Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Yuna Hollander, David Hollander & Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander & Jackie Pike

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Jackie Pike, St-Simon (Boston Bears), Ryan Carmichael, Adrian Zelenko [OC], Daniel Blake [OC], Niklas Edvardsen [OC], Derek Kessler [OC], Anders Holmqvist [OC], Carter Mackinnon [OC]

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s01e02 Olympians (Heated Rivalry), Post-Episode: s01e02 Olympians (Heated Rivalry), NHL | National Hockey League, trade fic, Slow Burn, very slow burn, POV Alternating, situationship - Freeform, They don't know they're in love, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander has had enough, Idiots in Love, Communication Failure, nhl trade, team separation, long distance, Tension, They're Fine (They Are Not Fine), this will hurt before it gets better, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Constipation, Emotional Repression, Unrequited Love (It's Not But it Feels That Way), Self-Protective Shane Hollander, Delayed Realization, Oblivious to their own feelings, trigger warning: talk of suicide, New Team [Carolina Breakers], Shane Hollander Leaves the Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of The Distance Between Us

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-14 Completed: 2026-05-26 Words: 77,974 Chapters: 11/11

Breathing Room

Summary

Shane Hollander arrives in Vegas with a question he hasn’t spoken out loud.

It isn’t complicated, exactly. It’s just the kind of question that requires honesty he isn’t sure he’s ready for - about what he and Ilya Rozanov have been doing for the past few years, about what six months of silence after Sochi actually meant, and about whether any of it is worth staying close to or whether he finally needs to go.

He gets his answer in a locked bathroom at the NHL Awards.

Ilya spends the summer convinced that Shane is fine. Upset? Yes. Angry? Definitely. But Shane always felt things fiercely despite what everyone said about him when he had his back turned. He’d calm down over the summer and then he’d be there like he always had been. He fills the silence with discipline and routine and the comfortable certainty that later is still available to him.

He’s wrong.

By the time Ilya understands what he actually lost, Shane is already gone; and Ilya is left trying to find a way back to someone who closed the door long before Ilya had ever thought to just walk through it.

Chapter 1: Not Nothing

The NHL Awards were exactly what they always were. 

Loud. Expensive. Carefully staged to look spontaneous. A room full of professional athletes in suits that cost more than most people’s rent, performing a version of themselves that the cameras and the sponsors and the league office had collectively agreed was the version worth broadcasting. Shane had been doing this for a few years now, long enough to know how to be here without actually being here - the nod, the smile, the appropriate reaction at the appropriate moment, the practiced ease of a man comfortable in his own skin. 

He was not comfortable in his own skin tonight. 

He had known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Rozanov would be here tonight. Of course he would be here - he’d just won the Stanley Cup and had the kind of season that generated a specific gravity of its own, pulling every camera and every question and every piece of available attention toward him like a natural force. He would be at the center of this the way he was at the center of everything he walked into, easy and magnetic and completely aware of the effect he was having and completely unbothered by it. 

Shane had been managing his awareness of Ilya Rozanov since he’d met the man. 

He was good at it, mostly. You got good at things you practised consistently, and Shane had practised this with the same focused discipline he brought to everything else - the deliberate calibration of attention, the careful maintenance of a face that gave nothing away, the internal architecture of compartmentalization that kept the thing between them in its designated space, which was: separate from everything that actually mattered. 

But that had been before Sochi. Before six months of silence so complete it had the weight and texture of something intentional. Before Shane had spent the better part of a winter quietly restructuring his understanding of what exactly he had thought they were doing, and arriving, eventually, at an answer that he had not been comfortable to sit with. 

He stood backstage, waiting for their turn to present the award for Sportsman-like Conduct, an irony that was not lost on him, while everyone around him was frantically wondering where Rozanov was, but he wasn’t anxious about it… absolutely not. He looked at his glass of water - he didn’t drink during the season, and technically the season was over, but he’d found over the years that he thought more clearly without it and tonight he wanted to think clearly - and he watched what rooms did when Ilya Rozanov entered them. 

The shift was subtle. Just a reorientation. A small collective turning of attention toward a spot, the way plants turned toward light without deciding to. 

Shane looked back at his water. 

He was fine. He had been fine for six months. He was going to continue being fine for the remainder of this evening, and then he was going to go back to his room and sleep, and tomorrow he was going to fly back to Montreal and deal with the thing he had not yet decided to deal with - the trade rumors that had been circling for weeks, quiet enough that they hadn’t been confirmed yet, present enough that he could feel them the way you felt weather before it arrived. He still wasn’t sure what was in store for his future in the NHL, now that he’d failed to secure the Stanley Cup for Montreal before Rozanov managed to secure it for Boston, he only knew that there were whispers about a restructuring and new leadership throughout the organization. Nothing concrete. Nothing official. He’d quietly reached out to his agent to give her a heads up on what he’d been able to parse together, but he hadn’t said anything to anyone else yet. 

One thing at a time. 

He was fine. 

He was acutely aware of the other man when he came to a stop behind him, and he looked in his direction, irritated by the casual smirk on his face. He scowled. 

“Looking for me?” 

“Fuck, Rozanov. What the fuck? We’re on in like five seconds!” 

Ilya looked entirely unbothered by this information. “Fifty seconds,” he said, with the particular ease of a man who had never once in his life experienced a consequence for being late to anything. “We are fine.” 

Shane stared at him. “Does it matter to you at all that everyone backstage has been having a heart attack looking for you?” 

“Not really.” 

It was the not really that did it - the complete, cheerful absence of concern, delivered in that accent with that expression, like the mild inconvenience of an entire production staff was simply not a category of thing Ilya Rozanov was required to engage with. Shane felt something hot move through his chest that he identified immediately as irritation and was not going to identify it as anything else. 

And it didn’t help that Ilya Rozanov being in a suit was profoundly unfair. 

Shane had developed what he considered a reasonable working relationship with his own attraction to the Russian center over the course of the five years he had known him, which was to say: he acknowledged its existence, he managed its expression, and he kept it in the compartment where it lived and visited it only under controlled circumstances. This had served him well. It was not a solution, exactly, but it was a functional arrangement. 

The suit was a complication. 

It wasn’t even a particularly unusual suit - dark, well-cut, the kind of thing that looked expensive without announcing it. But Rozanov wore things the way he did everything, with an ease that made it look like the suit had been designed around him specifically, like the alternative had never been considered. And he was standing close enough that Shane could smell whatever he was wearing, something faint and specific that his memory had filed away from the last time they had been this close, which was months ago now, in a context that Shane was not going to think about. 

I’m fine, he had said 

He was fine. 

“Where were you, anyway?” he snarled, because he needed to say something that was the safest available option. 

Ilya’s mouth curved. “Busy.” He was watching him with the expression he sometimes wore that Shane could never fully decipher - not quite a smirk, not quite anything readable, something in the eyes that did whatever it did and that Shane had spent five  years either responding to or walking away from, alternating between the two with what he was not proud to admit was an inconsistency that bordered on embarrassing. 

One word. Completely uninformative. Delivered with the specific quality of someone who knew exactly what busy was going to imply to the person receiving it and had chosen it deliberately. 

Shane’s jaw tightened. “Oh yeah? With who?” 

The question came out before he could stop it, sharper than he intended, with an edge that had no business being there. He heard it land in the air between them and felt the immediate, specific discomfort of having revealed something he had not meant to reveal - not because it was true, because it wasn’t, it was just irritation, it was purely irritation - but because Ilya’s eyes moved to his face with the particular attention of someone who had just been handed something interesting and was deciding what to do with it. 

He was saved, mercifully, by the floor manager appearing at Ilya’s shoulder. 

“You’re on,” she said, with the clipped urgency of someone who had spent the last six minutes in a controlled panic and was not yet sufficiently recovered to be polite about it. 

“We’re on,” Ilya said, to Shane, like this was information he was passing along rather than a situation he had caused, and turned toward the stage with the easy confidence of a man who had not spent the last thirty seconds being jealous - not jealous, irritated, there was a meaningful difference and Shane understood it clearly - of a word. 

Shane followed him out, glaring. 

Busy, he thought, one more time, in the particular way you returned to a bruise. 

The moment they cleared the stage Shane was moving. 

Not running - he was not going to run, he was a professional and he had years of muscle memory telling him how to exit a stage with composure - but walking with the kind of focused velocity that left no room for conversation or eye contact or anything except the corridor ahead of him and the door at the end of it. 

He needed thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds in a room where nobody was looking at him. 

The hand had been on his back for approximately five seconds. 

He had counted. 

It had started as something that could have been explained away - a natural placement, the kind of incidental contact that happened when two people stood shoulder to shoulder to take a selfie… at a podium in front of a room full of people and cameras. Shane had registered it and filed it and kept his face exactly where it needed to be, because he was good at this, because he had been good at this for a while now, because the entire architecture of what he and Rozanov were to each other in public rested on his ability to be good at this. 

And then the hand had moved. 

Not dramatically. Not in any way that would have registered on camera, or to anyone standing more than two feet away. Just - lower. A slow, deliberate slide that stopped just above the line of what could still technically be called his back, resting there with a light, specific pressure that communicated something Rozanov had absolutely no right to communicate in the middle of the NHL awards with so many cameras and the entire league watching. 

Shane kept smiling. That bastard.

He had kept his voice even when they read the nominees. He had laughed at the appropriate moment when Rozanov made the joke that the writers had given him, because he delivered it with that accent and that timing and the room had loved it, and Shane had stood beside him and smiled and felt the warm weight of Ilya’s hand and wanted, with a specificity that was genuinely alarming, to be anywhere else in the world. 

Not because he didn’t want it.

That was the problem. That had always been the problem. 

He pushed through the door of the backstage bathroom and let it swing shut behind him and stood in the sudden quiet of it - marble, ambient light, the engineered hush of expensive Vegas silence - and put both hands on the edge of the sink and looked at himself in the mirror and did a thorough, honest inventory of the situation. 

He had spent six months building something solid. Six months of quiet, deliberate reconstruction - of his expectations, his understanding of what they were, the careful dismantling of the habit of wanting things from Ilya Rozanov that he was not going to give him. He had done good work. He had arrived tonight prepared, composed, ready to be in the same room as the man and feel exactly what he felt and manage it the way he always managed it, cleanly and without incident. 

And then the bastard had put his hand on his back on a stage in front of the entire league and moved it approximately four inches downward and in five seconds Shane’s careful architecture had developed a significant structural problem. 

He turned on the cold tap. 

He was twenty-three years old. He was the captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. He was - probably - about to be traded, which was a thing he had not told anyone yet and was not going to think about right now because there was already enough happening in his chest without adding that to it. He was standing in a bathroom at the NHL Awards because Ilya Rozanov had touched the small of his back and he had needed to leave the building in any way available to him, which was not - this was not who he was. He was not the person who fled into bathrooms because of a hand on his back. 

He was also, apparently, exactly that person tonight. 

He heard the door. 

He didn’t turn around.

He already knew. 

Of course he already knew - because this was how it always went, because Rozanov had some specific and infuriating radar for the moments when Shane was least prepared for him, because the universe had apparently decided that Shane Hollander’s particular form of suffering was being found in bathrooms by the one person capable of making everything significantly worse and significantly better at the same time, and had arranged tonight accordingly. 

The soft, final click of the lock. 

Shane looked at himself in the mirror. 

Get it together, he thought, with some urgency. 

He was almost sure he wasn’t going to.

He heard Rozanov cross the bathroom behind him. He didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on his own reflection and his hands on the edge of the sink and focused on the particular discipline of not reacting, which he had been practicing all evening with diminishing returns. 

The other man stopped somewhere behind his left shoulder. Shane could see him in the mirror if he let himself look, which he wasn’t going to do, because looking at Ilya Rozanov in a mirror in a locked bathroom was not going to help anything. 

The silence stretched. 

It had a specific quality to it, the silence between them - it always had, even on the ice, even in the press corridors where they performed mutual antagonism for cameras. It was never empty. It was the silence of two people who had too much history to fill a room with nothing and both knew it. 

“Well?” Ilya said. 

Shane looked up. 

His eyes met Rozanov’s eyes in the mirror and immediately regretted it, because the Russian was watching him with that expression - the one that wasn’t quite a smirk and wasn’t quite anything Shane had ever been able to fully decode, the one that infuriatingly lived somewhere between amusement and want and something underneath both of those things that he’d never let stay on his face long enough to be identified. 

He turned around. 

“Well, what?” He snapped, and his voice was sharper than he’d intended, which was happening a lot tonight, which was information he was going to ignore. “What do you want from me, Rozanov?!” 

The man in question looked at him for a moment. Something moved through his expression - something that Shane caught and lost in the same instant - and then he glanced down at the floor and back up and said, with the complete, easy confidence of a man who had never once considered that this might not be a reasonable thing to say: 

“Are you not going to suck my dick?” 

Shane stared at him. 

The words took a moment to fully arrive, they way certain impacts did - you felt the collision before the pain registered. And then they arrived completely, and Shane understood them not just as words but as everything underneath them - the six months of silence, the hand on his back on the stage, busy, the locked door, all of it assembling into a single, clarifying picture of exactly what Rozanov thought this was and exactly what he though Shane was within it. 

Available. Unchanged. Waiting. Dispensible. 

The anger that moved through him was clean and specific and had been a long time building. 

“Fuck you!” He hissed. “Why don’t you suck mine?!” 

Something flickered in Rozanov’s expression. Not the reaction Shane had expected - not irritation, not the escalation of the push-and-pull that had always been their native language - but something more careful. More attentive. Like Shane had said something that required closer reading than the words themselves. 

He reached out. 

His fingers found Shane’s jaw with a lightness that had nothing in common with the pointed deliberateness of the hand on his back, a touch so different in quality that it short-circuited something in Shane’s chest before he could stop it. This was not provocation. This was - something Shane did not have a safe word for, something that lived in a part of Rozanov he only ever showed behind locked doors, in the spaces where performance fell away. 

“Maybe ask nice,” Ilya said, quietly. 

And Shane - god help him - almost did. 

Almost, because the touch was still on his jaw and Rozanov was close enough that Shane could feel the warmth of him and there was a version of this that his body remembered very clearly and wanted with an urgency that had nothing to do with sense or self-preservation. Almost, because six months of careful reconstruction had apparently not been quite enough to fully dismantle the specific pull of Ilya Rozanov in a locked room with that expression on his face. 

Then Rozanov kissed him. 

It was hard and a little unsteady and more urgent than it was usually like, like the six months had cost Rozanov something too, like the wanting had built up somewhere he hadn’t fully managed, and Shane felt it land in his chest and felt his hands come up - one against the other man’s chest, not pushing, just present - and kissed him back. 

For a moment. 

Several moments. 

Long enough that the careful architecture of his evening did not so much develop a structural problem as it ceased to exist entirely. 

And then something shifted. Not a decision - he had stopped being able to make clean decisions approximately forty-five seconds into standing at a podium when Rozanov’s hand slid down his back - but a recognition. The specific, physical recognition of a limit he had crossed before and understood the cost of, a place where the thing he was doing and the thing he had spent six months understanding about himself stopped being reconcilable. 

He pulled back. 

Rozanov looked at him. Close enough that Shane could see exactly what was moving through his expression - confusion, recalibration, the beginning of something that hadn’t fully formed yet. 

“No,” Shane said. 

The word came out quiet. Steady in a way that surprised him, given that nothing else about his internal state was remotely steady. He was not angry anymore - or he was, somewhere underneath, but the anger had burned down into something that felt, uncomfortably, like clarity. 

“Hollander–” 

“No.” He took a step back. Put space between them that felt necessary in the specific way that necessary things sometimes felt terrible. “I can’t… I can’t keep doing this.” 

Rozanov’s expression shifted. “What does that mean?” 

“It means no,” Shane said. He held the Russian’s gaze and felt the pull of him again - the specific, exhausting, constant pull that had not diminished by a single degree over six months of silence, which was its own type of hell - and stood in it and did not move. “It means I’m done.” 

“You are done?” Roznov repeated, slowly, like he was translating something. 

“Yeah.” Shane picked up his jacket from where it had ended up on the counter. He didn’t remember putting it there. The last several minutes had a slightly blurred quality at the edges. He looked at Rozanov one more time - at the confusion in his face, the thing underneath the confusion that Shane was not going to let himself look too closely at - and felt something that was not quite grief and not quite relief settle into his chest alongside everything else. 

“I’m done,” He said again. Quieter this time. Not for Rozanov. For himself. 

He reached for the door. 

“What does that mean?” 

It wasn’t a question. It was the particular flat delivery that Rozanov used when something had landed and he hadn’t decided what to do with it yet - not angry, not dismissive, just very still in the way he got when he was paying close attention and didn’t want you to know he was. 

Shane’s hand stayed on the door handle. 

“It means what I said,” He huffed, without turning around. 

“You say you are done.” A pause. “Dont with what, exactly?” 

Shane turned around. 

Rozanov was watching him with that careful stillness, arms at his sides, the confusion in his face having resolved into something more focused and considerably harder to look at. Shane looked at him and felt the full, specific weight of the evening - the backstage corridor, the stage, the hand on his back, the locked door, all of it - and felt something that had been sitting compressed in his chest for six months begin to move. 

“This,” Shane said as he gestured between them, a short frustrated motion. “Whatever this is. This - thing that we’ve been doing.” 

“This thing,” Rozanov repeated. 

“Yeah.” Shane’s voice was coming out harder than intended, which was happening because the alternative was it coming out as something he wasn’t going to let it come out as… something vulnerable. “This thing where you disappear for six months and then show up like nothing appended and expert me to just - pick up where we left off like I’ve just been sitting here and waiting for you.” 

Something shifted in Rozanov’s expression. “I did not–” 

“You did,” Shane hissed. “That’s exactly what you did. You walked up to me tonight like six months was nothing. Like what you said to me in Sochi was nothing. Like I was nothing. And then you followed me in here and you–” He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Looked at the ceiling briefly and then back at Rozanov because he was not going to look at the ceiling while he said this. “You told me to suck your dick, Rozanov.” 

He was quiet for a moment. 

“I know what I did,” he said, carefully. 

“Do you?” Shane spat. “Because from where I’m standing it looks like what you did was decide that after six months of complete silence I would still be - available to you. Like nothing between us had any weight to it. Like I’m just–” He stopped again, jaw tight, working through the words. “Like I’m something you can put down and pick back up whenever it’s convenient for you.” 

“That is not–” he started. 

“That’s exactly what it looks like to me!” Shane’s voice cracked slightly on the last word, not dramatically, just at the edge of it, and he felt the crack and kept going because stopping now would be worse. “Do you have any idea what the last six months have been like? Watching you just - not. Not text, not acknowledge me, not anything. After Sochi. After–” He stopped. He was not going to finish that sentence. “I spent six months feeling like a complete idiot for expecting anything at all, and then you show up tonight and you put your hand on my back on that stage–” 

“Hollander–” 

“-and you follow me in here and you act like it’s all completely normal, like nothing needs to be explained or addressed or–” He exhaled sharply. “I don’t know what this is between us. I have genuinely never known what this is. But I know what it’s not supposed to feel like, and it’s not supposed to feel like this. Like being used.” 

The word landed in the room and stayed there. 

Rozanov’s expression had done something complicated - a series of movements Shane couldn’t fully track, something that moved through his face too quickly to name. His jaw was tight. He looked, for just a moment, like a man who had been handed a picture of himself he didn’t recognize and was trying to reconcile it with the one he had in his head. 

“I do not think of you this way,” he said. The words came out carefully, deliberate, like he was placing them. “Like something to be used.” 

“Then what do you think of me as?” Shane said. “Because from here it looks like you think of me as a toy that you can pick back up whenever you feel like it. So tell me. What am I to you, Rozanov? What is this?” 

The Russian looked at him. 

The silence stretched long enough that Shane felt the familiar, specific humiliation of having asked a question he already knew the answer to - of having said the true thing out loud and been met with silence, which was its own kind of answer. 

“It is–” Rozanov started. Stopped. Something moved across his face that Shane had never seen there before, something that looked uncomfortably like someone trying to reach for something they didn’t have the language for yet. “It is not nothing.” He said at last. “To me. You are not - nothing.” 

Shane stared at him. 

You are not nothing. That was what he had. After six months of silence and a smirk like he expected Shane to fall to his knees on a dirty bathroom floor and this entire disaster of an evening, that was what Ilya Rozanov was able to give him. You are not nothing.

The anger came back, quieter this time and somehow worse for it. 

“That’s not an answer,” Shane hissed. 

“I know.” Rozanov’s voice was low, raw. “I know it is not answer. I am - am trying to say something and I do not–” He stopped. Made a short frustrated gesture with one hand that Shane had never seen from him before, a crack in the composure, something genuinely unscripted. “There are things I should have said. In Sochi. After Sochi. I know this.” 

“Then why didn’t you?” 

No answer. 

“Why didn’t you say them?” Shane said. “Why didn’t you text? Why didn’t you - why did you just ignore me? For six months, Rozanov, you did nothing. And now you’re standing in a bathroom telling me I”m not nothing, which is–” He laughed, a short humorless sound. “Thats the bar? I’m not nothing? That’s what six months gets me?” 

“Hollander–” 

“I’m done talking about this,” Shane said. He picked up his jacket. His hands were steadier than they had any right to be. “I’m going back out the ceremony.” 

Rozanov was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in the same careful deliberate way he’d said everything in the last few minutes that had landed wrong: “Fourteen-twelve.” 

Shane stopped. 

“My room,” he said. “Fourteen-twelve. If you want to - continue.” 

Shane turned to look at him. 

He stood there for a moment, looking at Rozanov’s face - at the careful steadiness of it, the thing underneath the steadiness that Shane could see and could not name and was too tired and too hurt to try to name tonight - and felt the pull of him, one more time, the specific exhausting pull that apparently six months and a locked bathroom and everything he had just said out loud was not sufficient to extinguish. 

He turned back toward the door. 

“Good luck tonight, Rozanov,” he said. “On the MVP award.” 

He walked out. 

The corridor hit him with noise and light and the business of people who had no idea what had just happened, and Shane moved through it without stopping, his jacket over one arm, his jaw set, the number fourteen-twelve sitting in his head like something he was going to spend the rest of the night thinking about. 

You are not nothing.

He couldn’t go back to the ceremony. He couldn’t risk anyone being able to read his expression in a way that he wasn’t ready for yet. He couldn’t risk questions. If anyone asked him tomorrow where he was, he’d tell them he started feeling sick and had to go lie down… at least it wasn’t a complete lie. His teammates would probably just assume that standing in such close proximity to Rozanov, his vicious rival that he hated so much, had made him physically ill. They didn’t have to know that his reaction had nothing to do with hatred. It was– no, he wasn’t going to think about that. There was no room for that kind of thinking… especially not now. Especially after Rozanov had made it very clear what Shane had meant to him… not nothing. 

Congratulations, Hollander, he thought to himself bitterly. You made it a step above nothing… 

He took the elevator to his floor. 

He was not going to go to room fourteen-twelve. 

He was absolutely not going to go to room fourteen-twelve tonight. 

He let himself into his room and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall, and felt the full weight of the evening settle over him - the six months, the stage, the bathroom, all of it - and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had finally said the true things out loud and found that saying them hadn’t fixed anything, that he was going to be carrying this for a while yet. 

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. 

He didn’t pick it up.

Fourteen-twelve.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and did not think about it, and thought about it anyway, the way you thought about things you had specifically instructed yourself not to think about, which was to say: constantly, and with great detail, and without any of the distance you had been hoping for. 

He had come to Vegas with a question. 

It was not a question he had told anyone about - not Hayden, not his agent, not his mother, not anyone - because it was the kind of question that required a certain amount of privacy to even formulate, the kind that lived in the space between what you admitted to yourself at two in the morning and what you were willing to say out loud in the daylight. He had carried it through the flight to Vegas and through the awards show and through the backstage corridor and busy and the stage and the hand on his back, and he had arrived at the bathroom with it still unanswered and had hoped, in the specific way you hoped for things you weren’t ready to admit you were hoping for, that something in that room would answer it for him. 

The question was simple. 

Was there something here worth staying close to, or did he need to go?

His agent had been fielding quiet interest from several teams for the better part of a month, ever since he’d told her about the rumors. Quietly of course. Shane loved Montreal, he truly did, but he didn’t want to be left with his pants around his ankles when Montreal decided it was time to move on; he also didn’t want to burn a bridge in case they were just that… rumors. He knew things like this happened all the time, that organizations restructured after something they’d hoped for hadn’t panned out. He knew that his rookie contract was coming up for renewal, and he knew that Montreal didn’t have to renew it. He knew that the rumors were circulating because he understood things went into motion before they were announced or anyone was made officially aware there was anything even happening in this business. His gut told him they weren’t just rumors, that his contract wasn’t going to be renewed. The only question was where he landed, and his agent had told him, carefully and professionally, that he had more input in the process than players usually did, that his value was high enough that he could reasonably advocate for a destination. 

He had been sitting on that information. 

Sitting on it because the answer to where he wanted to go was tangled up in a question he hadn’t been ready to ask, which was whether Ilya Rozanov was a reason to stay in the Eastern Conference or a reason to leave it entirely. 

If tonight had gone differently - if the bathroom had gone differently, if you are not nothing had been followed by something that had actually meant something, if Ilya had for once in his life found the words for the thing that Shane had always been able to feel underneath all the deflection and the locked doors and the six months of silence - then he would have called his agent tomorrow and told her Eastern Conference, Atlantic Division. Close. Within reach. The kind of geography that left room for something to develop into whatever it was going to develop into. 

But tonight had gone differently. 

Tonight had gone exactly the way Shane should have known it was going to go, which was to say: Ilya had given him the minimum. You are not nothing. A room number. The bare architecture of a door left open without any of the honesty that would have made walking through it possible. 

Shane stared at the ceiling. 

Colorado had come up in conversation a lot over the past month. It was an up and coming all-star team. There were a lot of guys on the team that made it something special. Having him would just make them stronger, he knew that. It was a different conference and a different part of the continent, it would give him a clean break… but it would also isolate him completely from everyone that he knew and loved. That felt more like a punishment for him than anything helpful. But… Carolina had come up twice in conversations his agent had relayed. A team in transition, building toward something, a coaching staff that wanted a center with his specific skill set. Same conference, different division - he’d see Boston maybe three or four times a season instead of the constant rotation of the Atlantic. Enough distance to breathe. Not so much that it felt like running. 

It felt, lying on a hotel bed in Vegas at two in the morning with fourteen-twelve still sitting in his head, like exactly the right amount of distance. 

He reached for his phone. 

He didn’t call his agent - it was two in the morning and she would answer, she always answered, but this wasn’t a two in the morning phone call. This was a decision that deserved daylight and a clear head, neither of which he currently had. 

He opened her contact and looked at her name on the screen and felt the decision settle into him the way decisions settled when they had been made before you consciously made them - quietly, without drama, with the particular weight of something that was already true. 

Carolina. 

He put the phone face down on the nightstand. 

Fourteen-twelve, he thought, one last time, with the specific exhausted finality of someone closing a door. 

He closed his eyes. 

He was not going to room fourteen-twelve. 

And tomorrow he was going to call his agent and tell her to make the calls, and the question he had carried to Vegas was going to have its answer, and the answer was going to be: distance. Enough to breathe. Enough to stop waiting for something that Ilya Rozanov did not yet know how to give. 

If he was going to be not nothing to Rozanov, then he was also not going to be something to him. 

It wasn’t what he had wanted the answer to be. Honestly, he hadn’t been sure what he’d wanted the answer to be at all. 

But it was the answer that he had. 

He didn’t sleep for a long time. 

Chapter 2: Later

Chapter Summary

Ilya's POV

The summer had a rhythm to it. 

This was what Ilya told himself in the mornings, when he laced up his skates at the private facility he rented in Boston for a few days at the start of every offseason - before he made the inevitable trip back home - and stepped onto the ice at six-thirty with nobody watching and nothing to prove. The rhythm was simple and entirely within his control: ice time at dawn, gym work by nine, film review in the afternoon, dinner alone. Sleep. Repeat. It was a champion’s routine, built on a season that had given him every reason to feel settled and satisfied, and was - by any external measure - exactly that. 

He was fine. 

Vegas had been - a thing. A complicated thing that he had replayed more times than he was going to admit and had arrived at, through a process of careful and deliberate reasoning, a satisfactory understanding of. Shane had been upset. Shane was sometimes upset - it was one of the things about him, the way feeling things came out as heat and edge when someone who had spent years keeping a lid on things and occasionally, spectacularly, stopped. In locked bathrooms. At award ceremonies. In front of Ilya, specifically, which was its own category of thing he was not going to examine too closely. 

That was fine. That was Shane. The anger would pass the way it always passed, and Shane would - eventually - be Shane again. Present. Open. The specific gravity that Ilya had been navigating toward and away from for five years without ever fully committing to either direction. 

He had waited until three in the morning in his room in Vegas. 

He had not been obvious about it - he had not sat by the door or watched his phone with any visible urgency, because he was not the type of man who waited for things. He had showered and changed and poured himself some Vodka and sat on the edge of his hotel bed and told himself that he was winding down from the evening, which happened to involve being dressed and alert and aware of every sound in the corridor outside his room. 

Shane had not come. 

At three in the morning Ilya had accepted this as a fact and lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and told himself it was fine - Shane was upset, Shane needed to cool down, Shane would text him in the morning when the anger had settled into something more manageable and they could find their way back to whatever this was. That was what always happened. The friction resolved. The pattern re-established itself. 

He had checked his phone at three-fifteen. At three-forty. At four. 

Nothing. 

He had eventually fallen asleep, and slept badly, and then woken up at six groggy and unrested, and he picked up his phone with the studied indifference of a man who was not checking for a message and was absolutely checking for a message.

Nothing. 

He had put his phone face-down on the nightstand. 

Fine, he had thought. Shane needed more time. That was allowed. He would text when he was ready. 

He had not texted Shane, either. 

He was aware of this. He was aware of it the way you were aware of a thing you had decided not to examine - present in the peripheral, not directly looked at, filed under the same category as later and when the time is right and the other comfortable deferrals that had served him adequately for most of his adult life. He would text when he had something worth saying. When he had figured out the shape of what Vegas had been and what came after it. When he was ready. 

He was working on being ready. 

The ice helped. It always helped - skating helped the way it always did - demanding just enough of his attention that everything else receded, moving everything else to the background where it was easier to manage. He pushed himself harder than he needed to in the offseason, harder than his conditioning coach would have sanctioned if his conditioning coach had known about the six AM sessions, and found in the burn of it something that functioned adequately as a substitute for the thing he was not thinking about. 

He was fine. 

The summers always went like this. 

Not the Vegas part - that was new, that was its own specific complication sitting in the corner of every day like something he kept almost-looking at and then not. But the rest of it. The offseason rhythm. The Boston facility empty of everyone except him. Boston had celebrated them all June and had since moved on, leaving Ilya in the penthouse with his training schedule and film sessions before he would have to board a plane back to Moscow for the rest of it. 

Boston was his hockey life. He had built it carefully and well over five years - the team, the captaincy, the respect of the league, the penthouse that looked exactly what a successful NHL player’s home was supposed to look like. It was a good life. It was the life he had wanted when he left Moscow at eighteen with his draft invitation and a very clear understanding of the distance he needed to put between himself and his father’s expectations and everything that went with that. 

But in the summers, when the team dispersed and the city went about its business and the penthouse was just a place rather than a base of operations, he became aware of something he didn’t have a clean word for. Not loneliness exactly. More like the recognition of absence - the shape of a life that had been built around hockey and had not yet figured out what it was supposed to be when hockey wasn’t happening. 

Then he’d go to Moscow. 

Not because he wanted to. Not because it felt like home - it had not felt like home since he was nine years old and had stopped feeling like home entirely the older he got and more clearly he understood what the apartment on Leninsky Prospekt actually was, which was a place full of people he was connected to by blood and very little else. He went because it was what he did. Because in the summer he had to go somewhere and Moscow was that somewhere he had always defaulted to, the familiar weight of it preferable, somehow, to the unfamiliar emptiness of staying in Boston with nothing to fill it. 

He went because he hadn’t yet built anything worth staying for. 

He had not examined that thought directly. He was aware of it the same way he was aware of the thread with Jane sitting unread in his phone - peripheral, present, not yet ready to be looked at straight on.

Svetlana texted him on the flight.

You are going back to the city of misery again?

He smiled despite himself. Svetlana had opinions about Moscow that she delivered without ceremony and without particular regard for whether he shared them, which was one of the things he had always found valuable about her. Svetlana Vetrova was the daughter of Anton Vetrov - retired Russian goaltender, seven seasons in the NHL in the eighties and nineties, the kind of man whose name still carried weight in certain rooms - and she had grown up around hockey in a way that meant she understood it completely and felt absolutely no obligation to be reverent about it. 

Ilya knew that she thought that Hollander was a better player than he was, despite all of his jokes about the Canadian being the second-best player in the league, by the way she mentioned how good he was and scoffed at Ilya’s chirps, without provocation - which Ilya found genuinely irritating in the way things irritated him most - when they were too close to true to dismiss.  

Father is not well, he typed back. 

I know. I’m sorry, Ilyusha. A pause, then: Your brother will be insufferable about it.

When is he not?

Fair point. How long are you staying?

As long as I need to.

She sent back a single emoji - the one with the grimacing face - which accurately summarized his feelings about the situation and required no further elaboration. 

He put his phone away and looked out the window at the clouds below and thought, for the first time that summer and not for the last, about Shane. About I don’t know what this is between us. About the exhaustion underneath the words. The sound of someone who had been carrying something too long and had finally stopped pretending it wasn’t heavy.  

He had heard the exhaustion. He had heard it and he had given Shane a room number. 

He pushed the thought away and watched the clouds. 

The thing about Shane Hollander, Ilya had decided somewhere in the third week of June, was that he was probably fine. 

Better than fine, actually. Shane had Pike, who was aggressively loyal in the way of someone who had decided a long time ago that Shane Hollander was worth showing up for and had never reconsidered that position. Shane had his parents, who from everything Ilya had gathered were the kind of parents that actually called and actually cared, which was its own category of thing that Ilya understood abstractly without having a personal frame of reference for it. Shane had his routines and his discipline and a self-sufficiency he had been building his entire career, the kind that didn’t leave room for needing anything from anyone. 

Shane was probably having a perfectly adequate summer. 

Shane was probably not thinking about Vegas at all, or if he was, it was with the clean satisfaction of someone who had finally said what they needed to stay and had walked away from a situation that wasn’t serving them and felt, with the clean pragmatism Shane brought to things when he’d made up his mind, better for it.

Shane probably woke up in the morning and went for his run and had his coffee and texted Hayden and did not think about Ilya Rozanov even once. 

This was fine. 

This was, in fact, ideal. This was exactly what Ilya wanted - for the thing between them to be something that functioned without weight or expectation, something that existed in spaces between everything else without demanding anything from the everything else. Shane being fine without him was the whole point of the arrangement. 

Ilya not being fine about it was not part of the arrangement. 

So, he was fine. 

Moscow in July was hot and familiar and immediately suffocating in the way that only childhood places could manage - every street and smell carrying the weight of a version of himself he had worked very hard to leave behind. 

Andrei met him at the apartment. 

Of course he did. 

His brother was three years older, and looked, as he always did, like a man who had made a series of decisions that had compounded poorly over time. He had their father’s broad shoulders and their father’s hard jaw and none of the things that had once, when they were young and the world was simpler, made Ilya look up to him. He was in the police, like their father had been, which had always struck Ilya as the least surprising thing about him - Andrei had always needed the structure of authority, had always needed to be the one with the power in the room, and the uniform gave him that without requiring anything as complicated as earning it.

“You’re late,” Andrei said, by way of greeting. 

“Flight was delayed,” Ilya said, which was not true. He had not been late. He had arrived exactly when he said he would arrive, and Andrei knew this, and they both knew that you’re late was not a statement about time. 

Anya was in the hallway behind him. 

She was four years old - Ilya had missed her third birthday because of the playoff run, had sent a gift through his manager and felt guilt that sat badly - the gift was a poor substitute for presence and he knew it, yet had sent it anyway because presence was complicated when presence meant dealing with Andrei. She had blonde hair and her mother’s eyes and she looked at Ilya with the frank, uncomplicated curiosity of a child who had not yet learned to perform anything for anyone. 

“Uncle Ilya,” she said gravely, like she was confirming information she had been given.

Something in his chest loosened that had not realized it was tight. He crouched down to her level. “Anya,” he said. “You are bigger.” 

She considered this seriously. “Yes,” she agreed, and held up four fingers to illustrate the point. 

He almost smiled. “Four,” he said. “Very big.” 

She nodded, satisfied and then retreated back into the apartment with the brisk finality of a child who had done what she came to do. Ilya watched her go and felt the complicated ache of loving someone he could not adequately reach because of the person standing between them. 

He stood up and looked at Andrei. 

“How is he?” he asked. 

Andrei’s expression did the thing it always did when the subject of their father came up - compression, something that was not quite grief and not quite resentment but lived somewhere between the two. His brother had given up this past year on pretending that their father was fine and that Ilya had been imagining his concern. “Not good,” he sighed. “He doesn’t–” he stopped. “He didn’t know me this morning.” 

Ilya nodded. He had expected this. The dementia had been progressing for the last two years, the doctors explained the trajectory with clinical patience, and Ilya had understood the trajectory and put it where he put things and had not taken it out more often than necessary. 

“I’ll go see him,” Ilya said. 

“He won’t know you either,” Andrei scoffed. 

“I know,” Ilya said. “I’ll go anyway.

The care facility he’d convinced Andrei to put their father in when he’d wandered out of his home in the middle of winter and been found on by the river without any idea how he’d gotten there, smelled like antiseptic and stale recycled air - the atmosphere of places that existed to manage decline with as much dignity as the situation allowed. Ilya had been here twice before - once when his father was first admitted, once in the spring when the reports had become concerning enough to warrant a visit. Both times had been difficult. The person in front of you physically present and fundamentally absent. 

His father was in a chair by the window with a scowl transfixed on his face. 

He was smaller than Ilya remembered. That was always the thing that caught him - not the blankness in his eyes or the unfocused quality of his attention, but the way age and illness had compressed the man who had loomed so large in Ilya’s childhood into something that looked almost ordinary. Almost fragile. 

Ilya sat down across from him.

His father looked at him with the detached attention of someone observing a stranger, and finding them wanting. There was nothing in his expression that indicated recognition - no flicker, no shift, nothing that suggested the man who had called Ilya lazy, stupid, and a disappointment at Sochi this past winter was anywhere behind those eyes. Just the mild, distant courtesy of someone who had learned that sometimes people came to sit with him because that was what the situation seemed to require. 

Ilya sat there for a long time. 

He thought about his mother. 

He didn’t let himself think about her often - it was one of the things he had learned to manage, the way he had learned to manage other things, through the simple discipline of nothing going there unless he had to. But sitting across from his father in a care facility in Moscow, he found the thought arriving without permission, the way certain thoughts always did. 

She had smiled. That was what he remembered most - not the end of it, which he had spent years putting in a place where it could not reach him during the day, but the before of it. The way she had smiled at everything. Her cheerfulness had been a performance - he had believed it completely as a child and understood it differently as an adult, the effort underneath it, the way she kept everything smooth on the surface while something else was happening beneath.

He had been nine years old. 

