’d been when he began first grade, and stamped his foot to underscore his stance that he was “too big” to be walked into school now. It would’ve been around that time that the evening news had updates on the Matthew Shepard murder.

The roar crescendos, and Yuna has to race to the bathroom to vomit it up.

5 November 2010

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co…

5 Nov 2010 at 9:03AM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Alicia! This is Yuna Hollander, we met at the CCM shoot last year. Do you have a minute?

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord)

Hi Yuna, great to hear from you! What can I do for you?

Yuna Hollander

Do you happen to have the contact details for Ilya Rozanov’s talent rep? Something came across my desk that might suit him, but I don’t have a phone number.

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord)

I don’t, sorry - I liaised with Ilya directly for day-of! Priya from legal should have it though :) I can send you her number?

Yuna Hollander

Yes please! You’re an angel.

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

5 Nov 2010 at 9:09AM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Priya, this is Yuna Hollander. We emailed last year about Shane Hollander’s CCM sponsorship. I’m trying to get in touch with Ilya Rozanov’s representative – Alicia said you might have their details?

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

Good morning Mrs H!!! Lovely to hear from you 😊 I have a number for Anatoly Sapozhnikov, but I’m not sure it will help 😢 he had a coronary last year and went home to St Petes 💔 but maybe he knows who reps Ilya now? I’ll send you his digits!

Yuna Hollander

Thank you, Priya, I appreciate it!

Anatoly Sapozhnikov

5 Nov 2010 at 9:24AM

Yuna Hollander

Hello Mr Sapozhnikov, Priya Bhatla from CCM was kind enough to pass on your phone number to me. I am trying to get in touch with Ilya Rozanov’s current representative. Would you be able to share that information? Kind regards, Yuna

Anatoly Sapozhnikov

⚠️ This message was not delivered and cannot be retried.

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

5 Nov 2010 at 10:18AM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Priya, sorry to bother you again. Would you happen to have an email address for Anatoly?

Priya Bhatla (CCM Legal)

No luck on the phone, eh? 📵 Sure thing, I’ll dig it up!

a.sapozhnikov@yandex.ru

Yuna Hollander

You’re a wonderful human being. Thank you again!

Yuna says, “For fuck’s sake!”

David and Shane, thankfully, have retreated to the kitchen and do not witness her outburst.

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co…

5 Nov 2010 at 2:23PM

Yuna Hollander

Hi Alicia! No dice with Priya and I think this might be time sensitive… obviously I would never ask for an athlete’s direct contact, but would you be willing to pass my number to Ilya and let him know I’m trying to get in touch with his rep?

Alicia Devereux (CCM Co-ord)

Oh, sorry to hear that Yuna!

I can certainly pass your details along :) Is this the best phone number for you?

Yuna Hollander

Sure is! Thank you – and let me know who I need to bully to get you a raise!

Ilya Rozanov (C) (Raiders)

5 Nov 2010 at 2:45PM

Ilya Rozanov (C) (Raiders)

Mrs Hollander, this is Ilya Rozanov. We met in the elevator in Toronto. You wanted to speak to me?

Yuna Hollander

Thank you for messaging! I’ve been trying to find out how to get in contact with your agent to discuss some branding possibilities. Would you mind passing along their email address? Thanks, Yuna Hollander

Ilya Rozanov (C) (Raiders)

I mean, if you have proposal to discuss, they will bring it to me.

We can cut out extra person.

What would you like to be telling them?

Chapter End Notes

iMessage workskin is Azdaema’s AO3-Skin_Messaging.

Gmail workskin is sunsetcurbed's Gmail Email Skin.

Google Search History workskin is BookKeep's Google Search Suggestions Work Skin.

---

You can find 409_conflict on tumblr as 409-conflict. You can't find ritualist anywhere, ever, no matter how hard you search, they cannot be found.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

This chapter goes out to anyone who’s ever woken up to an email from someone in a different timezone with an urgent request and survived the resulting total activation of their sympathetic nervous system.

27 November 2010

They manage to get a Men’s Health shoot scheduled in November, just after Thanksgiving. Boston and Montreal both have three days off in a row, which is the best they can hope for before Christmas.

Farah arranges transport for Yuna and Shane to a hotel near where they plan to shoot: a luxury chalet in a faux-rustic style that costs upwards of sixty thousand dollars a week to stay at in the off-season.