He had found her on a Tuesday morning and he had not understood immediately what he was seeing and then he had, and the world had become a different shape than it had been before, and it had stayed that different shape ever since. 

He had never talked to his father about it after his father had told him that his mother’s death was an accident. Yes, an accident… she had accidentally swallowed all of her anti-depressents. He had never asked what had been said in that apartment in the months and years before that Tuesday, what had been demanded, what had been ignored, what a man with his father’s particular brand of cruelty had done with a woman who smiled at everything and asked for very little. He had never asked because asking would have required having a conversation with his father that his father would not have recognized as the conversation it was. 

And now his father was sitting across from him and looking at him as if he were an inconvenient stranger that had interrupted his afternoon, and realized that he was never going to be able to have that conversation. 

Ilya looked at him.

“You were not a good father,” he said, in Russian, quietly, without heat. Not an accusation. Just a fact, stated in the empty room, for no particular reason except that he had been carrying it for a long time and the man in front of him was not going to hear it and was not going to respond and that made it, in some strange way, easier to say. 

His father just blinked at him, scowl still in place. 

Ilya nodded, like that was the response he had expected. He sat for another few minutes and then he stood and put his hand briefly on his father’s shoulder - a gesture that had no warmth in it and no coldness either, just the acknowledgement of a presence - and walked out. 

He wished things could have been different. 

His father died four days later. 

It was early in the morning, the nurse told him, the call arriving at six AM in the apartment that Ilya had purchased for himself in Moscow. Peaceful, she said. In his sleep. 

Ilya sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the wall. 

He waited for something to arrive - the complicated mixture of grief and relief he’d braced for - and what came instead was quieter than either of those things. Stillness. A tension that had been running so long it had finally stopped feeling like tension, finally going quiet. 

He texted Svetlana. 

He is gone.

Her response came within minutes. I’m sorry, Ilyusha. Are you okay?

He thought about it honestly, which was something he did not always do. I don’t know, he typed. I think so. It is - strange?

Strange how?

He looked at the wall of his bedroom, memories of his childhood coming back to him. Memories of the courtyard where he had learned to skate on a makeshift rink his father had flooded one winter, the winter where his father had seemed to find something in him worth encouraging… before that encouragement had curled into an expectation and that expectation into contempt. 

Like something is finished, he typed. Something I did not know was still going.

Svetlana was quiet for a moment, then: You loved him.

Yes, Ilya typed, because it was true the way complicated things were when layered over with other things that were also true. He was not a good man. But yes. 

I know, she replied. That’s the hardest kind.

He put the phone down and sat with it for a while. 

Andrei found him an hour later. 

He had the expression he wore when he was working up to something - a tightness around the jaw, a restlessness in his movements, the restless, coiled energy of someone working up to something. Ilya had known that expression his whole life. He had learned, over the years, that the most efficient response to it was to wait, because Andrei always got to the point eventually and nothing Ilya said before that point made any difference. 

He poured himself coffee and waited. 

“You’re going back to Boston,” he finally said. “After the funeral?” 

“Yes,” Ilya replied, simply. 

“And then what.” It was not a question. 

Ilya looked at him. “I don’t know what you mean.” 

“Yes you do.” Andrei’s voice had an edge to it now, the one that came out when the restlessness had nowhere else to go. “You’ve been waiting for this, you bastard. To leave and not come back. You think I have not noticed all these years how you look at this place? Like it’s something you’re counting down from?”

Ilya said nothing. 

“He’s gone now,” Andrei said. “So what - you just disappear? You think I don’t know what you are planning? What about me, Ilya? What about Anya?!” 

“Andrei–” 

“We’re your family,” he spat. “You’re just going to forget about us you cocksucker?” 

Ilya set his coffee down. 

He looked at his brother - at the man who had grown up with him, under the same father, who had made entirely different choices about what to do with that, choices that had led him here, to this kitchen, to this conversation, scared and strung out and reaching for the one bit of leverage he had left which was the word family and the weight it was supposed to carry. 

“We are family,” Ilya bit out. “That does not mean I owe you anything!” 

“You owe–”

“I owe Anya,” he hissed. “I do not owe you.” 

Andrei stared at him. Something moved through his expression - anger, fear, the collapse of someone who’d just watched their leverage named and diminished.  

“I will set up a trust,” Ilya said after a prolonged and uncomfortable silence. “For Anya. She can access it when she is eighteen. You cannot.” He held his brother’s gaze. “I will give you this apartment. It is yours. That is what I can give you, Andrei. That is what I choose to give you. The rest is done.” 

The silence that followed was the silence of a door closing. 

Andrei looked at him for a long moment, hands curled up into fists, forearms trembling. Ilya knew he wanted to hit him, he’d been punched by his brother enough times throughout his life to not be able to read the signs of it. But, then he looked away, jaw tight, and said nothing, which was the closest thing to acceptance that Ilya was going to get. 

Ilya picked up his coffee. 

He thought about Anya, holding up four fingers with grave seriousness. He thought about the trust fund sitting there for fourteen years, waiting for her, something clean and solid in an environment that had not been able to give her many clean and solid things. He thought about his father in the chair by the window and his mother on a Tuesday morning and the years of carrying things he had believed he had no choice about carrying. 

He was going to go back to Boston. 

He was done with Russia. 

After his father’s funeral it arrived. 

Not dramatically and not all at once, but inevitably it had been something that he knew had been approaching for a long time and had finally gotten close enough to see clearly. Hindsight was what it was. 

He had been watching a film. Boston's power play from the previous seasons, which he had watched enough times to have most of it memorized, and which he was watching again not because he needed to but because watching it was something to do with his hands and his attention when the alternative was sitting in his apartment in Moscow with nothing between him and the thing he had been not-thinking about for weeks now. 

He paused the clip. Rewound it. Watched it again. 

He was not watching the power play. 

He had been replaying Vegas in his head - not for the first time, not even for the hundredth time, but this time something was different. This time instead of arriving at his usual conclusion - Shane had reacted strongly, Shane needed time, Shane would come around - he found himself at the edge of a different one. One he had been actively avoiding arriving at. 

I don’t know what this is between us. I have genuinely never known what this is.

He had heard those words as frustration. As Shane’s anger looking for a target and finding the most available one. That was what he had told himself, because the alternative - that Shane had been saying something true, something he had been sitting with for a long time - was more uncomfortable than he had been prepared to be uncomfortable about in a Vegas bathroom. 

But sitting in his apartment in Moscow in July, after the silence between them sat on his phone, he turned the words over one more time and felt them land differently than they had before. 

Shane had not been asking a rhetorical question. 

Shane had been asking an actual question - the one he had apparently been carrying for five years without being able to get an answer to, the one Ilya had never answered because answering it would have required admitting things he was not ready to admit. And Ilya had responded by telling Shane to suck his dick, which was - he let himself see this clearly, for the first time, without the comfortable buffer of reframing - not a very good answer to give. In fact, it was the opposite of a good answer. It was a deflection so practiced it had stopped feeling like a choice. 

I know what it’s not supposed to feel like. Like being used.

He put the remote down. 

Shane had not been angry. Or he had been angry, but the anger had been sitting on top of something else - something exhausted and genuine and, Ilya understood now, an understanding that had arrived too slowly, that Shane had been hoping for a different answer. Shane had been hoping. He had walked into that bathroom with the anger already on, yes, but underneath the anger had been an openness of someone who was still, despite everything, leaving a door ajar.  

And Ilya had given him a room number. 

He sat with that for a long time. 

Shane had not been fine in that bathroom. Shane had not been fine for six months, probably - had been carrying the silence of the unanswered questions and the exhaustion of wanting something from someone who kept not giving it - while also not entirely being sure of exactly what it was that he had wanted in the first place - and had finally said so in the only venue available to him, which was a locked bathroom at an awards show, and Ilya had been so committed to the comfortable version of what they were that he had handed Shane the minimum and called it enough. 

He thought about what Svetlana had said the last time she had talked about Shane - half the league is probably in love with him - and felt something cold move through his chest that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. 

Shane was not fine without him. 

Or maybe he was - maybe Shane had done exactly what he said and was done, had tidied up the thing between them and filed it away with the practical efficiency he brought to everything else and had moved on. That was possible. That was, Ilya thought with growing discomfort, the version he deserved. 

But. 

The way Shane had looked at him in that bathroom when the anger had dropped for just a moment. The thing in his face that had been there before he covered it. The look of it that Ilya had filed under later and was now, too late and in the wrong country, taking out. 

Shane had felt something. 

Shane had been feeling something for a long time. 

And Ilya had spent five years knowing it and not knowing what to do with it and had finally run out of time. 

He picked up his phone.

He opened the thread with Jane.

He stared at it. 

He put the phone back down, because what he needed to say was not something he had the language for yet, and saying it wrong would be worse than not saying it, and he needed - more time. Just a little more time. He needed a plan. 

Later, he thought. 

But the word had lost some of its reliability. For the first time, sitting in his apartment on a Tuesday in July, Ilya noticed that later had edges on it. That it was not, as he had always assumed, an infinite resource. 

He was going to need to do something about that. 

He was going to need to fix what he hadn’t even realized he had broken.

He texted Svetlana from the airport in August. 

I am not coming back, he typed. I don’t think. 

Her response took a few minutes. When it came it was characteristically direct. Good. Moscow was always too small for you. ESPN released a new special on Hollander… he is very good, Iluyusha. Better than you, I think. 

He stared at the screen. 

He is not better than me.

He is a little bit better than you.

He is absolutely not…

That hat trick he scored last season, against New York’s first line. You should have seen the third goal, it was very beautiful. Like art. I think I am a little bit in love with him. 

Ilya looked at his phone with an expression that he was glad no one in the airport could see. 

You are not in love with Hollander.

No, she agreed, cheerfully. But I do love you.

He smirked. I love you, too. Because he did. Svetlana was his best friend, she knew the parts of him that he kept hidden from everyone else and she didn’t find him less than because of them. She was gorgeous and she was available when he wanted her to be, and yes they did fuck on occassion…  but she was his best friend. 

Da, yes I know this. 

Three little dots kept appearing and then disappearing, until finally: But not like you love, Jane. 

He typed: I am not– 

He deleted it. 

He typed: I am not in love with Jane.

There was a long silence before Svetlana simply said: Yes you are, and I hope he knows how lucky he is.

She knew… of course she knew. She didn’t know who Jane was. But of course she knew that Jane was a man.  

He typed: It is complicated.

It’s always complicated with you, Svetlana said. You made everything complicated. Just tell him. 

I am going to, he typed. I have plan. 

Your plans, she teased, with the fond exasperation of someone who had watched his plans in action before. Your plans are terrible, Ilyusha. Does Jane know about this plan? 

Not yet.

Ilyusha…

I know.

Tell him, she said. Before someone else does. Before he stops waiting for you, while you are sitting in airport in Moscow being mysterious and complicated about it. 

I said I have plan.

He thought about what she’d said (... not like you love Jane) and waited for the reflex denial to arrive, the automatic filing-away, the comfortable deferral that had always been available to him when the thing got too close. 

It didn’t come. 

What came instead was something quieter and more specific - the particular clarity of a thing that had been true for a long time finally being acknowledged as true without the architecture of avoidance around it. Like looking at something directly after years of looking slightly to the left of it.

He loved Shane Hollander. 

He sat with that in the departure lounge of Sheremetyevo Airport with his father recently dead and his brother’s anger still sitting in his chest and Anya’s four held-up fingers somewhere in his memory, and he let it be true without immediately doing anything about it. 

Good, she said. Now go fix it. And text me when you land. 

He put his phone in his pocket and looked out at the tarmac. 

He had a plan. 

He would fix this. 

The flight back was long and he slept for most of it, which was usually for him on planes, and he woke somewhere over the Atlantic with the particular disoriented clarity of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had put it down during sleep and was now remembering, in the first waking moments, that they had put it down. 

He opened his phone. 

He opened the thread with Jane. 

The last message in it from him was from before Sochi, followed by strings of unanswered messages from Shane up until Vegas, sitting there unacknowledged, and then nothing after that - the archeology of a conversation that had stopped and never restarted. He looked at it for a moment and then he typed, carefully, because he was careful when he typed things in English that mattered: 

I want to talk. When you are ready. There are things I should have said. I know this. 

He stared at it. 

He sent it. 

He put the phone away and looked out the window at the dark over the Atlantic and felt, for the first time since Vegas and possibly for the first time considerably longer than that, something that was not the absence of feeling but the presence of something he had finally stopped running from. 

He was going back to Boston.

He was going to stay. 

He was going to fix this - not with a room number, not with a deflection, not with the comfortable minimum that had always been easier than the alternative. With the actual words. The true ones. The ones he had been finding his way toward since a locked bathroom in Vegas and a Tuesday morning in Moscow and a departure lounge where Svetlana had said not like that and he had not been able to argue with her. 

He was almost ready.

He just needed Shane to be willing to listen. 

He put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes and did not let himself think about what it would mean if he wasn’t. 

He landed in Boston at six in the morning. 

His phone showed the message to Jane as delivered.

Unread.

He picked up his bag and walked through arrivals and told himself it was fine, that Shane would read it when he was ready, that the plan was still intact, that later was still - just barely, just enough - available. 

He was, mostly, sure of it. 

Chapter 3: Whirlwind

Chapter Summary

Shane's POV

Chapter Notes

The end of this chapter has been revamped a little bit - what I originally had there just wasn't sitting right with me and I wasn't able to fully move on to Chapter 4 while I was trying to figure out what I didn't like about Chapter 3; I hope that this hits better for everyone!

The morning after Vegas, Shane ran six miles before seven in the morning. 

This was not unusual. He ran most mornings since he was fifteen years old and had discovered that the rhythm of it - feet on pavement, breath finding its pattern, the world narrowing to the immediate physical fact of moving forward - was the most reliable method available to him for making the inside of his head quieter than it naturally wanted to be. It worked for bad losses. It worked for difficult conversations. It worked for exhaustion that had nothing to do with his body and everything to do with the weight of the things he was carrying. 

It did not, entirely, work this morning. 

He ran anyways. Six miles through the Vegas streets before the heat became genuinely hostile, past the hotels and the casinos and the unreality of a city that had been built to make you forget what time it was, and he thought about nothing, which was to say: he thought about the bathroom. About the locked door. About you are not nothing and the room number and the quiet devastation of understanding, somewhere around mile three, that he had been right to leave. 

He had been right. 

He repeated that to himself on mile four and mile five and mile six, with the conviction of someone who needed to hear something enough times for it to become true. 

He was right. 

He went back to his hotel room and showered and packed and checked out and got on his flight home, and by the time Montreal appeared through the plan window he had the thing in the place where it needed to be - contained, manageable, separate from everything that actually mattered - and he felt, if not fine, then functional, which was close enough. 

His phone buzzed as the wheels touched down. 

It was his agent.

Call me when you land. Nothing urgent. I just want to touch base.

Shane looked at the message for a moment. Farah Jalali had been his agent since he was drafted, a sharp, precise woman who did not use the phrase nothing urgent when she meant nothing urgent. She used it when she meant: this is urgent but I don’t want you to panic on an airplane.

He called her from the car. 

“Hey,” she said as she picked up on the second ring. “How was Vegas?”

“Fine,” Shane lied. “What’s going on?” 

A pause. Farah’s pauses were calibrated - she used them the way a surgeon used instruments, precisely and with specific intent. “I’ve been hearing some things,” she finally said. “About Montreal. About the direction they’re thinking of going this offseason.” 

Shane looked out the window at the highway. “Tell me.” 

“Nothing confirmed,” she said carefully. “But the conversations I’m having suggest that they’re looking at a significant roster restructuring and your contract renewal was a large part of that conversation.” 

“So, they are trading me,” Shane sighed. 

Another pause. Shorter this time. “It looks like it,” she said. “I want you to be prepared and I want to make sure that you’re sure on where you’d like to land - I told you before that you have enough clout to advocate for where you’d like that to be, and I meant it.” 

Shane leaned his head back against the seat. 

He’d known it was coming in his gut. He had known it by the quality of certain conversations, in the way management had looked at him after the playoffs, by the atmosphere of the organization, like it was trying to decide what it was going to be next and had started, quietly, to move the furniture around. He had told himself it was speculation. He had told himself he was reading into things. 

He had not been reading into things. 

He’d planned on telling Farah about his decision to go to Carolina, if they’d take him, in the morning after his run, but he still hadn’t been sure exactly where his head was at after the previous night’s turn of events and after he’d gotten some sleep. 

He thought about Ilya and their conversation in the bathroom and not nothing. He thought about the necessity of space if he was going to finally be able to put whatever this thing between them was to rest. He thought about his parents and Hayden and Jackie and his goddaughters - and godson - and about wanting to make sure he wasn’t going to be unceremoniously dumped off on another part of the continent, away from everyone he cherished. 

“Okay,” he breathed. “Let’s talk.” 

The summer arrived in Montreal the way it always did - suddenly, completely, and aggressive. Shane ran his miles and went to the gym and ate what he was supposed to eat and slept when he was supposed to sleep and did all the things that constituted taking care of himself in the offseason, and underneath it all, constant and not fully addressed, Vegas sat. 

Not loudly. Not in the way that demanded immediate attention. More like the low hum of something electrical in the walls - present, persistent, audible - if you stopped making enough noise to cover it. 

He had done the right thing. 

He told himself this regularly and with enough repetition that he hoped it would stick. He had set a limit. He had said what he needed to say. He had walked out of that bathroom with his dignity intact and his decision made and he was not going to spend the summer second-guessing it, because second-guessing it would require examining it, and examining it would require admitting things he was not ready to admit about what Vegas had meant and why it had hurt the way it had. 

He was not going to do that. 

He ran six miles. He ate well. He slept adequately. He texted Hayden enough to keep him from showing up at his door with a six-pack and a look of concern, and he called his parents on Sundays the way he always did, and he did not text Ilya Rozanov, which was a decision he had made and was maintaining with the same discipline he brought to everything else. 

He was fine.

The trade rumors started circulating the last week of June, which was when nothing urgent started to become urgent. 

It started small - a line in a hockey insider’s column, vague enough to be deniable, specific enough that Shane read it three times and felt his stomach drop on the third. Sources indicate Montreal is looking to move significant pieces this offseason as the organization reconsiders long-term direction and leadership. Significant pieces. He was a significant piece. He was, apparently, the piece the organization was considering moving according to Farah. 

He called Farah. 

“I’ve seen it,” she said, before he could speak. “I’ve also had two calls this morning from Carolina. They’re interested, Shane. Not tire-kicking.” 

“Who?” 

“Their GM called me directly this morning,” She said.

Shane sat down on his couch. “They’re actually interested?” 

“Yes.” A Pause. “It’s what you wanted, Shane. It’s still in the Eastern Conference, but it’s a different division. Good coaching staff. They’re building toward something real and they know it, and they want you to be a part of it.” Her voice was measured, professional, giving him the information without the editorial. She was good at that. “I think it’s worth moving forward to see what they’re offer is.” 

Shane thought about what he had decided in the hotel room in Vegas. Different division. Enough distance to breathe. Not so much that it felt like running. 

“Set up the call,” he said. 

The confirmation came on a Thursday in early-July, which was an ordinary Thursday in every other respect - Shane had run his miles, had his coffee, had been watching something on his laptop when his phone rang with Farah’s name on the screen. 

“It’s done,” she said. “Montreal agreed to the framework this morning. We’re finalizing the terms.” 

Shane set the laptop aside. 

“Carolina?” He asked, though he already knew. 

“Carolina,” she confirmed. “Shane, it’s a good deal. You’re getting the contract we would have expected Montreal to have given you if they’d resigned you. You’re not going to be the captain anymore, but you’re going in as an alternate captain. The coaching staff has been asking about you specifically - Hendricks has been on the record saying he wants a center who thinks about the game the way you do. This is a good situation.” 

“I know,” Shane said. 

“Are you okay?” 

He thought about it honestly, which was something he had been doing more of lately. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Ask me in a week.” Montreal had been the team he’d dreamed of playing for his whole childhood. It had been his mom’s favorite team growing up as well. Montreal was in his blood. He’d hoped that he would play with them until he retired and have his jersey up in their rafters. He’d hoped to win multiple Stanley Cups with the team, eventually, after he helped whip them into shape. He’d hoped to build a dynasty with them. He’d hoped he’d be able to show them that he belonged on the team based on his skill and merits alone. 

Sometimes hopes mean nothing, he thought bitterly. 

Farah gave him a moment. That was one of the things he had always valued about her - she understood the difference between a question that needed an answer and a question that needed space. “Okay,” she said at last. “I’ll send you the full terms tonight. Read them when  you’re ready.” 

He put the phone down. 

He sat on the couch for a long time, in the stillness. He’d been braced for impact for so long and it finally arrived.  Montreal was trading him. The organization that had drafted him second overall, that he had given three years to, that he’d captained through three playoff runs - they had looked at the math of what he cost and what he represented and had decided that the math didn’t work anymore. 

He was the piece they were moving. 

He thought about the way Theriault had looked at him after they’d lost their bid for the Cup, again. He thought about the way he looked at him when Boston won it instead. The careful blankness of it, the deliberate non-engagement that communicated everything without saying anything. He thought about the way the GM had shaken his head and muttered something about diversity not being an answer. He thought about the locker room - about Comeau’s voice and the particular register it took on when he was saying something he knew he could get away with, about the way voices always seemed to say things they thought they could get away with just because of the way he looked. 

He thought about being the diversity hire, as Couillard had called him in his first season, which had landed in his chest and stayed there with permanence, because it had been said to wound and had succeeded. 

He was half-Japanese. His mother was Japanese-Canadian, his father was White-Canadian, and he had grown up navigating a space of being not-quite-one-thing and not-quite-another in a sport that had a very specific idea of what its stars were supposed to look like. He had been good enough that it hadn’t mattered, mostly. He had a last name that sounded normal enough that the other kids sometimes had forgotten what he was. But it hadn’t always worked and when they’d lost this last bid for the Stanley Cup for the third year in a row since his draft - after he’d been held up as the answer to the franchise’s losing streak since 1993 - the term diversity hire had started getting thrown around the locker room by cruel men who understood exactly where to put the knife. 

Montreal hadn’t protected him from that. 

Montreal had, in fact, been fairly busy deciding that he was too expensive to keep. 

He picked up his phone and called Hayden. 

Hayden had answered on the second ring, which meant he’d been waiting for this call. 

“Shane,” he breathed. 

“You heard,” Shane said. It wasn’t a question. 

“Twenty minutes ago.” A pause. “Shane, I’m - I’m sorry. This is bullshit. You’ve given everything you could to this organization and they’re–” 

“Hayden.” 

“I’m serious. You’re the best player on this team. You have been for your entire rookie contract. The fact that they’re moving you… because management wants to pretend that their losing bids for the Stanley Cup is a problem with you and not a problem with Theriault not being able to coach his way out of a paper bag–” 

“Hayden,” he interrupts. “I know.” 

A beat. Hayden’s voice changed register, dropping out of the angry friend and into something steadier. “Are you okay?” 

Shane looked at his apartment. The place he’d lived for the past three years. He was going to pack this up. He was going to have to put it in boxes and move it all to Raleigh, North Carolina, and start over in a city he had never lived in with a team he had never played for and a locker room full of people who would look at him and see - what? The guy that Montreal didn’t want? A diversity hire? 

Or maybe just another hockey player. 

Maybe just that. 

“I think I will be,” Shane said. “Eventually.” 

Hayden was quiet for a moment. Then: “Come over. Jackie’s making dinner and the girls have been asking about you and my arms need a break.” 

Shane almost smiled. “I’ll be there in an hour.” 

The Pike household was, as it always was, organized chaos. 

Ruby and Jade were almost two - twin girls with Hayden’s energy and Jackie’s precision, a combination that expressed itself primarily as an ability to conduct two separate conversations (if you could call them that) simultaneously while also negotiating a third with each other through a system of looks and gestures that Shane would never be able to decode. They met him at the door with the enthusiasm of children who had been told company was coming and had been saving it up. 

“Uncle Shane!” Ruby announced, like she was introducing him to the room. 

“We made cookies,” Jade said, with the gravity of someone reporting the news. “But daddy at three.” 

“Two,” Hayden said, from somewhere in the kitchen. “It was two.” 

“Three!” Both girls yelled with the unified certainty of people who had been witnesses.

Shane crouched down to their level. “Save me one?” 

They exchanged a look - the twin look, the one that conveyed an entire negotiation in approximately half a second - and nodded as if they were honoring a contract. 

Jackie appeared from the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder and hugged Shane with her free arm. “How are you doing? Really?” 

“Working on it,” Shane sighed, which was the most honest answer he had. 

Jackie gave him a look. She’d been Hayden's wife for almost three years and had, by extension, been Shane’s friend for nearly as long. She had a talent for reading rooms that Shane had always found difficult and slightly alarming. “Okay,” She said, her tone indicating that she’d clocked whatever it was that he wasn’t saying and was going to give him the space to say it. “Dinner’s in twenty. Hayden, stop hovering and set the table.” 

“I’m not hovering,” Hayden grumped, appearing in the doorway, hovering. 

“Table,” Jackie said. 

He went. 

Shane sat on the floor in the living room with Ruby and Jade orbiting him with cookie-related updates, and felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight since Thursday morning. These were good people. This was a good room. He was going to miss it, which was its own specific kind of grief - not the dramatic king, but the quiet kind that arrived when you realized something was ending and you hadn’t fully appreciated it while it was happening. 

Dinner was loud and warm and full of an energy that only a household that had been built carefully and well could radiate. Shane sat at the table and at Jackie’s cooking and listened to Ruby and Jade conduct what appeared to be an ongoing dispute about the correct way to arrange crayons and felt, and for the first time since the confirmation call, something adjacent to okay. 

After dinner, when the girls were in bed and the three of them were at the kitchen table with wine for Jackie and beers for Hayden and Shane, Hayden said what he had been waiting to say all evening. 

“It’s not fair,” he said. “What they did to you. Trading you as if you were the problem–” 

“Hayden–”

“Let me say it,” Hayden said, not unkindly but with the firmness of someone who had been holding something in for hours. “You were not the problem. You were the best player on that team and a good captain and you did everything right. They– they fucked up!” 

“Swear Jar,” Shane said and Jackie smiled. 

“Oh come on! The way they talked about you–” Hayden was frustrated. “I should have done more about it!” 

Shane looked at him. “You did plenty.” 

“Not enough.” 

“Hayden.” Shane set his bottle down. “You had my back every single time it mattered. That’s not nothing.” 

Hayden looked at him for a moment, jaw tight, and Shane could see the guilt in it - the guilt of a person who had been a good friend and was holding themselves to a standard that went beyond what friendship could reasonably be expected to cover. 

“The diversity hire thing,” Shane said, because it was there and it needed to be said and he trusted these two people with it. “Yeah… it sucks” 

Jackie made a sound that was not quite a word. 

“I know it’s not true,” Shane said quickly. “I know my numbers. I know what I bring to the ice. But when you hear it enough times, in every locker room, from guys who are supposed to be your teammates–” He stopped and looked at the table. “Sometimes it gets in.” 

“Of course it gets in,” Jackie said, and her voice held a heat to it and Shane could tell she was choosing her words carefully because the ones that she wanted to use would not be appropriate for the kitchen table. “It’s designed to get in. That’s the whole point of it.” 

“I know,” Shane sighed. 

“You are not a diversity hire,” Hayden said, flat and certain, his voice telling Shane he was not interested in a discussion. “You were the second overall pick in your draft year. You are a three-time All-Star. You are the reason Montreal has been relevant for the past four years, ever since they announced their decision to draft you. And the fact that you’re also–” He stopped, glanced at Shane. “Sorry.” 

“Half-Japanese?” Shane smirked. “You can say it. It’s not like it’s a secret.” He paused. “It’s kind of just - my face.” 

Hayden laughed, surprised, and Jackie’s expression softened into something warmer. It broke something open in the room that needed breaking. 

“I’m not sorry to be leaving,” Shane said. “That locker room - I’m not going to miss it. I’m going to miss you. I’m going to miss JJ - he’ll probably get all of the diversity heat now that I won’t be there - and I’m going to miss this house and those girls, and I'm going to miss–” He stopped. “I’m going to miss what it was supposed to be. Not what it became.” 

Jackie reached across the table and put her hand over his. 

“Carolina is going to be lucky to have you,” she smiled. 

Shane looked at her hand on his. He thought about fresh starts and clean ice and a locker room that didn’t know yet what it was getting, which meant it also didn’t know yet what it had decided he was. 

“I hope so,” he said. 

The realization arrived the way things usually did when you had been actively preventing them from arriving - all at once, and at the worst possible time, which was eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night in late July when Shane was lying bed trying to sleep and his brain had decided that now, specifically now, was the appropriate time to stop lying to itself. 

He’d been thinking about Vegas and the why it upset him so much of it all. 

And it hit him. 

He was in love with Ilya Rozanov. 

He lay there with that for a long moment, thinking that if he was still enough that he would un-have that thought, and waited for his own internal architecture to find a way to argue with it. The architecture tried. It produced several reasonable objections - Ilya’s behavior in Sochi, the six months of silence, the bathroom in Vegas, the you are not nothing delivered with the ease of a man who thought that was sufficient - and then it ran out of objections, because the objections were about Ilya’s behavior and the feeling was about Shane’s, and those were two different things that could both be true simultaneously. 

He was in love with Ilya Rozanov. 

He had been, he understood now with some clarity, for a lot longer than he was comfortable calculating. It had been there in the way he tracked Ilya on the ice even when the puck was elsewhere. In the way Sochi hit him harder than it should have if Ilya had just been someone he occasionally slept with. In the six months of silence that had felt, from the inside, less like absence and more like an amputation. 

He was in love with Ilya Rozanov. 

And Ilya had told him he was not nothing and given him a room number. 

Shane stared at the ceiling. 

The thing about loving someone who did not love you back was that it required a complete reorganization of how you understood the situation - not just the practical elements, which were already being reorganized by the trade and the move and the fresh start in Carolina, but the internal ones. The story he had been telling himself, which was that whatever existed between them was complicated and undefinable and possibly mutual in some way that neither of them had words for - that story needed revising. 

The revised version was simply and considerably worse.

Ilya wanted him physically. Ilya found him interesting in the way you found a worthy opponent interesting. Ilya had, at some point, developed the habit of Ilya, which was the pull of something familiar and available and undemanding. And Shane had mistaken all of that for something it wasn’t, because he was apparently the kind of person who could take you are not nothing and build a structure of hope on top of it, which was not his finest quality. 

He was in love with Ilya Rozanov and the Russian bastard did not love him back. He was moving to Carolina and that would be the full complete, unedited version of the situation. 

He felt like he’d been such an idiot. 

He rolled onto his side. 

Fine, he thought, with the grim pragmatism that had gotten him through most of the difficult things in his life. Fine. You know now. You can work with knowing. 

Knowing, at least, had the advantage of being a fixed point. You could build around a fixed point. You could make decisions around it, structure a life around it, move to a different city and start over around it. 

You could stop waiting for something that wasn’t coming. 

He closed his eyes. 

It was going to be another sleepless night. 

His parents came to Montreal at the end of July. 

On Tuesday he got a call at eleven in the morning.

Shane was on his second coffee post-run, staring at nothing in particular through the window of his apartment when his phone lit up with his mother’s name. He looked at it for a moment before he answered. His mother called on Sundays. She called on Sundays because that was the system they had - the standing call, the one he’d been managing carefully for weeks now, giving her sentences with as little space between the words as possible so there was nothing to read into. 

Tuesday meant the system had been suspended. 

“Hi, mom.” 

“Hi.” A beat. “Your father and I were thinking of coming to Montreal for a few days. We haven’t seen you since April and with everything going on with the trade we thought–” She paused, and he could hear her recalibrating, choosing the version that wasn’t pressure. “We’d love to see you, if you’re up for it.” 

Shane looked out the window. 

Four and half hours from Ottawa. They wouldn’t have called unless they’d already decided. The call wasn’t a question, it was a courtesy - his mother giving him the shape of what was coming so he wasn’t blindsided at his own door. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Come down.” 

They arrived on Thursday evening. 

His father hugged him at the door the way he always did - a real hug, both arms, the kind that communicated everything before anyone had said a word. Shane stood in it for a moment longer than he usually allowed himself and felt something in his chest go quiet that had been loud all week. 

His mother hugged him too, shorter, tighter, her hand coming up briefly to the back of his head the way it had when he was small. She pulled back and looked at him with her sharp eyes and he watched her take inventory - the shadows under his eyes, the set of his jaw, whatever she found in his face that she always found - and say nothing about any of it. 

“You look tired,” was what she said. 

“I’m fine,” was what he said back.

They both understood that neither of those things was the whole truth, and left it there for now. 

Dinner was his mother’s cooking. 

She’d brought things from the Japanese grocery store in Ottawa, and she moved through his kitchen with the efficient ease of someone who didn’t need much space to produce something good. His father sat at the island and kept her company while Shane set the table, and the apartment was filled with something warm and familiar that he hadn’t realized he’d been missing until it was there. 

They talked about ordinary things. 

His father’s work - a project that stretched longer than expected. His mother’s sister in Osaka, who had just had her second grandchild. The renovation, still ongoing, the kitchen floor that had somehow become a years-long saga that his parents had developed an entire comedic relationship with. 

“The contractor says it’ll be done by September,” his father said. 

“The contractor said it would be done by February,” his mother replied, without looking up from the stove. “And march. And May.” 

“He’s an optimist.” 

“He’s a liar.” 

Shane almost smiled. 

He ate and listened and asked the right questions and let the evening move at its own pace. His parents were good at this - at filling a room without demanding anything from it, at being present in a way that didn’t crowd. His mother had always been the sharper one, the one who noticed things and filed them away, but she knew when to use what she noticed and when to let it sit. 

She was letting it sit tonight. 

And somewhere between the end of dinner and the quiet that followed - dishes done, leftovers put away, the three of them back at the table with nothing left to occupy their hands - Shane looked at his father and felt something shift. 

Not a decision exactly. More like the slow collapse of the argument he’d been having with himself for years, the one that had never resolved cleanly and never was going to, because there wasn’t a clean resolution available. Just the sudden bone-tired understanding that he was more exhausted from carrying it than he was afraid of putting it down. 

He looked at the table. 

His hands were flat against the wood and he could feel his pulse in them, which was not ideal but was also just what was happening. The kitchen felt very still. 

“I need to tell you both something,” he said. 

His mother went still. 

His father just looked at him. Steady. Already there. 

Shane opened his mouth. 

Nothing came out. 

He tried again and his throat closed, not for any physical reason, just the wiring that had been misfiring since he was a teenager deciding that this was the moment to malfunction. His heart was going too fast. He was aware of every sound in the apartment - the refrigerator hum, a car outside, his own breathing - in the way he only got aware of things when his brain was trying to crawl out of his skull. 

Say it, he thought. You’ve said it a hundred times. You’ve said it to the ceiling and the mirror and the shower wall. It’s one word. One syllable. Just Say. It. 

The ceiling had never looked at him. 

The ceiling wasn’t his parents. 

His father didn’t push. Didn’t speak, didn’t shift, didn’t do anything except remain completely and quietly present in the way that had always been his particular gift, and Shane held onto that the way you held onto something solid when the ground wasn’t cooperating. 

He exhaled through his nose. 

Tried to find the word. 

Found it, lost it, found it again. 

“I’m–” His voice came out wrong, too thin, and he stopped and reset and made himself look at the table and not at either of their faces because looking at their faces right now was not an option, the stakes of their expressions were too high and he couldn’t manage that and the word at the same time. “I’m gay.” 

It landed in the room. 

He stared at the grain of the wood and waited and counted without meaning to. 

One.

Two. 

Three. 

His father’s hand came over his. 

“Okay,” he said. Simple and whole, carrying everything it didn’t need to say out loud. It hadn’t changed anything. It was never going to change anything. Whatever calculation Shane had been running about this moment for years had always had the wrong answer. 

Shane pressed his lips together hard. 

His mother still hadn’t said anything. 

The silence stretched just long enough that the part of his brain that had been catastrophizing this for the past few years began to stir, began to construct something out of the quiet - and then he heard the scrape of her chair and made himself look up. 

She was already on her feet, already moving, and for one lurching second he didn’t know what she was doing and then she was next to him, pulling him up out of his chair and wrapping both arms around him, and she was small but she held on like she meant it, one hand pressed flat between his shoulder blades, her chin against his temple. 

She didn’t say anything for a moment. 

She just held on. 

Shane stood in it, arms coming up around her slowly because it had caught him off guard, and felt something crack open in his chest that had been sealed for a very long time. 

“I know,” she said quietly, against his hair. “I think I’ve known for a while.” 

“Mom–” 

“We know you pretty well, honey,” she chuckled as she pulled back and held him by the shoulders, looking at him with eyes that were very bright and jaw doing the same thing his jaw did when he was holding something in. He recognized it with a jolt because he’d seen it in the mirror his entire life. “I want you to know that it doesn’t change a single thing. Not for us. Not for anything that matters.”

Shane looked at her face. 

“We are so proud of you.” 

He’d built so many versions of this moment over the years. Run them at two in the morning, on planes, in the shower after bad games. Some had been terrible. Some had been fine. None of them had felt quite like this - like standing in his own kitchen with both of his parents and the floor simply holding. 

It didn’t feel like relief yet. His heart was still going too fast for relief. 

But it felt like something real. 

His mother released his shoulders and pressed one hand briefly to his cheek, her thumb passing once along his cheekbone. Then she stepped back and sat down and looked at him and for a moment none of them said anything, and that was okay. It was the first silence all evening that hadn’t had anything underneath it. 

His father poured two fingers of whiskey into a glass and slid it across to his mother without benign asked. She picked it up and held it and didn’t drink yet. 

“How long?” she asked. Not accusatory. Just - asking. 

Shane thought about it honestly. “A long time,” he said. “Since I was a teenager, I think. Maybe earlier than that.” 

His mother closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them they were still bright. “I wish you hadn’t had to carry that alone for so long.” 

“I wasn’t sure how it would land.” 

“Shane.” Her voice was quiet but there was something firm underneath it. “You are our son. There is nothing–” she stopped. Set the glass down. “There is nothing you could tell us that would make us love you less. I need you to know that.” 

He did know it, intellectually. He had always known it intellectually. The knowing and the believing were two different things and he had spent years in the gap between them. He didn’t say that, but he thought his mother could see it anyway because she reached across the table and took his face in both hands the way she had when was very small, tilted it up slightly, and looked at him. 

“I mean it,” she said. 

“I know,” he said. And for the first time he thought he might actually. 

She let go. Picked up her glass. Drank. 

His father hadn’t said much, but that was his father - he communicated in presence more than words, and his presence right now was doing everything it needed to do. His hand had not left Shane’s. 

“Are you okay?” his father asked. “In general. Not the trade, not hockey. Just - are you okay?” 

Shane considered the question the way it deserved to be considered. “I’m getting there,” he said. 

His father nodded slowly. “Then that’s what matters.” 

The quiet settled again, easier than before. His mother turned her glass slowly between her palms, looking at it, and Shane could see her thinking - the visible processing of someone reorganizing information, slotting things into new places, following threads backward. 

“There’s someone,” she said. Not a question exactly. 

Shane looked at her. 

“I’m your mother,” she said simply. “And you have had the same look on your face tonight that you had when you were seventeen and you thought you were hiding a crush from me. Which you were not.” 