Rozanov meets them at the hotel. He doesn’t have a parent with him, or even his manager.

Once all the paperwork is signed, Yuna leaves the boys in the hands of the Men’s Health team. The photographer and her crew are efficient and professional, and based on their joint shoot with CCM in the summer, Yuna is aware that the best thing she can do is give everyone some space.

She lingers around the edges of a conference room as the boys try on the outfits they’ll wear tomorrow; today, a pair of unexpectedly punkish young women mark them up in chalk for hasty tailoring. Yuna snoops through the clothes rack and takes notes on potential labels to pursue. In between outfit changes, Shane and Rozanov sit shoulder to shoulder in hoodies and sweatpants. Rozanov ignores his buzzing phone in favour of joking around with Shane, even managing to make him laugh once or twice. It settles Yuna to see that no matter how much of a brute Rozanov can be in a game, he’s a decent young man off the ice.

Last night there’d been an incident when Shane was halfway to gnawing his fingers off, when she asked, apparently, once too often if he was sure he was alright with Rozanov. A mug had been smashed. Tears had been shed. David, the guardian angel of her entire goddamn life, pulled levity from depths even she wasn’t aware he was capable of, and said: “I know the saying’s about milk, but are we crying over spilt sencha now?” then took Shane out for a jog. When he came to bed, he tangled his fingers in hers, and told her Shane wasn’t scared of the shoot, he was scared of the interview.

So: the worst was yet to come. But what a relief, all the same, to have her son hug her in the morning, and watch Rozanov come sidling over the instant they arrived, and insist if they were going to keep meeting like this, they should exchange phone numbers. God help her, she liked him, not just for the way he put the wind back in Shane’s sails, not just for his nonchalance of the part she asked him to play. He just seemed like good people. Pity about Boston.

She leaves them having a whispered conversation while the tailors wrangle them into a pair of suits that probably cost more than same as a mid-size sedan, and goes outside to sneak a cigarette.

The hotel is strictly no smoking, but Yuna exits via a door marked STAFF ONLY and finds an empty beer can serving as an ashtray exactly where she expected it. She fishes her pack and lighter out of her purse.

Despite the fact she’s fifty-two, and she’s cut down to a scant one or two every now and then, she’s never gotten out of the habit of flailing like a schoolgirl to hide the fact of her smoking, which makes her feel utterly ridiculous when the person barging out of the banging door is Rozanov, catching her in the act of stubbing out a barely-touched cigarette in the snow.

“Well. This is surprise.” He pauses. Assessing. “Good surprise. I have only two left. Not enough for very long day.”

“Here.” Yuna passes him the pack and lighter, and, like any two smokers anywhere on the planet, they build an immediate companionship from the rigmarole of extracting, lighting, losing the flame in the wind, shaking the lighter, cursing, turning their backs and cupping their hands, and finally leaning back against the wall and inhaling.

“So,” Ilya says. “Another race for Hollander to win. First to come out of the closet in the NHL.”

Yuna promptly chokes on her next inhale and has to cough like a teenager with baby’s first menthol before she can rasp, “What do you mean?”

Ilya makes a so-so gesture with a long, elegant hand. It’s really a crime he doesn’t have a jewellery sponsorship yet. “Is that not the way to say it? First openly gay player, then.”

She almost drops the cigarette. “Shane told you?”

Rozanov looks wryly amused. “He is telling everyone, no?”

“Yes. Right. Okay.” Yuna’s face does something complex. She clenches her teeth around the filter and breathes smoke.

Ilya must read something in her face, because he exhales – turning his face away politely – and hastily says, “Is okay. I have, uh, same secret. Well, not secret for Hollander, after the interview, but…”

“You mean you’re – like Shane?”

“Not exactly like, but not straight, either. Uh, ni to ni sjo. Biseksual. What is it in English?”

“Almost the same. Bisexual,” Yuna offers. Which isn’t the point at all, but dammit, she needs a fucking minute here.

Ilya Rozanov is attracted to men. Ilya Rozanov shot a commercial with her son in July, when they all stayed in the same hotel. Shane mentioned that a man had hit on him over the summer, and had presumably been intrigued enough by the offer to spark off this whole chain of events. Hell, Montreal and Boston played each other right before Shane went to that Halloween party.