His father made a sound that was almost a laugh. 

“There’s someone,” he confirmed, because there was no point in denying it. “It’s not–” he swallowed. “It’s complicated… and it’s not going to go anywhere, but yes.” 

His mother’s expression had shifted into something softer. “Is it someone we know?”

“No,” Shane said. True enough. 

His father was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry. Realizing you love someone and thinking that it’s not returned… that’s its own kind of loss and it’s okay to grieve it.” 

Shane looked at his hands. 

The table was quiet. His mother had both hands around her glass and was looking at him carefully, taking stock, the same inventory she’d been running since he’d opened the door and she had looked at his face and said you look tired and had meant something considerably larger than that. 

He knew what was coming before she said it.

“Shane.” Her voice was very careful. “This - everything with the trade, and - what happened in the spring. That wasn’t–” She stopped. Started again, more quietly. “That didn’t have anything to do with–” 

“No,” Shane said. 

The word came out steadier than he felt. He looked up and met her eyes and held them, because she needed to see that he meant it and he did mean it - that was true, that part was true, the two things lived in separate places inside him even if they had happened in the same terrible season. 

“You’re sure,” his father said. Not a question exactly. The voice of someone who needed to hear it stated plainly. 

“I’m sure,” Shane nodded. “It was - it was a lot of things… but it wasn’t that.” 

His mother pressed her lips together. Her jaw was doing the thing it did again, and her hands around the glass had gone tight, and Shane looked at her and felt the weight of what it meant to be the person who had put that expression on her face - that careful, controlled fear that she had been carrying since the spring and had not put down. 

“We worry,” she said. Simple. Just that. 

“I know,” Shane could feel a prickle behind his eyes. “I know you do.” 

“You’re seeing someone,” his father said. “Still? You’re–” 

“Yes,” Shane said. “I’m not - I’m okay. I’m working on it.” He paused. “Carolina will be good… I think it’s going to be good.” 

His mother looked at him for a long moment. He let her look. He didn’t try to manage it or give her a face that would make it easier - he just sat there and let her see whatever she could see, because she had earned that, because she had been the one… she had been carrying it since May and the least he could give her was this.

Whatever she found, it seemed to be enough. 

She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. 

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay.” 

His father’s hand came over both of theirs. 

None of them said anything for a moment. The kitchen was very still. Outside, Montreal went about its evening, indifferent and continuous, and the three of them sat with the thing they were all holding and didn’t try to make it smaller than it was. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked finally. 

“Not yet.” He paused. “I love him… but he doesn’t feel the same way.  He can’t.” Shane looked at their hands all piled together. “I - Carolina will help… some distance will help.” 

His mother looked at him for a long moment. “Well, whoever he is, he’s an idiot.” 

It landed somewhere tender and he looked at the table… and allowed himself a small smile. 

Then his mother sat up. 

He knew the shift. He had always known the shift. 

“There are going to be several brands that would want to move quickly with this,” she said. “The visibility angle is significant and there are companies that have been actively–” 

“Mom”

She stopped. 

He looked at her. He watched the manager part of her push against the mother part of her, and he watched his mother win, barely. 

“Your timeline,” she smiled. “Your choice.” 

“Thank you.” 

She nodded, jaw tight. Under the table her foot pressed briefly against his, and he understood it as exactly what it was - the version of tenderness she had left after everything else tonight had taken what it took. 

“Carolina,” she sighed, after a moment. Gently. “A fresh start.” 

“A fresh start,” he agreed. 

He didn’t say: and enough distance to breathe.

But he thought it.

The summer moved quickly from there. 

Shane packed. 

It was straightforward, he told himself. You put things in boxes. You decided what was coming with you and what wasn’t. You made the calls you needed to make and you didn’t think too hard about any of it because thinking too hard about any of it was a luxury he wasn’t going to extend to himself right now. 

He kept the navy couch. He donated three boxes of things he couldn't explain why he’d onto in the first place. He wrapped things in newspaper and sealed boxes and stacked them by the door and told himself this was fine, this was just moving, people moved all the time, this was not a bigger thing that it was. 

It kept being a bigger thing than it was. 

He found his first Voyageurs jersey in the back of his closet - not a game jersey, just something he’d had since he was draft, soft from washing, the C not yet on it because he hadn’t been captain yet. He stood there holding it for longer than made sense and then folded it carefully and put it at the bottom of a box and put other things on top of it and moved on.

He was fine. 

He donated three boxes worth of things he’d been holding onto for reasons he could no longer identify, except somewhere around the second box he understood that he could identify the reasons perfectly well and was just choosing not to, because examining why you’d kept a game program from your first seas or a cracked puck from a practice three years ago was not the kind of thing you did when you were fine about everything. 

He taped the box shut. 

The last dinner at Hayden’s helped and didn’t help in equal measure. Ruby and Jade were in full force - an ongoing argument about crayons that had apparently been running for two days, settling nothing and generating significant noise - and Jackie laughed at Hayden’s expression across the table and the whole house had a warmth to it that Shane had been walking into for years now without fully clocking what it was. 

He clocked it now, sitting there with a beer going warm in his hand, watching Jade reorganize her placemat with great seriousness. 

He was going to miss this. Not Montreal, not the Bell Centre, not the skyline - this. This kitchen, these kids, this specific version of not being alone that he had built so gradually he hadn’t noticed it happening until he was about to leave it behind. 

He was going to carry it with him. He knew that. It didn’t make the last hug at the door any shorter. 

Farah called on a Wednesday in mid-August. 

“Everything’s signed,” she said. “You’re officially a Carolina Breaker. Be prepared for the press cycle.” 

He was standing in his empty apartment. 

He’d known it was coming - had been the one to push for Carolina specifically, had made the calls and had the conversations and had chosen this team, this city, this distance… so it shouldn’t have felt like anything except the natural conclusion of decisions he’d already made. He looked around at the bare walls and the marks on the hardwood where the furniture had been and the light coming through the windows onto nothing, and waited for it to feel like a conclusion. 

Carolina Breaker.

He turned the words over. 

He thought about the coast, which he’d never seen. He thought about a locker room full of people who didn’t know him yet, who hadn’t decided what to make of him yet, who he was going to have to start from zero with in a city he had never lived in. That part was terrifying in a way he was trying not to examine directly because if he examined it directly he was going to have to acknowledge how much of his sense of himself was built around being a Voyageur, around being Montreal’s, around the version of his future he had been constructing since he was old enough to understand what the second overall pick meant. 

He was not going to examine that directly. 

Instead he thought about the other thing - the room that didn’t know yet what it was getting, which meant it also didn’t know yet what it had decided he was. A coaching staff that had asked for him by name. A fresh start. 

He was going to be okay. 

He said it in his head twice, which was one more than he usually needed to believe something, and noted that without judgment and moved on. 

His phone was in his hand before he’d decided to pick it up. 

The thread with Lily sat there the way it always sat - quiet, present, the last message from ilya a week old now. I want to talk. When you are ready. There are things I should have said. I know this. 

Shane had read it twenty-four times. He knew because he’d started counting somewhere around the sixth time as a way of making himself feel like he had some control over the situation, which had not worked, but the number had stuck. 

He hadn’t responded. 

He’d opened the thread enough and stared at it and this thumbs would hover and then he’d put the phone face down and go do something else, because everything he could think of to say either gave way too much away or said nothing at all, and he didn’t know which of those was worse right now. He wasn’t ready. Ilya had said when you are ready and Shane wasn’t ready. She was trying to figure out if he was ever going to be ready or if he was just going to keep not-responding until Carolina made the decision for him by putting enough miles between them that it stopped mattering. 

He put the phone in his pocket. 

He picked up the last box. 

It was lighter than the others, just a few kitchen things, and he stood there holding it and looked at the apartment one more time. He’d lived here for three years. He’d come back to this place after every game, after every road trip, after Vegas. He’d lain on that navy couch - now somewhere in a moving truck - and stared at this ceiling and rehearsed conversations he never had and made decisions he’d been too scared to make and talked himself into and out of things more times than he could count. 

The apartment looked like it was already someone else’s. 

He turned off the light. 

He pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the hallway in the dark for a moment, the way he always stood in places he was leaving, and gave himself to the count of three. 

One.

Two.

Three.

He walked down the stairs. 

He didn’t think about the jersey at the bottom of the box. He didn’t think about Ilya’s message sitting there unanswered. He didn’t think about the version of the future he’d been building in his head since he was eight years old and what it meant that it wasn’t going to happen 

He thought about Carolina. 

He thought about waves. About clean ice. About a locker room that hadn’t already made decisions about who he was and what he was going to be. 

He was going to be okay. 

He was mostly sure of it. 

Chapter 4: Not Alone

Chapter Notes

Ilya POV

Be prepared, this is a longer one - I needed to do this one justice.

Boston hit Ilya the moment he stepped out of the arrivals at Logan - the air thick and humid, pressing in after the recycled cold of the plane, the kind of heat that had nothing gentle about it. His driver was waiting at the curb. Bag in the trunk. The city moved past the window and he watched it go without really seeing it, the familiar streets and buildings sliding past while something in his chest did a slow, quiet recalibration. 

He’d been away for six weeks. 

It felt longer. Not in a bad way - more like the kind of absence that changed the shape of things. You came back and had to relearn the dimensions of your own life. The distance between rooms. The weight of familiar objects. The silence of a place that had been sitting empty. 

Moscow did that to him. Every summer he came back to Boston slightly sideways, his eyes needing time to readjust to the life he’d built here instead of the one he’d come from. Every summer it eventually felt like home again. 

This time felt different. Like he was seeing things he’d stopped seeing. Like six weeks had scraped something off the lens and he wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted it back. 

His father was buried in Vagankovo Cemetery, in a plot Ilya had arranged and paid for and stood over in the grey Moscow morning while the priest spoke words that landed somewhere beside him rather than inside him. Andrei had stood across the grave looking at nothing. Anya had held Ilya’s hand with her small serious fingers and he had held on and thought about trust funds and fourteen years and the things you could give someone from a distance when presence was too complicated. 

The penthouse was exactly as he’d left it - clean, quiet, the skyline spread through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He dropped his bag in the entryway and stood in the living room and looked at it. 

Good apartment. He’d built it carefully over the past few years. It looked the way a successful NHL captain's home was supposed to look. Sharp lines, good furniture, nothing out of place. 

He’d always found it satisfying before. 

Standing in it now, fresh off a transatlantic flight with Moscow still sitting somewhere in his chest, it looked less like a home and more like a photograph of one. Present and correct and slightly beside the point. 

He unpacked. Made himself eat. And then he sat on the couch in the quiet of the apartment and thought about Shane, which was not something he had given himself permission to do properly since he left Moscow but which he was apparently doing now, at eleven at night with his bag half-unpacked and the skyline doing nothing useful outside the window. 

He thought about the bathroom. 

Not the version he had been replaying all summer - the one where Shane was upset and emotional and would eventually calm down and come back, the one that had let Ilya go to bed at three in the morning and sleep and wake up and board his flight and go to Russia and convince himself that later was still available and intact. 

The other version.

The one he had been avoiding looking at directly since the departure lounge at Sheremetyevo, when something had finally shifted and he had stopped being able to look to the side of it. He kept getting stuck on the same moment. 

Shane’s face, just before he’d picked up his jacket. The anger had dropped for a second - just a second - and there had been something underneath it that Ilya had seen and not reached for and had been turning over ever since without quite being able to name it. Not just hurt. Something more than hurt. Something that looked, uncomfortably, like a person who had been hoping for a specific answer to an unsaid question, had not gotten it, and was now closing a door. 

And Ilya had watched him close it. 

He had stood in that bathroom and watched it happen and had thought: he just needs time. He’ll text in the morning. 

He had not texted in the morning. 

Ilya lay in the dark and turned it over and could not get comfortable with any angle of it. He had handled Vegas badly - he knew that, had known it since he got on the plane to return to Boston. He had said the wrong thing at the wrong moment and he had not said the right thing when it mattered and he had gone back to his room and waited and Shane had not come. That much was clear. 

What he kept circling, and couldn’t quite get to the center of yet, was the why of it. Not why Shane had been angry - that part he understood. But why the moment before Shane had left had looked the way it had. Why had there been something in Shane’s face that felt less like anger and more like the conclusion of a long, exhausting argument that Ilya hadn’t known was happening. 

He didn’t have the full shape of it yet. 

He was getting closer. 

He fell asleep still thinking about it and woke up still thinking about it and reached for his phone. 

Delivered.

Not read. 

He put the phone face-down on the nightstand and got up and went to the rink. 

The ice helped. He pushed hard - harder than the offseason program called for, harder than anyone supervising him would have approved - and found in the burn of it the thing he’d always found there. The world narrowing to edges and speed and breath, everything else receding to a manageable distance. 

He skated until his legs ached and the tightness in his chest had loosened enough to breathe around. Then he went home and showered and stood in the kitchen with his coffee and thought about Shane, which was becoming something of a habit. 

He thought about what Svetlana had said on the phone before he’d left Moscow. Not the not like you love Jane part - he’d turned that one over enough that the edges of it were worn smooth - but the other thing. Tell him before he stops waiting for you. 

He had not, at the time, fully processed the implication of that. He had taken it as urgency - tell him soon, don’t wait - without sitting with what stops waiting actually meant. What it looked like from the outside. What it might look like from the inside of a person who had been waiting and finally, at some point he hadn’t announced, decided to stop. 

That was the thing he kept almost seeing and not quite seeing. 

He checked his phone. 

Delivered.

He put it in his pocket and went home - he checked it twice more before noon.

Marlow called on a Thursday. 

“End of summer thing at mine,” he said. “Saturday. You’re coming.” 

“I was not planning to come.” 

“I know, Roz. You’re coming anyway.” No argument in it - just the ease of a man who knew which battles were worth having. “Carmichael’s already invited himself over and St-Simon is flying in from Colorado.” 

“He has place there,” Ilya said. “In the mountains.” 

“Right. Point is everyone’s coming in and you’ve been in your apartment alone now for two weeks.” A pause. “Come. Bring something to drink.” 

Ilya looked out at the skyline. 

The summers had always felt slightly untethered - roster dispersed, arena empty, the city that had claimed him for nine months suddenly busy with other things. He had filled the gap with training and the Moscow trip and had managed, the way he always managed. 

This summer the apartment felt quieter than usual. 

He had been telling himself it was because of his father, because of Russian, because of the weight of the things he had carried home from Moscow. And that was true. But it was not entirely true, and the part that wasn’t true had dark hair and freckles and a phone that was showing delivered and nothing else. 

“Fine,” He grumbled. “I will come.” 

Marlow’s brownstone in Cambridge had the warmth of a house actually lived in - kids’ drawings on the refrigerator, a dog with strong opinions about guests, furniture that looked comfortable rather than expensive. Ilya had always liked it. It felt like the opposite of the penthouse in a way he’d stopped examining too closely. 

Carmichael had arrived first. This was obvious from the volume before Ilya even got through the door. He was at the kitchen island with a beer in each hand and three days’ worth of things to say backed up behind his eyes, and he pointed one of those beers at Ilya the moment he walked in. 

“Roz! You look terrible!” 

“Thank you, Ryan.” 

“Not bad, terrible - tired, terrible. Did you sleep on the plane?” 

“I slept on the plane three weeks ago.” 

“Right, right.” His face made the adjustment it made when he was trying to be careful, which required visible effort and he never fully succeeded. “The Russian thing. Are you–” 

“I’m fine,” Ilya said. 

Carmichael looked at him for a moment and then handed over one of the beers. For him, it was an act of considerable restraint. 

St-Simon was on the couch with his long legs stretched out and a beer balanced on his knee, scrolling through his phone with the unhurried calm he brought to everything. He glanced up. 

“You’re tan,” he said. 

“Moscow in July is hot.” 

“I didn’t know that.” 

“Most people don’t.”

“Hm.” He looked back at his phone. 

Marlow came out of the kitchen and clapped Ilya once on the shoulder. “Glad you came, Cap,” he said. Nothing performative about it. 

“You did not give me much choice,” Ilya said. 

“That’s the idea.” 

Carmichael had already pivoted to telling Marlow about a fishing trip, gesturing wide enough to nearly take out a lamp, and Marlow listened with the expression of a man who had long ago stopped fighting the chaos that followed Ryan Carmichael into every room. 

Ilya settled onto the couch and let the afternoon move. 

ESPN was on in the background, muted. Music was playing. The conversation moved the way it moved when these four were together - loose and warm and without agenda, the kind of talking that happened between people who’d spent enough years in locker rooms and on road trips and deep into playoff runs that they didn’t need to perform anything for each other. 

Something in Ilya that had been braced since Moscow began slowly to ease. 

This was his team. Not the organization, not the contract, not the captaincy - these three people in this room who knew him better than almost anyone alive and had never made him feel like that knowledge was a liability. He had not realized until this moment how much he had needed to be back here. 

The afternoon moved. The fishing story grew to improbable dimensions. St-Simon offered dry commentary from the couch. Marlow refilled drinks without being asked. And Ilya sat in it and let himself be present instead of in the bathroom in Vegas or the departure lounge at Sheremetyevo or the quiet of the penthouse with his phone face-down on the nightstand. 

He was on his second beer, listening to Carmichael escalate the fighting story further, when Carmichael stopped mid-sentence. 

“Holy. Fucking. Shit.” 

The room went quiet. 

He was staring at the TV. 

He grabbed the remote and unmuted it fast, turning the volume up, and the room filled with an ESPN anchor mid-sentence, a banner scrolling along the bottom of the screen, and a photograph Ilya’s brain processed before the rest of him caught up. 

BREAKING: Shane Hollander Traded from Montreal Voyageurs to Carolina Breakers in Multi-Asset Deal. 

Ilya went very still. 

The anchor was talking about contract terms, draft capital, what this meant for Carolina heading into the season, what it meant for Montreal’s long-term direction. The words arrived in order and Ilya understood each of them individually and could not make them resolve into something that made sense. 

Carolina. 

The Metropolitan Division. 

Shane was going to Carolina. 

The first thing he felt was confusion - clean and uncomplicated, because this was genuinely news, genuinely unexpected, something he had not known was coming and had no framework for yet. He had heard the rumors circulating that Shane hadn’t signed a new contract with Montreal after his Entry-Level Contact was finished, before he’d left for Moscow, but had not paid close attention; he had assumed, the way he assumed things, that it would work itself out, that Montreal would renew Shane’s contract because they would have to, because the alternative was incomprehensible. 

The alternative was apparently not incomprehensible. 

The alternative was apparently happening right now, on ESPN, in Marlow’s living room. 

“They actually did it,” St-Simon said, sitting forward. “Montreal actually traded him…” 

“That’s–” Carmichael shook his head. “Hollander is the best thing that organization has had - ever - and they’re just moving him?” They sat there and listened to the anchor and his co-host discuss the possible reasons for the trade, the speculations and Carmichael laughed. “Seriously? They’re saying that they let him go because he couldn’t win Montreal the Cup before we got it? That’s Theriault covering ass, that is! That’s management panicking and Hollander taking the fall!” 

“Theraiult couldn’t coach his way out of a paper bag,” St-Simon said. 

“Exactly what I’m saying!” 

“I know. I was agreeing.” 

Carmichael pointed at him. “Right. Yes. Thank you.” He turned to Ilya and his voice shifted. “Sorry. I know he’s your–” 

“Rival?” St-Simon offered. 

“Yeah, that.” Carmichael didn’t put any weight behind the words. 

Ilya was staring at the TV. 

The photo they’d pulled up was from last season - Shane in his Voyageurs jersey, the C on his chest, looking at something off-camera with an expression that gave nothing away. Ilya had seen that expression a thousand times. One the ice, in press corridors, at events where they’d occupied the same room and performed their mutual antagonism for cameras that were always watching. 

He had seen behind it too. In locked rooms. In Vegas. 

Carolina. 

Shane was going to Carolina and Ilya had a message sitting delivered and unread on a phone that was now - he did the geography automatically, helplessly - twelve hours away by car. A different division. A different rotation. A whole shape of the plan he had been building since Moscow shifting under him without warning. 

He had not texted Shane again after the first message, because he had a plan and the plan required patience and he had been patient, or something that looked like patience from the outside, and now Shane was going to Carolina and the plan needed to be rebuilt from the ground up and he needed a moment that was not in this room with Carmichael’s voice filling all the available space. 

“I need air,” he said. 

He put his beer down and went to the balcony before anyone could say anything. 

It was still hot outside, the evening air close and thick, the harbour glittering below in the fading light. Ilya stood at the railing with an unlit cigarette turning between his fingers and looked at nothing. 

The Carolina Breakers were in Raleigh, North Carolina… which was twelve hours from Boston by car. 

Twelve hours. A different division, different scheduling. Instead of seeing Shane every other week the way the Atlantic rotation allowed, they would cross paths four times during the regular season. Maybe three. The math rearranged itself in his head in a way that sat uncomfortably in his chest. 

He had a plan. He had come back from Moscow with a plan - the comfortable deferrals stripped away, the thing he felt finally acknowledged for what it was. He was going to find the words and say them properly. Not hand Shane a room number and go back to his room and wait. Not give him the minimum and call it enough. Not anymore. 

That plan had assumed Montreal. 

Five hours away. Same division. The same rotation that had made later feel like a reasonable position to operate from from five years. 

It had not accounted for this. 

He thought about the bathroom again. About Shane’s face before he’d walked out, the door closing behind him with a sound that had been very quiet and very final. He thought about three in the morning is his Vegas hotel room, the way he had checked his phone and found nothing and told himself: he just needs time. 

He thought about Svetlana. Tell him before he stops waiting for you. 

He was starting to think he understood what she had meant by that. 

He heard the door. 

Marlow came out and stood beside him at the railing without speaking, offered him a fresh beer. Ilya took it. They looked at the barbour together, the city moving below them, indifferent and continuous. 

“You going to light that?” Marlow nodded at the cigarette. 

“No.” 

“Okay.” A beat. “Talk to me, Roz.” 

“I needed air.” 

“Ilya.” 

Ilya turned the cigarette between his fingers. 

“You have been watching me,” he said. 

“Since 2010,” Marlow said. “You and Hollander both. At games, at events, in every press corridor where you two do that thing–” 

“What thing?” 

“Where you perform hating each other and everyone believes it except the people who are actually paying attention.” He paused. “I’ve been paying attention.” 

Ilya said nothing. 

“The message you sent him,” Marlow continued. “I know about it because  you’ve been checking your phone more in the last two weeks than I’ve ever seen you check it, and you only do that when you’re texting with Jane… or should I say Shane.” 

The harbour lights were coming on below them, one by one, catching on the water. 

Ilya thought about the departure lounge. The plastic chair, his bag between his feet, Svetlana’s words finally landing the way they’d been trying to land all summer - not like you love Jane. The feeling of something that had been true for a long time being acknowledged as true. The strange lightness of it sitting alongside the weight of knowing he had waited too long. 

Marlow waited. 

“Five years,” Ilya admitted, working through the English more carefully than usual. “There has been something between us. Since the draft, maybe before. I handled it badly.” He paused. “Very badly. Vegas was - I said things I should not have said. I did not say things I should have. And then I went to Russian and there was six months of silence and I had plan to fix it when I got back, and now he is going to North Carolina, and the plan–” he made a short gesture. “The plan was not built for North Carolina.” 

Marlow was quiet for a moment. “How bad are we talking about?” 

Ilya thought about the bathroom. About what he had said and how it had landed and the look on Shane’s face and the door closing. He thought about lying awake in his Vegas hotel room at three in the morning telling himself it was fine, that Shane just needed time, that they would find their way back. He thought about how long he had been telling himself that and how it had stopped being true without him noticing. 

“Very bad,” he said. 

“Are you in love with him?” 

The words sat between them. 

Ilya looked at the harbour. 

He had said it to himself in a departure lounge. Said it to Svetlana in the half-language they used for things mostly unsaid, and she had translated it without mercy. He had turned it over in the penthouse at two in the morning and on the ice and in the kitchen with his coffee. 

He had not said it out loud to another person. 

“Yes,” he said. 

It landed differently than it had before. Heavier, more real, the weight of it shifting when someone else was in the room with it. 

Marlow took it in steadily. “Okay,” he said. Just placing it. 

“You are not surprised,” Ilya said. 

“I suspected something. I didn’t know it was that.” A beat. “Does he know?” 

“I thought he did,” Ilya said, and then shook his head. “He does not know how much. I have never–” He stopped. “I have not said it. Not once. Instead I said he was not nothing. That is what I need to fix.” 

“And now he’s in Carolina.” 

“And now he is in Carolina, yes.” 

They stood there. The city moved below them. Music drifted up from somewhere down the street and faded. 

“You know what this means,” Marlow said with a small smile. 

“I know.” 

“You’ve got to fix it, Ilya. Not a gesture. Not one well-placed moment where you almost say the right thing and wait for it to do the work for you. You’ll probably have to grovel. Actual sustained grovelling. The embarrassing kind, too. Words. Showing up. Whether or not he makes it easy.” 

“I know what groveling is.” 

“Do you?” Marlow looked at him sideways. “Because every time I’ve watched you want something, your version of going after it looks a lot like waiting for it to come to you.” 

Ilya opened his mouth. 

Closed it. 

Marlow was almost never wrong about things like this, which had always been deeply inconvenient. 

“Fine,” he said. “Yes. I will grovel properly.” 

“Good.” Marlow nodded toward the door. “Come back inside. Carmichael’s brain’s working in overdrive right now.” 

Ilya finally put the unlit cigarette in his pocket. 

“Why?” 

“It’s Carmichael… who fucking knows, Roz.” 

When they went back inside, the conversation had not moved on. 

St-Simon had pulled up Carolina’s roster on his phone and was working through it quietly, while Carmichael had been pacing and stopped the moment they came back in. 

“Okay,” Carmichael was saying to St-Simon. “So, Connors played with Hollander in juniors.” He paused and turned to Ilya and Marlow when he saw them. “Did either of you know that?” 

Ilya sat down. “No.” 

“I talked to him a few weeks ago.” Carmichael paused, glancing at Marlow. Something passed between them. He sat down - which was its own signal. Carmichael didn’t sit down when he was being loud. He sat down when something had actually gotten to him. “I don’t remember why we were talking about Hollander at the time… it might have had something to do with how out of it the guy looked in Vegas - but he said some stuff. About what it was like coming up through the system with Hollander.” 

The room shifted. No dramatically - just settling into something more careful. 

“What did he say?” Ilya tried to feign nonchalance, but judging by the look on Marlow’s face he was failing. 

Carmichael looked at Marlow again. 

“Tell him,” Marlow said. 

So Carmichael told him. 

It came out slowly at first and then with more momentum as one thing connected to the next. Things Connors had told Carmichael directly. Things Carmichael had seen himself at games over the years, filed away without fully processing what he was seeing. Things he’d heard from players on other teams who had come up alongside Shane - chirps that went beyond being competitive, things said on the ice and in tunnels and at events that Carmichael had always categorized as just hockey, just how the league ran, without stopping to think about what it actually was or what it cost. 

The parents in the stands during juniors. The coaches who looked the other way or, worse, said nothing. An opposing player who would say something that a referee heard and chose to ignore, and a coach who told Shane not to let them get in his head - as if the correct response was to treat it as a tactical problem. 

The teammates with the chopsticks. More than once. Everyone laughing… nobody stopping it. 

The way Shane had absorbed every single one of these things with complete composure and gone back on the ice and performed exactly the way he always performed and given nobody anything to point at. 

“Connors told me,” Carmichael was quieter now, turning his beer in his hands, “that he stayed late after practice one night - thought the locker room was empty… but Hollander was still in there and he could hear him through the door.” He stopped. “In the showers. Crying. Probably thought no one was around to hear it… Connors never said anything to anyone - figured that Hollander wouldn’t want him to.” A pause. “He’s felt really bad about it for years - they were sixteen I think.” 

Silence. 

St-Simon put his phone down and hung his head down. 

“I was on the Olympic team with him,” he said. “Sochi.” A long pause. “We went to dinner one night… all of us on Team Canada. Some of the other guys–” His jaw tightened. “They gave Hollander the check and made a joke… about math and-” He looked at the table. “They said: aren’t all you people supposed to be good at math… and I said nothing.” His expression was pained. “I have thought about that a lot…” 

The room stayed quiet. 

Ilya had not said a word through any of it. 

He sat with his elbows on his knees and his beer forgotten in his hand and let it in without filtering it. He was taking everything he had just heard and layering it over five years of memory and watching the picture change. 

Shane at the awards show, composed and correct while Ilya slid his hand down his back and every camera in the room watched, without seeing. Ilya had known exactly what he was doing. Had known it would cost Shane something to stand there and hold that face and had done it anyway, and had not once thought about what it was costing Shane to be wanted that way in public with no warning and no choice.

Shane in the bathroom. Like being used. Ilya had heard the exhaustion underneath the anger and called it Shane being emotional because examining it would have required examining himself, and that had not been convenient. 

Shane, always composed. Always managed. Always giving every room exactly what it needed from him and nothing less… but also, nothing more. 

And Ilya had called him boring. Had called him a hockey robot, a hockey machine, a boring Canadian who felt nothing - had been doing it since 2009, since Regina, since the first time he’d met the man and started building the language they used with each other - without once asking himself what the composure was made of or what it was protecting. 

He thought about his mother. 

The thought arrived without warning and sat in his chest like ice water.

The performance of fine. The walls built so early and so high you forgot there was anything behind them. The smile she had maintained through everything, the cheerfulness that had seemed so genuine to a nine-year-old boy who had not yet understood that some performances were survival rather than choice. He had watched it up close for years and had not understood what he was watching until a Tuesday morning when the world became a different shape and did not go back. 

Shane was not his mother. He knew that. Shane was stronger in ways that she hadn’t been, had people around him, was not in that place. 

But the parallels had arrived and would not leave. 

And sitting in Marlow’s living room, Ilya felt something he had not expected - not guilt, though that was definitely there, not grief, though that was there too. Relief. That something had moved Shane out of that locker room in Montreal before it had taken more than it already had. That Montreal had, through their own self-interest and their own small cruelties, accidentally done the right thing… because Montreal… Ilya had heard things about Montreal. 

He was grateful they had traded him. 

He had not expected to feel that today. 

“Hey.” 

Marlow’s voice. Close. 

Ilya looked up. 

All three of them were watching him. Carmichael still, St-Simon steady, Marlow careful. 

“I’m good,” Ilya said. 

Nobody moved. 

He looked at his hands. At the beer he hadn’t touched in twenty minutes. At the carpet… and then, because he was tired of looking at things that weren’t people, he looked at Marlow. 

Marlow looked at him for a long moment. Not unkindly. Just - steadily, in the way he did when he had already made a decision but was just waiting for the right moment to act on it. 

“We’ve been friends for a long time,” Marlow said 

“Yes,” Ilya said carefully.

“All four of us,” Marlow continued. Ilya wasn’t sure what he was trying to get at, but he had a suspicion. “You don’t keep things from your brothers–” 

“I’m not–” 

“Ilya,” Marlow’s voice was even. “These two chucklefucks–” Carmichael and St-Simon looked offended “-might not be Rhodes scholars, but even they can see that you’ve been the quietest we’ve seen you in the last three years tonight. You went outside to smoke and you didn’t even light the cigarette. You’ve checked your phone four times since we came back in and every time you look at it like it’s personally offended you.” He paused. “Just tell them.” 

Carmichael looked between them.

St-Simon put down his phone. 

Ilya said nothing. 

“You don’t have to–” Carmichael started. 

“He does,” Marlow pushed, not unkindly. “Because he’s been carrying it alone, and that’s why he looks like that.” He nodded to Ilya. “So. Talk.” 

“There’s nothing to say,” Ilya looked at the wall, a stubborn set to his jaw. “Hollander was traded. It is surprising. That is all.” 

“Is it?” Marlow asked. 

“Yes.” 

“Ilya.” 

“I said yes, Cliff.” 

Marlow looked at him. Picked up his beer. Set it back down. “Okay,” he said. “Let me try this a different way. Is there something you want to tell the class about your girlfriend, Rozanov?” A pause. “Jane, I think it was?” 

The room went very quiet. 

Carmichael’s mouth had fallen open slightly. “Roz has a girlfriend?” 

St-Simon went still and tried to pretend like he wasn’t paying close attention, but he definitely was. 

Ilya looked at the table. 

“That is–” he stopped. “I do not have a girlfriend.” 

“I know, bro–” 

“They why did you just–” St-Simon clamped a hand over Carmichael’s mouth to shut him up, which earned him a glare. 

“It is not what you think.” 

“What do I think?” Marlow asked. 

“I don’t know. But whatever it is–” 

“I think,” Marlow said, carefully. “That you have had Jane’s number saved on your phone for the last two years, probably longer, and I think it is time to tell these two that Jane is not a Jane at all.” he paused. “And I think you need to tell them the reason you went outside when Hollander’s trade came on the TV and it wasn’t because he is your rival.” 

Ilya said nothing. 

“Am I wrong?” 

A long silence. 

“No,” Ilya said. Quiet. Flat. The word cost him something. 

Carmichael made a sound from behind St-Simon’s hand that was not quite a word. 

“Okay,” Marlow said. He didn’t press. Just let it sit there, let Ilya have a moment, before he said, carefully. “Is there something you’d like to tell us?” 

Ilya looked at the table. At his hands. At the beer he hadn’t touched. 

He thought about Moscow. About the departure lounge and Svetlana’s voice and then decision he had made on the plane - to be done with avoidance, to be done with the comfortable minimum, to show up properly and say what he really felt instead of taking the easy road. 

He had meant that for Shane. 

He was starting to think that maybe he had meant it for more than Shane. 

“I–” he stopped. The English felt inadequate in the way it sometimes felt inadequate when things required precision. He tried again. “I am not - only interested in women.” 

The room was quiet. 

“Okay,” Carmichael said slowly. Like he was making sure he understood. “So you’re–” 

“Bisexual,” Ilya said. The word in English was the same as in Russian and he had not said it out loud to another person before, ever, not once, and it landed in the room with a weight he hadn’t fully anticipated. “Yes.” 

Another silence. 

“Jane is a man.” He figured he might as well drop that on them without any warning, wasn’t that what Marlow wanted. Ilya glared at Marlow, who sat there with a look of smug satisfaction. 

Carmichael set his beer down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, trying his best to look calm and collected and sincere. “How long have you been seeing this Jane?” He was doing his level best to play at being a protective older brother, Ilya could tell. 

“Since 2009…” 

Carmichael stared at him. 

He had gone very still, mouth slightly open, clearly rearranging a significant amount of information in real time… and it looked painful for him to do. 

St-Simon blinked once. Looked at Marlow. Back at Ilya. 

Marlow looked at his beer with a slight smirk.

“Since you were eighteen?” 

“Yes.” 

“Five fucking years?”

“Yes, Ryan.” 

Carmichael closed his mouth. Opened it. “Is it serious?” 

Ilya glared at him. “He’s gone - he doesn't want anything to do with me anymore.” He let out a frustrated groan. “What does it fucking matter?!”  

Carmichael’s face did something complicated. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Thank you for telling us. That’s - yeah. Thank you.” 

St-Simon, who had been quiet through all of it, looked at Ilya with his different colored eyes and said: “It does not change anything. You know that.” 

“ I know,” Ilya said. 

“Good,” St-Simon picked his phone back up. “Then we move on.” 

It was so thoroughly St-Simon - the complete, unceremonious acceptance of it, delivered with the same energy he would have at a power play lineup change - that something in Ilya’s chest loosened that he hadn’t realized was tight. 

Carmichael had a look of acceptance on his face, but something Ilya saw there screamed that he wasn’t quite done freaking out about it though. “Did you know?” Ryan turned to look at Marlow. 

“I suspected something,” Marlow nodded, but he told me on the balcony.  

“How did you–” Carmichael shook his head. “Roz always acted like a man whore! Never mind. Who was it?” 

Ilya looked at the table. 

“Rozanov,” St-Simon pressed. Ilya looked at him. He’d clearly done the math in his head already and he was just patiently waiting for the idiot in the room to catch the fuck up. “Who is Jane?” 

Ilya shook his head and pressed his forehead to his knees. Fuck.

He thought about Sheremetyevo. About later finally running out of edges. About a message sitting delivered and unread on a phone that was now, apparently, on its way to North Carolina. 

“Hollander,” he whispered. 

Four seconds of silence. 

Then Carmichael, at a volume with no business existing indoors: “WHAT THE FUCK?!”

“Carmichael–” 

“Hollander? Shane fucking Hollander?” He was on his feet now, pacing in a small circle, looking like he was having an existential crisis. “Shane Hollander?” 

“There is only one Shane Hollander,” Ilya deadpanned. 

“HOW?!” He sat back down. He stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again. “He fucking hates you!” 

“He does not hate me…” 

“He literally said it at the 2012 All-Stars!” Carmichael was looking at him like he was stupid. “He fucking said you were the most insufferable human being he had ever–” 

“He did not hate me,” Ilya smirked. 

Carmichael stopped. 

Stared. 

Ilya watched it happen in real time - five years of assumptions flipping over one by one. Carmichael turned to St-Simon. 

“He doesn’t hate him?” 

“I am aware,” St-Simon said. 

“The whole - all of it - the press corridors, the–” 

“Mostly real,” Ilya said. “One the ice it is genuine… we are competitive. That part is not performance.” 

“But the other part–” 

“Is complicated…” 

Carmichael was still gaping like a fish - Ilya chuckled in his own head as he recalled Carmichael’s fishing stories that kept getting more exaggerated as the afternoon had drug on - and then finally: “Oh fuck you! Was it fucking foreplay or some shit?!” 

Marlow barked out a laugh.

St-Simon choked on his beer for a second. 

Ilya just stared at him. 

Carmichael just sat back down and looked at the ceiling like he was reviewing an entire era of his life through a completely different lens. “The awards show,” he said slowly, to nobody. “In Vegas… you disappeared for like forty minutes and then came back… Connors and I watched as Hollander practically ran to the elevators - I think that’s why we started talking about him that night, actually - and then you came back and sat down looking like–” He looked at Ilya. “Did you guys have a fucking fight or some shit?” 

Silence confirmed it. 

“Oh my fucking God,” Carmichael said quietly. “I need a fucking second.” 

“Take your time,” St-Simon said.

“I’m taking it, man.” He held up a finger. Lowered it. “Okay. I’m good.” He looked at Ilya again. “What the fuck happened then? What did you fucking do?” 

“Why do you assume it was me?” Ilya scoffed, offended. 

All three of them just stared at him. 

“For six months… for six months I did not talk to him - I was,” he waved his hand trying to find the word. “Silence.” Thinking of no better way he could say it. “After Sochi… and then I saw him in Vegas,” Ilya sighed. “I said something I should not have said. And I did not say things I should have. And then I went back to Russia… and I told myself that Shane was fine, that we would find our way back eventually… because we always have.” He paused. “I was wrong about that, apparently.” 

“What the fuck did you say, dude?” Carmichael asked. “What happened in Vegas?” 

“What happens in Vegas,” St-Simon said with a teasing tone, “stays in Vegas - or do you want us to talk about what happened to you in Vegas in 2008?” 

Carmichael shut his mouth. 

St-Simon turned back to Ilya. “You love him.” 

Not a question.

“Yes,” Ilya said. Third time. It came out easier than the first time. 

St-Simon nodded once. “Then you need to fix it.” 

“I know.” 

“Carolina is not that far.” 

“It is farther than Montreal.” 

“Yes,” St-Simon allowed. “But not impossible. They play in Boston twice this season. We play in Carolina twice. Four chances minimum, not counting playoffs, not counting events.” He paused. “What is not workable is showing up to one of those games with no plan and no words and thinking proximity will do the work. Hollander is not going to be moved by proximity alone.

“No,” Ilya agreed. “He is not.” 

Marlow leaned forward. “Here’s the thing, Roz. From everything we’ve just heard, from what happened in Vegas, from what you’ve told us - Hollander has spent a long time being let down by people who should have done better. Coaches. Teammates. The organization.” He paused. “And you. He was looking for something real in that bathroom and you handed him the minimum and went back to your room and waited for him to come to you. And he didn’t.” No heat in it. Just the fact of it. “And you were surprised?” 

Ilya looked at the table. 

“I was not surprised,” he said. “I understand what I did. Now. I did not understand it clearly enough before.” 

“Okay.” So you understand it. That is the start. But him knowing that you understand it is something different, and the only way to close that gap is time and consistency and showing up.” 

“He will not make it easy,” Ilya grimaced. 

“No,” Marlow agreed. “He won’t. And he shouldn’t. He’s been waiting for five years for you to show up properly and you keep giving him just enough to keep the door open without ever walking through it. At some point, dude, that door closes. You need to walk the fuck through it before that happens.”

“It was casual,” Ilya tried to argue. “He was not waiting–” 

Marlow looked at him like he was an idiot again. “There was nothing casual about the way you looked when you were texting Jane. Don’t bullshit us now, Roz.” 

Ilya sighed.  Fuck. Marlow was right… there really hadn’t been anything casual about what he was doing with Shane. That was just another lie he told himself so that he could make it easier when he inevitably fucked it up, like he always did… which he did do in the end. 

He thought about the text. When you are ready. About Shane maybe reading it, maybe not reading it, maybe reading it and then putting his phone face-down the same way Ilya put his phone face-down when something was too much to deal with directly. 

“I know,” he said. 

“You’re going to have to come out to the team,” Marlow said. “Before any of this can happen properly. You can’t pursue this with our help while the locker room thinks that you hate each other and has absolutely no context for any of it.” 

Ilya went still. 

He had thought about this, distantly, in the abstract - as something in the future, in the later that had always felt available. Something he would deal with at some point… when he was ready. 

“What?” He stared at Marlow. “The team?” 

“Training camp,” Marlow said. “You don’t have to do it all at once… but it needs to happen.” 

“Some of them will not–” 

“Some of them won’t,” Marlow agreed. “And those people will deal with it, and if they don’t then that’s their problem and we will handle that as a team. But most of them… most of them are going to react the way we did.” 

“Which is to say,” Carmichael added. “Surprised that you managed to pull Hollander, but not at all surprised that you somehow managed to mess it up.” 

St-Simon made a sound that might have been a laugh. 

Ilya looked at the three of them. 

“What?” Carmichael put his hands up. “We’re all thinking it! It’s fucking Hollander! He’s objectively the most attractive man in the league - even ask GQ!” 

Marlow just shook his head. 

“Oh come on,” Carmichael rolled his eyes. “Everyone is a little bit gay for Hollander.” 

Ilya glared at him. 

“Shit sorry,” Carmichael added. “I’m not trying to - you got nothing to worry about from me, Roz… I swear–” 

Marlow just clamped a hand over Ryan’s mouth to shut him up. 

“Fucking seriously, bro?” 

These three people already knew more than almost anyone alive did… he trusted them. But the rest of the team? 

“Okay,” he said at last. “Training camp.” 

Carmichael leaned forward, as Marlow wiped his hand on his jeans with a horrified look on his face. 

“You fucking licked me!” 

Carmichael ignored him. “We will help you, Roz… all of us.” 

Marlow nodded. “Right.” 

“Operation Hollanov,” Carmichael smirked.

St-Simon looked at him. “Non.” 

“It works–” 

“It sounds like a Cold War military operation.” 

“Well, one of them is Russian–” 

“Dude,” Marlow rolled his eyes. 

Carmichael subsided. But he had a look in his eyes that Ilya knew meant that he was set on something and he was not going to let it go… Ilya knew that he had not heard the last of those two words combined. 

He pressed his knuckles to his eyes. 

“It is going to be very long season,” he sighed. 

“Yeah,” Carmichael said, and his warmth was genuine and uncomplicated. “But we’re going to figure it out.” 

Ilya looked at him. At Marlow. At St-Simon, who had gone back to his phone but whose mouth held the faint shape of something that was almost a smile. 

He thought about Shane in a Carolina jersey he had never seen. About four games this season where proximity would be possible and proximity would not be enough. About a message sitting delivered and unread on a phone that was now twelve hours south of him. 

He was going to fix it. 

He had not fixed things before - not properly, not with words and presence and the full weight of what he felt rather than the comfortable minimum. Not once in his life. He had not known how to, or had known and been unwilling, and in the end those two things amounted to the same thing. 

He was going to learn. 

He looked at the harbour through Marlow’s window, the lights coming on across the water one by one, and felt the plan reshape itself around what he now knew. Longer road than he had expected when he’d boarded the plane in Moscow with his chest full of hard-won clarity and a message already sent. 

Still the same destination. 

“Shane fucking Hollander…” 

“Dude, shut up!” 

Ilya smiled to himself, a small thing, and shook his head.  

He could do this.  He wasn’t alone. 

These guys. His team. His friends. His brothers. He was not alone. 

He would do this. 

He would do whatever it took to make things right.

Ilya always liked training camp. The quiet of the offseason being replaced overnight with the noise and physicality of forty men competing for roster spots, the facility being loud again, the ice busy. It was the rhythm of a season reasserting itself. He liked the return to structure after the untethered weeks of summer, the way everything narrowed back down to hockey and what his body could do and the clean satisfaction of being exactly where he was supposed to be. 

He usually went into training camp every year ready.

This year, he came into it ready and distracted, which was a new combination. 

He skated well. He always skated well - that was not the issue. The issue was the space between the drills, the quiet moments in the locker room, the drive to the facility in the early morning when there was nothing to occupy his brain except the thing he kept returning to. The math of the season laid out in his head like a map of a problem he didn’t yet know how to solve. 

Four times. 

That was the number he kept arriving at. Four games where Boston and Carolina would share the ice - two in Boston, two in Raleigh. Four chances where Shane would be in the same building and proximity would be possible. And the All-Stars game in February, assuming Shane made the roster, which he would because Shane had always made the roster, even in their rookie season. Five, then. Five moments in an entire season to make something happen, which was not nothing but was considerably less than the Atlantic Division rotation had always provided, the easy frequency of it that made later feel like a reasonable position. 

He didn’t have that luxury anymore. 

He thought about it on the ice and in the locker room and at the facility at six in the morning when the building was mostly empty and the only sound was his blades on the ice. He thought about what Marlow had said on the balcony - you keep giving him just enough to keep the door open without ever walking through it - and tried to figure out what walking through it actually looked like in practice. With five windows in an entire season to work with.   

He was still figuring it out when Marlow found him after the roster had been finalized and the guys that made it were going to go and celebrate. 

“Team dinner tonight,” Marlow said, appearing at his locker. “Whole roster. Russo’s.” 

“I know,” Ilya said. “It is on the schedule.” 

“Good.” Marlow paused. “I want you to be ready.” 

Ilya looked at him. “Ready for what?”

Marlow looked at him, his expression clearly stating that he was waiting for Ilya to catch up. Oh. 

“Just be ready,” he said again, and walked away. 

Russo’s was loud, they were always loud when a whole team of professional hockey players occupied them - the noise level calibrated somewhere between celebration and minor catastrophe, the staff moving through it with efficiency because they’d done this before and they were being well compensated for their patience. 

Ilya sat at the long center table between Marlow and Carmichael, which was where he usually sat at these things and which tonight felt slightly more deliberate than usual. St-Simon was across from him, already engaged in what appeared to be a low-stakes argument with Dubek about something Ilya couldn’t quite track. Connors was at the far end, talking to someone Ilya didn’t recognize from the rookie intake. There was a warmth to the moment, this group of men used to spending a significant amount of time together, more than some of them even saw their own families during the season, getting reacquainted after the weeks of summer where they were separated. It was a familiar rhythm of being a team again. 

Ilya ate and listened and let it wash over him. 

He watched as Carmichael escalated his fishing story from the summer to the three players across from him when Feller, two seats down, leaned back in his chair and said to nobody in particular: “Hey, did you hear about Beaumont? He got engaged.” 

The table rippled with the news. 

“Beaumont from Dallas?” Carmichael asked. 

“Yeah. Posted it last week. Some girl he met in–”

“Good for him,” someone else said. 

“My girl’s been dropping hints,” Dubek groaned, like he was trying to accept his fate. “Very not subtle hints.” 

“Just do it,” St-Simon told him. “Waiting does not make it easier.” 

“Wise words,” Connors added, deadpan, which got a laugh from the end of the table. 

“Easy for you to say,” Dubek said. “You’re not–” 

“I’ve been married for three years,” St-Simon said. “I know what I am talking about.” 

More laughter. The conversation fractured into smaller threads - other engagements, other summers, who had done what and gone where and come back changed in ways that were already becoming visible on the ice. Ilya half-listened, turning his water glass in his hand, and felt as if he were apart from them, despite being surrounded by all these people. 

Marlow leaned toward him slightly, the movement almost imperceptible. 

“Now,” he said quietly. Just that.

Ilya looked at him.

Marlow looked back, steady and calm, and Ilya understood that this was what he had meant in the locker room that afternoon. This was the moment he had been told to be ready for. The table still rippling with conversation, nobody watching, the noise level providing enough cover that what happened next could feel organic rather than staged. 

He could let it pass. He could put his water glass down and rejoin whatever thread of conversation was closest and let later be available for one more day. He could do it in a less public place. 

“-said about Hollander?” Ilya heard someone say from across the table, and his head jerked up. 

“Fucking cocksucker,” Koslov muttered, under his breath at the mention of Hollander’s name and Miranov smirked. Ilya grimaced, he had heard these two discussing Hollander in Sochi, making jokes about him being passed around his locker room. Jokes that Ilya had found in poor taste then, and he found in poor taste now. 

He could definitely let this moment pass. But, looking at the looks that were shared by those that were sitting closest to the other two Russians on the team, and seeing at those looks being ones of discomfort and not agreement. It made Ilya feel a bit more brave. Fuck it. He squared his shoulders and sat up straighter. Fuck Koslov and Miranov, for thinking that they could just say whatever they wanted about Shane… as if there were something wrong with Shane for being gay… not that they knew he was - not for sure. Ilya knew it was a chirp that they threw around with Shane’s name because Shane was prettier than anyone else in the league, and for some reason it made men like Koslov and Miranov think he was somehow lesser than everyone else for it. 

“I am bisexual,” he said, his volume carrying to the nearest half of the table without it being an announcement. The conversation nearest to him tapered. He looked at Koslov and Miranov, steel in his eyes. 

The rest of the table quieted in sections, word traveling down it the way it traveled in a group of this size - one person noticing, then two, then the whole thing settling into attention without being called to it. 

Their eyes all turned towards him. 

Ilya had been in front of larger crowds. He had given post-game press conferences after playoff losses and a Stanley Cup victory and every other kind of game in between. He was not a man who was easily made uncomfortable by being watched. 

He was uncomfortable right now. 

“I am bisexual,” he said again, harder this time. The weight of it settling over him like it had when he’d said it in Marlow’s living room, and he let it sit there in the room without trying to manage what happened to it. He looked at Koslov and Miranov again. “You will not talk about Hollander like that again.” He glared. “Not in my locker room. Not on my team.” 

Miranov muttered something under his breath. 

Low. Not intended to carry. But the table was quiet. The word that landed on Ilya was one he recognized and had heard aimed at other people from these two, but he had not expected it to be aimed at him by his own teammates. 

Something went cold and then hot in Ilya’s chest. 

He didn’t move. 

He didn’t move because moving would mean responding and responding would mean giving the word more room than it deserved, and he was not going to do that in this restaurant with his team watching, because how he handled this moment mattered and he knew it. 

His hands went still on the table. 

Carmichael heard it too. 

Ilya could see it in the way that Carmichael’s face had gone - not red, which was what happened when he was going to be loud about something, but pale and controlled, which was rarer and considerably more dangerous. He had started to lean forward. Marlow put a hand on his arm without looking at him, a single quiet restraint, and Carmichael sat back, but he didn’t relax. 

St-Simon looked at Miranov across the table and said nothing at all, which was somehow more effective than anything he could have said. 

There was silence around Miranov and Koslov now, as the rest of the table collectively decided what to think of what had come out of Miranov’s mouth. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t a confrontation, not yet. It was just the unmistakable cold of a group of people withdrawing something that had been extended. 

Miranov looked up. 

Ilya glared at him. 

He looked at the faces around him and understood what he saw there and then looked back down at his plate. 

He and Koslov got up and left without saying anything else. 

“Well,” Carmichael coughed into the silence. “That was awkward.”

Several people laughed and then someone at the far end of the table started clapping, which was either sincere or ironic and possibly both, and the person next to him joined in, and within a few seconds it had spread to the rest of the team and Ilya let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. 

Feller raised his glass. “To Roz!” 

“To Roz,” a handful of voices said, and glasses went up around the table. 

Ilya looked at them. 

He had not known what to expect. He had told himself he was prepared for most outcomes and had not entirely believed it, because preparation and belief were two different things and he had not been able to fully bridge the gap. But this - the ease of it, the glasses in the air, Carmichael beaming at him like he had personally arranged for the entire thing - this was not something he had fully prepared for, and it landed somewhere in his chest that had been braced for impact and was now not sure what to do with the absence of one. 

He looked at Marlow.

Marlow just picked up his glass and tipped it once, small and private, in Ilya’s direction. 

The rest of the dinner moved on. 

The conversation restarted in an organic, self-correcting way, like most group conversations - one thread picked up, then another, the noise rebuilding, the room finding its warmth again. Like a bomb hadn’t just been dropped in the middle of them. Like Ilya had said nothing abnormal or strange. Like he’d just announced: I have curly hair - and the group just accepted it for what it was and went right back to what they had been doing before Ilya’s outburst. Ilya ate and talked and laughed at the right moments and felt, underneath all of it, like something had just shifted, and it was not going to shift back. 

Nobody mentioned either Miranov or Koslov again. Nobody at the table said anything about the word. Nobody said anything about them leaving. Nobody needed to. The team had communicated what it needed to communicate without requiring words, which was a language that Ilya had always been fluent in and which had never felt quite so much like being held up as it did tonight. 

He looked at Carmichael at one point, who was once again mid-story about his fishing trip, hands moving and the guys in front of him laughing, and he caught Carmichael’s eye. Ryan gave him a look and then went back to his story. 

Ilya looked at St-Simon, who met his eyes briefly and then nodded once, the same way he had nodded in Marlow’s living room when he’d said You love him and Ilya had confirmed it. Unceremonious acknowledgement. 

He looked at Marlow, who was not looking at him, but whose hand was still loosely around his glass as he was quietly paying attention to everything being said around him without making it look obvious, making sure that the backlash and fallout was limited to just Miranov and Koslov. 

Ilya picked up his own glass.

He was not alone. 

He had known that, intellectually, since Marlow’s living room. He was starting to know it in a different way tonight - the way you just knew things that had been confirmed by evidence rather than just decided upon, the way knowing settled into something more solid when the people around you made it real. 

He was not alone. 

And Miranov and Koslov could wallow in their pocket of judgment and make their positions known and the team would close around them until the thing resolved itself, which it would, one way or another. 

He had a season to get through first. 

Five windows. 

He was going to make every single one of them count. 

Coach LeClaire found out on Wednesday. 

Not from Ilya, and not from Marlow, though Ilya had the impression that Marlow could have directly said something to him if he’d wanted to and had chosen not to, on the grounds that some information traveled better through certain channels. It came to him through the particular osmosis of a locker room that was processing something and the way the team had moved around two specific individuals with a deliberateness that coaches who had been in the league long enough had learned to read like weather. 

LeClaire was in the hallway outside the locker room when he caught Ilya and Marlow coming out of practice. 

“My office,” he said. 

They went. 

LeClaire was sitting behind his desk, looking at them for a long moment, and they sat down across from him. Nervous, like they’d just gotten called into the principal’s office at school. 

LeClaire observed them. That was what LeClaire did. He observed. He trusted the people he had built around him to do what they were built to do. And that was exactly what they were doing. He did not insert himself into the middle of things that his team was already handling. He just observed. 

“I don’t need to know the details,” he grumbled at last. “But I do need to know if my locker room is going to be a problem.” 

Marlow and Ilya looked at each other and then looked at him. 

“No,” Ilya said. “Not most of them.” 

Marlow sat back and crossed his arms. 

“Who?” 

“Miranov.” Simple, direct. Marlow lifted his eyebrow as he looked at LeClaire.  “Koslov.” 

LeClaire nodded once. He had coached professional hockey for long enough to have very little patience for anything that compromised a locker room that he’d built. He looked out the window of his office at the ice below and said, without any particular heat: 

“I have a roster full of fuckheads who apparently can’t make it through an offseason without turning my training camp into a soap opera.” He looked at Ilya for a moment and then took a gulp of his coffee - which Ilya was pretty sure had something stronger in it - and observed. He had the expression of a man who had seen a great many things in his career and had developed, over the years, a finely calibrated sense of what mattered and what didn’t. Then he said: “Your edge work on the left side has been a little sloppy since you got back.” 

“I know,” Ilya agreed. 

“Fix it.” 

“Yes, coach.” 

LeClaire took another drink of his coffee and waved his hand at him, signaling that they were dismissed. 

That was just how LeClaire operated. That was just what he did. 

Training camp continued as usual and LeClaire didn’t bring any attention to their little office conversation. 

On the last day of camp, Ilya skated through the final practice. Focused. He had spent the last week getting his head on straight and had mostly gotten there, the sloppy left edge had been fixed, his timing was back, the season’s shape clarifying in his mind from a vague outline into something more defined. 

After practice, someone - Carmichael, inevitably - produced a speaker from somewhere and music filled the locker room at a volume that suggested that the soundproofing was about to be tested. The mood was good. The roster was set, or nearly set, the decisions made, and if Miranov and Koslov were no longer in the locker room went noticed, no one mentioned it. 

Ilya saw it and noted it, because that was LeClaire’s answer to the hostility and tension. No issues. No fanfare. No drama. They were just gone. 

Carmichael appeared at his shoulder with two beers, handed one over, and clinked his against it with ceremony. “Good week,” he grinned. 

“Good week,” Ilya agreed. 

“You ready?” 

Ilya looked around the locker room. At Connors arguing cheerfully with Dubek. At St-Simon sitting in his usual corner, earphones in, the faint shape of a smile on his face. At Marlow, across the room, who caught his eye and raised his own beer once in a small, private toast. 

He thought about five windows. 

He thought about Shane in a Carolina jersey. He thought about him in a city that he wasn’t used to. He thought about him in a locker room that didn’t know yet what they had just gained. 

He thought about when you are ready.

He was not entirely ready. He suspected he was not going to feel entirely ready when the first window arrived either, that readiness was perhaps not the thing that was required and that showing up was what was required instead, imperfectly and consistently and with the full weight of what he actually felt instead of the comfortable minimum. 

He could do that. 

He picked up his beer. 

“Ready,” he said. 

Carmichael grinned. “Operation Hollanov.” 

“Ryan, I swear to God–” 

“I’m just saying! It’s a good name–!” 

“It is not a good name–” 

“Victor! Back me up!” 

“Non,” St-Simon said, without removing his earphones. 

Carmichael pointed at him. “You didn’t even hear what I said!” 

“I did not need to.” 

Ilya shook his head, the corner of his mouth doing something it hadn’t done much of this summer, and drank his beer and let the locker room noise wash over him and felt, for the first time since he stepped off the plane at Logan with Moscow still sitting in his chest and a plan that hadn’t yet accounted for Carolina, something that was close enough to settled to work with. 

The season was starting.

He was going to fix this.

He was not alone. 

Chapter End Notes

I think that Carmichael and St-Simon in this fic are going to be my favorites to write.

Chapter 5: Solid Foundation

Chapter Notes

Shane's POV

He had the Range Rover fully packed on a Tuesday morning. 

It had taken three trips from the apartment to the parking garage and one very undignified moment with a box of kitchen things that was slightly too wide for the elevator, and then he stood next to the loaded SUV in the concrete quiet of the garage and looked at it and thought: this is everything. Three years in Montreal and this is what it comes to. An SUV with the seats folded down and boxes that Hayden had helped him load at seven in the morning while Ruby and Jade supervised from the building entrance like they had been given a very important job; he’d decided against bringing the couch and Hayden had gladly strapped it to his roof rack to use in the kids’ playroom in the basement. 

He had hugged Hayden for a long time in the parking garage. 

Hayden didn’t say anything, which was its own kind of language, and had clapped him twice on the back and stepped away and told him to drive safe and text him when he got there.

Shane had gotten in the car. 

He had not looked back at the building. 

And he left. 

The first two hours were fine. 

He knew this highway. He had driven it so many times, the route so familiar it barely required active attention, his brain running on a kind of pilot that left plenty of room for the radio and staring at the early morning Quebec light on the highway. He drank his coffee and let the kilometers accumulate and thought about nothing specific, which was a skill he’d developed over the years of long drives and longer road trips and which served him reasonably well in the ordinary run of things. 

It served him until he crossed the border into Vermont. 

It wasn’t dramatic - there wasn’t anything he could point to specifically that did it, no sign, no landmark, no border control guard. Just the awareness, building over the next hour, that he was being taken in a direction that he had not been moving in all summer. That every kilometer was not just distance from Montreal, but distance toward something else. That the math of the drive, which he had looked at on a map and understood logically as Montreal to Raleigh, had not fully resolved in his chest until now, and it was resolving with a precision he had not prepared for. 

Boston. 

He would be driving through Boston. 

He had known this. He had known it for weeks, had looked at the route and noted it and told himself it was just a city, just a point on a map, just the logical corridor between here and there. He had believed this with the part of himself that was good at believing things he needed to believe in order to function. 

The other part of him was less convinced. 

There were other routes he could have taken… but he chose this one. He had told himself it would give him closure when he had mapped it out, but now he just felt like he was a masochist. 

He turned the radio up. 

He stopped for gas somewhere in New Hampshire, standing at the pump in the grey afternoon light and watching the highway and trying to identify what exactly what happening in his chest, which had been doing something unhelpful since Vermont and had not improved. He was not going to see Ilya, he knew that - Ilya was in Russia, he was always in Russia until the training camps started. It was early August and the offseason wasn’t over yet, he would be in Russia. He wasn’t sure what Ilya was doing right now, but he knew that whatever it was - whatever his summer looked like - it wasn’t happening in Boston. He was just driving through a city. A city that happened to contain a penthouse that happened to belong to someone that he was trying very hard to stop being in love with and was not yet succeeding at. 

He was a masochist. 

He got back in the car. 

He was fine. 

He kept driving. 

Boston appeared through the windshield and Shane’s hands went tight on the wheel without his permission. 

He didn’t know exactly which part of the skyline contained Ilya’s building. He knew the neighborhood, roughly - Back Bay, the penthouse, the floor-to-ceiling windows he had never seen but had assembled in his imagination from enough context clues to have a picture of it. He looked at the skyline and despite himself tried to find it, which was exactly the kind of thing he had been telling himself not to do and his traitorous brain was doing anyway. 

The traffic slowed. 

He sat in it. 

He thought about the text still sitting on his phone - I want to talk. When you are ready. There are things I should have said. I know this. - and about the twenty-four times he had read it and then the zero times he had responded and the exhaustion of continuing not to respond to it when every part of him wanted to. 

He thought about Vegas. About not nothing and what it had cost him to understand that not nothing was not enough. About the bathroom door and the number fourteen-twelve and the ceiling of his hotel room and the decision made at two in the morning that had not felt like enough and had also been the right one. 

The traffic moved. 

He moved with it. 

He watched the skyline in his rearview mirror as the highway curved south and felt the weight of it - not the dramatic kind, just the weight of miles between himself and a person he loved who did not love him back the way way. The weight of choosing distance because you needed it, not because you wanted it. 

What he didn’t know, sitting in Boston traffic with his hands tight on the wheel and Ilya’s building somewhere in the skyline he couldn’t locate, was that Ilya was up there. Back from Moscow. Standing in his penthouse or sitting on his couch or lying in the dark thinking about the same bathroom in Vegas that Shane was thinking about, in the same city, twelve floors up and completely unaware of Shane’s car moving through the traffic below. 

Shane didn’t know that. 

He just drove. 

By Connecticut the tightness in his chest began, incrementally, to ease. 

He noticed it, gradually, moment by moment as they accumulated. The Boston skyline was gone from his mirrors. The highway carried him south through landscapes that were unfamiliar and therefore not loaded with anything, trees and exits and rest stops that had no history in them for him. 

He stopped for coffee in New Haven and sat in the parking lot for a few minutes, looking at his phone. 

The text was still there. 

He put the phone face-down on the passenger seat and drank his coffee and thought about North Carolina. About a locker room and people who didn’t know him yet. About clean ice and a coaching staff that sounded excited to meet him. About a team that was building toward something real and had decided that they wanted him to be a part of what they were building toward. 

He thought about what his mother had said. A fresh start.

He wasn’t fixed. He knew that - that was not how any of this worked, you didn’t just drive twenty-four hours and arrive somewhere new and be fixed, the work would be ongoing and he would do it. But he was here. He was moving. He was putting miles between himself and the version of things that had almost broken him, and somewhere in the accumulation of those miles was something he was cautiously willing to call hope.

He started the car. 

He drove south. 

Raleigh arrived without announcement - no skyline moment, no dramatic reveal, just the highway becoming surface streets and the surface streets becoming a city and the city being, simply, where he was now. Green and warm and wide in a way that Montreal wasn’t. The sky bigger. The buildings lower. The whole place carried a quality of space that he hadn’t known he needed until he was driving through it. 

He found his building. He found parking. He sat in the car for a moment after he turned the engine off and looked through the windshield at the entrance to the place he had decided he was going to live. 

Okay, he thought. 

Not fine. Not fixed. Not the version of himself he wanted to eventually be. 

Just, okay. Just, here. Just, this is where it starts. 

He got out of the car. 

The condo was clean and modern and empty - unlived in - good light, hardwood floors, bare walls that belonged to whoever was going to put things on them. Shane stood in the living room with his bags still by the door and looked at it and thought about the Montreal apartment he had stood in for the last time two days ago, the marks on the floor where the furniture had been, the light coming through the windows onto nothing. 

This was different. 

There were no marks on the floor. The light coming through the windows had never landed on anything that belonged to anyone. He was the first person who was in this condo, which meant it could be whatever he wanted it to be, which meant the question of what he wanted to be was suddenly more available than it had been in a long time. 

He put his bags down and took a deep breath. 

He was fine. 

It took him six trips - because he didn’t have Hayden with him this time - but he got all of his boxes up to his condo. The frustrating kitchen box that wouldn’t fit into his old elevator slid into his new one easily, no adjustments necessary. It fit, he fit. He would fit. 

He stayed at a nearby hotel that the organization had paid to put him up in temporarily while he got everything situated in his new condo - new furniture, new bedding, new appliances, new everything. New except for the car-full of boxes that fit in his SUV, containing the things that he couldn’t replace. 

He unpacked those boxes and put things in their places, the kitchen got stocked, his running route was mapped out the first morning before six when the city was still quiet and the air was cool enough to breathe. He found a grocery store and a coffee place. He built the infrastructure of a life, piece by piece, and let Raleigh be unfamiliar without trying to make it become familiar faster than it was ready to be. 

He called his mother on Sunday. 

He called Hayden on Tuesday, which was still not the right day for it. 

“How is it?” Hayden asked. His voice was warm. The distance was felt, but they had been determined that the distance would not be a problem. 

“Different,” Shane answered. 

“Good different - or bad different?”

Shane looked out the window at the Raleigh skyline, smaller than Montreal’s and greener at the edges and entirely unfamiliar. “I don’t know yet,” he answered honestly. “Ask me in a month.” 

Hayden accepted it, he understood that Shane’s timelines were his own. “Okay,” he said. “But, you’re eating right? Jackie wanted me to make sure–” 

“I’m eating,” Shane said. 

“Bird food doesn’t count.” 

“Hayd.” 

“I’m serious–” 

“I’m eating,” Shane said again, with slightly more firmness, and moved on. 

He was eating the bird food as Hayden liked to call it. It was a performance enhancing diet that he’d been eating now for so long that it stopped feeling like a choice and just felt like how he ate, the same way composure had stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like just how he was. He made note of it and filed it under things to examine later after his run. 

He was not ready to examine it yet. 

His diet was fine. 

He was fine. 

The practice rink was twenty minutes from his condo, and Shane didn’t know Raleigh traffic yet, which meant he added twenty minutes onto every morning for the first week as a buffer and arrived early enough that the facility was quiet when he got there. 

He liked quiet. 

He skated alone in the empty rink on those first mornings and let himself settle into the ice the way he always settled into the ice - the familiar weight of skates, the silence of a rink before anyone else arrived, the world narrowing to the clean fact of movement. 

He felt, on the ice, like himself. 

Off it he was still trying to figure out what that meant in this city, in this jersey, with these people he didn’t know yet. 

Practices were different than he was used to. 

Not the skating itself - that was the same, the ice was the same, his body knew what to do without being asked. But the space around the skating. The way Hendricks ran a session. The way information moved through the group. 

In Montreal, systems came down from the top and were implemented. You ran the drill, you got the feedback, you adjusted. Shane had opinions about the systems - he had always had opinions, had been geometry on the ice since he was eight years old and had worked out angles that grown men hadn’t even noticed yet - but he had learned early on that offering those opinions unprompted produced one of two outcomes. Either they were ignored, which was its own particular kind of invisibility, or he was ridiculed before they were absorbed without credit, surfacing later in someone else’s voice as someone else’s idea, and that was worse. 

So he stopped offering them. He learned to keep what he saw to himself, running the calculations internally and executing them without narrating the math, which had earned him a reputation as being a machine, by people who didn’t understand how his brain worked, people had already decided they knew who he was without bothering to know him. 

He was used to that. 

What he was not used to was Derek Kessler. 

Kessler was tall, unhurried, and his authority was just a part of how he moved through a room. He found Shane at his locker before the first full team practice and introduced himself with a handshake that communicated clearly that Shane was welcome and that Kessler had meant what he’d said to the press. 

Then, on the third day of mandatory practice, during a power play drill that wasn’t working - Shane could see why it wasn’t working, could see the angle problem and the timing gap and the adjustment that would fix both, and he was running it internally the way he always did. Quietly. Saying nothing. Then Kessler skated over and said, “Hollander. What do you see?” 

Shane looked at him. 

Not what do you think in the way people said it when they were being polite. What do you see? Like he had already decided that Shane was seeing something and wanted to know what it was. 

Shane told him. 

Kessler listened - actually listened, not the usual performance of listening that he’d been used to, not waiting for Shane to finish so he could respond but actually taking in what was being said - and then he turned to Hendricks and said, “Let’s try the adjustment!” 

They ran the drill again… Shane’s way. 

It worked. 

Hendricks looked at him. His expression wasn’t surprised that he’d had a useful thought, it was just the expression of a coach noting information. “Good eye,” he said, and moved on. 

Shane stood on the ice for a moment after that. 

He had been in the NHL for three years now. He could count on one hand the number of times a coach had asked him what he saw and then used the answer since he’d been in Peewees. 

He shook his head and skated back into the drill. 

Anders Holmqvist was harder to read than Kesser, but worth the effort. 

Holmqvist was a bigger man than Kessler and had an intensity about him. He communicated primarily in silences, you had to look to where his attention was focused - where he aimed it, how long he held it, what he did when he looked away. When he did communicate with the team directly, he did it through eyebrow movements, and once you understood the system it was remarkably efficient. He was the kind of player that didn’t need to speak much to be understood. Shane had learned early in his career that a lot of people were loud and what they said was less informative than what they didn’t say, and he’d built his understanding of the world accordingly. 

When Holmqvist did talk, the things he said tended to land differently than they might have from someone else. 

On the fifth day of camp, after a defensive zone coverage drill that Shane had executed correctly but which had required him to override what Hendricks had drawn up in favor of something that actually worked given the positioning - he had done it quietly, without comment, and it had worked, and nobody said anything - Anders skated alongside him on the way back to the bench and said, “I saw what you did.”

Shane looked at him. 

“It was right,” Anders nodded. And skated past him. 

That was all. No elaboration. No performance of approval. Just the acknowledgement, from someone who watched things carefully, that Shane had seen something and then acted on it. 

Shane sat on the bench and thought about how long it had been since someone in hockey had noticed something he’d done correctly and said it to him in a way that wasn’t attached to something else. 

He thought about juniors. He thought about being thirteen and watching his coaches run systems that were demonstrably less effective than the adjustments he could see needed to be made. He learned pretty quickly after that that the coaches would look at him and then roll their eyes and do nothing to fix the problem simply because he was the one that had been making the suggestion. 

He had understood his place in the structure immediately. 

He stopped thinking about juniors and watched the next line take the ice. 

Blake and Zelenko operated differently than pretty much everyone else on the team. 

Where Kessler and Anders communicated very deliberately, Blake and Zelenko were just - present. Blake was quieter, more measured, and had a tendency to watch before he spoke with a dry precision when he did. Zelenko was the opposite - quick and loud and genuinely funny, with the ability to fill any silence and the good sense to know when not to. And both of them consistently and genuinely were there in a way that didn’t ask Shane to be anything in particular in return. They didn’t seem to need him to behave in a specific way socially. They weren’t running a calculation about what he owed them for their friendliness. They were just simply - there, and the next day and the day after that, without an agenda. 

Shane had found that… disorienting. 

He was used to friendliness that wanted something. When he was younger it had been status - being seen with the good player. In Montreal it had been complicated - image management, positioning, the subtle social economy of the locker room where everyone was aware of everyone else’s market value. He had learned to keep a comfortable distance from all of it, to be pleasant and professional and to give nothing away. 

Blake and Zelenko didn’t seem to be playing that game. 

One day before practice, Zelenko appeared at his locker with two coffees and handed one to Shane without being asked. 

“You take it black?” Zelenko asked. 

“Yes,” Shane said, slightly wrong-footed. 

“Good.” Zelenko dropped onto the bench beside him. “Blake thinks you’re too quiet.” 

Shane looked at him. “I’m not quiet.” 

“You’re hockey quiet,” Zelenko laughed. “Which is different. You talk about hockey fine. You just stop talking when the hockey stops.” 

Shane said nothing, which he realized, approximately one second later, proving Zelenko’s point. 

Zelenko grinned. “See?” 

“I’m sitting here and talking to you right now!” Shane objected. 

“Because I gave you coffee and you felt obligated.” He was entirely unbothered. “That’s okay. We’ll work with obligated.” he stood up. “See you on the ice.” 

He left. 

Shane looked at the coffee in his hand and he drank it. 

After that they always seemed to find him together, which was apparently how they did most things. According to Kessler they were the two wingers who were going to be on his line and they operated as a unit, energy coordinated after playing alongside each other for long enough that they were able to move in sync off the ice as well as on it. And they had just decided that Shane was part of their group and that was that. It was casual. It was thorough, and they were not interested in discussing it. 

By the end of the first week they had established a shorthand on the ice that felt like it had been there for far longer than it had any right to and the three of them could read each other with a fluency that Shane had never been able to manage with anyone else he’d ever played with - not even Hayden. He liked it… but it was uncomfortable in a way he didn’t want to examine too closely. He wasn’t ready to admit that what he had always felt were his own limitations all of these years might have actually just been the environments that he was in. 

Carter Mackinnon was the one who surprised him the most. 

Not in a dramatic way - Mankinnon didn’t do dramatic. He was quiet and dry and had a habit of appearing in Shane’s peripheral vision at moments he hadn’t expected, a steady presence that didn’t announce himself or ask anything. Shane had taken note of it early and catalogued him under safe after he stopped having a miniature heart attack every time he looked over his shoulder. There was just something about him that Shane’s instincts told him he could relax around, the same instincts that had always told him - correctly - which rooms he could let his guard down in and which ones required full composure at all times. 

Two weeks into camp, after a particularly good session on the power play that Shane had spent most of contributing actually thoughts to out loud - which still felt strange, and he still caught himself waiting for someone to look at him with an expression that said: okay, we’ve heard enough from you - Mackinnon fell into step beside him as they left the ice. 

“You’ve been doing that your whole career,” Mackinnon said. 

Shane glanced at him. “What?” 

“Seeing the play before it happens and then waiting for someone else to name it.” Mackinnon said, just an observation. “Where did you learn to do that?” 

Shane thought about it. “I’ve always done it,” he said. 

“The seeing or the waiting?” 

Shane looked at the ice. 

“Both, probably,” he admitted. 

Mackinnon nodded once, like that answered something he had been thinking about, and went to the locker room. 

Shane stood in the corridor for a moment and thought about being twelve years old at a hockey camp in Ottawa, working out angles in his head that the coaches weren’t running and then saying nothing because the one time he had raised his hand and offered a suggestion a coach had smiled and said that’s very creative, Shane in a tone that said sit down. Thought about how quickly he’d learned, after that, that even if he was right… he wouldn't be taken seriously. 

By the end of his second week Shane had started looking for him on the ice the way he looked for people he trusted to be in the right place when they were supposed to be. 

Niklas Edvardsen, the Breakers goaltender - and a damn good one because every time Montreal had played against Carolina Edvardsen had been the most difficult goaltender he’d ever had to get shots past - was harder to learn than the others. 

Not because he was difficult - he wasn’t, he was in many ways the easiest person on the team to be around. He carried a steadiness and patience into every interaction that didn’t ask anything from you in return. He didn’t fill silences unnecessarily. He didn’t perform friendliness. He was just - there, in a way that Shane recognized because he had always been the one doing it. 

Being on the receiving end of it was… disorienting. 

Shane noticed it within the first week. The way that Edvardsen’s eyes would find him in the locker room at moments he hadn’t anticipated. Not aggressively - there was nothing aggressive about him - but with a quality of focus that Shane had always associated with himself, with the way he watched rooms and catalogued information and drew conclusions he kept entirely to himself. He was used to being the one doing that. Having it done back to him was different. 

On the ice it was a little less unsettling, because on the ice the attention made more sense - Edvardsen was the goaltender and watching the players in front of him was simply what goaltenders did. But Shane started to notice what Edvardsen watched was not just the puck or the play. He watched the players themselves. The way they moved when they were tired versus when they were fresh. The way some guys got looser and more instinctive as practice wore on and others got tighter and more mechanical. The way Shane, specifically, skated differently in the first twenty minutes of a session than he did in the last twenty - not worse, just differently, the calculations becoming less visible and something underneath them coming through. 

He noticed this because Edvardsen told him. 

Not in a pointed way. They were coming off the ice after a long session, most of the team was already in the tunnel, and Edvardsen fell into step beside him, like Mackinnon had, and said without preamble: “You skate differently when you stop thinking.” 

Shane looked at him. 

“Toward the end,” he clarified. “When you’ve been at it long enough that the calculations are automatic. It changes.” He paused. “It’s better.” 