Well, she thinks hysterically. Shane’s always been very literal. Yuna did say fuck Rozanov right up the butt in front of him.

Oh, god, was he on his way to proposition her son when she ran into him in the elevators?

Not the time. Yuna regathers her wits as best she can.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she says, because that’s what the blogs she consulted suggested as a response. “Is there any way I can support you?”

“Mm, not really. Maybe opposite.” Ilya stubs out his cigarette, looking both deadly serious and far too young. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Would it be helping Hollander – helping Shane if I also come out? Same time, maybe?”

Yuna’s brand management brain kicks in. She could definitely make it work, especially with the sleek European styling the outfits so far have suggested. Hell, Daniel Craig was advocating for a bisexual Bond in his promo interviews for Quantum of Solace; that was, what, two years ago?

And more importantly, it would mean Shane wasn’t alone. The league can sideline one gay star rookie; all they’d really have to do was hint that he hadn’t lived up to his potential. But two queer rookies, each of them the centrepiece around which an original six franchise was rebuilding? That would be so much harder to deny.

Then the rest of her brain comes back online.

“Ilya,” she says, because she can’t call him Rozanov right now. Any professional distance between them has been evaporated by the probability that he triggered her son’s sexual awakening. “Coming out is such a personal decision. Don’t let the situation rush you or pressure you.”

Ilya shrugs. “I don’t feel pressured.”

“Still, you should talk to your agent about it first,” she insists. “Get some outside advice.”

“Yes, of course. This is a good idea.” But his tone – the words, even – is the same one she used all throughout the 1980s, whenever her bosses told her she’d get the promotion next time, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to be a bit friendlier (wink, nudge, vomit). “I will call Anatoly. Thank you for listening.”

The door closes behind him with a bang that pierces her clean through. Fuck. She doesn’t have the capacity to mother-agent two prodigious teenage talents. She doesn’t. So she shouldn’t try. She should trust in Rozanov’s own team, though she can concede that it must be tremendously frustrating to try to reign in such a strong will from across the Atlantic.

Wait. Did he say Anatoly? Anatoly Sapozhnikov? The coronary-afflicted, internet-invisible, email-bouncing ghost? She should get his number…

But when she follows him inside, Rozanov’s already making Shane roll his eyes and huff a laugh, making some joke about the tailoring required to fit Shane’s ego into Armani off-the-rack, and she doesn’t have the heart to insert herself into their easy conversation, not when she’s the whip-cracking-no-fun-pragmatist to Rozanov’s breezy companionship, and not when Shane hasn’t smiled like this in the last three weeks.

Yuna calls David from her hotel room that night. She’s jittery and impatient, and David cuts her off before she can even ask about his day.

“What’s eating you, honey?”

“So, hypothetically,” Yuna says, “if there were another queer NHL player in Shane’s draft class…”

“Statistically, it seems very likely,” David says.

“And if that player were, for example, drafted to the Boston Raiders—”

“Ah,” David says. “Well, I think that player – assuming we’re thinking of the same player? – he’d probably have different concerns than Shane does.”

“It can’t be that different, surely. I mean, I know the city of Boston is progressive, but NHL franchises—”

“Actually, honey…” David speaks slowly, each word heavy with some meaning Yuna can’t quite catch. “I wasn’t even thinking about the NHL. I was thinking about … his home. His family, maybe.”

“His team should be his family,” Yuna mutters. Her thoughts turn, as they often have since that day in Shane’s apartment, to locker rooms. What his so-called brothers among the Metros might do to her baby boy.

“When you worked at the CRA, did you ever have to do Foreign Interference Training?”

This non-sequitur is sufficiently jarring that Yuna is briefly concerned David’s had a stroke. “What? No? Oh, actually … I think so? Darling, are you—”

“I’m just concerned.” Stroke victims are supposed to have difficulty with speech aren’t they? Yuna doesn’t recall that an alteration from world’s-most-patient-listener to sudden-interrupter is on the list of symptoms. “About the hockey, yes. But more about the … reception he might have. When he goes home.”

Of course, David’s looking at the world with a wider lens than Yuna is. He’s always comparing trade-offs, thinking through costs and benefits, weighing the costs of contingencies. It’s what makes him so damn good at his job. She hadn’t even considered this angle: if Rozanov is forced out, or leaves voluntarily, how will he be greeted if he returns to the KHL? Yuna isn’t across their locker room culture at all.