Shane didn’t know what to do with that. 

He said “okay” and kept walking and Edvardsen didn’t push it, didn’t ask him to respond or explain or do anything with the observation at all. Just offered it and moved on, the way someone might point out that the weather was changing. 

Shane thought about it for the rest of the day. 

He thought at what it meant that Edvardsen had been watching closely enough to notice something Shane hadn’t even noticed about himself. And about what it meant that the observation hadn’t been delivered with an agenda attached to it - no performance of insight, not expectation of reciprocation, just information passed from one person to another because it seemed worth passing. 

He didn’t know what to do with that. 

What he did know was that Edvardsen made him feel seen in a way that was different from the others, and that was not a very comfortable feeling when you spent a long time being careful about how much of yourself was visible. 

He didn’t know what Edvardsen was looking for. 

He wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to find out. 

So he kept a polite distance. 

And Edvardsen let him keep it, which was somehow more unsettling than if he had pushed. 

They eventually found an equilibrium in it - two people that circled each other and didn’t name what it was - a language that Shane had become very fluent in over the years with Ilya. 

He let that sit and let the rest of the team flow around him, carrying him with them as they went. 

The locker room was an animal he was still learning. 

Not the layout - he had memorized that in the first week, the same way he memorized everything that constituted the infrastructure of a new place. His stall, the equipment arrangement, who sat where and why, the unspoken geography of a professional hockey locker room that was the same everywhere and entirely specific to each team. That part he had down. 

He was still learning the atmosphere of it. 

Montreal’s locker room had always had something about it he couldn’t quite name precisely but he’d always felt - a low-level pressure, like the air in the room was slightly thicker than it needed to be. Not always hostile. Not always directed at him. Just - present. Like residue of years of dynamics and hierarchies and cruelties that accumulated in environments where men spent too much time together under too much pressure and were never asked to examine what that did to them. 

He’d learned to move through it pretty quickly with his composure intact and his eyes forward and his opinions filed away where nobody could find them, and it had worked, more or less, for three years. 

But this locker room was different. 

He wasn’t ready to say how just yet. He wasn’t ready to trust the different, because trust required time and evidence accumulated over time and he’d been here for a month and a month was not enough. But he was aware of it - the way the air in the room sat differently, the way conversations moved, the way no one seemed to be looking for anything specific. 

He watched it carefully, from a distance, and waited to see when the thing that was always there would start to show itself. 

But he just kept waiting. He just kept watching. He just kept filing things away for later. 

Kessler ran the locker room the way he ran the ice, his authority so settled it had become invisible. He didn’t assert it. He didn’t need to. It was just there, the same way gravity was there, and the room organized itself around it without being asked. And Shane had noticed after the first week that Kessler’s authority also left room. 

In Montreal there had always been a hierarchy of voices - who spoke in the locker room and how much and about what, who got listened to and who got the silence that meant the room had already moved on. Shane had been the captain for two of those three years and he had still felt that silence more often than he should have, and he’d learned to read it and route around it and say the things that were necessary in the moments that were necessary and when they weren’t, to just stay quiet. 

Kessler’s locker room didn’t have that silence. 

Or - it had silence, but it was a different kind. The kind that existed between people who were comfortable with each other, not the kind that existed when someone was being managed out of a conversation. 

Shane noticed this in the second week of training camp when a rookie named Lavoie who had barely said a word since camp started, offered a thought during a film review session and Kessler had stopped the tape and said “say it again” and actually meant it. 

Lavoie had said it again and Kessler had considered it, looked at the tape, then looked back to Lavoie, and simply said: “You’re right,” and moved on. 

Lavoie had looked like someone who had been handed something unexpected and wasn’t sure what to do with that. 

Shane recognized that look. 

It was a look he was making himself, a lot lately. 

Training with the team went smoothly for the most part, the structure was good, full enough that the time moved but not so restless that there was nothing left at the end of it. Practice, film, the locker room, the ice, the locker room again. The repetition of it building something in Shane that he couldn’t quite identify, a slow accretion of normalcy that he kept waiting to be disrupted. 

And damn it, it kept not being disrupted. 

He was cautious about this. He’d learned a long time ago that rooms that seemed different sometimes just had a longer lag before they became more of the same. That the thing you were braced for sometimes just took longer to arrive. But it always arrived in the end. He had walked into junior locker rooms that felt fine for a month or two before they didn’t, and he’d learned not to let the couple of fine months lower his guard because they were not a guarantee of anything. 

So he kept his guard up. 

He was professional and pleasant and present in the ways that were required of him and he filed away the observations for later - Kessler giving Lavoie’s thought the weight it deserved, Anders’ quiet nods, Mackinnon’s precision, Blake’s steadiness, Zelenko’s complete inability to let a silence exist if he could fill it with something, and Edvardsen’s ever constant observation - and he did not yet draw conclusions from them. 

He just drew provisional observations. 

And if his provisional observations were cautiously positive then he didn’t share that with anyone else. 

The most disconcerting thing of all was when he noticed that, more than anything else, was that nobody was waiting for him to fail. 

He had not realized, until he was part of a team where it wasn’t happening, how much of his energy had gone toward managing the awareness of being watched for signs of inadequacy or weakness. Not just the overt things - the diversity commentary, the way some guys’ voices would change register when they were saying things they knew they could get away with - but the subtler things underneath all of it, the ever present hum of a group that had decided what he was and was now watching for evidence to confirm it. 

He had gotten very good at not providing evidence. 

He had gotten so good at it that he had stopped noticing how much it cost. 

Here, nobody seemed to be watching for anything in particular. 

Kessler watched him the same way he watched everyone, no more and no less. The rest of the team just seemed to follow suit, not because they had been told to but because apparently that was just how this group worked. 

Shane stood in the middle of it and kept waiting for the floor to give way and the floor kept holding. 

He still wasn’t ready to trust the floor, but he was starting to notice it holding. 

By the end of the training camp, with the roster settling into its final shape and the preseason only days away, Shane sat at his still after the final practice and looked around the locker room. 

Zelenko was arguing with Blake about something that had happened on the ice, the argument appeared to be just another variation of an argument that the two of them had apparently been having for years and had absolutely no intention of resolving it. Mackinnon was reading, which he did whenever there was a spare moment, focused and serene and completely unbothered by all the noise. Homqvist was on his phone, his expression suggesting the call was family-related, the attention he brought to those calls was always different than to everything else. 

Kessler was talking with Hendricks in the doorway, unhurried, the conversation that of two people who had built something together and were checking in on it. 

Shane watched it all. 

He thought again about Montreal. About sitting in a different locker room after a different practice. About having to always keep his guard up to the point of exhaustion. 

He thought about how different this was. 

He still wasn’t ready to say it out loud. He wasn’t ready to let himself believe it fully, because believing it would lead to lowering his defenses… and he wasn’t there yet - he might not be there for a while yet - and it was going to require more time than had already passed to prove that the floor would keep holding. 

But he was aware of it. 

Quietly, carefully, and with all his usual reservations intact… he was aware that something here was different. 

And somewhere underneath the reservations, in a place he was not going to be examining yet too directly, something that had been very quiet for a long time was beginning, cautiously, to consider the possibility that different might actually mean better. 

He picked up his bag and threw it over his shoulder. 

He went home. 

The full, final roster had a get-together every year at Mckinnon’s place Shane found out, after training camp was over and before preseason started. He had mentioned it on the last day of camp, very simply - “My place, Saturday, six o’clock, bring something” - and that had been it, the entirety of the invitation, and Shane’s phone pinged with a notification that he’d been added to a group text - something that he chose to interpret as intentional rather than an oversight, like it usually was. 

He brought beer and he arrived on time, which meant that he arrived before most people, and it also meant he stood on Mackinnon’s back deck with a drink and watched the space fill up and did what he always did in new social situations. 

He awkwardly observed. 

Mackinnon’s house was in a quiet part of the city, a proper house with a yard and deck and a lived-in quality that made it a home rather than just a place you occupied for sleeping. There were kids' toys in the living room, thrown haphazardly into a basket in the corner in a manner that reminded him of Hayden’s house in Quebec, that made his chest twinge a little to think about. A small dog was conducting a thorough investigation of the fence line and someone had set up a folding table along the back fence loaded with enough food to constitute a significant logistical operation, which turned out to be Zelenko’s contribution - he arrived with way more than was possibly necessary and no apology about it. 

“You’re early,” Zelenko said as he appeared beside Shane with two beers in his hands. 

“I’m on time,” Shane rolled his eyes. 

“Early is on time, on time is late–” 

“Zelenko.” 

“I’m just saying.” He handed Shane a fresh beer in exchange for the one he’d already surprisingly emptied. “Mingle. Talk to people. Be social.” 

“I’m talking to you right now.” 

“Because I came to you.” He said it without an edge, just an easy frankness, like he’d already decided that he was going to be Shane’s friend and was not going to be quiet about the process. “Come on.” 

He walked away without waiting for Shane to agree, which left Shane with the choice of following him or standing on the deck alone, and the deck alone had its own implications, so Shane followed. 

The evening was warm and loud and easy, like it should be when you were with a group of people who genuinely liked each other. Partners and wives had come - Mackinnon’s girlfriend, a calm woman who asked Shane two questions about Montreal and then moved on without making a project of it; Blake’s girlfriend, who turned out to have been the college roommate of Mackinnon’s girlfriend, a relationship that predated both of their hockey relationships; Anders’ wife Petra, a Swedish woman with the same direct energy as her husband, currently deep in conversation with one of the younger defensemen about something Shane couldn’t hear from where he was standing. 

There were kids. Not many - a toddler being carried by one of the defensemen, a girl of about seven who had found the dog and was now in an intense negotiation with it over a tennis ball - but enough that the yard had the quality of a gathering that wasn’t just a team event but a real collection of people’s actual lives. 

Shane moved through it more than he had expected to. 

He talked to Kessler near the grill, a conversation that moved from hockey seamlessly into the city to a restaurant near Shane’s condo that Kessler recommended with enough conviction that Shane noted it was genuine. He talked to Petra, who told him three things about playing hockey in Sweden that she thought he should know, having decided that they were important, and he found himself genuinely interested. He talked to one of the rookie defensemen - Rourke, he thought - about a defensive coverage adjustment he’d been thinking about since their last practice, and Rourke leaned in and engaged with it seriously, without the glazed over look that Shane had learned to recognize as polite tolerance rather than actual interest. 

He found himself at the food table, looking at Zelenko’s contributions and trying to identify them, when the man in question appeared at his shoulder. 

“You need to eat more,” he stated. 

Shane looked offended. “I eat.” 

“You eat like someone has been telling you exactly what to eat for so long that you’ve forgotten that food is supposed to be enjoyed.” He gestured at the table. “This is food. Whatever you’ve been doing - the containers, the measuring - that is fuel. There’s a fucking difference, Hollz.” 

“My diet is–” 

“Nutritionally optimized, yes, I know.” Zelenko picked up the tongs. “Here.” 

He put food on a plate and held it out. 

Shane looked at it. 

Zelenko looked back at him, obviously planning to stand there with the plate until something happened. 

Shane took it. 

He ate.

It was good. Straightforwardly good in a way that his performance diet had stopped being approximately six months into following it. Just food. A plate of food that someone had made because they wanted to, and Shane stood there and ate it and felt slightly unmoored by how uncomplicated the experience was. 

“Well?” Zelenko asked. 

Shane swallowed the bite in his mouth. “It’s good.” 

Zelenko pointed at him. “I know.” He walked away satisfied. 

Blake appeared at Shane’s elbow. “He’s been waiting for someone to say that since he got here.” 

“I got that impression," Shane smiled. 

Blake smiled back and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re going to be just fine here, buddy,” and went back to his girlfriend. 

Shane stood at the food table with his plate and thought about what that meant - said without an agenda, without performance, just a plain statement that Blake appeared to simply believe - and he was still thinking about it when the gate on the side of the yard opened. 

Edvardsen came through it with someone beside him. 

A man about Shane’s height, dark-haired, moving with an ease that suggested that he was arriving someplace that he was not at all uncomfortable with or unsettled by. Edvardsen’s hand was at his back as they came through the gate - casual, automatic, the kind of touch that existed between people who’d stopped thinking about it.

Shane went still. 

Not visibly. He was good at not being visibly still. But internally, the kind that happened when something needed a moment to be processed. 

He watched. 

Mackinnon crossed the deck and gave the man a hug. The man - Liam, Shane had heard someone call him - laughed and Mackinnon went back to his girlfriend. That was the entirety of it. No production. No moment. Just a hug and a laugh and Mackinnon going back to what he was doing. 

Zelenko waved from across the yard and called something that made Liam roll his eyes, which suggested a well established dynamic between them. Petra stopped them on their way through and started a conversation that Liam immediately engaged with. One of the younger players nodded at Edvardsen and nodded at Liam in the same movement, the same energy, no distinction between them. 

Nobody made it a thing. 

There was no performance of acceptance, no slightly too-careful welcome, no attempt to make something appear fine that they weren’t actually fine with… they were simply just fine. Edvardsen and Liam moved through the yard and the yard received them and that was that. 

Shane stood at the food table and felt something move through him that he didn’t have a clean word for. 

He was still standing there as they got closer and Shane noticed that Liam was Asian. 

It landed quietly, and he heard himself take a sharp intake of breath. Liam was close enough to the food table now that Shane could hear him talking to Petra, laughing at something she’d said, entirely at ease in this yard with these people, received without an asterisk or the careful attention that Shane recognized as the performance of tolerance rather than the actual thing. 

He thought about every room he’d ever walked into. 

About the weight of arriving somewhere and waiting for people to judge you and decide who you were before they even bothered to let you open your mouth. About what it cost, over years and year, to manage that weight without letting anyone see that you were doing it. 

Liam was not managing anything. 

He was just simply here. 

Shane looked at his plate, which he’d stopped eating from without noticing. 

He was still looking at it when Edvardsen appeared beside him. 

“You’ve been standing here for a while,” he stated. 

“I was watching.” 

“I know.” Edvardsen stood beside him and looked at the yard. Not pressing. Not asking for anything. Just there, with that damned patient attention that Shane didn’t know entirely what to do with. 

“That’s Liam,” Edvardsen said. 

“I heard.” 

A beat.

“How long?” Shane asked. 

“Four years,” Edwardsen smiled. “We met when I was still in the minors. He comes to everything - home games, road trip sendoffs, team events. It’s always been like this.” A pause. “He’s Chinese-Canadian. Third generation, Vancouver. He still gets asked where he’s really from at least once a week.” 

Shane said nothing. 

He watched Liam, who had migrated from Petra to Blake’s girlfriend and was well into a conversation about something entirely unrelated to hockey, entirely at ease, as if there were nothing unusual about being here. 

Because there wasn’t. To this yard, to these people, there was nothing unusual about it at all. 

“I’ve been seeing things since you got here,” Edvardsen said. Not an accusation. Just a statement. “I’m not going to push. I just wanted you to know that this is a group where you don’t have to manage everything the way you’ve probably had to manage it before.” 

Shane looked at him. 

Edvarsen looked back, steady, and did not add anything to what he’d said. Said what needed to be said and then stopped, and let Shane do what he needed to do with it. 

“I appreciate it,” Shane said. He meant it. He was not yet ready to do anything with it, but he meant it. 

Edvardsen nodded. He picked up his drink and looked back at the yard, standing beside Shane without asking anything further. 

They stood there for a moment. 

“He seems good,” Shane said eventually. About Liam. It was the safest thing he had available. 

“He’s the best person that I know,” Edvardsen nodded. 

Shane looked at him. 

There was something in his face as he said it - settled and certain, an expression that said that he’d found what he was looking for and he didn’t need to look any further - and Shane looked at it and then looked back at the yard and thought about Ilya. This time it was quieter and less sharp, more like a question he was carrying than a wound he was managing. 

What it might look like, someday, to be in a yard somewhere with someone and have that one his face. Whether or not that was possible for him. 

He thought it might be.

He wasn’t ready to reach for it yet. But he was starting to think that maybe it was possible, which was more than he’d been able to think for a while.

That was enough for now. 

Chapter 6: Okay

Chapter Notes

Shane's POV

** I know that I usually do Shane and then Ilya and then back to Shane for this fic, but I think that Shane's whole arc needed to be more developed and fleshed out before returning to Ilya's role in all of this **

The preseason started and something shifted in Shane that he didn’t have a word for yet. 

Not all at once. It wasn’t a single moment or a single practice or a single game - it was one small thing and then another and then another until the accumulation of them became something he couldn’t ignore. He was still paying attention to all the usual things - positioning, line chemistry, Hendrick’s system, the way Blake and Zelenko moved and how to fit himself into that movement without overriding it sometimes. He was still doing the work. But underneath the work, something had changed in the way he felt being on the ice, and it took him almost two full weeks to notice it because he hadn’t been expecting it. 

He had stopped dreading things in practice. 

That was the first thing. He understood in retrospect, because while it was happening it had no name - just the absence of the low hum that had been running underneath everything in Montreal, the constant low-level awareness of being watched for something, assessed for something, the feeling of performing rather than playing. He had been carrying that for so long it had stopped registering as weight. It was just how practice felt. It was just how hockey felt. 

And then one morning he drove to the facility in the early dark and realized, somewhere on the highway with his coffee going cold in the cupholder, that he was looking forward to getting on the ice. 

Not relieved to be getting on the ice. Not bracing himself for it. Looking forward to it, the way he had looked forward to it when he was a kid in Ottawa and the rink was the best part of his day and nothing about it had stakes yet. 

He sat with that for a moment and then the exit came up and he took it and he didn’t examine it further. 

But it was there. 

And it kept happening - on the ice in small ways before it could become anything he could name. 

There was a drill in the second week where Hendricks had them running a neutral zone transition, a timing drill that required reading the defense and making a decision - shoot or pass, hold or release - in a fraction of a second. Shane had run variations of this drill his entire career. He knew the mechanics of it. He could execute it in his sleep. 

What he was not prepared for was the moment midway through when the decision came up and he faked the shot and slipped the pass through a gap that hadn’t existed until it did, threading it to Blake who was exactly where Shane had known he would be, and the play worked with a precision that was almost geometrically satisfying, and Shane felt something move through him that had nothing to do with the result. 

He had enjoyed that. 

He wasn’t satisfied with it. He wasn’t relieved that it worked. He enjoyed it - the way you enjoyed something that was elegant, that had a shape to it, the pleasure of a thing done exactly right. 

He kept skating and didn’t say anything about it, but he was aware of it for the rest of the drill, the feeling sitting in his chest like something he had been looking for and hadn’t expected to find it here, in a Tuesday morning practice with his coffee still cold in the cupholder in the parking lot. 

It kept happening. 

A breakout on another day where the ice opened up in front of him and he had a half-second of pure uncluttered space and he accelerated into it not because the play called for it but because the ice was there and he wanted to. A passing sequence with Zelenko that built and built until it clicked into something that made both of them laugh, genuinely laugh, on the ice in front of everyone, and Shane had not checked whether that was appropriate before it happened. 

He had just laughed. 

He was aware that this was something. He wasn’t sure he was ready to admit what. 

Their first preseason game was at home. 

Carolina won 4-2 and Shane had one assist and two goals that he had scored on breakaways in the second and the end of the third periods - clean runs, nobody between him and the net, the kind of plays where all the thinking stopped and there was only the ice and the puck and the geometry of where it needed to go. 

And he’d scored. 

On the last one, the PNC Arena had filled with noise that he could feel in his chest, and he turned toward the bench and his teammates were coming over the boards at him and Zelenko had both arms in the air and Blake was grinning, and Shane stood there with his gloves off and his heart going and felt something arrive at him that it took a moment to name. 

Not satisfaction again and not relief. Not the clean executive function of a thing accomplished. 

Joy. 

He stood there and felt it and let himself feel it without immediately reaching for whatever he was supposed to do with it, and it lasted approximately thirty seconds before Zelenko crashed into him from the side and said something loud and completely incoherent about the goal and the moment passed into the noise and warmth of his teammates surrounding him. 

But it had been there. 

He had thought about it in the locker room afterward as Hendricks was going over things that they needed to work on, which was not tactically ideal but which he was apparently going to do anyway. And then he thought about how the locker room had been between periods. And then in the car on the way home, the city moving past the windows, Raleigh doing what it had now been doing for weeks - becoming familiar - and Shane sat in the driver’s seat and tried to figure out when he had last felt exactly that. 

He kept going further back. 

Further than last season. Further than the season before that. Further than his rookie year, which had its own version of excitement about it and joy - the joy of arrival, of proof, of finally being where he had worked to be - but even that had been complicated by everything the arrival brought with it. The scrutiny, the expectations, the weight of what it meant that he was even there. 

He kept going. 

He found it eventually. 

He was six years old, on the backyard rink that his father had flooded when the temperature dropped enough to hold it, in Ottawa in the early morning before anyone else was awake. Just him and the ice and the puck and nothing at stake yet. Not a single thing in the world at stake. Just the feeling of his skates on the ice and his breath in the cold air and the freedom of doing something for no reason other than purely because you loved it. 

He had been chasing that feeling since he was thirteen years old and the expectations had started to close in around him. He hadn’t known that was what he had been chasing all this time. He hadn’t known, until right now, that he had even lost it. 

He drove home. 

He sat in his condo for a while in the quiet. 

He thought about what it meant that it had taken him so many years and a trade and a city he didn’t know yet to find his way back to something he had when he was six years old in his family’s backyard in Ottawa, and he thought about everything that had accumulated between then and now - the expectations and the standards and the carefulness and the composure and the don’t give them anything - and he felt, underneath it all, something that was not grief exactly but it lived in the same neighborhood. 

He had loved hockey his whole life. 

He had spent years not feeling like he could show it. 

He sat with that for a while before he got up and made dinner - real food, not the performance diet, Zelenko would have been pleased - and at it at his kitchen table and let Raleigh be quiet around him and felt, for the first time in longer than he could accurately calculate, like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. 

Edvardsen was the one that he found himself talking to the most. 

Not because it had been planned - Shane didn’t plan things like that, didn’t sit down and decide to trust someone, contrary to what some people thought about it - the decision happened the way that most happened for him, gradually and without a clear moment he could point to. But Niklas had a way of being present that made talking to him feel like the natural conclusion of being in the same space, rather than something that required effort or calculation. 

They fell into a habit of being the last two off the ice after practice. 

Not every day. Some days one of them left first or had somewhere to be. But often enough that it became a thing without being named a thing, the way certain habits just formed in hockey - through proximity, the same two people in the same place at the same time often enough that it started to feel like it belonged there. 

It started, as most things with Niklas started, with him noticing something and saying it plainly. 

The first time it happened they were the last ones left after a long session, most of the team already in the tunnel, and Shane was skating a slow cool-down lap near the boards when the goalie fell into stride beside him. They skated in silence for a moment. 

“You’re better later in practice than early,” Niklas said. 

Shane looked at him. “What?” 

“Your first twenty minutes - you’re good. You’re always good. But the last twenty minutes, when you’ve been out here long enough that you stop thinking and start playing–” He paused. “That’s different.” 

Shane didn’t say anything. 

“I’m not saying it as a criticism,” Niklas laughed. “I’m saying that you’re good - but later on you’re extraordinary.” 

He skated ahead and left Shane with that. 

Shane finished his cool-down lap and stepped off the ice and stood in the tunnel for a moment and thought about what it meant that Edvardsen had seen that - not just noticed it, but named it, the distinction between thinking and playing, the version of Shane that existed when the worry and the performance wasn’t there and something underneath snuck through. 

He had not known anyone could see that from the outside. 

He thought about that the whole way home. 

After that Shane found himself talking with Edvardsen more often. 

They talked about hockey mostly. Niklas had opinions about goaltending that Shane found interesting, not because he shared them exactly but because they came from an angle on the game that Shane had never really had access to - the view from the crease, the way the game looked from back there, the information you gathered from watching forty minutes of play from that position. Shane had always understood hockey in terms of angles and trajectories and what was going to happen before it happened. Edvardsen understood it in terms of tells and patterns and the weight of probability. 

They were, Shane realized one afternoon, approaching the same game from two completely different directions and arriving at similar conclusions. 

“You knew I was going to pass it before I did,” Shane said, after a practice where Niklas had positioned himself for a shot that hadn’t come, the pass going exactly where he’d expected it to go. 

“I knew you were thinking about it,” he admitted. “You look at the boards differently when you’re deciding between and shot and a pass.” 

Shane looked at him. “No I don’t.” 

“Your weight shifts,” Niklas laughed. “Left shoulder drops about half an inch. It’s very small, but it’s there.” 

Shane stood on the ice and thought about how long he’d been playing hockey and how nobody had ever told him that before and what it meant that a goaltender he had known for a little more than a month had noticed something about his game that apparently nobody else had ever bothered to look for. 

He picked up his stick and skated toward the tunnel without saying anything. 

Niklas let him go without pressing it, that was just the way he did things, and Shane spent the drive home thinking about tells and weight shifts and the idea of being seen by someone who paid attention.

He came out on a Wednesday in the third week of the preseason. 

It wasn’t planned. The team was in the locker room after a morning skate and Zelenko was in the middle of an involved story about a woman he had met at a bar the previous weekend, and someone said something to Shane in the middle of it - a comment about whether he had a type, whether he was into brunette women or blonde women, the easy locker room currency of men who’d decided that Shane was one of them and were treating him accordingly. 

Shane looked at the room. 

He looked at Blake, who was listening to Zelenko’s story with the patient expression of someone who had heard many, many versions of it. At Mackinnon, who was reading. At Anders, who was checking his phone. At Niklas, across the room, who was not looking at Shane but whose stillness communicated awareness. 

He thought about the yard at Mackinnnon’s place. About Liam navigating the afternoon without having to manage anything. About the floor holding. 

“Neither,” he said. “I’m gay.” 

He said it into the middle of the locker room at a normal conversational volume, the same way he would have said anything else, and then he looked back at the person who had asked the question and waited. 

The locker room absorbed it. 

Zelenko stopped his story mid-sentence. Looked at Shane. Looked at the room. Then, because apparently his confession required an immediate and enthusiastic response: “Okay first of all, good, because I have been trying to set you up with my cousin Laura for three weeks and this saves me a very awkward conversation.” 

Several people laughed. 

Blake said, from across the room: “I know a guy, actually.” 

“No!” Zelenko pointed at him. “You’re taste is fucking terrible!”

“My taste is fine–” 

“Your taste is objectively–” 

“Can we not make this about your feud with Blake,” Mackinnon sighed without looking up from his book. 

Anders looked at Shane from two stalls down with an expression that said all Shane had done was confirm something that he’d already known and was glad about it. He nodded once. Shane nodded back. 

Kessler, who had been at the far end of the room and may or may not have heard, said nothing, which from Kessler was complete and unambiguous acceptance delivered in his preferred language of silence. 

Edvardsen, across the room, looked up and met Shane’s eyes briefly. Not I told you so. Not even I’m proud of you. Just acknowledging it like it was something he’d been waiting for and was just glad that the waiting was over. He smiled, a soft thing, and mouthed words that Shane understood, even if he couldn’t hear them: I’m glad you’re here. 

Shane closed his eyes for a moment, letting that settle over him for what it was. 

Shane looked at the team. 

Nobody was making it a thing. 

The conversation had already pivoted back to Zelenko’s story, the argument about Blake’s taste in men apparently now running parallel to the original narrative as a subplot, and the locker room was loud and warm and entirely uninterested in treating what Shane had just said as anything other than information that had been received and filed and did not require a production. 

He sat at his stall and felt lighter. The weight of the secret he’d been carrying for too long finally being set down somewhere safe. 

He hadn’t known exactly how heavy it was until he put it down. 

He called Hayden that night. 

Hayden picked up on the second ring. 

“Hey,” Hayden said. “How’s Carolina?” 

“Good,” Shane said. “Really good, actually.” He was on his condo balcony, the Raleigh evening warm around him, the city doing what it had been doing for weeks now - becoming familiar without him forcing it. “I need to tell you something, actually.” 

“Okay,” Hayden said. Just that. 

Shane told him. 

It came out the simplest it had come out yet, which made sense - he had said it now more times, to his parents and to Edvardsen and to the whole locker room this afternoon, and each time the words had gotten lighter. This was Hayden, who had been showing up for him since he was nineteen years old and uncertain and figuring out what kind of people his teammates were going to be, and he had never once given Shane a reason to think he would stop. 

The silence lasted five seconds. 

“Okay,” Hayden said. Then: “I’m really glad you told me.” A beat. “And I’m sorry. That you didn’t feel like you could before.” 

“Hayden–” 

“I mean it. You’re my best friend and I should have - I don’t know… I should have made it easier?” 

“You couldn’t have known,” Shane offered. 

“Maybe not.” He didn’t sound convinced. A pause. “Does this mean all the times I tried to set you up with Jackie’s friends–”

“Yes,” Shane smirked. 

“Oh god.” A longer pause. “There was one time - Shane, I spent twenty minutes convincing you to come to this dinner because Melissa from Jackie’s book club was supposedly really into you, and you sat there the whole time looking like you were enduring something–” 

Shane chuckled. “I was being mildly tortured.” 

Hayden made a sound that was half laugh and half groan. “I’m so sorry.” 

“It’s fine, Hayd,” Shane said. And he meant it. 

“I’m going to tell Jackie,” Hayden said. “If that’s okay. I can’t keep things from her and she’s going to want to know and she absolutely won’t tell anyone–”

“Tell Jackie,” Shane said. 

“She’s going to have feelings about this.” 

“I know.” 

“Good feelings,” Hayden clarified quickly. “Very supportive feelings. A significant quantity of them. Shane, you should see some of the shit these women read in their bookclub–” 

Shane laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, at the Raleigh evening. 

“Are you happy?” Hayden asked. “Actually happy? Not the fine version. You just sound happy?” 

Shane thought about the goal in the second period and what he had felt standing at the bench afterwards. About the locker room this afternoon and the floor holding. About Edvardsen’s quiet look across the room. 

“I think I’m getting there,” he said, finally. “I think I wasn’t fine… but I’m going to be okay.”  

“Good,” Hayden said. A pause, and then softer: “I really miss you, man.” 

Shane looked out at the Raleigh evening. 

“Me too,” he said. “I miss you too.” 

The preseason deepened and the team took Shane apart in ways he hadn’t anticipated and put him back together slightly differently. 

It happened gradually, the right way, because the environment was right and the people were paying attention and they weren’t making a project of him. Nobody sat Shane down and told him that he needed to change. Nobody made him feel like the person he had been was wrong. It was more that he started noticing, in the presence of people who didn’t require him to be a specific thing, that some of the things he had always done were choices he had been making for survival and eventually they had gotten to be so automatic that they’d stopped feeling like choices. 

His diet had been the first thing. 

Zelenko had been making inroads there since the yard at Mackinnon’s palace, and the inroads continued with persistence. Like he’d decided that it was his personal mission to undertake. He didn’t lecture. He didn’t make it a health conversation. He just kept putting food in front of Shane - good food, real food, food made by people who cared about the result - and Shane just kept eating it, and at some point the performance diet had become something he did out of habit rather than conviction, and then something he just did less and less, and then something he occasionally returned to when things got busy and then abandoned again. 

He started eating like a person. 

It sounded like a really small thing, but it wasn’t a small thing. He’d spent years treating his body as a machine to be optimized and had accumulated the habit in ways he hadn’t fully clocked until he’d stopped, and stopping felt like putting something down that he had been carrying without realizing it had been heavy - the same feeling he’d had in the locker room, the same feeling as telling Hayden, the same release that came from setting something down where it was safe to put it down. 

He felt better. He played better. He had more energy in the third period than he had managed in the last two seasons in Montreal, which was either the food or the absence of the low-level dread that had been running underneath everything in Montreal, or both, or the fact that for the first time in a long time he was sleeping without his brain conducting an inventory of everything that was wrong. 

Probably all three.

The chirping was Zelenko’s fault specifically, and Shane wasn’t at all surprised by this. 

It started in the second preseason game, an opposing defenseman who had been taking runs at Zelenko all night finally drawing Shane’s attention in the wrong way at the wrong moment, and Shane had said something back before the decision to say anything had fully formed - not loud, not dramatic, just pointed and precise and it had landed exactly where it was aimed. 

The defenseman had looked startled. 

The referee just stared at him. 

Zelenko had looked at Shane with an expression of pure delight, like Christmas had arrived early and turned out to be better than he ever expected. 

“Did you just–” he started. 

“We’re not talking about it,” Shane said, mortified. 

“You just chirped Henderson!” 

“I know what I did.” 

“That was–” Zelenko was grinning. “That was actually pretty good.”

“Zelenko–” 

“I’m just saying. There’s hope for you yet, Hollz.” 

Shane had spent two minutes in the penalty box for unsportsmanlike conduct after that, which was new, and sat there and thought. 

He had been told his whole life not to do what he had just done. Not to react. Not to give them anything. Be better than them - which had always meant be quieter, be more composed, be the version of yourself that nobody can point to and say: see, there it is, there’s the thing we said you were. 

He thought about white players and what they were allowed to be. 

He thought about chirping and the fights and the penalty minutes that were just hockey when they came from the right people, the players who got to be passionate and fierce and emotional without it being held against them, without it confirming jack shit about who they were. 

He thought about what he had been told he was allowed to be, and the gap between that and what everyone else was allowed to be, and how long he had been living in that gap and calling it just how things were. 

It wasn’t just how things were, he realized. 

It was a standard that had been applied to him specifically, with specific intent, and he had internalized it so completely that he had started applying it to himself too. 

He came out of the penalty box and scored on their next power play. 

After the game, when the locker room had settled into its post-win warmth, Zelenko had appointed himself the official narrator of the evening’s highlight reel. Shane sat at his stall and let the noise wash over him, thinking about his mother, about being thirteen years old and being told how he needed to be a good role model. That kids who looked like him were watching and he needed to show them what was possible. That he had to be careful, always careful, because the window was narrow and the margin for error was smaller for him than for anyone else and one wrong move could close it– 

“-and then,” Zelenko announced, to anyone still listening, which was apparently everyone, “Hollz here looks this guy dead in the eye–” 

Shane thought about the gap between what he was allowed to be and what everyone else was allowed to be–

“-and says–” Zelenko paused for dramatic effect, pressed his hand to his chest, and feigned a full swoon against his stall– “Oh, fuck, man… Henderson’s face, I swear to God–”

Shane almost smiled despite himself. 

“-two minutes for unsportsmanlike conduct!” Zelenko was saying, to renewed laughter. “Two minutes! For that! I’ve heard worse things said about somebody’s mother at a church picnic–” 

He thought about Liam, when they had wound up at the food table at the same moment towards the end of the evening at the big get-together at Mackinnon’s place. 

The yard had been thinning out around them, and Liam had looked at him with a sort of directness and said: “I just wanted to say - I think what you do takes a lot of guts.” 

Shane had looked at him. “Playing hockey?” 

“Being visible,” Liam said. “At that level. With everything that comes with it.” He paused. “I work in finance. Nobody’s watching me. Nobody knows my name. And I still get the comments, the questions, the jokes that aren’t jokes.” He glanced over at Niklas. “I deal with it by keeping my head down and being twice as good as everyone else and never giving anyone anything to point at. It works, mostly.” A beat. “But I’ve started to wonder lately whether keeping my head down just makes it easier for everyone to pretend it isn’t happening.” 

Shane had not said anything. 

Liam had smiled, small and without bitterness. “Anyway. I think it matters that you’re out there. Even when it’s hard.” He put his hand on Shane’s shoulder. “Maybe especially then.” 

He moved away before Shane could respond, back to Petra and whatever conversation they’d had going on, and Shane had stood at the food table and turned those words over in his head. He hadn’t known what to do with them at the time. 

But he knew now. 

Sitting in the penalty box for two minutes for saying something about Henderson’s mother that any other player in the league would have gotten away with - that any other player in the league would not have even been flagged for - he understood what Liam had been pointing at. The composure, the careful, the don’t give them anything - it hadn’t protected him. It had just made the double standard invisible. Made it easier for everyone, including himself, to pretend it wasn’t there. 

Being in the penalty box was not the worst thing that had ever happened to him. 

It was two minutes for existing in a way that didn’t accommodate the double-standard applied to him, and that was different, and the difference mattered. 

And here was the thing he was starting to see, sitting in this locker room in Raleigh with Zelenko still narrating the chirp to increasing embellishment: a kid who looked like him, watching him play, needed to see him stand up for himself. Needed to see him be full and present and human on the ice, not a machine that performed at a high level and gave nothing away. Needed to see that you didn’t have to make yourself smaller to belong. 

His mother had meant it with love. He had always known she meant it with love. She had been scared for him, legitimately scared, because the world she was describing was real and the dangers were real and she had been trying to protect him the only way she knew how. 

But somewhere in the accumulation of those instructions, in the years and years of careful and composed and don’t give them anything, he had stopped being a person and had started becoming a performance. And the performance had cost him things - had cost him the ability to show up on the ice as anything other than a machine, had cost him teammates who might have been friends if he had let himself be known, had cost him years of eating food that was fuel rather than pleasure and standing at the edge of locker rooms rather than inside of them. 

His mother had been trying to help him… but she had also been teaching him to disappear. 

He called his mother on Sunday, which was their day. 

She answered - the way she always answered - on the second ring, voice present, there. 

“Hi,” she said. 

“Hi, mom.” He was at his kitchen table, not the balcony, because this was not a balcony conversation. “I’ve been thinking and I need to say it and I need you to hear me before you respond. Okay?” 

A pause. “Okay…” she said carefully. 

He told her. 

Not everything - not all of it, not the full accumulated weight of what it had cost over the years, because that conversation was going to take longer than a Sunday phone call and he wasn’t ready for that yet. But the shape of it. The standard that had been different for him. The way composure had become survival and survival had become identity and somewhere in there he had lost the thread of who he actually was when nobody was asking him to be something smaller. 

The chirp. The penalty box. The power play goal. 

He told her that he was starting to understand that the way he had been taught to survive was also a way of disappearing, and that he wasn’t going to do it anymore. 

His mother was quiet for a long time after he stopped talking. 

When she spoke, her voice came out as if she was holding something carefully - not together, exactly, but carefully. “I know.” A pause. “ I know I did that. I’ve been thinking about it since Spring…” A shaky breath. “I was so scared for you. I’m still scared for you, because the things I was scared of are still real and I don’t know how to stop being scared of them just because you’ve decided to stop accommodating them.” 

“I know,” Shane said. 

“But you’re right,” She said. “I hadn’t thought about it like that. That wasn’t - I never wanted that. I never wanted to teach you to disappear. I just wanted to keep you safe.” 

Shane looked at his kitchen table, tears prickling behind his eyes. 

“I’m not angry at you,” he sniffed. “I want you to know that. I’m not telling you this because I’m angry.” 

“I know.” she choked. “That makes it harder, actually.” 

He almost smiled at that.

“Carolina is good,” she said, after a moment, more composed. Not a question. 

“Carolina is good,” he agreed. 

She exhaled. The relief in it was audible. “Good,” she said. “That’s - Shane, that’s good.” 

The preseason ended and the regular season approached and Shane was not the same person he had been when he drove into Raleigh in August with the windows down and the city unfamiliar around him. 