“I’ll look into it,” she promises.

“Good.”

Geneviéve Lee (GSA)

27 Nov 2010 at 8:45PM

Yuna Hollander

Gen! SOS! Shane came out to one of his friends, and now ANOTHER baby pro athlete has come out to me! Help!

Geneviéve Lee (GSA)

ohhhh yeah that can happen

sorry Yuna you’re the cool mom now

Yuna Hollander

You take that back!

I have been hip. I have been chic. I have even (briefly) been punk. I have never once been cool.

Geneviéve Lee (GSA)

but you’re going to the mattresses for your queer kid which is about as cool as it’s possible to be for a teenaged closet case

also you problem solve instead of react which is … pretty much the ideal form of comfort for a terrified man lol

Yuna Hollander

… fuck.

28 November 2010

Yuna scrolls through the coverage of what people are already calling Cablegate as the boys are led away to hair and makeup. Presumably, there’s significance to all the secret documents WikiLeaks has published beyond what it means for her specifically, but all she can absorb is a vague gratitude for the all-consuming headlines. She and Farah had worried that they had hours to days before Shane was outed by someone with a higher profile than Sainte-Catherine Scoops!, but now everyone with an audience has much, much bigger fish to fry.

Discordantly, while the world discusses Washington’s spying on Ban Ki-moon, three people dress Ilya in a black Brioni suit with delicate gold details and a vodka martini; Shane gets an Armani topcoat in Metros blue cashmere and neat whiskey. Or something that looks like it, anyway; Yuna imagines it’s more likely to be coloured water, to make sure it shows up well in the photographs. These details are more important to her than the intelligence assessments suggesting North Korea has supplied nuclear weapons to Iran. Teenage Yuna is disgusted.

The boys are within an inch of each other in height, and at this point in the season they’re both a little north of two hundred pounds, but the styling and the way they’re posed draws attention to their differences; it’s like seeing James Bond and Jason Bourne side by side. Ilya lounges. Shane looms.

The boys change back into sweatpants and hoodies while the crew set up for the next shoot in the gym.

Shane seems lighter than he has at any time in the last four weeks: with the notable exception of when he’s on the ice. Whenever Yuna seems him like that, lissome and racing and rosy-cheeked, the coals in her are stoked anew. She’ll disarticulate the fucking league, defenestrate management, burn down headquarters, take a baseball bat to players’ knees before she lets anyone ruin this for her son.

She wonders, sometimes, how many other mothers have made a similar vow. She wonders how they sleep with the failure.

Ilya’s phone buzzes again. He picks it up, mutters something she’s very sure is swearing – the tone comes across, even if the specific curse is new to her – and excuses himself to answer it. His voice automatically deepens, his consonants crisper as he walks past her; his shoulders are rigidly straight. His manager, maybe? Someone who stresses him out, by the tick in his jaw. That’s no good; a young athlete needs someone they can be comfortable with, someone they trust. Not someone who makes them look like a schoolboy called to the principal’s office.

Shane has his headphones on. He’s scrolling on his phone. He looks comfortable.

Yuna fishes two cigarettes out of her pack and waves them at Ilya, who jerks his head at a side door. She steps outside and finds a place where, if she presses herself up against the wall, she can just about avoid the wind slicing through her. Ilya joins her a moment later.

“Everything okay?” Yuna asks, once they’ve both lit up. “That phone call seemed … bad?”

Ilya turns his face away to exhale smoke. It’s subtle, but Yuna recognizes a teenage boy trying to compose himself into maturity; she can see it in the way his knuckles flex around the cigarette as he looks at her.

“The article writer reached out to my family for comment,” he says, very flatly. “My father is… concerned.”

Yuna takes her own turn exhaling a plume of smoke as an excuse to look away. When she’s choked down the first few choices, she asks, very neutrally, “What part of the article is he concerned about?”

“He worries too much.”

“Rozanov.”

“It is no problem.”

“It might be.”

“You see, you worry too, Mrs Hollander,” he concedes, with a pointed, ash-tipped gesture. “But you find a way to help your son. My father, he just says: ‘you are not thinking clearly, this is bad idea, Russia will have proble—’”

“Rozanov. Ilya. What’s a bad idea?”

“To stand next to a gay man.” Rozanov spreads his hands wide and waggles his fingers, evoking the appearance of the monster at a campfire story.

Yuna frowns. “So your father has a … problem with gay people?”

“He says whether he has a problem doesn’t matter. Vladimir Vladimirovich has a problem, so…” Ilya trails off and shrugs one shoulder, a fluid, irritatingly eloquent gesture. It really is a crime he doesn’t have better sponsors. He has a natural elegance that puts Yuna in mind of a big cat, a sort of languid power that would look incredible in the right TV spot.

“Vladimir – you mean Putin?”

“Da. Vladolf Putler needs to, uh…” Ilya draws a circle with the tip of his cigarette. “Make friends out of the church and the less crazy vatnik, uh, nacionalist.”

“Consolidate,” Yuna suggests. “Bring them into alignment.” Wait, not the point. “Is he worried about legal trouble?”

“Mm, not really. There is no law against it.” Ilya exhales smoke through his nose and gives her a grimly arch smile. “Yet.”

“But it might damage your reputation?”

Ilya gives her another expressive shrug and ashes his cigarette. “Not worse than anything else. Even,” he adds pointedly, “if I come out.”

“Ilya, honey,” she says cautiously, “even if that solved everything, we wouldn’t put you at risk. Shane wouldn’t want that. I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Risk is a problem for me. Not for you, not for Papa.”

“As a parent, I absolutely beg to differ.” She watches him mouth the words, which only proves the underlying point: six feet of height and two hundred pounds of body weight might make him and Shane seem adult, but do not sufficiently compensate for missing decades of lived experience, whether that’s with English vocabulary or risk-reward ratios. “I mean: I disagree.”

“Well, Mrs Hollander, I disagree. And maybe I decide to post this on my Twitter and my Facebook tonight,” he shrugs, and let that sit in the frigid air for a moment. “Or maybe you can help me to make less risk.”

Is it racist for her to mentally frame this conversation like a nuclear armament treaty negotiation? Who the hell taught this kid to play a game of chicken with a big red button like this anyway? She makes a mental note to tell Shane never to bet money on cards with him.

She proceeds carefully, tiptoeing through a likely minefield: “How would I do that?”

“I fire my manager, sign with whoever you recommend. Maybe with you, if you can get me a Rolex deal like Hollander’s.” A flash of teeth and a roguish grin. God, he’s gorgeous. If she was twenty years younger… “And they switch me over to the – I forget the name. Work visa that gives me US citizenship.”

“EB-1A,” Yuna says. “That’s not a bad start, but—”

She snaps her mouth shut as one of the PAs pokes her head around the door.

“There you are!” she says brightly. “We’re almost done setting up in the gym. Can you head back to wardrobe, please?”

“Da, of course,” Ilya says. He gives her a last meaningful glance before he follows the PA inside.

Yuna grinds her cigarette butt under her shoe contemplatively. Then she calls Farah.

29 November 2010

Yuna calls Grigori in the middle of the Russian afternoon, which is 7am for her. The sun has not yet risen, and nor, it seems, has anyone else staying in their hotel. Yuna gets a cup of tea from the (frankly, subpar for the price point) breakfast offerings and takes over one of the business centres.

She has briefly spoken to Ilya about Grigori, and has come away with very little sense of the man. Not a warm paternal figure, the way David is, but then nor was Yuna’s own father. Not everywhere has the same expectations of parents. Yuna is not inclined to judge anyone by Canadian cultural standards, especially not with how much time she’s spent untangling all the ways the “tiger mom” stereotype fucked her up.

Beyond that, Ilya has confirmed that his father speaks English competently and is aware of the legal structures around sports management, although Yuna is prepared to simplify her English around some of the jargon. She spent a while looking up Russian terms for LGBTQ+ people just in case, but it seems like many of the polite terms are cognates – bisexual translates as biseksual, among others – so she’s not sure that was the best way she could’ve spent her time.

At least it kept her from pacing a hole in the carpets.

“Mrs Hollander.” His voice is a blunt weapon, and even though she wields a voice like that of her own when she has to, she still feels like she’s in trouble. “How is the weather?”

“Mr Rozanov, lovely to speak with you. Quite cold here, although I imagine not as cold as Moscow.”

“Yes. I wish to speak with you about my son.” Jesus. This is going to be the longest brief call of her life, isn’t it. Yuna tries to identify the part of her that yearns to be pleasant and likeable and amiable and cow it into submission. “I have many problems with him, and I would be thanking you for helping.”