Not unrecognizably different. Not fixed. Not done. Not the finished version of himself - he understood that. There wasn’t a finished version, this would be ongoing and it would take work and it would take a long time to undo the architecture he’d built up around himself over years and years of careful construction. But he was working on it and he was different in ways that were visible on the ice and in the locker room and in the mirror in the mornings before his run, when he looked at himself and didn’t immediately look away. 

He was playing the best hockey of his career. 

He had not realized it until it was happening, how much of himself he had been withholding on the ice. Not tactically - his game sense had always been intact, that part of him that read angles and calculated trajectories and saw what was going to happen thirty seconds before it happened. But the rest of it. The joy of it. The part that made playing hockey feel like something other than a demonstration of his right to be there. 

He had forgotten that part. 

He was remembering. 

And on a Tuesday evening in October, three days before the regular season opener, he sat down with Niklas. 

And he talked to him. 

He didn’t tell him everything. Not all of it. Shane was not, and might never be, someone who could ever fully talk about it - that was just not how he was built, the disclosures came in pieces over time as the trust accumulated and people had proven themselves, and Niklas had proved himself, he had been proving himself for over two months now… but he was still not ready to say all of it. 

He just knew he needed to say some of it, he couldn’t keep bottling it up and pretending it wasn’t there. That it hadn’t happened. And if there was one person he had come to know that wouldn’t judge him, that wouldn’t feel the need to try to fix it in a misguided attempt to help him… one person who would understand it was Niklas Edvardsen. 

They were the last two off the ice, the way they usually were, the arena emptying around them, and Shane was skating slowly near the boards and thinking about the season and about the work that had brought him here and about the spring, which he thought about less than he had when he arrived, but he still thought about it. He still carried in the place where he carried things that had changed the shape of his life. 

“Something happened in the spring,” Shane said. “Something that pushed my trade out of Montreal… and it wasn’t what the media speculated it to be.” 

He said it to the ice and not Niklas specifically, just into the space between them that had become safe enough over two months to hold things. 

Niklas just skated slowly beside him and said nothing. 

“I know you know that,” Shane said. “Not the details - and I’m not– I’m not ready to talk about the details. But you know that something happened. You’ve known since the get-together. Maybe even before that.” 

A long pause. 

“Yes,” Niklas confirmed. 

Shane nodded. 

He kept skating. 

“I’m here,” Niklas offered. Not I’m sorry. Not what happened. Not the performance of concern that required Shane to manage someone else’s reaction. Just: I’m here. Simple and complete and requiring nothing in return. “And,” he added. “You’re still here.” 

Shane skated. 

“ I know,” he said. 

They did another lap on the ice in silence, the arena quiet around them, the season three days away, and Shane felt the weight of the spring settle a little differently in his chest - not gone, not resolved, it wasn’t the kind of thing that resolved, but he just held it differently now, the way things should be held when you weren’t holding them entirely alone. 

He stopped at the boards. 

He looked at the ice. 

“I’m okay,” he said. “I want you to know that. I’m not - I’m actually okay.” 

Edvardsen stopped beside him. Looked at the ice the same way Shane was looking at it. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been watching you for two months.” 

Shane almost smiled. “You and your watching.” 

“It’s useful, no?” Edvardsen smirked. “You skate differently when you stop thinking.” 

Shane looked at him. 

Niklas looked back, steady and unhurried and entirely present, the way he was always present, and Shane thought about the drive from Montreal and the windows down and the cautious thing he had been willing to call hope somewhere in Connecticut. 

He had been right to call it hope. 

“Come on,” Edvardsen said. “Blake and Zelenko are at Maria’s and Zelenko texted me seventeen minutes ago about the pasta.” 

“He texts you about pasta?” 

“He texts everyone about pasta.” Niklas stepped off the ice. “Are you coming?” 

Shane looked at the ice one more time. 

He stepped off.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m coming.” 

As they walked down the tunnel to the locker room, Shane realized that he was okay.

He might not be fine… but he would be okay. 

Chapter 7: Overdue

Chapter Notes

Ilya's POV

The flight to Raleigh left Logan at seven in the morning. 

Ilya boarded early, found his seat, and looked out the window at the tarmac. The rest of the team filed in around him. Wyatt Hayes, the team’s new goaltender they’d traded for from Toronto, dropped into the row across the aisle already mid-sentence, stuffing his bag into the overhead bin without pausing. He was talking to Carmichael about something that had apparently started at the gate and showed no signs of concluding. 

“-and the thing people don’t understand about butterfly technique is that the whole debate is based on a false premise, because if your read is good enough then your base positioning becomes almost secondary, which is what I’ve been trying to explain to every goaltending coach I’ve had since I was sixteen–” 

“Right,” Carmichael said, his tone suggesting that he’d agreed to the conversation without understanding exactly what he had been agreeing to. 

“-and Edvardsen has been doing something that I find genuinely interesting from a technical standpoint, his weight distribution in the crease before the shot releases is not standard, it’s something I’ve been trying to reverse engineer from film for the last two seasons–” 

“Hayes.” 

“Yeah?” 

“I don’t have any idea what those words mean in that order.” 

Hayes blinked. “I can explain it.” 

“Please don’t.” St-Simon sighed. 

“It won’t take long, like ten minutes, maybe fifteen–” 

“Wyatt.” 

Hayes looked over at Marlow, who had settled into the seat next to Ilya with two coffees. Marlow was looking over at Carmichael, his expression said help me and Marlow looked back with an expression that said you did this to yourself. 

"Please stop." 

“Hm.” Hayes seemed genuinely unbothered. “I’ll explain it later.” He turned back to Carmichael immediately. “So the other thing I wanted to ask you about–”

Carmichael made a sound that was not quite a word. 

There was always a bit of a stereotype that goaltenders were a little off… Hayes did nothing to suggest it was wrong. Ilya couldn't help but smirk a little bit at Carmichael’s obvious annoyance. 

Troy Barrett had taken a window seat two rows ahead from the main cluster of the team. Headphones on before he even sat down. Face turned toward the window. Ilya had been watching him, carefully, trying not to make it obvious that he was watching. The kid was quiet in a way that went beyond reserved - it was the quiet of someone that silence cost less than being seen - when it was easier to build walls to keep things hidden and keep building those walls until they stopped feeling like walls and became a part of who you were. 

He recognized the architecture. 

He had built versions of it himself over the years. Different situations, different reasons, same materials. Barrett was somewhere in the process.

He looked out the window. 

October 17th. The date had been sitting in his mind since the schedule dropped in September, not loudly, just present. Six weeks since training camp ended and the preseason had begun. Six weeks of telling himself he was ready for this. 

He was as ready as he was going to get. 

His phone was in his jacket pocket. He didn’t take it out. He knew what the thread looked like - his messages down one side, read receipts under every one of them since mid-September, nothing coming back. He had been sending the kind of texts that Marlow had suggested. Not declarations. Not apologies that needed real conversations behind them to land correctly. Observations. Things noticed. Evidence of attention that didn’t demand anything in return. 

He was toeing a very fine line between patience and desperation and he needed to stay on the right side of that line at all costs. 

I have watched your games. You are hard to watch. 

Your backhand is better. Finally. 

Blake and Zelenko play well with you. That is harder than it looks.

You are playing not like you normally play. It is better. I do not know if you know that. But you are. 

Your breakout timing is different. 

I saw the sequence with Zelenko in third period against Buffalo. Good hockey. 

Shane read every one of them. 

Shane responded to none. 

Marlow handed him a coffee without being asked. Ilya took it. 

“You sleep?” Marlow asked. 

“Some.” 

Across the aisle Hayes had pivoted from butterfly technique to something involving lateral movement and hip angles, and Carmichael had reached a stage of nodding at intervals without tracking the content of the conversation, which was his standard response when things had exceeded his interest threshold but there was no polite way to exit. 

“I just want to make sure that you’re actually ready,” Marlow said. Low enough that it stayed between them. “That you’re not just telling yourself you are.” 

Ilya looked at him and then back out the window. The tarmac was flat and grey and gave him nothing useful. “I have been ready for a long time,” he said. “Problem was never the readiness. Problem was I was doing nothing with it. That is what I am fixing.” 

Marlow looked at him for a moment. Nodded once. Drank his coffee. 

From across the aisle Hayes leaned over, pulling Marlow and Ilya both into his eyeline. “Quick question - the neutral zone thing Carolina’s been running. Carmichael thinks it’s a trap but I’ve been watching their last four games and there’s something happening with their defensemen’s positioning that I don’t think is a trap at all, I think it’s–” 

“It is not a trap,” Ilya said. “Looks like a trap because defensement read the play early. Completely different thing.” 

Hayes pointed at him. “Yes. Exactly. Because from my perspective in the crease the shot angles coming off it are completely inconsistent with what you’d see from a trap, which means–” 

St-Simon, in the row behind Ilya, removed one earbud. “It is a modified forecheck.” He replaced the earbud and went back to looking at his phone. 

Hayes stared at the back of St-Simon’s headrest and then looked at Marlow. “Does he just - do that?” 

“Constantly,” Marlow sighed. 

“And he’s always right?”

“Usually.” 

Hayes considered this. “That’s impressive and also deeply irritating.” He turned back to Carmichael. “Anyway, as I was saying about the shot angles–” 

Carmichael looked at Ilya with the expression of a drowning man watching a lifeboat pass. 

Ilya looked out the window and the plane began to move. 

The PNC Arena was loud before the puck dropped. 

Ilya had played in loud arenas his entire career. He knew how to filter out the crowd noise and keep it in the background - something ambient rather than something that demanded attention. He filtered it now as he stepped onto the ice for warmups and told himself to do this right. Skate the drills. Warm up properly. Do not spend the next twenty minutes watching the far end of the ice. 

He lasted for four minutes. 

Shane was at the far end with Blake and Zelenko, running something that Ilya didn’t recognize from any of the Carolina films he had studied. He watched it, trying to identify the structure, and understood after a moment that there wasn’t one - not in the way that drills usually had structure. What the three of them were doing was emergent, all of them reading each other’s movement in real time, adjusting without calling anything, building each sequence from what the other two were doing organically instead of from a predetermined pattern. It required trust built through repetition and practice so that thinking would drop out of it entirely. You couldn’t install that into a line. It either happened or it didn’t. 

This one had happened. 

Then Shane came off the sequence and laughed. 

Not the careful smile Ilya had seen him use in the past. Not a controlled acknowledgement that something was mildly amusing. He laughed - open and completely unguarded, at something that Zelenko had said - and it changed his whole face. It was the kind of laugh that took over completely, that didn’t leave room for anything else. It was beautiful. It made Ilya stop mid-stride. 

Ilya had seen Shane laugh before. In locked rooms. In the privacy of moments between them where the performance of rivalry would collapse and something real came through. He had always understood those moments as Shane choosing to let him in - access granted, specifically, to him and not to anyone else, because that was who Shane was - he was a very private person. 

Watching Shane laugh during warmups in front of an arena full of people, he wasn’t sure he’d understood those moments correctly. 

Shane hadn’t been performing vulnerability in those moments - they had been real - he truly believed that. But what he thought was just Shane being Shane, might not have been the entire picture he’d believed it to be. Those glimpses might not have been special access granted because of accumulated trust, but were more likely just cracks - real ones - in a wall. But a crack was not the same as a wall coming down. There was a distinction, and it mattered, and he was only now starting to see it clearly because he was actually paying attention. He was watching right now - Shane moving through warmups with an ease that Ilya had never seen from him before. This was not a crack in a wall. It was the absence of one. 

Shane had let him see through that wall a bit, sometimes. 

Shane had never taken the wall down. 

Ilya made himself skate his drills. 

Ilya went in on Edvardsen for a shot attempt. The Carolina goaltender tracked him from the moment he crossed the blue line, already positioned, the angle wrong before Ilya released it. The shot went wide.

Edvardsen just watched him. 

It wasn’t in an unfriendly way. Just - aware. The look of someone that had already catalogued you. 

There was something about Edvardsen that unsettled Ilya in a way that he couldn’t fully account for. Most goaltenders tracked the puck. Edvardsen seemed to be tracking something else - not the puck, not even the shooter exactly, but something that preceded both of those things. He watched with a patience that suggested he already knew what was coming and was simply waiting for the ice to confirm it. 

Ilya skated back to his zone and focused on the warmup. 

He was good. He had always been good, and the knowledge of it was not arrogance so much as an accurate accounting - years of being the best player in most encounters had given him a clear-eyed understanding of his own capabilities. He didn’t step onto this ice thinking he was going to have a bad game. He stepped onto it knowing that he was going to compete at the level he always competed at. 

What he was less certain about, watching Shane run that passing sequence one more time, was whether competing at the level he had always competed at was going to be sufficient to close the distance he was only beginning to understand actually existed between them. 

He pushed the thought away and went back to his warmup. 

Eight minutes into the game, Ilya understood it was going to be a long night. 

Not because the Bear’s game was off - it wasn’t. They were moving well, making reads and executing. Carolina was playing in a way that film preparation hadn’t been able to capture. You can map tendencies and structures and development patterns all you wanted. You could not map the feeling a team had about itself and what it was capable of, the way they played like things were going to go right and were only mildly surprised when they did. 

He was on the first line and Shane was on the second. They were not often directly matched up. That meant that Ilya had shifts on the bench, watching. 

He watched. 

Shane read a developing play before it even became a play. Not guessing - reading. The distinction was visible in the way that his body was already repositioning before the information existed to position to. The geometry resolved in his head and his feet moved from the conclusion. He received the pass in stride, found Zelenko, and Zelenko’s shot went wide but only barely. Four seconds. The whole sequence took four seconds and it was calculated to such a precision that it looked easy, which was a mark of intelligence on the ice that most people watching would never fully understand. 

Ilya didn’t even fully understand it, but he noticed it. 

He watched Shane take a puck battle in the corner against Dubek - who had more height, more weight, and was not shy about using it. Shane didn’t just survive it. He controlled it, came out of it with possession of the puck, found Blake with a pass that required knowing where Blake was going to be before Blake had decided to go there. The kind of pass that looked impossible. 

In the second period Iliya lined up against Shane for the faceoff at the dot. 

It happened because of a line change - the timing of it putting them directly across from each other, finally. For a moment before the linesman came in Ilya and Shane were just two people standing on opposite sides of a dot looking at each other. Shane’s expression gave nothing away. It never did in public at times like this. But his eyes were steady in a way that Ilya felt in his chest before he made himself focus on the puck. 

The linesman moved in. 

Ilya had won faceoffs against Shane before. He was good at them - not exceptional, but solid, better than most centers in the league. He knew Shane’s tendencies - he had a plan. 

“How’s Jane doing?” Shane smirked at him. “Doesn’t seem like she’s interested. Must be a new experience for a guy like you. Guess you can’t charm everyone.” 

The puck dropped. 

Ilya lost it cleanly and completely, his stick arriving half a second late because his brain had done something it was not supposed to do during a faceoff, which was process language. Shane drew it back to a defenseman and was already moving up the ice before Ilya had fully reset. 

Shane chirped him. Loose about it. Easy. Ilya had been on the receiving end of plenty of chirps his entire career and he had never once lost a faceoff because of one. 

By the end of the second period Boston was down 4-1. 

Intermission. He sat in the visitor’s locker room and looked at the wall and put what he’d seen together to the best of his ability. 

He had watched Shane for five years. On the ice, in press corridors, at events, in the guarded distance he kept in every interaction he had ever been a part of. He had read all of it as Shane’s personality. Guarded. Private. The hockey robot, the hockey machine, the boring Canadian who gave nothing away. He had chirped him for it. He had called him boring. He had watched it from across divided ice since 2009 and taken it at face value - just a thing that Shane simply was. 

It had apparently not been Shane’s personality. 

It had been what years of being places that were not safe for him had produced. The composure was not composure at all. It was the architecture that someone who had learned, very early and very painfully, that being seen cost more than being hidden. Shane had been building that architecture since before Ilya had ever met him, and had been maintaining it every day through every interaction he walked into and every camera pointed at him and every locker room where voices said things they knew they could get away with. And Ilya had watched the maintenance of it for five years and called it boring. 

He had chirped at Shane for surviving. 

The version of Shane laughing during warmups, chirping at faceoffs, moving with ease on the ice - like he had finally put something down that was too heavy to carry - that wasn’t a new version of Shane. That was the Shane that had always existed underneath the performance of composure, that had never felt safe to see the light until now. 

He had seen glimpses of it in the past. In locked rooms. In the moments between them where the wall had cracked slightly and something real had come through. He had understood those glimpses as Shane choosing him specifically to have access granted because of what they were to each other. 

He understood them a little differently now. 

They had not been chosen so much as allowed - Shane’s guard dropping below a threshold when the conditions were right, not because Ilya had earned it. He had been close to the real version. He had never fully reached it. And the distance between close and fully, sitting in a visitor’s locker room down by three, felt suddenly like something he had done to himself. 

Then he thought about his mother. 

He hadn’t planned to. He rarely planned to - the thought arrived sometimes when conditions made it impossible to keep it in the peripheral. And tonight was one of those nights. He had just watched someone he loved playing in a way that made it clear that the version of them he had known for years was a performance. And that performance had been so sustained and so complete that Ilya had stopped looking at what was underneath.

His mother had done that too. 

His mother had smiled at everything. He had believed that smile. He had been nine years old and he had believed it so completely, and he had not understood until a Tuesday morning that the smile had been what survival looked like from the outside. 

He had been watching Shane be perfectly composed at everything. He had watched Shane be so perfectly composed for five years and called it personality. Shane who wasn’t rattled by anything. Shane who was the NHL’s prime example of perfection and composure in the face of adversity. He had never once bothered to let Shane take a different shape, despite having caught glimpses of things that didn’t fit with the narrative. He had never put together in all that time that maybe - just maybe - Shane’s composure had been what survival looked like from the outside. 

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. 

The intermission ended. 

He went back out and played the third period well, because whatever was happening he was Ilya Rozanov and he was not going to let a complicated evening produce a bad game of hockey. He competed at the level he always competed at. He was good. 

They lost 6-2. 

The gap had been there from the opening faceoff and had not closed. Ilya sat in the visitor’s locker room at the end of the game and took accurate stock. He had studied their system. He had prepared well. He had competed at the level he’d always competed at. 

He had also watched Shane Hollander play sixty minutes of hockey that required him to revise something he had been carrying since 2009. 

He had been calling Shane the second-best player in the league since their draft year. It had been his favorite chirp. The best chirps always had a bit of truth to them. He had felt like he was the better player. He had believed it. 

Sitting in the visitor’s locker room in Raleigh after having watched Shane so thoroughly dismantle his team for sixty minutes, Ilya was willing to admit - privately, to himself, to absolutely nobody else - that he might need a new chirp. Shane was not second best. Shane probably had never been second best, ever. The gap had just been obscured by everything that had been done to Shane over the years and by the need for composure that wasn’t composure, by years of a player who was not allowed to fully be who he really was. 

The gap was not obscured anymore. 

Ilya was still very good. 

He had always believed that he and Shane had been neighbors in that gap of their skill and the rest of the league’s. 

He was starting to realize that Shane was moving to a different address. 

Hayes dropped into the stall beside him. “So,” he said, with the ease of a person who experienced post-game locker rooms as social gatherings, “Edvardsen and I are going to have to have words. Professionally. Goaltender to goaltender.” 

Ilya looked at him. 

“Not bad words,” Hayes clarified. “Analytical words. There’s something he’s doing with his crease positioning that i’ve been trying to figure out for the past three seasons and tonight I think I finally identified–” 

“Hayes,” Carmichael said from across the room.

“Yeah?”

“We just lost 6-2.” 

“I know. That’s why I’m focusing on the technical analysis. It’s forward-thinking.” 

Carmichael looked at the ceiling. Marlow looked at Carmichael. St-Simon looked at his phone. 

“You coming out tonight?” Carmichael asked Ilya. 

He thought about it for approximately three seconds. He needed to reset before he went back to the hotel and thought through what tonight had shown him. An hour with his team. Something to take the edge off. 

“Yes,” he said. 

The bar they found had been there long enough to stop trying - dark wood, no pretension, staff moving through large groups without visible stress. 

The Bears took up one end. Ilya sat with his vodka and let the noise of his team wash over him. 

He was not expecting the door to open and the Breakers to walk through it. 

The noise shifted - not loud, just the register change of a large group arriving in a good mood. He looked up. 

The Carolina Breakers filed in with the energy of a team that had just won a decisive victory against the team that were the reigning Stanley Cup champions, and knew it - and they were not being subtle about enjoying it. 

Shane was with them. 

Ilya set his glass down. 

In the three years of professional experience he had playing against Shane and observing him - games, events, every shared hockey context in existence - he had never once seen Shane at a bar after a game. Shane managed post-game socializing the way he managed everything else. Efficiently and with minimal exposure - first out the door or close to it, always somewhere else by the time the gathering properly formed. 

Shane was not somewhere else. 

He was between Blake and Zelenko, relaxed and socializing, like you’d expect from someone that wasn’t Shane Hollander. He wasn’t managing a conversation, he was present and engaged without any effort underneath it. 

He sat there and observed Shane for a while. Watched when Shane accepted a drink from one of his teammates and watched the freckles on his face crinkle with his nose as he laughed at something that Zelenko said. 

Ilya was across the bar before he had even decided to move. 

He walked with the directness he brought to everything he had decided to do. The room responded the way they always did when he moved through them. The Carolina group stiffened as he got closer, shifting in attention, the wariness of people who had played against him and remembered what it was like. He was not, outside of Boston, a person that people were glad to see arrive. He had never pretended otherwise. 

He stopped at the edge of their group. 

Blake looked at him. Mackinnon assessed him. A couple of defensemen tracked him with the wariness of men who had been on the receiving end of his antics plenty of times before. 

Shane ignored him. 

He was talking to Zelenko, his back mostly toward Ilya, he had registered Ilya’s arrival - Ilya was certain of this - and had made a decision about it. The decision was: pretend that Ilya Rozanov did not exist. 

Ilya tried to put the group at ease to the best of his ability - interact with them in a way that wouldn’t put them on edge. The type of interaction that he wasn’t typically known for, especially with an opposing team. He engaged Blake in a conversation about third period structure, because he noted that Blake would engage with hockey conversation genuinely and it was something to do while he was waiting. He said a few words to one of the defensemen. He did not force himself into Shane’s space and did not perform indifference, because Shane knew that he was waiting and he was pretending otherwise - pretending that he wasn’t doing that would only have been transparent to Shane and completely beside the point. 

The group eventually shifted as people moved toward the bar to get more drinks or to start socializing with some of the other members of the Bears that had come to see what was going on. The configuration changed and Shane got closer. 

He still wouldn’t look at Ilya. 

Carmichael appeared at Ilya’s shoulder at some point, having crossed the bar with some of the others and he fell into a conversation with Zelenko easily when the one Zelenko was having with Shane subsided enough to allow for a gap. The two of them quickly established a rapport that some people spent years working on - Ilya realized after listening in that it was probably because Carmichal and Zelenko seemed to both radiate the same kind of controlled chaotic energy as each other - kindred spirits. 

There was more movement in the group and that movement created a gap at Shane’s side. 

Ilya moved into it. 

“Hollander.” 

Shane turned. 

He didn’t look surprised - he had known exactly where Ilya was the entire time. Something shifted in his expression at being directly addressed, however. Not the warmth that had been there when he was talking to his teammates. Just a controlled neutrality that gave away nothing. The kind of expression that Ilya had grown used to seeing on his face over the years - just not usually directed toward him. 

“Rozanov.” 

“You played well tonight.” 

Shane just looked at him. 

“Not a chirp,” Ilya said. “Just true.” 

“Thankss?” Shane said it in the flattest register available to him, and then he turned back toward his teammates and started to engage in a conversation with Mackinnon. 

Ilya stood there.

Be here. Make it count. This is one of only five windows in the season. 

He had figured that Shane would do this. He had come anyway, because he had so few windows this season to engage with Shane and he would not let one slip past him without trying. He looked at the back of Shane’s head and thought about the past five years and Vegas and a text thread full of read receipts and the plan and the four remaining windows in the season and was still working out his next move when Carmichael, who had been monitoring their interaction from the corner of his eye while talking to Zelenko, leaned toward Shane with the confidence of someone who thought they were doing something helpful. 

“He’s been trying to get a hold of this girl, Jane, that he’s had a thing with forever,” Carmichael smiled. “Like, a lot. Maybe she’ll take pity on him and text him back. Poor guy.” 

Ilya had one very clear thought. 

I do not wish to be buried in Russia.

Shane turned around slowly. 

He looked at Carmichael. Then at Ilya. His expression had changed completely - gone was the passive indifference and whatever ease there had been when he was talking to his teammates, replaced by something cold and seething and not going anywhere. 

“He told you.” Not a question. 

“I–” Carmichael started, taken aback a bit by the sudden shift in temperature.

“He told you about me.” Still not a question. Cold gaze locked on Ilya. Ilya felt a chill run down his spine and shivered a bit. 

“It is not–” Ilya started. 

Shane’s voice rose - controlled, deliberate - and his eyes swept over the Bears that had integrated into their group. Marlow, St-Simon, Hayes, Connors, Dubek - all of them staring in their direction with various levels of alarm. “Did everyone on your team have a conversation about me?” The cold thing in his expression had settled into something that Ilya couldn’t quite put a name to. His voice dropped, which was worse than if he had raised it. “I came out to people that I chose to come out to. Those were my choices. That was not your choice to make, Rozanov.” He spat Ilya’s last name out like it was venom. 

“Did he tell all of you?” Shane’s voice had risen, not out of control but deliberate, to make sure that the rest of the Bears team members could hear him, gaze sweeping across the room - the rest of the team staring back in alarm at the sudden volume. “Did you all fucking sit around and–” he stopped, jaw working, tension obvious. 

“Shane–” 

“Don’t–” he spat. “Don’t you fucking dare say my name, Rovanov,” he hissed. Seething. Absolute. He held Ilya’s gaze for one more second before he turned to Zelenko. “I’m heading out.” 

Zelenko looked between Shane and Ilya and Carmichael. It took him about half a second to make a calculation in his head. “Yeah, Hollz. Me too actually.” 

Shane and Zelenko walked out. 

Fuck. 

Ilya stood in the group and felt the evening collapse in on him. 

“I shouldn’t have–” Carmichael started. 

“No.” 

“I was just trying to–” 

“I know.” He wasn't angry at Carmichael. He didn’t have space for anger at Carmichael when he was so angry at himself, at the chain of events that had led to this moment - six months of silence, Vegas, the conversation with Marlow, confessing to St-Simon and Carmicahel, Carmichael just being Carmichael in a bar in Raleigh. Each step individually was explicable. Together they accumulated to result in a disaster. “I know you were.” 

He put his drink down and left. 

The Raleigh evening was warm for October. 

Ilya stood on the sidewalk outside the bar and looked at nothing. Thoughts swirling in his head like a hurricane. 

He had one fewer window now than he had started the evening with, and the gap between what led him here and what he had to do to fix had widened even further. 

He had hurt Shane in a way that he hadn’t realized before tonight - not the Vegas kind of hurt, which was about what Ilya hadn’t given. This was about something he had taken. Shane had managed his privacy his entire career with extreme care, had apparently chosen people to let in and share his secret with, and he had made those choices deliberately and carefully. Ilya had made a choice about that secret in a room he hadn’t been in, with people he didn’t know, and that he hadn’t consented to. 

It was bad, Ilya had fucked up. What made it worse, standing on the sidewalk turning it over, was that Ilya understood exactly why he’d done it. He had been blindsided by the trade announcement in Marlow’s living room, had been sitting in a place of vulnerability of having just said yes about something he held in for so long for the first time out loud, and then when Marlow had pushed him to say it in front of St-Simon and Carmichael he had let it happen because he had been too overwhelmed to thinking clearly about what it would mean for Shane. He hadn’t thought about Shane at all at that moment. He had only been thinking about himself and his feelings and his pain. 

And that was a pattern, wasn’t it? 

In Vegas he hadn’t been thinking about what his silence had done to Shane. He hadn’t been thinking about what telling Shane to suck his dick would mean to Shane. He hadn’t thought about what sliding his hand down Shane’s back on stage would do to Shane. He hadn’t thought about Shane’s feelings and emotions at that moment either. He had only thought about what he wanted at the time and what he could handle. 

Fuck. 

Ilya had been thinking about himself and what he wanted from his situationship with Shane for the past five years. Not once had he stopped to think about what Shane had wanted from it. 

He picked up his phone and typed: I am sorry. I wasn’t thinking about you. That is no excuse. 

He looked at it. 

Sent. 

He put his phone in his pocket and walked. 

He took the long way back to the hotel, through streets he didn’t know in a city he had only visited a handful of times in his career, and he let the walk be long enough to hold the weight of the evening without trying to put it down before he was ready. He thought about the chain of it all again - not just tonight, not just the summer, not just the six months of summer before Vegas - the full chain going back to 2009, to Regina - to the place where he had first met Shane Hollander and had started building the wrong understanding of him from day one. 

He thought about Shane’s composure and his realization that it wasn’t just composure. 

He thought about the wall he had gotten close to but never been able to break through. 

As he walked through Raleigh in the dark, he thought about how that wall was probably more heavily fortified after the night’s events and revelations, than it had been previously. 

He got to the hotel and went up to his room. 

He sat on the edge of the bed for a while in the dark, and then he lay back and looked at the ceiling, waiting for his brain to come up with something useful. 

It didn’t. 

At some point he stopped fighting against his own brain and let himself feel the full weight of the evening - the bar, Shane’s face, the coldness in his expression, the hatred that had always been pointed to in their rivalry by the media, hatred that he had never actually had directed at him by Shane before tonight - and he realized that if Shane actually hated him then he deserved it because he had taken something from him, his privacy. The weight of that realization cracked something open in his chest that had been sealed since he walked away from Shane at that rink in Sochi. 

He did not try to hold it together. 

There was no one there to hold it together for. 

He grieved at the loss of something he hadn’t realized he even had. Something that he hadn’t taken any care to maintain. Something he hadn’t even allowed himself to realize he needed until it was too late. Something that he wasn’t sure after tonight he would ever be able to get back. 

He cried himself to sleep in a hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the text marked read at 2:47 AM and nothing coming back. 

As October moved into November the Bears found their footing the way they always did - through games and adjustments and dedication to teamwork - and they won more games than they lost. 

Ilya played well. He always played well and the fact that his personal life was a controlled disaster never once affected what he did on the ice and it wasn’t going to start now. 

The text thread ran alongside all of it. 

Three days after Raleigh he tried to message Shane again - he tried to keep pushing forward on his plan - he wasn’t going to just give up. That wasn’t who he was. 

I watched the game against Tampa. Second Period. You were the only one on the ice who saw that play coming. 

Read. No response. 

Ten days after that: You do not celebrate enough on the ice. You should. 

Read. No response. 

He kept going. 

No declarations. No apologies - because those he realized needed real conversations behind them now more than ever. Just observations. The daily, unglamorous, accumulated evidence that he was paying attention in a way he had never been paying attention before. Shane’s name at the top of every message. Not Jane. Shane. 

One morning before practice Marlow appeared at his stall with two coffees and sat down. 

“How you doing, Roz?” He asked. It wasn’t really a question, he knew that Ilya wasn’t doing really well outside of his game. 

“Fine,” Ilya lied. 

Marlow handed him a coffee and looked at him with an expression that communicated he was going to accept fine as an answer but that he wasn’t going to believe it. “The texts?” 

“He has read every one.” 

“And?”

“And nothing, Marlow. Still no response.” 

Marlow turned his coffee cup in his hands. “That’s something at least.” 

Ilya looked at him sharply. 

“He’s not blocking you,” Marlow offered. “It’s a choice. A small choice. I’m not saying it’s more than it is. But it’s not nothing.” 

Ilya thought about it. It was a small thing. It was also true. Shane hadn’t blocked him. Shane had been reading his messages and he’d chosen, every time, to leave the door slightly cracked by not blocking Ilya’s number, which was different than closing it entirely. It was not nothing. 

He wasn’t sure what else he could do though at a slightly cracked door that was too stubborn to open except for keep showing up at it. 

“I know,” he sighed. “And I know I fucked up, bad. I am lucky he has not blocked me.” 

“You did,” Marlow said. Simply. Not piling on. “And I’m not proud of the role that I played in that.” 

“It is worse now.” 

“It might be,” Marlow agreed and took a sip of his coffee. “It might take longer and it might require more. The texts are good. Keep going. Keep showing up. Keep being consistent. Don’t make any big gestures that put pressure on him to respond. Just be there - reliably - over time and give him that time… without asking him for anything.” 

Across the room Barrett was lacing his skates and not appearing to listen, which Ilya had come to understand was not the same thing as not listening. Barrett listened to everything. Showed nothing. 

Ilya recognized it. 

He wasn’t going to say anything about it. 

Hayes appeared in the doorway of the locker room holding two sticks and looking at them with an expression of intensity that was slightly alarming before eight in the morning. 

“Question,” Hayes said, to the room at large.

“No,” Carmichael groaned.

“It’s a quick one!”

“It’s never a quick one.” 

“This one is.” Hayes held up the sticks. “These are identical. Same specs, same curve, same flex. But one of them feels completely different in the crease and I can’t figure out why and it’s been bothering me all week.” 

Everyone looked at the sticks. 

“They are identical,” St-Simon said. 

“That’s what I thought,” Hayes said. “But one of them is wrong.” 

“Wrong how?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” 

Carmichael looked at St-Simon. “Are all goaltenders this strange?” 

“I have been told yes,” St-Simon nodded. 

“I don’t think these are identical,” Hayes kept going, holding them closer together and squinting. “I think there’s something in the blade angle that’s–” 

“Hayes,” Ilya interrupted. 

Hayes looked at him. 

“Put the sticks down.” 

Hayes looked at the sticks and then back at Ilya. He put them down carefully, like they were somehow going to remember what he’d been saying about them. And backed away from them slowly. 

St-Simon made a sound that might have been a laugh. 

Carmichael caught Ilya's eye across the room and shook his head, his expression one that suggested he was trying to make peace with the people he had been given to interact with. 

Ilya drank his coffee and thought about consistency. About showing up reliably without asking for anything back. About small accumulated evidence of his attention that was the only thing he had to offer right now. 

Across the room, sticks forgotten, Hayes looked in his direction. “Consistency,” he said. “That’s what works with things like that - not one big moment - just showing up every day. It’s the only thing you can do. Lisa says that.” He paused. “She’s right about most things. More than me, definitely. Probably more than most people I’ve met.” He looked at his gloves thoughtfully. “She’s also right that I overthink crease angles but that’s a separate–”

“Hayes,” Marlow said. 

“Yeah?”

“We were having a moment.” 

Hayes looked around. “Were you? I thought you were just sitting there.” 

“We were sitting there meaningfully.” 

“Oh.” Hayes nodded, seriously. “I’ll let you get back to it.” He went back to his equipment, still eyeing the sticks warily, then looked up again immediately. “For what it’s worth though. Consistency. That’s the thing.” 

Marlow looked at Ilya. Ilya looked at his coffee. 

The rest of the team had found out - that was the thing about the bar in Raleigh, Shane had made sure of it, his voice carrying the way it had when he looked towards the rest of the Bears and the question had landed. Most of them had assembled the picture now on their own from the pieces, the ones who hadn’t had been helped by the ones who were faster. It had happened with less drama than Ilya might have expected, which he attributed partly to the fact that the team already knew he was bisexual and partly to the fact that half of them had apparently already had suspicions about the direction of his attention at events where the Bears and Voyageurs had been in the same room together. He and Shane hadn’t been as subtle as they thought they were apparently. 

Connors had told him the next morning on their way to the airport, with an expression that mixed pride and sheepishness in roughly equal measure. “We’re observant,” he had said. “As a group.” 

“You are not observant,” Ilya had said. “You were just watching me.” 

“We were observantly watching you,” Connors had said, and seemed to feel that it was a meaningful distinction. 

The texts kept running. 

Shane kept reading. 

He thought about consistency. About showing up reliably without asking anything back. About the small, accumulated evidence of attention that was the only thing he had to offer right now. 

He could do that. 

He had been doing it. 

He was going to keep doing it. 

The Bears had a rest day on the Tuesday that the Carolina Breakers played the Montreal Voyageurs. Carmichael had, with the organizational enthusiasm he reserved exclusively for things that he was not required to, claimed the living room of Ilya’s penthouse by eleven in the morning. He had produced a quantity of food that was definitely unreasonable for the number of people present and arranged it on the coffee table - because apparently he had very strong opinions about snack placement. 

Marlow arrived. St-Simon arrived. Connors wandered in. 

Hayes arrived soon after with his wife, Lisa. Hayes dropped onto the couch next to Carmichael. Lisa settled into the armchair, opened her book that she’s brought, and said nothing. 

“She’s happy to be here,” Hayes said. 

“I am not,” Lisa argued pleasantly, turning a page in her book. “I am here under protest.” 

“She is,” Hayes confirmed, helpfully. 

“I brought snacks though,” Carmichael said.

Lisa turned another page. “That’s the only reason I’m here.” 

“She’s here in an observational capacity only. She has opinions about all of you and she will share them if provoked,” Hayes warned. 

“Only Carmichael,” Lisa added. 

“Only Carmichael,” Hayes confirmed. 

“Hey!” 

“She tolerates you,” Hayes smiled. “That’s something.” 

Carmichael put a hand over his heart. “I’m touched.” 

Ilya looked at his living room full of these people and felt the thing he felt when he looked at them - the thing he still didn’t have a clean word for in English or in Russian - and looked back at the television. 

“I still do not understand why we are all watching this,” he sighed. 

“Reserach,” Marlow stated. 

“Investment, Roz,” Carmichael nodded.

“He is not wrong,” St-Simon said, without looking up from his phone.

“I’m here because the food sounded good,” Hayes said honestly. 

“Same,” Lisa said, turning the page of her book. “I’m here in case you idiots hurt yourselves.” She looked up in the silence that followed. “Doctor,” she supplied helpfully. 

Hayes picked up something from the coffee table and examined it. “Carmichael, what is this?” 

“It’s good. Just eat it.” 

“That’s not an answer–” 

“Just eat the thing, Hayes.” 

Hayes ate it. His expression shifted from caution to genuine appreciation. “Okay. That’s actually good.” 

“I know,” Carmichael said. 

“Carmichael brought it,” Hayes told his wife. 

“I know. That’s why I came, babe - it definitely wasn’t for the company.” 

Carmichael pointed at her. “I respect that.” 

St-Simon, on the floor with his back against the couch, looked at his phone. “The game is starting.” 

Everyone looked at the television. 

It was clear from the first period that Carolina was going to win this one. 

The score was 2-0 through most of it - Shane with assists on both goals, his positioning in the offensive zone creating the chances his linemates finished - but the score wasn’t the indicator. The indicator was the quality of Carolina’s possession, the confidence of it, the way they played like the outcome had already been decided and they were simply executing. Montreal was good - not nearly as good as when Hollander was their captain - but they were playing against something currently better. 

Shane was on the second line. 

Shane was everywhere. 

Ilya had recalibrated his understanding of this version of Shane over the past month since Raleigh. He’d watched clips, updated the picture, thought he had accounted for the gap between who Shane had been in Montreal and who he appeared to be now. 

Shane still found ways to surprise him. 

What Shane was doing in the second period made Ilya sit forward on the couch and stop thinking about anything except what he was watching. Two separate sequences where the play developed in Shane’s head before anything on the ice could have possibly indicated it was coming - the positioning, the movement, the read of where the puck was going and where the people around it were going and what the intersection of those two things was going to produce five seconds from now. Both became goals within forty seconds of each other. 