Right, no problem, she can stamp out that flare of friendliness easily with the fucking audacity of what she’s hearing. “You have ‘problems’ with him? Because of who he is?”

“Yes. He is young, and stubborn. Like donkey. He is only thinking of what is now, what is tomorrow. Never what is next year. I have told him this too much times, now he is thinking I am stupid old fool.”

“My son can be stubborn, too,” Yuna says diplomatically. “Many young men are, at that age.”

“Yes,” Grigori says. “I remember this. But as parent, I must protect him, yes? Even from himself, sometimes.”

That gets Yuna somewhere tender, under the ribs.

“I understand,” she says. “I would do anything to protect my son.”

“And you are protecting him, yes? Interview, photos – you protect him with this. Because big threat is to his career, mm?”

“That is one threat, and the threat we are addressing with the interview, yes. Other threats are being handled in other ways.”

Grigori makes an sort of approving grunt. “I respect this. But threats for your son are not the same as threats of mine.”

Yuna has an idea of what he might mean, but she’s also extremely, notably, very much not conversant in modern Russian societal norms. If anything requires clear, blunt language, it’s this. “Could you tell me what that means?”

“This is meaning that my … contacts in ministries are knowing Russian government will be promoting Christian values. Family values. It will be number of years before it is not safe for a boy like … our boys.”

Through the phone, she can feel a hard stare. The stare of a man who made it through the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, she thinks, which must have been no mean feat. “Is it possible to protect Ilya from that?”

“Not if this interview is published.”

And there’s the rub. What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander. And though it hurts her to say it, because if Shane were across an ocean in a strange land, she’d be begging Grigori Rozanov to do what’s best for him, she has to say: “Mr Rozanov, your son is an adult.”

“Mrs Hollander.” Grigori sounds exhausted, in a way Yuna has only heard from other parents of young men. “He is adult, but to me, he is always moy synochek. If I live long enough for him to be old man with grey hair, I will still look at him and see my little boy.”

Yuna swallows to try and clear the tightness in her throat. “He’s your baby.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t wish to cast aspersions on your homeland, Mr Rozanov,” Yuna says carefully, “and I certainly won’t pretend that North America is perfect. But is it possible that the best way to protect your boy is to let him leave?”

“This causes other problems,” Grigori says. Which is not a no. Yuna takes note of this as the start of the negotiations. “He was too young for Vancouver, but already there is noise about Sochi. Pressure from Komitet, pressure from Minsport…”

“Four years is long enough for him to gain citizenship elsewhere, if that would help.”

“Russia will not recognize two passports. He is Russian here, only. Always. Unless he gives it up. And this I do not think he can do, Mrs Hollander. His brother, his niece, his mother’s grave – all here.”

“His father, too,” Yuna says gently.

Grigori makes a low sound – it could be a scoff or an unvoiced laugh or just an exhalation. Yuna can’t tell. “No, no, Ilyushka is very like me. I could not wait to get out of father’s house either.”

“Grigori,” Yuna tries, “you’re still his father. I’ve only spoken with Ilya briefly, but even that was enough to see how much he respects you.”

There’s a faint click and a longer exhale. Yuna suspects Grigori is smoking. She longs fervently for a cigarette of her own.

“Respect is not enough. One hand holds fame, celebrity,” – she particularly enjoys the cadence of ‘celebrity’ in this accent – “money, beautiful girls and boys. And the other is holding his Papa, who he is thinking is a paranoid Soviet starpjor.”

“Grigori. What would you like me to do?”

The silence hangs long enough for her to pull the phone away and check the connection. “I cannot ask you to stop protecting your son. So I cannot ask you to be stopping this. But, my Ilya … he respects you. I hear this in his words. Please, talk to him. Maybe he will be trusting, if it is coming from you.”

“I can try.”

He laughs, loud and unabashed. Whatever she expected from this call, it wasn’t a strong desire to take Grigori Rozanov out for a boozy dinner and share anecdotes of their obstinate boys. “I know this tone. This is what we say to our Ministries when they tell us of unpossible new targets.”

“I will try,” she insists.

“Yes yes, I believe you. And we both know he will ignore you too. Okay. Will you tell me: afterwards, after this happens. How will his team be? Will he be safe?”

Yuna brightens, at once on firmer ground. “I’m sure you know that things are never guaranteed when you’re dealing with this many people,” she says – Grigori strikes her as a man who will appreciate an honest caveat more than blustering surety – “but I am very confident that your son’s team will do right by him. In fact – and I will say this only once – in this one area, Boston might be doing better than Montreal.”

“Naturally,” Grigori says. “Boston had sense to draft my boy first.”

“You can comfort yourself with that,” Yuna says primly, “while my boy beats yours for the Rookie of the Year award.”

“Hockey parents!” Grigori laughs. “All we know is competition.”

Yuna allows herself to chuckle, more relief than humour. “Yes. Even when we’re on the same team.”

Chapter End Notes

Thank you all for the overwhelming interest! So many of you had fun questions or comments, and while we could not possibly reply to them all, we are thinking about doing a little author commentary supplement to this fic. If you’d be into that, comment to let us know, and make sure to subscribe to the authors so you can see if/when we post it. We also have a few ideas for sequels which will explicitly address some of the things you want to see, so subscribe to the “baby shane’s big night out” series to see those when they go up!

A few notes:

• Ritzy and Connie (we are informed these are the hockey-bro versions of our AO3 names) were born within 6-12 months of the protagonists of Heated Rivalry, and this is drawn from our own experiences as young adults coming up in the early socmed era.
• Nightclubs used to (and in some cases still do) hire professional photographers to take photographs of their attendees, which were mostly dumped (unedited! Unfiltered!) onto Facebook so any jackass could see them and/or tag you. Being at the nightclub was presumed to be blanket permission for this.
  • Yes, this includes gay clubs. The assumption, at least for the clubs Ritzy got photographed at circa 2009-2014, was that if you were at the club, you were sufficiently out to be documented at the club.
  • People - not just gay people! - did get fired or face other consequences if these photos circulated back to their boss. Especially if they called out “sick” and their boss suspected this was code for “hungover”. Or even for just wearing something too risqué for their employer’s tastes.
• Social media moved a LOT slower in this era. These days, if something goes viral, it goes viral to everyone at the same time. Back in 2010, things might only go viral in the hyperlocal blogs or news sites, which have largely gone extinct in the modern internet ecosystem. For example, everybody in Montreal’s gaybourhood might hear about some piece of gossip, but it wouldn’t necessarily make it out of those circles for weeks to months (or at all.)
  • Social media marketing/monitoring was still an early/emerging job at this time! The power of Facebook for brands wasn’t really unleashed until the “Share a Coke” campaign launched in 2012. This absolutely would have flown under the radar of the NHL.

• We did check: terms like “rainbow capitalism” and “Vladolf Putler” were already in use in 2010.
• If you weren’t big into reading the news during Cablegate, it’s hard to overstate how entirely it superseded every other headline. This lasted for a while.
• Have a Google of Robert Newton and Matthew Mitcham if you feel like being sad about the commercialisation opportunities for queer elite Olympic athletes in Ye Olden Days.
• Ritz said “wouldn’t the whole Grigori thing be so much more tragic if he wasn’t an outright villain, but rather, a flawed man desperately doing his best in a terrible situation?” and we both took psychic damage. Ritz’s reasoning:
  • There was a brief window, post-Soviet but pre-Putin, where things were actually getting better for queer (and other marginalised) Russians. Grigori, working for the police in Moscow, would’ve had a front row seat to watch those communities flourish and then be crushed.
  • At least in show canon (which is our primary source), Grigori isn’t really abusive… but he’s got a truly toxic combination of Slavic Masculinity and Post-WW2 Euro-Boomer Trauma.
    • To put this in context, Ritz’s dad isn’t even Slavic, and the closest he’s ever come to complimenting his child is saying “for a smart kid, you’re incredibly stupid”. Ritz!Dad isn’t abusive. He loves Ritz. He would kill for Ritz. That’s just how his generation of Euro-dads are.
    • Connie would like to take this opportunity to shout out her dad for telling her that he loves her every day.
  • Bonus round: to survive Soviet- and post-Soviet-era policing, Grigori probably has decent people skills. Even if you read him as an abusive asshole (which is valid!), he has a pretty good guess of how to pull on Yuna’s heartstrings to try to get what he wants. How genuine is he being in that conversation? Up to you. :)