“Damn,” Hayes said, tone impressed. “He’s good.” 

“Yes,” Ilya agreed. 

“Like - actually good. Not stats good. Ice good.” 

“Yes.” 

“You see what he does with his weight before the pass?” Hayes was leaning forward too, food forgotten. “The way he shifts before anyone else on the ice even knows he’s made the decision? By the time you read it it’s already done. That’s remarkable.” 

Ilya looked at Hayes. 

“What?” he asked. “I watch players. Goaltender thing. We read bodies for a living.” 

He thought about five years of playing against Shane and never having noticed that himself. 

He got up to get a beer during a line change. 

He was almost back to the couch when Carmichael’s voice hit a register that could have cleared a room. 

“What the actual fuck!” 

Ilya was in the doorway in two steps. 

Shane Hollander had Gilbert Comeau by the jersey. Gloves off. 

He watched the punch connect and Comeau’s head snap back and watched as blood came, and then both benches were moving and the referees were converging and in the middle of it all Shane had released Comeau’s jersey and was standing there, hands at his sides, watching Comeau go down. Not hot anger  in his expression. Something colder than that. 

The refs converged together and looked like they were having a heated debate with the linesman. Shane’s teammates had pulled him back a bit while Comeau’s came to take him back to Montreal’s bench. The refs separated. 

Five minutes. Roughing. 

The room went quiet. 

“Did Hollander just–” St-Simon started. 

“Yes,” everyone said. 

“Good,” Connors said. 

Everyone looked over at him. 

He hadn’t moved from his spot in the corner of the couch. Arms crossed, jaws set, eyes on the screen. He said it again, quieter: “Good.” 

Nobody argued. 

Lisa had put her book down at this point and was watching the screen with the rest of them. 

Shane came out of the penalty box and Couillard had apparently been waiting for it. The cheap shot came inside thirty seconds - an elbow, not clean, the kind that lived in the gray area referees sometimes chose not to see. The Carolina defenseman didn’t wait for the referee’s judgement. He stepped in and hit Couillard with the kind of force that communicated something Beyond hockey, and Couillard went down. 

Gagnon tried on the next shift. A different defenseman, same result. 

After that Montreal’s players started to give Shane a wider berth. 

“They’re protecting him,” Carmichael said, quietly. 

“Teams protect their forwards,” St-Simon said, eyes on his phone. 

“Not like this.” Carmichael shook his head. “This isn’t gap control, Vic. Watch -  they’re not watching the puck when Shane’s on the ice. They’re watching the Montreal players near Shane. They’re responding before anything even happens.” He paused. “They’re watching for it. They’re waiting for it.” 

Ilya watched the next shift. Carmichael was right. Every time a Montreal player came within range of Shane, at least one Carolina defenseman was already adjusting, already closing the gap, already positioned - not for a play but for Shane. It was anticipatory rather than reactive. The team had decided, at some point, that they were not going to allow a certain thing to happen on their ice, and were making that decision visible. 

Standard defensive coverage was about the puck and the play. 

This was about Shane. 

He watched Shane on the ice, moving with ease because there were people at his back, and felt the comparison sit in his chest again - what this team had given Shane in three months against what Ilya had given him in five years. He did not try to make the comparison comfortable. It wasn’t. 

The game ended 7-1. 

The post-game press conference ran twenty minutes later. Ilya watched it without looking away. 

Shane was composed in front of the cameras - he was always composed in front of cameras, that hadn’t changed. But it was a different kind of composure than what Ilya had watched from him for years - not the product of training and managed presentation. 

Six minutes in. 

“Can you speak to the unprovoked attack on Gilbert Comeau in the second period?”

Shane looked at the reporter, gaze sharper than normal. 

“Violence is not an answer to things,” he said. “On the ice or anywhere else. I have believed that my whole career.” A long pause. “But sometimes it is the only language you can speak when racist assholes don’t speak any other. I have been quiet about it for a long time.” He looked at the reporter with narrowed eyes. “I am done being quiet.” 

The room on the screen went still. 

Ilya’s living room went still.

He picked up his phone. 

He typed, deleted it, typed again. He had never been good at this party - the emotional thing, the honest thing to say when something was overwhelming in your chest. He had been practicing for three months to get better with it. He was better with it than he had been. He was still not good at it. He typed: 

The press conference. I heard you. What you said - it mattered. I am sorry it took me this long to listen.

He looked at it. 

He sent it. 

He put the phone down on the couch cushions and looked at the television where the press conference had moved on. Carmichael was looking at his food very carefully. St-Simon had put his phone face-down. Hayes was looking at the screen with an expression that was quieter than his usual expressions. 

Connors was still looking at the screen. His jaw had loosened and there was something quiet in his expression. Connors had been with Shane as they came up. He had watched what Shane had absorbed when they were kids. Ilya watched as he nodded to himself, small and private, like a long overdue debt had just been paid. He had been waiting for this moment longer than anyone else in the room. 

The phone showed the message read at 11:47 PM. 

No response. 

Ilya picked it up and put it in his pocket. 

“Good,” Marlow said at last. To no one in particular. 

Ilya looked at the blank screen. 

He was going to keep going. 

He was going to fix this. 

He was not going to give up.

Chapter 8: Ready

Chapter Notes

Shane's POV

Shane had been doing a lot of thinking about what happened the last time he saw Ilya in Raleigh. 

Not that he was thinking about Ilya exactly, but more about what he was going to do regarding the connection between them. There was a difference. 

Ilya had hurt him - betrayed him - by sharing their secret with his teammates without Shane’s knowledge or permission. But - looking back on that night at the bar - he couldn’t place the blame for that completely on Ilya’s shoulders alone anymore. He remembered the looks on their faces when he shouted across the bar so that they could all hear him; he could still see the shock of realization that was dawning on most of them - that surprise was only not present on a few of them, clearly the few that Ilya had shared the information with - and Shane had apparently shared that information with the rest of them himself. What Ilya had done was wrong, but Shane wasn’t innocent in that either. 

He remembered Carolina’s first game against Montreal - in Montreal - a couple of weeks before the Breakers played the Bears, and he had dinner with Hayden and Jackie afterwards. He had told them about his relationship with Ilya, because he had started to feel himself slipping and wanting to text Ilya back… and he knew that Hayden would have feelings about the Rozanov of the situation and stop him if he knew - so he told him. Wasn’t that something similar to what Ilya had done? Didn’t he - before he even knew that Ilya had done it too - shared Ilya’s secret with Hayden without Ilya’s permission or Ilya’s knowledge? Did that make him any better in that regard? 

There was no going back from it now… both of their teams knew that something happened between the two of them - and if they hadn’t figured it out in that moment, they definitely were aided by the quicker members after the fact. 

Brilliant move there, Hollander. Way to let that cat out of the bag. 

But, just because he felt like he wasn’t any better than Ilya in that regard, and just because he knew that eventually he was going to give in and that he wasn’t done with the thing that existed between them - he had sat with that question honestly enough to know the answer and while uncomfortable it was something he had made peace with - that didn’t mean that he was going to make it easy. 

Ilya had been operating on the ease of his situationship with Shane for years now, on the understanding that Shane would come around eventually whenever he got upset and that the friction would resolve. That the pattern of things would just re-establish itself because it always had. He had always handed Shane the minimum and sat back to wait for Shane to come to him. And it had worked - every single time - because Shane had let it. He always came back. 

But Shane was not coming back this time. 

Not yet. 

Ilya needed to sit with what he had done for a while. Not just Vegas. Not just the bar. But the whole of it - the six months of silence, the room numbers as answers, the five years of just enough without ever showing up. Ilya needed to feel the weight of it the way Shane had been feeling the weight of it. And that would only happen if Shane stopped making it comfortable for him. 

He was starting to get very good at making things uncomfortable when he had decided to lately. 

He knew what he wanted. 

That was the part that surprised him - not the wanting itself, which had been there for long enough that he had stopped tracking when it had arrived, but the clarity of it. The way it had resolved from something vague and unexamined into something he could hold up and look at directly and name now without flinching. 

He wanted Ilya Rozanov. 

Not the version of wanting that had existed between them - the locked rooms and the room numbers and the careful distance maintained everywhere else. That version had served a function for a long time, and had given them both something without requiring either of them to admit what that something was. He understood why it had been built that way. He had helped build it. 

He didn’t want it anymore. 

What he wanted was to be able to say Ilya’s name out loud in a context that wasn’t about hockey. He wanted to not have to translate the wanting into something smaller and safer every time it arrived. He wanted mornings that didn’t require managing, and conversations that didn’t have a ceiling built into them. He wanted the ordinary intimacy of being known by someone in all the ways that mattered and not just the ones that were easy. 

He thought about a specific moment - not one of the locked room moments, not vegas, but something smaller. A hotel lobby in 2012, after a game in New York, both of them in the elevator going up - Shane there for a photoshoot, Ilya there to win a decisive victory over the dinosaur, Scott Hunter - and Ilya had said something about Shane’s game from the week before that was not a chirp and was not a compliment, it wasn’t anything that Shane had a clean category for - just an observation, direct and genuine, the kind that Ilya almost never made outside of a room where there was no audience. Shane had stood there in that elevator and felt something he had not named at the time and hadn’t wanted to examine. 

He was examining it - and other moments like it - now. 

He had been collecting those moments like that for years. Filed away and unexamined, because examining them would have required admitting that they were adding up to something. They were adding up to this - that he was in love with Ilya Rozanov for long enough at that point that it stopped feeling like a choice and was just the way things were. Like the ice. Like his skates. 

He wanted all of it. 

He also knew that wanting it and being ready to go back to it were two different things, and he was not ready. Ilya needed to sit with what he had done. Not because Shane wanted to punish him - he had sat with that motivation honestly enough to know it wasn’t true - but because Ilya had spent five years not sitting with things and Shane was not going to let him skip out on it. 

Not this time. 

When Ilya had done the work, Shane would know. 

Until then, he was going to play his season and take care of himself and let the distance do what the distance needed to do. 

If Ilya cared about him and it wasn’t just a game to him, then he would do the work. 

He supposed that he had Edvardsen to thank for part of it. 

It had been a few days after the bar in Raleigh when Niklas had found him. 

Not found him - Shane hadn’t exactly been hiding. He’d been in the film room after everyone else had gone - the way he sometimes was - watching the Carolina power play from the previous game and making notes. Niklas had come in and sat down without asking and looked at the screen for a moment before he’d looked at Shane. 

“You want to talk about it,” he said. Not a question. 

“Not particularly.”

Niklas nodded. He stayed anyway. 

That was the thing about him - he stayed. He didn’t push but he didn’t leave. He just stayed and waited and let silence be whatever silence needed to be, which was one of the reasons that Shane felt the need to start talking. 

He told him about Ilya. Not all of it - not the full five years of it, not every locked room and every room number and every moment of six months of silence. But enough. The shape of it. What it had been and what it hadn’t been and what Shane was starting to think that he’d wanted from it all along. 

Niklas listened patiently like he always did - completely, without interrupting - and waited for Shane to finish speaking. He just listened and when Shane was done he was quiet for a moment more before he said: “I watched him at the bar.” 

Shane looked at him. 

“Before everything happened,” Niklas added. “I was watching the room - habit, I can’t turn it off - and I watched Rozanov from the moment we walked in.” He paused. “He didn’t move for a long time. He just stayed where he was, watching you.” 

“That’s not–” 

“Not the way you’re thinking,” he said. “Not the way someone watches something they want. He watched you like you were something he was afraid of losing.” He looked at the screen. “I’ve watched a lot of people in a lot of different scenarios over the years. I know the difference.” 

Shane looked down at his notes. 

“I’m not telling you what you need to do with that,” Niklas put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m just telling you what I saw.” 

They had sat in the film room for a while after that, not talking, the power play footage running on the screen between them, and Shane had turned what his friend had said over in his head and hadn’t known what to do with it yet. He hadn’t been ready to examine it that closely then. 

He was ready to examine it now. 

Was it possible that maybe Ilya actually wanted the same thing that Shane wanted after all and he was just too emotionally obtuse to show it right? 

Could Shane have read into things entirely wrong? 

The night before the Boston game the team went out to Flour & Barrel, it had become something close to their regular spot. Shane had grown quite fond of something on their menu that Zelenko had turned him onto - the Big Ass Meatball - and he was man enough to admit it might have been bordering on an obsession at this point. 

Shane sat between Blake and Zelenko - his usual spot at these things he’d discovered - and ate his meatball. The ease at which he was eating and enjoying actual food was still something that surprised him. He didn’t miss the absence of the calculation behind his diet. He listened to Zelenko hold court about something that had happened in practice that afternoon, with the air of a man who was recounting some kind of historical event. 

“The point,” Zelenko was saying, “is that Rourke had no business trying that move in that situation–” 

“The point,” Blake argued, “is that it worked.” 

“It worked despite itself, man. That’s very different from it being the right call.” 

“Is it though?” 

“Yes! Adrian, yes, it absolutely is–” 

Shane listened and ate and let the noise of his team wash over him and thought about Boston tomorrow. About TD Garden and the crowd and the game and - Ilya. 

He was going to see Ilya again in person tomorrow. 

He had a plan for that, and the plan was simple, he was going to execute it without any drama. He had gotten good at that lately - executing things without drama. The version of himself that had stood in a Vegas bathroom and said everything out loud had been doing the right thing, but he had not had the tools yet. This version of himself had the tools. 

Edvarsen appeared at his shoulder with a fresh drink he’s gotten from the bartender. He didn’t sit down - he just stood there for a moment and put the drink in front of Shane and said, quietly, under the noise of Zelenko and Blake’s ongoing disagreement: “You okay for tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Shane said. 

Niklas looked at him. 

“I have a plan,” Shane said. 

“I know you have a plan,” his expression was dry. “You always have a plan.” A pause. “I’m asking if you’re okay.” 

Shane thought about it honestly. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I actually am.” 

Niklas nodded once and went back to the other end of the table. 

Zelenko had escalated the practice incident to involve three separate witnesses now and a disputed video review. Blake was holding firm. Mackinnon, two seats down, was reading. Anders had an expression that said he’d heard every version of this argument and had opinions about all of them. 

Shane ate his food and felt something he had been feeling a lot lately - the quiet of being somewhere he was supposed to be - with people who knew him, doing something that didn’t cost him anything.

He was going to be fine tomorrow. 

The second game that the Breakers played against the Bears was in Boston. 

TD Garden was loud - Boston was always loud - and the crowd carried a hostility towards visiting teams that was wholly unique to them. Shane had been on the receiving end of it plenty of times when he had been playing with Montreal. He had never minded it. Hostile crowds were just noise, and noise was something to filter out. 

He filtered it now and went to work. 

The warmup was where it started. 

Ilya was at the far end of the ice when Shane stepped out, running a skating drill with Carmichael that they both clearly knew by muscle memory. He didn’t look in Shane’s direction immediately. Shane knew this because he was tracking Ilya the way he tracked all opponents - peripheral, informational, not acknowledged. 

By the time Shane had finished his second lap Ilya was looking at him, openly. 

Shane knew this too. 

He skated his drills and he didn’t look back. He ran the power play sequence with Blake and Zelenko that had been working all season and let himself get into the ice, into the feeling of it, the ease of it that had been coming back to him slowly over the past months - the joy of it that he had thought he’d lost and had been finding again, piece by piece in Raleigh. 

He did not look at Ilya. 

At one point he was close enough - both of them near the neutral zone during a break in the drill - that not looking required active maintenance. He maintained it. Barely. He talked to Blake about the sequence they had just run, made a small adjustment, ran it again. Ilya was approximately twenty feet away and Shane gave him nothing. 

He could feel the nothing landing. 

The game itself was what you would expect from Boston - structured, physical, every inch earned. The Bears were a good team and they knew how to make a visiting team feel it. 

Shane played his shifts and read the ice and did the work. 

Ilya was on the first line and Shane was now on the second, which meant direct matchups were limited, which meant that when they did happen - on a line change, at a faceoff, in the traffic of the neutral zone - those moments had a specific weight to them. 

The first time it happened was at a faceoff in the first period. 

Not the second period faceoff - this one was incidental, a line change that put them in the same vicinity, and Ilya said something as they passed each other in the neutral zone. Not loud. Not performed. Just something directed at Shane, in the register Ilya used when he was talking to him and not for any else’s benefit. 

Shane did not respond. 

He kept moving, kept his eyes on the play developing ahead of him, gave Ilya the exact same nothing that he’d been giving to him all night. He did not look at Ilya throughout it. 

Or - he looked, but only in the way he would have looked at any opponent that he needed information from; Angle, positioning, what was likely to happen next. He would look and then he would look away with the same detachment that he would have looked at any other player that he didn’t have a history with. He gave Ilya nothing. Not a held gaze, not a reaction, not even the awareness that anything existed between them on any level that would give Ilya anything he could read into. 

He felt it landing. 

And he let Ilya feel it.

The second time was after a whistle in the second period, both of them waiting near the same faceoff dot while the referees sorted something out at the other end. Ilya positioned himself nearby, which was not accidental, and said something else. Shane looked at the referees and waited for the play to resume. When it did he skated away without acknowledging that Ilya had even spoken. 

He was not angry when he did this. That was the thing he hadn’t expected - he had expected that ignoring Ilya would feel like work, like something that required effort and energy and the suppression of his impulse to respond. It didn’t feel like that. It felt clean. It felt like a natural consequence of a decision he had made and was at peace with. Ilya could try. Shane could choose. Those were just the facts of the situation right now. 

In the second period he started to notice the Bears newest teammate, Troy Barrett, a bit more.  

The first time had been peripheral - Barrett on the ice, the way he held himself, the recognition that had landed and been filed away. Now Shane was watching with a bit more attention, the way he usually watched things he was trying to understand. It wasn’t dramatic - Barrett just played with a focus that Shane recognized - and that recognition wasn’t anything related to his plays, but more in the way that Barrett was holding himself as he played. 

Barrett was good. Genuinely good - not in the way you said someone was good when you were being diplomatic, but in the way that meant it when you watched the actual player. He was reading plays well. He moved efficiently. He was different from some of the players that hesitated and from the players who were reckless - he made decisions early and he committed to them. 

But that wasn’t what Shane was watching. 

There was a way that people moved when they had learned to make themselves look smaller. A type of presence, or lack thereof, that offered nothing that wasn’t specifically asked for. Shane knew it because he had lived inside that space for years. He had worn the same armor like a second skin for most of his life and he’d only recently started to understand what it had been costing him. 

And Shane knew that Barrett was wearing it now. And he wondered if anyone had told him yet what it cost. 

He watched as Barrett finished his shift and skated back to the bench; he watched the way he sat - not relaxed, not tense, just contained. He watched the space around Barrett on the Bears’ bench. The way his teammates moved around him. The way Carmichael said something to him between shifts and Barrett nodded and Carmichale seemed to accept the nod as sufficient. The way Marlow handed him water without being asked and Barrett took it and that was the whole exchange. 

They had figured out his language. The Bears had figured out how Barrett communicated and they’d adjusted to meet him in it, the same way the Breakers had adjusted to meet Shane in his, which was - something. That was something that meant they were paying attention. It meant that they had decided that Barrett was worth learning. 

Shane had filed it away and went back to the game. 

The Breakers won 3-2. 

It was harder than the first game and it felt like it - not the clean decisive victory of Raleigh but something earned, the kind of win that came from refusing to give ground when ground was being taken. Shane had two assists and one goal and was very satisfied with it. Which was its own kind of good. 

After the final buzzer he shook hands and went through the motions and found his way to the visitor’s locker room and showered and changed and told Blake he would meet them at the hotel when they asked if he was coming out to celebrate. 

He wasn’t in the mood for a victory celebration tonight. He especially wasn’t in the mood to risk another encounter with the Bears at whatever bar they ended up at. He was too exhausted from his focus on actively ignoring Ilya. 

He was waiting outside the arena for his car when the door opened behind him. 

Barrett. 

He had his jacket on and his bag over one shoulder and he stood in the doorway for a moment looking at the parking lot like he was assessing something, and then he looked at Shane, and he stayed. 

Shane glanced away. 

If he wanted to say something to Shane then he could, Shane wasn’t going to stop him. He just waited and created a space for Barrett to decide what to do with. That seemed to be the right move with Barrett - create space, let him decide what to do with it. 

“You played well,” Barrett said finally. Flat. Informational. 

“Thanks,” Shane nodded at him. “You too.” 

Barrett nodded. He stayed where he was. 

Shane waited some more. 

“Rozanov.” He stopped. Tried again. “He’s been texting you.” 

“I know.” 

“He doesn’t–” Barrett’s jaw moved. “I’ve been with the team for two months. I hear things. On the bus. In the locker room. They don’t think I’m listening.” A pause. “I am.” 

Shane looked at him. 

“He cried himself to sleep in Raleigh,” Barrett said. “After the bar. I had the room next to his.” He said it flat, factual, without editorial. “Marlow had to go check on him eventually.” 

Shane looked down at his feet. 

“I’m not saying forgive him,” Barret said. His voice had dropped slightly, which from Barrett seemed to be the equivalent of a significant shift in register. “I’m saying it’s not–” He looked for the right word. “It’s not a game. What he’s doing.” 

Shane nodded 

He wasn’t sure what else to say, so he settled on: “Thank you.” 

Barrett nodded once, like that was the end of what he had to say, and left. 

Shane stood there, waiting for his Lyft back to the hotel, and went through what Barrett had said to him. He wondered if he had been reading into Ilya’s texts and actions differently than what the Russian had intended them to be. 

He still wasn’t ready to forgive Ilya. 

But something around the edges of the anger had shifted slightly, fractionally, and it was probably going to keep shifting, and he was not going to examine it too closely tonight. 

He wasn’t ready for that. 

His car arrived. 

He got in. 

He went back to the hotel. 

Shane had been home for three days when he finally stopped moving long enough to sit with it. 

Not that he had been avoiding it exactly. The schedule had been what the schedule was - practice, film, the ordinary pace of a season in full swing - and he had been doing what he always did. It had been enough, mostly. He loved this team, and that surprised him more than he wanted to admit at first.

He hadn’t been sure when he first made the move, what his feelings about it would be. But, this team, there was an ease to them that he hadn’t felt in all of his years of playing hockey, and for that he was thankful. 

But the Barrett thing had been sitting with him since Boston. 

He cried himself to sleep in Raleigh. I had the room next to him. 

He had turned it over and over, trying to figure out what to do with those words. He had turned them over on the plane home from Boston and in the car from the airport and during practice and during film and during the team dinner at Flour and Barrel two nights ago where Zelenko had done something inadvisable with the dessert menu and Blake had looked at Shane as if he were witnessing a slow-motion event he had predicted and had been unable to prevent. 

He had turned it over and it kept arriving at the same place. 

Ilya had been upset because Shane had been upset. 

Ilya, who did not show his emotions in whatever it was that they had had between them. Who had spent five years not showing him anything, who had perfected the art of strategic disappearance, who had always waited for Shane to come to him and had never once had to sit with the consequences of Shane not coming, because he always did. Ilya had sat in his hotel room in Raleigh and cried because Shane had walked out of a bar and not come back. 

He didn’t know what to do with that yet. 

He was sitting on his couch with his laptop open and not looking at it when his phone rang. 

Hayden. 

He picked up. 

“Hey, man,” Hayden said. “How’d it go?” 

“Good,” Shane said. “We won in Boston.”

“I saw.” A pause. “How are you doing with the–” Hayden stopped. Started again. “How’s the Rozanov situation?”

Shane could hear the restraint in Hayden’s voice that indicated he had thoughts about the Rozanov situation and was making a conscious effort to present them in a measured and supportive way. He had heard Hayden talk like this before. It never lasted long. 

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Shane admitted. “A lot lately.”

“Okay,” Hayden said. Carefully. “And where are you landing?” 

“I don’t know yet,” Shane looked at the ceiling. “Barrett talked to me - after the game in Boston?” 

“Barrett? The new kid on the Bears? The one who barely talks?” 

“Yeah.” 

“What did he say?” 

Shane told him. The parking lot, the flat delivery, the revelation about Ilya in Raleigh. Hayden listened without interrupting, which was something Hayden was capable of doing when the information was significant enough to warrant it. 

When Shane finished, there was a pause. 

“Okay,” Hayden said. “So… okay.” Another paused that suggested he was performing some kind of internal calculation on what to say next. “I’m trying - I’m trying to be supportive here, Shane. I really want you to know that. I’m genuinely trying–” 

“Hayden.” 

“Because you’re my best friend and I want what’s best for you and if he is what is best for you then–” He stopped. “The thing is, Shane, and I say this with love, that man is a complete–” 

“Hayden!” 

“I’m just. Okay.” A breath. “I mean crying in a hotel–that’s something. I’ll give him that. That’s something.” A pause. “It doesn’t make him not a complete–”

“I know,” Shane said. 

“Because the bar thing, Shane. The bar thing was–” 

“I know.” 

“And Vegas before that–” 

“Hayd, I know.” 

“I just.” Hayden exhaled. “I want to physically–there are so many words in the English language Shane and none of them are enough to describe how much I want to hit that man over the head with a chair most of the time. Is that something I’m allowed to feel?” 

Shane almost smiled. “Yeah. It’s something you’re allowed to feel.” 

“Okay. Good. Cause I feel it.” A pause. “Are you softening on him?” 

Shane looked at the ceiling. 

“Shane.”

“A little,” Shane admitted. “Not–I’m not ready to do anything about it yet. I’m not going to text him back or anything - I’m not there yet. I just.” He stopped again. “Barrett said it’s not a game… what he’s doing.” 

“Barrett - who barely speaks - said that?” 

“Yeah.” 

A long pause from Hayden’s end. “Okay. If the guy who barely speaks felt strongly enough about it to actually say those words out loud then–” Another pause. “I still want to hit Rozanov in the face with a shovel.” 

“That’s fair,” Shane laughed. 

“Supportively,” Hayden said. “I want to do it supportively. In a way that would ultimately be of service to your happiness.” 

“That’s not what that means.” 

“I’m workshopping the framing.” A beat. “Ruby asked about you the other day. She wants to know if you’re coming to visit.” 

“Tell her soon.” 

“She’s going to hold you to that. She made me write it down. She has a notebook now, Shane. She writes things down that people promise her and she brings the notebook out when they forget.” 

“She’s only three.” 

“She’s terrifying,” Hayden said. “She gets it from Jackie.” A pause. “Are you okay though? Actually okay?” 

“Yeah,” he smiled. “I think I’m actually okay.” 

“Good,” Hayden sighed. “That’s–Shane. Good.” A pause. “I’m still going to want to punch him when I see him.” 

“I know, Hayd.” 

“Supportively.” 

“You keep saying that word.” 

“I’m going to keep saying it until it means what I need it to mean.” 

Shane shook his head, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it did lately, and he looked out the window at Raleigh in December - grey and mild and entirely his - and felt the quiet of a place he had made into somewhere he belonged. 

“Tell Ruby I’ll come visit when I play in Montreal again,” he said. 

“She’s going to write it in the notebook.” 

“I know.” 

“Don’t make me look bad, man.” 

“I won’t,” Shane promised. “Tell Jackie hi for me.” 

“She’s going to have feelings too about the Rozanov update.” 

“I know.”

“Good feelings,” Hayden said. “Very supportive feelings. I don’t know why she doesn’t want to hit him with a–” 

“Hayden.” 

“Right. Okay. I’ll tell her.” A pause. “That man was basically a rake. I still can’t believe you - the straight-laced golden boy fell for a fucking rake.” 

Shane chuckled. “I’ll talk to you later, Hayd.” 

He put the phone down and sat in the quiet of his condo for a while, the city outside doing what cities did in December, and thought about what was shifting and what wasn’t and what he was going to do about their next game. 

They were playing Toronto. 

Their game against the Guardians was in Toronto. 

Shane had played in Toronto before - plenty of times with Montreal. The Scotiabank Arena was loud and hostile - but in a Canadian way, which was different from American arenas - it was more personal somehow. The crowd was more invested in the outcome in a way that you felt in your chest. He’d never minded it before. But tonight felt colder. 

The Breakers were a far better team than Toronto this season - most seasons if he was being honest with himself - Toronto was currently holding the record for the longest run without having the Stanley Cup out of any of the other teams. That was just simply the fact of it - the standings said so, the underlying numbers said so, the first twenty minutes of the game confirmed it. 

Shane had two shots on goal in the first period and an assist on a Kessler goal in the power play that came from a play he had seen developing before anyone else on the ice had even known there was something to watch. 

He was playing well. 

He was also, in the background of playing well, watching Dallas Kent. 

He had watched Kent for years from across divided ice - the Toronto captain, big and loud and carrying an authority that screamed the best way to lead was to make everyone around him small enough so that he was the largest in the room. Shane had never liked him. That was not unusual - there were plenty of players that he didn’t like - but Kent… there was something more to it. It was a dislike he reserved for people like Comeau. 

In the second period, during a stoppage in play while the referees sorted out an icing call. Shane was near the boards, waiting, and Ken drifted into his vicinity with the deliberateness of someone who had decided to say something and was positioning himself to say it without a large audience. 

“Hollander,” Kent greeted. 

Shane looked at the referees. 

“Heard you have been asking about Barrett - I’m thinking you probably have a lot in common,” Kent’s voice was low, conversational, the tone of someone delivering something they found amusing. “Two of a kind, huh? Do you like to stare at your teammates in the showers too?” 

Shane went very still. 

He understood immediately what Kent was implying. There was no ambiguity to it - the register, the emphasis, the satisfaction in Kent’s voice because he thought that he had delivered something clever and cutting. He had heard versions of shit like that his whole career - even though he wasn’t out to anyone other than those closest to him - usually they were aimed at other people, sometimes aimed at him, the same thing wearing different words. 

He looked at the referees. 

He thought about Barrett. 

He thought about Barrett in Toronto, in that locker room, under that captain, and the walls he was wearing and how thick they were and how long it took to build walls that thick. He thought about the macho surface that he presented, the presence he gave off, the survival strategy that predated Toronto that Toronto had apparently made necessary in a very specific way. He thought about Barrett showing up in that parking lot in Boston, and the I’ve been with the team two months, I hear things, they don’t think I’m listening, I am. 

He had wondered why Barrett felt the need to talk to him about Ilya. He wondered what stake Barrett had in it. Maybe Barrett had wanted there to be some hope for players like him - if Kent was right about him. 

He thought about what it would have cost Barrett to be in that locker room and to play for that captain. To maintain that armor every single day under the weight of a room that would have used that truth against him. 

He understood Barrett’s walls now. 

Not just the existence of them. The reason for them. 

He thought that he understood why a quiet guy like Barrett might have decided it was important enough to speak to him in a parking lot in Boston. 

The play resumed. 

Shane skated away from Kent without acknowledging that he had spoken, which was the cleanest thing he could do with the anger that had arrived in his chest - not hot, just precise, a cold understanding of something that he was still deciding what to do with it. 

He scored in the third period. 

Then he scored again. 

The Breakers won 5-0 and it was not even a close game. It had never been a close game. And when the final buzzer went and Shane skated through the handshake line - he had made a decision, because he had people at his back - and he wanted Kent to know that Barrett had people at his back. That Kent couldn’t use the truth against Shane because Shane was going to embrace his truth. What could Barrett truly do with it anyway? Expose him? Bring it on. 

Kent was near the end of the line. 

Shane got there. Looked at him. Took his hand. 

“How does it feel,” Shane said, so that only Kent could hear him. “How does it feel to be so thoroughly dominated by a gay guy?” 

He skated away before Kent could respond. 

In the locker room after, Edvardsen appeared at his stall before Shane had finished unlacing his skates. He sat down without asking, which was what he usually did, and looked at Shane - attention steady. 

“I talked to Hayes,” he said. 

Shane looked at him. 

“Boston’s goaltender?” he clarified. “We exchanged numbers - he has a lot of questions and ideas about the crease. But I wanted to talk to him after you told me about Barrett - because they were in Toronto together.” He paused. “He played on that team for three seasons - he knows what that locker room was like - he knows what Kent is.” he looked at his hands. “Barrett wasn’t just closeted in Toronto - Kent made it a specific thing. Anyone Kent suspected, anyone he decided was - Kent made it known that it wasn’t acceptable. Barrett was good enough and quiet enough that Kent never pointed at him directly - but–” He stopped. “It took its toll on the kid.” 

Shane thought about Barrett. The dismissiveness that people accused him of. The abrasiveness that had read from the outside to so many of the other players as a personality, but Shane knew what it was. 

It had been built and not grown - like his own composure had been built instead of grown. 

The same materials. Different pressures. 

“Hayes said Barrett came out to him in Toronto,” Edvardsen said. “Barrett was okay with him telling us about it - nobody else, just us - but he said - Barrett was terrified for a long time. The whole time there he was terrified.” 

Shane finished unlacing his skate and sat with it. 

“He’s not terrified in Boston though,” Niklas smiled. “From what Hayes says - it’s different there.” He looked at Shane. “The way it’s been different here for you.” 

Shane thought about the Bears bench and Marlow handing Barrett the water and Carmichael accepting a nod as sufficient and the team having figured out his language. 

“Yeah,” Shane said. “I could tell.” 

Niklas nodded and stood up. “The Kent thing in the handshake line.” He looked at Shane with something close to a smile. “Liam texted me after the broadcast… immediately.” 

“What did he say?” 

“He said, and I’m quoting directly: I don’t know what Hollander said to him, but the way his mouth hit the ice was the greatest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.” 

Shane almost smiled. 

Edvardsen went back to his stall. 

Shane sat in the locker room as everyone was getting ready to leave and thought about Barrett and Kent and the handshake line and how he was surprised that he wasn’t afraid anymore of people knowing who he was. 

I am done being quiet. 

He had meant it.

He still meant it. 

As December moved into January, Shane continued to play well - the numbers and stats reflected that. 

He was good. 

He was playing the best hockey of his career. 

He was also thinking about San Diego and All-Stars and seeing Ilya again. 

Not constantly. Not the way that Ilya had lived in the back of his mind like a ghost when he was in Montreal - that low persistent hum underneath everything that he could never fully turn down. This was different. This was more deliberate. Something he had picked up and was carrying consciously now rather than something that had attached itself to him without his permission anymore. 

All-Stars was in San Diego in the first week of February. 

Ilya would be there. Shane would be there. That was just the math of it, and Shane had been doing the math since the roster dropped and had been turning it over in his head ever since. 

He sat with it one evening towards the end of January. Raleigh winter outside his window - mild and grey and nothing like Montreal or Ottawa - and the condo was quiet around him. The quiet was different than it had been in Montreal, that quiet had been an absence of things. This was just calm and peaceful. His own. 

He thought about what he wanted San Diego to look like. 

He had spent a lot of time thinking in the past months about what he wanted and it was getting clearer in his head. The answer had been assembling itself slowly. He knew the answer. He had known it for a while now and had stopped flinching at it when he looked at it directly. 

He wanted Ilya. He wanted something real with him. Not the version they had built - careful distances and the room numbers and six months of silences between them. That version was over. He wanted the real one. The one he had glimpsed in locked rooms and unguarded moments and that he had never been able to give into. The version that could be out in the open, in a context that wasn’t managed, like Niklas and Liam could be out in the open, without a ceiling built into it. 

He wanted all of it. 

He just hoped that that was what Ilya wanted as well. 

What he wasn’t sure about was whether or not he was ready to say that to Ilya’s face yet. 

He thought he was. 

The anger had shifted. It was still there on some level under the surface - he was not going to go to San Diego and pretend that five years of being handed the minimum hadn’t cost him anything because it had. And Ilya was going to have to live with that. But the anger was no longer a sharp thing like it had been in the bar. It had changed into something that he had absorbed and made peace with, because he was man enough to admit that they both had hurt each other - they both had betrayed each other in similar ways. It was just part of the picture, but it wasn’t the whole of it. 

He had been watching Ilya’s texts come in for months. Reading them and putting his phone down and going back to his life. He had read every single one and he had not responded and he had watched Ilya keep sending them anyway - not declarations, not apologies, just attention. Consistent, unglamorous, daily attention. Not asking Shane for anything. Not barely disguised innuendo like he used to do when they first started texting. It was the kind of attention that was easy to dismiss once and impossible to dismiss forty times in a row. 

He had read all of them. 

He had read them and thought about Barrett in a parking lot in Boston saying it’s not a game, what he’s doing, and Niklas in the film room in Raleigh one day saying he watched you like you were something he was afraid of losing, and the fact that he had apparently cried in a hotel room in Raleigh. He turned those things over and over in his head and he had been trying to figure out what he was going to do with it all. 

He was going to go to San Diego. 

He was going to play in the All-Stars game the way he always played, and he was going to be there with some of his teammates and his friends and he was going to enjoy it the way he had not been able to enjoy things for a long time, because he was allowed to enjoy things now and he was not going to stop doing that for anyone. 

And at some point during that week he was going to find Ilya Rozanov and he was going to say the things that needed to be said. He was going to make it clear where he stood and what he wanted and what Ilya was going to have to actually do if he wanted to get there. 

Ilya was going to have to show up. 

Not the minimum anymore. Not room numbers and six months of silence and managed distance maintained everywhere that wasn’t locked. He was going to have to show up fully, the way Shane wanted him to show up, or he wasn’t going to have Shane in his life. 

Shane thought he was capable of it. 

He was going to find out in San Diego.

He looked out the window at Raleigh in January - his city now, his team, his life, the one he had built from the wreckage of a spring that had almost broken him and hadn’t - and felt something he was becoming familiar with, which was the particular steadiness of someone who knew where they were going. 

He was ready. 

Chapter 9: Hope

Chapter Notes

Ilya's POV

San Diego in February was warm, and Carmichael had approximately thirty seconds of patience before he felt the need to say something about it. This was not because he was surprised - he had been to California before, they all had, the weather was not a mystery - but because Carmichael operated on the principle that things worth experiencing were also worth talking about, and the afternoon sun hitting them after a February morning in Boston felt like something worth acknowledging. 

“It’s good out here,” he said, stopping on the sidewalk outside arrivals and taking a moment with it. 

“You said that in October,” St-Simon said, walking past him with his bag. 

“I said it in October because it was good out here in October.” Carmichael fell into step behind him. “I’m saying it now because it’s good out here now. These are related statements.” 

“They are the same statement.” 

“Context is everything, Victor.” 

St-Simon looked at him once over the top of his sunglasses and kept walking. Marlow had already found the car and was standing beside it, coffee in hand - where he found it Ilya wasn’t sure - and he didn’t intervene. He never did when waiting seemed to be easier - and faster. Carmichael loaded his bag into the trunk and got in, still talking, the point about February apparently not having resolved to his satisfaction. 

Ilya got in last and let the conversation wash over him. 

Shane was somewhere in this city. Had been since yesterday, based on the All-Stars schedule that Ilya had looked at enough times over the past three months to have memorized it without meaning to. This was the third of the five windows he had mapped out in August sitting in Marlow’s living room with the trade announcement still fresh and a season stretching out in front of him that suddenly had a very different shape than the one he’d been expecting. Four games and the All-Stars. That was the inventory. He had made it through two of them and this was the third event. He was here and so was Shane and this week was going to be whatever it was going to be. 

He looked out the window at San Diego going past and thought about that first game against Carolina. About the faceoff in the second period and the chirp that had landed and cost him the draw, and about a stoppage in the second game where he had said something and Shane had looked at him - not the composed nothing he had been maintaining all night but something that was present in a way the nothing wasn’t, something that had a quality of decision to it, like Shane was standing at the edge of something and had not yet chosen whether to step off. It was subtle, barely there, but he noticed it. 

Something had shifted slightly between the first and second game. 

Not resolved. Not open. But shifted, and he was going to find out what that meant over the next four days. 

“Operation Hollonov,” Carmichael said, to nobody in particular, looking at the city going by out his window. 

“Ryan,” Marlow groaned. 

“You said it.” 

“I said it as an orientation statement. To establish tone and direction for the week.” 

“Do not establish the tone that way,” Marlow said, in the voice he used when he was not going to revisit this. 

Carmichael subsided. He was still looking out the window, though, and the expression on his face suggested that the tone had been established internally regardless of what anyone said about the external version. 

St-Simon had been on his phone since the airport. He looked up. “The red carpet is at 3:30 PM,” he said. “Game format announcement follows. Networking event this evening. The skills competition tomorrow at seven.” He put his phone away. “Saturday is the game.” 

“I know the schedule,” Ilya grumbled. 

“I know you know,” St-Simon said. “I was just saying it out loud.” 

“Why?” 

St-Simon considered it for a moment. “It felt useful to have said it.” He looked back at his phone. 

Marlow had coffee, which he had acquired between the airport doors and the car without anyone seeing him do it, which was a talent Ilya had long since stopped trying to understand. He drank his coffee and said nothing - watching out the window with the rest of them. Ilya had always been grateful for Marlow’s silences. They didn’t require filling most of the time. 

The hotel was the kind that the league always chose for All-Stars - significant without being excessive, the rooms large enough that you didn’t feel the walls pressing in, the common areas designed for the kind of prolonged proximity that a week of shared events produced. Ilya had stayed in a dozen versions of it. He moved through the check-in and the elevator and the corridor to his room without thinking about any of it, the way you stopped thinking about things you had done enough times. 

He put his bag down. 

He stood at the window. 

San Diego spread out below him in the afternoon light. The hotel was on the beach this year and he had a balcony, which he hadn’t fully expected. The skyline was lower than most cities his career took him to. The California light made everything look cleaner than it was. It always did. Maybe it would help. 

He had no particular feeling about San Diego as a city. What he had feelings about was the fact that Shane was in it, in some room in this hotel. 

He took out his phone. 

The text thread looked the way it had looked over the past six months - his messages down one side, read receipts under all of them, nothing coming back. And wasn’t that just ironic? He had stopped counting how many he had sent somewhere around the fortieth one, when counting had started to feel like a form of obsessiveness he didn’t want to indulge. He had kept sending them anyway. Not declarations, not the things he felt needed a real conversation behind them so that they landed correctly, just observations. Things noticed. The daily proof of attention that didn’t ask for anything in return. 

Shane had read every single one. 

He had responded to none. 

Ilya put his phone in his pocket and looked at San Diego and thought about the week ahead. He had been preparing for this since August. He was ready for it. 

There was a knock at the door. 

Carmichael, holding two bottles of water - he had apparently already found the ice and vending machines, which tracked. He handed one over to Ilya and leaned against the doorframe. His expression had shifted - not the easy grin he had been wearing since the airport, but something quieter and more focused. This version of Carmichael only showed up when he decided he had something to say that mattered. 

“Found the gym,” he said. “Fourth floor. There’s a view of the beach, which is genuinely good and I’m allowed to say so even if Victor thinks I’m not. Also Vic found a coffee place two blocks away and Marlow has already been once, possibly twice, which tracks.” He tilted his head. “How are you doing?” 

“Fine,” Ilya said.

Carmichael looked at him. “That was a medium pause.” 

“I do not know what that means.” 

“It means you’re medium fine,” Carmichael said. “Which I already knew. I’m asking because asking is the thing you do when you want someone to know that you noticed.” 

Ilya was quiet for a moment. The afternoon light was coming through the window and the water bottle was cold in his hand and the text thread was in his pocket and Shane was somewhere in this hotel. 

“I do not know what this week will be,” Ilya admitted. “I know what I want it to be. I have known that since August. But knowing what you want and being able to make it happen are different things. I have not always done well with that difference.” 

Carmichael nodded. He didn’t fill the space, which was not his natural tendency and which meant he’d decided this was a moment that didn’t need it. When he did speak it was without performance. “You’ve been doing everything right for the past six months - mostly. Consistently and without anyone asking you to. Whatever happens this week, that part is already done.” 

Ilya looked at the window. 

“Gym’s on the fourth floor,” Carmichael said again. “Ocean view.” He pushed off the doorframe. “I’m going to go and check in on what Vic’s doing.” He pushed off from the doorframe. “He’s quiet - but he’s been quieter than normal since the airport.” 

He went. 

Ilya looked at the water bottle.

He drank half of it. 

He went to the gym and worked until his body stopped doing anything except what it was supposed to do, and then he stood under the shower until the hot water ran out and got dressed and sat at the edge of the bed with his phone in his hand and looked at the thread one more time before he put it away and went to get ready for the red carpet. 

Thursday

The red carpet event at three-thirty was familiar ground - a long stretch of carpet with photographers at intervals, event staff moving people through on a tight clock, the whole thing running with smooth confidence. Ilya had done enough of these to have a face for them. Composed, faintly present, the right amount of engagement. He put it on and moved through his section. 

He found Shane before Shane found him, which was how it had always worked between them for reasons that Ilya had never fully examined and no longer needed to - he was always aware of where Shane was, had been for five years, it was simply how his brain organized itself whenever Shane was in the same space. Shane was near the midpoint of the carpet with Kessler and Edvardsen, talking to a journalist with a recorder held out between them, and he was–

Ilya took a moment and looked at him properly. 

Shane had cut his hair since Ilya had last seen him in Boston. He was wearing a suit that was dark and fit well and he was standing the way he stood now - weight evenly distributed, nothing held back, taking up exactly the space he was supposed to take up without checking whether or not he was allowed to. The journalist said something and Shane laughed, quick and unguarded. Ilya smiled. 

That laugh had always existed in locked rooms.

It was not in locked rooms any longer. 

Carmichael materialized at his elbow from the direction of Zelenko, who had arrived at the far end of the carpet and was already acquainting himself with the event photographer. 

“He looks good,” Carmichael said, at a volume calibrated precisely only for Ilya. 

“Yes,” Ilya agreed. 

“Relaxed. Like he belongs here.”

“He does belong here.” 

“I know,” Carmichael said. “That’s not what I meant. I meant it looks like he knows it now. Like - he used to not realize he belonged in these spaces and now he does.” He paused. “That’s good, right? That’s what you want.” 

“Yes,” Ilya smiled. “That’s what I want.” 

Carmichael looked at him for a moment with an attention that didn’t need words, and then he clapped Ilya once on the shoulder and went back toward Zelenko. 

Ilya looked away from Shane and moved through his section. 

He shook hands with Hunter, the fossil. He talked briefly with Kessler, who was exactly what the league said he was - steady, genuine, the kind of captain who didn’t need you to know he was good at it because the people around him already knew. He exchanged a few words with Drapeau, who had been in the league long enough that red carpet events barely registered as events when he was moving through them, serving out his social obligations. He still didn’t like that man. 

And then the event coordinator appeared with a clipboard and a professionally warm smile and asked if they could get a shot of him and Hollander together, and the afternoon changed its shape. 

Shane was already moving to where the coordinator indicated before Ilya had fully processed the request. Not reluctant, not eager - just compliant, a smooth and professional compliance. He had done these kinds of shots a thousand times and knew how they worked. Ilya moved to where he was placed, which was beside Shane, close enough that their arms almost touched, close enough that Ilya could see the line of his jaw and the way his eyes went forward looking for the cameras. 

And then Shane looked at him. 

Not at the cameras yet - at Ilya directly, for a moment that was brief and deliberate and completely different from the composed nothingness he had shown him in Boston. It was as if he was checking something - like there was a calculation running that Ilya wasn’t privy to and Shane was verifying a variable before proceeding. It lasted less than a second and then his eyes went to the cameras and his expression settled into something composed. 

But it had happened. 

Ilya put his hand on Shane’s back. 

Flat between his shoulder blades, in the place he always put it when they were in shared spaces with cameras - the gesture that existed at the exact same edge of plausible deniability that both of them had always understood was not nothing without it ever being named. Not dramatic. Not something anyone watching would look at twice. But specific, and Shane knew it was specific, and the fact that Shane knew was the point. 

He felt Shane’s breath change. 

The smallest catch, less than a second, a barely-there tension that assembled and reassembled so quickly that anyone who wasn’t paying the kind of attention that Ilya had been paying attention would have looked right past. Shane’s expression stayed perfectly composed. His eyes stayed straight forward. But it had been there. 

The camera clicked. 

The coordinator thanked them both and Shane stepped away the moment she was done, smooth and immediate, and said something briefly - and quietly - to Edvardsen who had appeared nearby. But as he turned away, he glanced back at Ilya - just once, just briefly, not the nothing of Boston and not quite open either, something between the two that Ilya had not been given in months and which landed with a weight that surprised him even though he had been waiting for it. 

He was going to hold onto that. 

Behind Shane, Edvardsen looked at Ilya with a quiet awareness, like he had been doing since October. Not hostile. Just informed. The look suggested that he knew exactly what was happening and had decided to let it happen while making it very clear that he was watching. 

Ilya looked away first.

He moved through the rest of the red carpet and did what was required of him and thought about one second of eye contact and a glance back and the breath catch, and he thought: something has shifted. Something is different. He was going to find out what. 

The game format announcement came at five in a conference room set up with rows of chairs and a temporary screen at the front and the assembled All-Stars doing the thing that professional athletes did when asked to sit and receive information - which included various degrees of patience and various degrees of actually sitting and listening. 

Ilya was with Marlow and Carmichael and had his full attention on the breakdown. 

Eastern versus Western Conference. Split by division. Three-on-Three format, eleven-player rosters per team, semifinal structure with the conference finalists meeting in the championship. A division that was set up like a mini Stanley Cup playoff run. 

Metropolitan division. Shane was in the Metropolitan division, which meant Shane was on the Metropolitan team, which meant that Shane and Ilya were on opposite teams because he was in the Atlantic. 

Shane versus Ilya. 

On the ice. 

He felt something settle in his chest at that, not relief exactly but something adjacent to it - the calm of something becoming clear. 

“Metropolitan versus Atlantic," Carmichael said, leaning over. 

“Yes,” Ilya said. 

“You’re going to go against him on Saturday.” 

“Yes.”

Carmichael considered this. “That’s actually perfect.” 

“Is it?” Ilya asked. “Is no different from normal season when we play.” 

St-Simon came up on Ilya’s other side, he’d been looking at something on his phone throughout the entire announcement, which was not disrespectful so much as characteristic. Victor found information faster when he was looking for it himself. He looked up. 

“Hollander’s obstacle course times last season have been tracked against his responses in similar scenarios this season by Carolina’s analytics team,” he said. “Someone published the data. His left edge on tight turns is faster than any other forward in the league right now. By a large margin.” He put the phone down. “Worth knowing going into tomorrow.”

Carmichael looked at him. “When did you find that?” 

“On the plane,” St-Simon said. 

“Why?” 

“Because it seemed relevant?” He shrugged. 

“Vic?” Ilya said. “Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome.” St-Simon said as he got back out his phone. 

Carmichael leaned toward Marlow. “He looked it up on the plane.” 

“I know,” Marlow said. “He told me.”

“When?” 

“At the airport. While you were talking about the weather.” 

Carmichael looked at St-Simon with something approaching respect. St-Simon didn’t acknowledge this. 

The networking event was in the hotel ballroom that evening - drinks and small plates and the social physics of a large gathering of professional athletes in an unstructured environment, which they all navigated with various levels of skill and enthusiasm. Some moved through with ease, finding people and conversations and staying in them. Others clustered near familiar faces and let the evening come to them. A few stood around the edges and watched before deciding anything, which was the approach that Ilya took tonight. 

He was watching Carmichael work, which was its own form of entertainment. 

Ryan had found Zelenko again within the first ten minutes, which Ilya had anticipated - they had the same frequency, Carmichael and Zelenko, the same loud and warm energy that filled whatever space it was in and made that space feel bigger rather than smaller. They had been talking for forty minutes now with an intensity. Like two people who had been waiting to have this particular conversation without knowing it and the group around them expanded naturally as the evening progressed. 

Through Zelenko he had reached Blake, who was quieter but engaged when engaged properly. He listened before he spoke and when he did speak he was very precise about it. Through Blake to Kessler, who received Carmichael with patience - he’d clearly dealt with many Carmichaels over many seasons and had developed a way to go about it. The Metropolitan players were orbiting the Carmichael-Zelenko epicenter with varying degrees of awareness that this was happening, and Kessler was watching all of it with a cautious awareness. 

St-Simons had found Anders Holmqvist, which was remarkable primarily because both of them were people who operated best in the near-silence of saying exactly what needed to be said and nothing else. They were standing against the wall on the far side of the room having what appeared - from a distance - to be a perfectly functional conversation, which meant either it was extremely substantive or they’d both decided that standing in companionable silence near a wall was a reasonable way to spend an evening and were just going to do that. 

“What do you think those two are talking about?” Carmichael reappeared at Ilya’s elbow with a fresh drink he didn’t have thirty seconds ago, nodding in St-Simon’s direction. 

“No idea,” Ilya smiled. 

“Me neither. It’s either the most interesting conversation in the room or nobody is saying anything.” 

“Does it matter?” 

“No,” Carmichael admitted. “But I’m going to find out eventually.” He looked around the room. “Are you drunk?” he asked, as if the thought had just occurred to him. 

“No,” Ilya said. “Why would I be drunk?” 

“I wasn’t asking because I thought you were, I was just making conversation.” Carmichael tilted his head. “Are you actually doing okay right now? I meant, Hollander’s only about forty feet away and you’re not moving through the room like you normally would.” 

Ilya looked at where Shane was standing. 

Shane was with Hunter, Drapeau, and someone from the Western Conference whose name Ilya couldn't place, and he was present in the way he had been present in everything this season - even if things between him and Drapeau looked a little tense. He was laughing at something that Hunter had said, the quick and genuine laugh that made Ilya’s heart flutter, and making a point that had Hunter nodding in agreement. He was just existing - and while Ilya wished he could exist in his orbit, at that moment he was just happy to see Shane existing at all. 

He had not come over.

But he also had not performed not coming over. There was a distinction that Ilya had gotten good at reading over the past six months - the difference between avoidance and waiting, between a door being shut and door that was simply not quite open yet. Boston had been avoidance, deliberate and maintained and it had cost something. Tonight it felt more like waiting. Like Shane had a timeline in his head that Ilya wasn’t privy to and that timeline was running and something was going to come from it. 

“I am okay,” he said. 

“Medium okay - or actually okay?” 

“Actually okay.” He looked at Carmichael. “I have been patient for six months. I can be patient for a few more days.” 

“That’s very mature,” Carmichael smiled. 

“I am trying.” 

“I mean it. That’s actual growth.” Carmichael drank his drink and muttered something under his breath that Ilya couldn’t quite make out. 

“What?” 

“Nothing.” He looked back toward Zelenko. “I’m going to go see if Zelenko has strong opinions about breakfast food. I feel like he does and I want to know what they are.” 

He went.

Fucking Carmichael. 

Ilya got a fresh drink and stood where he was and let the evening continue around him. He watched Marlow, who had found Hayden Pike and was deep in a conversation with him that had been going on for the past twenty minutes in a corner that wasn’t exactly private - but it was quieter than the rest of the room. Pike wasn’t a big man, and he had a warmth to him that said he liked people because he actually liked them. Pike had never been warm towards him - but then again he’d never given him any reason to be. He was also Shane’s best friend. He was talking to Marlow and his attention was very focused, their conversation looked very serious. 

Kessler, across the room, caught Ilya’s eyes. 

He looked at Ilya for a moment - measured, neutral - he had the look of a captain taking stock on something he had been thinking about. Ilya knew that look, he loved to use that look. Then he went back to his conversation without any particular expression that could give away what he was thinking. Ilya wasn’t sure what that meant or what to do with it. 

Edvardsen was watching him from near the bar. 

Ilya was still unsettled by that man. He looked away. 

He stood where he was and he was patient and let the evening wind down around him. As people drifted toward elevators and the room quieted, he eventually went to his room and lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about what these next three days were going to give him. 

He thought they would give him something. 

He just wasn’t sure what it was going to be. 

Friday

The skills competition started at seven and ran until ten. The format might have sounded manageable in theory, but it was relentless once it started moving. The three rounds followed each other with the kind of momentum that didn’t leave much room for anything except the next thing. 

Twelve players. Four events each in round one, top eight in round two, top six to the obstacle course that made up round three. 

Ilya looked at the event list and made his choices the way he always liked to make his choices - he looked at what Shane had registered for. 

Fastest Skater. 

Accuracy Shot.

Stick Handling.

One-Timers. 

He gave his registration sheet to the eager staff member and told himself it was just a skills competition - even if he didn’t entirely believe that himself. 

The fastest skater went first, and watching Shane run it was different from watching Shane skate in games. The way someone did one thing with focus was always different from the way they did the same thing when they were also focusing on twelve other things simultaneously. In games Shane’s speed was subordinate to everything else - the read, the positioning, the pass decision, the defensive coverage - it was always there but it was never the highlight. Here it was the only thing, and it was extraordinary. 

Ilya had always known that Shane was a fast skater - he had watched him plenty of times now at these All-Star Games each season, but he had never allowed himself to give over and really focus on watching Shane like he was doing this year. 

He finished a full second ahead of Hunter. While Ilya joked and called Hunter a dinosaur most of the time, that didn’t change that Hunter was an exceptional player - probably the best in the league until Shane and his draft year. Shane looked at the posted time and nodded to himself, like it was exactly how he’d expected it to go. He just nodded once, small and private, and moved on. 

Ilya came in second. 

He was a fast skater. He’d always been a fast skater, it was one of the things the league said about him, it was one of the things he knew about himself. The gap between Shane and him in the fastest skater event was not enormous but it was there. He stood on the ice afterwards and looked at the posted times and thought about five years of calling Shane the second best - it was uncomfortable to think that he had really been wrong about it all this time and while it was a bit of a joke, he knew that it wasn’t an accurate one and he was now letting himself acknowledge it. 

This year the accuracy shot went to Kessler, which surprised no one who had been watching Kessler putting pucks into the net this season. There was something almost meditative about the way that Kessler approached precision events - no performance, no buildup, just decision and execution. Shane placed second and Ilya placed third. 

Stick handling went to Shane. 

He ran the course like he’d assessed every gate and every turn before the clock had even started and was just doing what he had already decided to do, the puck moving as an extension of intention rather than something being directed. Ilya watched him from the group and thought about the obstacle course in 2011 and how he had watched Shane run that one and called it impressive and not examined what impressive actually meant in that context. When Shane finished and looked at the time he nodded in the same way he had nodded at the fastest skater time - private, confirming, moving on. Ilya had always known in advance what his own capabilities were, and he was not shy about it. Shane had always been a little more shy and reserved, a little more humble as if he hadn’t realized just how good he was - now he was starting to show that he understood who he was. It was nice. 

Ilya finished second again, which he was starting to find both impressive - because of how Shane was performing - and slightly aggravating. 

One-Timers. Shane again. This time the margin between first and second was Ilya and Hunter, who had apparently decided that this was the event he was going to own and he’d prepared for it in ways that showed. Ilya finished third this time and stood on the ice after his last shot and did a brief accounting. 

Round one standings: Shane first, the lead comfortable. Ilya second, one point ahead of Hunter. Top eight advanced - Shane, Ilya, Hunter, Kessler, Vaughan, Pike, and two Western Conference players named Eriksson and Carter. 

Round two was a one-on-one against a goalie of the player’s choice. 

Shane chose Drapeau. 

Ilya chose Edvarsen. 

Ilya had been thinking about this since Thursday. He’d been tracking Shane and Edvardsen all week - the closeness between them visible to anyone paying attention. There was an easy shorthand between them that said they’d built something real over the course of the season and it made Ilya’s gut twist with jealousy. It also made Edvardsen unnerve him that much more. It wasn’t anything romantic - he was certain of that - but that might have been wishful thinking on his end. Whatever it was, it was significant, and it had been sitting in his chest since October. 

When the coordinator relayed the information to Edvardsen, the goalie looked at Ilya across the ice with an expression that was completely neutral and said nothing - which frustrated him even more. 

The one-on-one did not go quite the way Ilya had expected, which was not something that happened to him often in hockey and he found it both a little instructive and extremely irritating. 

He was one of the best scorers in the league. This was not vanity, it was the standings and the analytics and four seasons now of numbers that said the same thing consistently. He had studied Edvardsen’s tendencies from film the way he studied every goalie he played against. He’d been thorough, he hadn’t let ego in, he’d looked for patterns and tells and the positioning habits that would tell him where space would likely be. He had a plan. The plan was good. 

Edvardsen had apparently read the plan before Ilya could even execute it. 

Not because the plan was obvious - Ilya’s plans were never obvious, that was the whole point of having them - but because Edvardsen appeared to be operating on a different level of information than most goalies that Ilya had played again. He positioned himself a half-second before Ilya would commit to a decision, which meant that by the time Ilya’s body did what his brain had decided to do, Edvardsen was already where the puck was going to be. It happened once and Ilya adjusted, changed his approach, went left where he had been going right. It happened again. He went for his backhand, a sequence he rarely used and had not shown much in film because he used it like a secret weapon. Edvardsen was still there. 

He scored twice in the five attempts. 

He stood at the slot after his fifth attempt and looked at Edvardsen and Edvardsen looked back with the same calm and neutral expression - patient and unmoved - and it frustrated Ilya to no end. 

“How?” Ilya panted. 

Edvardsen tilted his head slightly. “Your left shoulder,” he said. “Before you commit to the shot direction it drops. Very small. Very consistent.” He paused. “I have never missed it once it was pointed out to me.” 

Ilya stared at him. 

“Shane told me,” he said. He said it in the way you said something that was simply true. He skated back to his crease. 

Ilya stood at the slot. 

For years now Shane had apparently been watching him closely enough to clock a half-inch shoulder drop, and held onto that knowledge. He’d decided - at some point - to share that with the one person most likely to be in a position to use that against Ilya. Whether that was protective or competitive or something else entirely, Ilya couldn't tell. And he wondered if Shane could either. He passed it on to Edvardsen like a set of coordinates. Here. This is where he’s vulnerable. This is what I noticed. The thing was, it was a tell that Ilya hadn’t even realized he had until sixty seconds ago. 

Shane had carried it quietly until he had found somewhere useful to put it. 

Would he have done any differently if it was reversed? 

He did not advance to round three. 

He went and sat on the bench and watched the obstacle course and thought about left shoulder drops. 

Shand won the obstacle course. 

He ran it the way he did everything this season - with a plan already made in his head before the clock had started apparently. Each section was addressed before he even reached it, the whole course existing in his head as a problem solved before his body started to solve it physically. He finished forty-three seconds ahead of Hunter, who was in second place. It wasn’t close by any measure, and when the time went up and the crowd reacted he looked at the scoreboard and smiled - nodding the same way he had been nodding all evening. 

The prize announcement came immediately after. 

One million dollars to the winner. 

Shane stepped up to the microphone.

“I’m donating this to HopeLine, a mental health awareness and suicide prevention organization out of Raleigh.” 

No major speech. No explanation. Just information - delivered clearly and without performance. He stepped back from the microphone and let it settle over the crowd. 

The crowd took a moment before it reacted. It was the kind of pause that landed and needed a beat to settle before a response came. Ilya wasn’t sure what to make of it. He watched as Kessler and Edvardsen each put a hand on Shane’s shoulders and it looked like it meant something that had been understood and not just heard. 

Shane received it with composure and a smile. 

Ilya sat on the bench. 

He didn’t react outwardly to what had just happened - because there was no external reaction that would have been appropriate for what was happening internally. There was a picture assembling in his head that had been assembling piece by piece since their first game against Carolina earlier in the season. Uncomfortably. He couldn’t get out of his head what Carmichale had said to him in August, and what St-Simon had described happening in Sochi, and what Ilya himself had been watching for five years and not understanding what he was watching - it was complete now, or at least it was solid. He understood that Shane had been dealing with a lot. He understood that if Shane hadn’t been traded then he might have lost Shane the same way that he’d lost his mother. He would be eternally grateful that Montreal hadn’t realized what they had in Shane Hollander and let him go. 

He sat with that. 

Carmichael appeared beside him on the bench, without an announcement and dropped down with the subtlety of an avalanche. He was quiet, which was notable. Ilya thought maybe he had pieced some of it together himself. He watched as some of the members of the crowd gained a little bit of understanding based on things that Shane had said in interviews like I’m done being quiet. Both of them watched as Shane accepted congratulations from Kessler and Edvardsen. He was okay - he was genuinely and actually okay - which was what mattered. 

“Hey,” Carmichael said eventually. 

“I know,” Ilya looked down. 

A pause. 

“He’s okay.” Carmichael said. “He’s strong - and he’s clearly okay now.” A pause. “He’s strong.” 

“I know,” Ilya agreed.  

They sat there until the event wound down around them and then they got up and went back to the hotel and Ilya lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about everything - about Shane and about his mother - and at some point after midnight, he slept. 

Saturday

Finally, the day had arrived. Everything before it had just been context. Now it was the main event itself. 

Ilya woke early and went to the gym and worked out hard enough that his mind ran out of things to say about anything except the immediate physical demands, and then he showered and sat with his coffee at the window and watched San Diego in the morning and thought about the game. 

Not just the game. 

But about what came after the game. 

He had been patient for six months and he had one more day of being patient before he decided he’d had enough of being patient. He was going to talk to Shane - he was going to say something that was real and ask something that was. He was going to push Shane into having an actual conversation with him and look at him. He knew what he needed to say, he had known what he needed to say since August, and he was going to do it. He’d been finding the English for it piece by piece over the past six months of texts and silence and the education of watching Shane become fully Shane from a distance. 

He was ready. 

He just had to play this game of hockey first. 

The Eastern Conference Semifinal was Metropolitan Division vs. Atlantic Division and it moved fast - three-on-three always moved fast, the format opening the ice up in ways the regular season never allowed, the skill level of the players making that open ice genuinely dangerous. Ilya played with complete focus because complete focus was the only mode he had ever known how to operate in, and the game was competitive the way All-Star games were when the players decided to make it so - not performative, not held back, actually competitive.

Which was shocking to Ilya, because this year he had Pike on his damn team. 

Shane was on the other side of the ice playing the way he’d been playing all season, which Ilya now understood was the way he had always been capable of playing - but that the circumstances hadn’t allowed for. Reading the open ice the way he read everything - before it was there, before it became available, anticipating the geometry of it long before anyone else on the ice saw what the play was going to be. Finding Kessler in the seam when the seam existed for less than a second. Pulling the defense left and then finding the right side with a pass that required knowing where the right side was going to be before the right side even got there. 

At the stoppage in the first period Ilya moved toward Shane without deciding to, which was how it had always worked. 

Shane looked at him. 

It wasn’t with the nothingness that he had been looking at him with all season. He actually looked, directly and briefly and present.

“You are playing well,” Ilya said. 

“So are you,” Shane said. It was genuine. His eyes went back to the ice. 

Three words. Ilya counted them on the way back to his position and held onto all three of them. 

At the stoppage in the second period they ended up near the faceoff dot, waiting on the referees sorting out a call at the far end. Ilya positioned himself close enough so that talking looked natural. 

“Your breakout in the first,” Ilya said. “The pass to Kessler. I did not see it coming.” 

Shane glanced at him sideways. “Yes you did.” 

“I did not.”

“You were watching Edvardsen’s positioning,” Shane said. “Which is why you probably missed what Kessler was doing on the far side. Kessler was setting up the right flank before that pass happened. You would have seen it if you weren’t watching the crease.” 

Ilya looked at him. 

“You watch the goalies,” Shane shrugged. “It’s a habit. You’ve had it since at least 2010.” He looked back at the ice. “I noticed it in the game in Ottawa. You were positioning based on where Rask was rather than where the play was going.” 

The linesman came in and dropped the puck before Ilya could respond and Shane won the faceoff and was already moving up the ice. Ilya stood at the dot for a fraction of a second longer than he should have and thought about the international prospect cup in 2010 and what it meant that Shane had been watching him closely enough since then to notice a positioning habit and had filed it away and kept it like that for five years and had apparently now decided that it was the right time to drop that bomb. 

He had not been the only one paying attention. 

He had just been the only one not doing anything with it. 

The Metropolitan team won 5-3. 

Shane’s team, Shane’s division, and they celebrated on the ice with warmth. They had just competed hard in an exhibition and come out on top, and Ilya watched from his bench with the equanimity these stakes deserved and also with the other thing running underneath it, the stoppage conversations and the so are you and the 2010 observation and the red carpet and the breath catch and the glance back and all of it was accumulating and building towards something. 

Ilya found Shane in the stands watching the Western Conference match after the Eastern teams had finished in the locker rooms and the showers. He was watching the ice with concentration, clearly trying to gauge the plays of the competition. Ilya took a chance and sat down next to him. 

Shane didn’t flinch, but he didn’t look in Ilya’s direction either. Just kept his gaze steady on the ice in front of them. 

The score was 4-3 going into the third and the Central division team was pushing hard. 

Ilya watched the play develop from his seat and said, without looking at Shane. “Mackenzie should dump it. Too much pressure.” 

Shane said nothing. 

Ilya waited. 

On the ice Mackenzie pushed further, drawing the defender and Ilya said: “See? Nothing there. He reads it wrong.” 

A beat. 

“He didn’t,” Shane said at last. 

Ilya kept his eyes on the ice. “Lane is closed.” 

“The left lane is closed.” Shane corrected. “The right opens in a few seconds when Karlsson finishes his cut. Mackenzie knows this. He’s waiting.” 

Ilya watched. 

Karlosson finished his cut and the right lane opened up. Mackenzie pushed through cleanly and the defender out of reach. 

Ilya said nothing. 

Shane said nothing. 

Ilya gave it ten more seconds. 

“He will shoot from there,” Ilya said. “Best angle.” 

“He’ll pass.” 

“The net is right there-” 

“Eriksson is at the back door.” No hesitation. Eyes still forward. “Mackenzie pulls the goalie left. Eriksson gets the pass and scores. If his timing is right.” 

“You cannot know the timing–” 

“Eriksson sets up wide every time he comes down the right side,” Shane continued. “He’s been doing it all game. He’s been waiting for someone to give him the pass for the past two minutes.” He paused. “Mackenzie noticed it and he’s been working towards it since then.” 

On the ice, Mackenzie passed. 

Eriksson was exactly where Shane said he would be. He received it, shot once, and scored. 

Ilya did not react to the goal. 

He turned and looked at Shane. He had always known that Shane was smart and read geometry on the ice, he just hadn’t really had the opportunity to see it in action himself. It was breathtaking. 

Shane was still watching the ice, face giving nothing away. Calm and collected. 

“Two minutes ago,” Ilya said. “You knew two minutes ago?” 

“The setup was there.” 

“I did not see it.” 

Shane glanced at him. The first time he’d looked at Ilya directly since he’d sat down. “You were watching the puck.” 

“Da, because that was where the puck was.” 

“That’s why you missed it,” Shane said, and looked back at the ice. 

Ilya looked at the ice too. 

Neither of them said anything for a moment. 

Then Ilya said: “What is happening now?” He was curious what Shane could see that he was missing. 

A long beat.

“Central scores again,” Shane said. “Eighty-eight seconds.” 

Ilya watched the clock. 

Eighty-eight seconds later, Central scored. 

He turned. Shane was already looking at him. A small smile played on his lips and something had shifted in the way he was sitting here.  

“How?” 

Shane just smiled. 

He looked back at the ice. 

Ilya looked back at the ice and said nothing. 

In the end the Eastern Conference beat the Western Conference team 5-1. 

The celebration afterwards moved to the hotel bar that was reserved for the All-Stars and their guests, and Ilya went with Marlow and Carmichael and St-Simon and stood at the edge of it all, looking for Shane. He found him at the bar with Edvardsen and Kessler and Hayden Pike, who had attached himself to the Metropolitan celebration because he’d been Shane’s best friend for so long now that he had standing permission to be wherever Shane was. 

Ilya looked at Marlow when he appeared at his elbow and then turned back to look at Shane again - only to notice he’d disappeared. 

“Looking for love?” he smirked. 

“I have found love,” Ilya said, scanning the crowd. “I have just temporarily misplaced him.” 

Marlow just looked at him.

“Shane,” Ilya clarified. 

“I know, man.” 

Marlow looked in the direction of Hayden Pike, who had been with Shane at the bar, and Pike glanced back at him. They looked like they were having a silent conversation between them that Ilya was not privy to. 

“Give him time,” Marlow said. “The evening is young and you’ve had a good week. The red carpet, the stoppage conversations, the fact that he’s not avoiding you anymore like he was in Boston - these are real things, Roz. Don’t force an ending.” 

“I have been not forcing for six months.” 

“And it’s been working,” Marlow said as he picked up his drink. “Be patient.” 

Ilya looked down at the bar. 

He was catastrophically bad at being patient - even though he’d been getting better at it for the past six months - but he was still only somewhere between marginally better and still catastrophically bad depending on the day. Tonight was going to require the better version. 

He got a drink and he waited. 

Hayden Pike found him about forty minutes into the evening. 

He came across the bar, direct, like he had been deciding to do something for a while and he was finished deciding and now as the doing part. He stopped in front of Ilya, his expression wasn’t unfriendly but it also wasn’t warm. The expression radiated that he was going to say something and be honest, and Ilya wasn’t sure how he was going to feel about it. 

“Rozanov,” he said. 

“Pike,” Ilya acknowledged. 

They looked at each other for a moment, both of them doing a preliminary accounting - sizing each other up. 

“I’ve been watching you,” Pike said. “Red carpet. Last night. The game today.” He took a drink. “You’ve been patient.” 

“I am trying to be.” Ilya took a drink as well. 

“I know the difference,” Pike said. “Trying to be patient and being patient look very different from the outside - I have three kids… I know things.” He paused. “It wasn’t what I expected from you.” 

“What did you expect?” 

Pike considered this. “You’re an asshole.” He tilted his head. “I didn’t expect you to be soft.” 

Ilya looked at him. 

Pike was quiet for a moment. He knew that Pike didn’t like him - the feeling was mutual, but not because Pike was a bad person. He just got to be open with Shane in a way Ilya never had. 

“He told me about you,” Pike said. “Not everything - but enough. What it was…” The edge to his voice was honest rather than hostile. “What he wants it to be.” 

“I understand.” Ilya tried to calm down his racing heart at Pike’s choice of words: What he wants it to be. Not wanted. Wants. 

“He came out to me,” Pike said. “A few months ago. And then he told me about your - whatever you two have been doing for five years. And I had to sit with that. The fact that for the three years that I’d known him he didn’t tell me about it and I should have known.” His jaw tightened slightly. “He was splintering,” he said. “Last year. Slowly, fragment by fragment, and I was right there and I didn’t see it.” 

“I did not see it either,” Ilya admitted. The news that Shane had been splintering was new, but Ilya wasn’t going to tell Pike that. 

“No,” Pike said. “You didn’t. You were closer to him in ways that I wasn’t and you didn’t see it either.” He looked at Ilya steadily. “Some of what happened in that locker room after the Voyageurs got knocked out of the playoffs last season… the things that were said. He heard it all. And he was already - I knew that he wasn’t okay. And he heard it all.” 

Ilya stood very still. 

He thought about Shane’s face in the bathroom in Vegas, the raw emotion and vulnerability behind it. He thought about the donation at the skills competition the night before, and what it confirmed for Ilya. The unpleasant feeling in his gut that Shane had even thought in that direction. He thought about how if Shane hadn’t gotten out of Montreal how he could have possibly lost him, permanently, if things didn’t get better - and in that place… they wouldn’t have gotten better. He pressed that thought down because he didn’t want to let that conclusion fully arrive - not here. 

“I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty,” Pike continued. “I’m telling you because you need to understand what it cost and what it means that he’s okay now. That has to be protected. Not the minimum, not anymore. No more silences and no more distance.” Pike took another drink. “He deserves all of it. And he finally believes that he deserves all of it. And I will not let you–” he stopped himself. “I will not let anyone make him think otherwise.” 

“Good,” Ilya said. “I will not either.” 

Pike looked at him for a long moment - like he was measuring him. 

“He was yours from day one,” Pike sighed. “I thought you should know that.” He turned his glass in his hands and looked down at it. “I don’t understand it, fuck. I really fucking don’t get it.” He shook his head once, the gesture of a man accepting something he hadn’t expected to accept. “If you hurt him I will break your ass.”  

“Understood,” Ilya nodded. 

Something in Pike’s expression settled - not approval, but a decision to proceed on the basis of what he’d seen rather than what he’d feared. He picked up his drink. “You two are fucking precious, I swear.” He smiled. “And by precious I mean sickening–” He gestured with his hand in a circular motion. 

“Your face is sickening,” Ilya smiled. Ah, what a supremely witty rejoinder. 

Pike snorted. “Oh thank fuck.” He chuckled. “I thought I was going to have to like you for a minute.” 

Ilya smirked back and Pike walked away. 

Ilya stayed where he was. 

He thought about what Pike had said. The weight of it and added that to the weight he was already carrying. He thought about the donation and about Shane and mental health and suicide prevention. No speech. No explanation. Just information. Public. Plain. 

He thought about his mother. 

He pressed his hand flat against the bar and breathed until the wave of whatever it was passing through him passed. 

Then he went to find Shane. 

And he found him in the bathroom. 

Oh, the fucking irony. 

It wasn’t planned. He’d been moving without any specific destination, just moving, giving himself something to do while he thought more about what Pike had said and where the evening was going, and he pushed through the bathroom door, feeling like he could use a moment to splash water on his face before he found Shane and he wanted to be composed. And then he opened the bathroom door and Shane was there, standing at the sink with the water running. His hair damp at the front, like he had the same idea about splashing his face that Ilya had, looking at himself in the mirror - his expression conflicted like he was struggling with something internal. 

Shane looked up when Ilya walked in. 

He didn’t move immediately. He looked at Ilya in the mirror and for a moment he looked different than he had seen him all season - no red carpet or camera ready composure. No game focus. Not even the carefully controlled ease of the stoppage conversations. Something more direct and more raw. He looked like he had made some kind of decision in his head and he was standing on the other side of it. Mentally preparing himself for whatever he was going to do with it. 

He turned the faucet off. 

“Shane–” 

Shane turned around. He looked at Ilya with his full direct attention and Ilya felt his heart stutter in his chest. His jaw was set and his eyes were clear and he let out a growl of frustration and a quiet “Fuck…” 

Before Ilya could say - or do anything - Shane crossed the distance between them, shoved him against the wall and kissed him. 

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t tentative. It was full of force - like he’d been carrying something and holding something at an arm’s length for so long that he’d run out of strength to hold it there any longer. He brought both hands up to grab Ilya’s jacket. His kiss was hard and immediate and furious and real. So very real. And Ilya’s hands found his face without his permission and for one suspended moment everything was exactly what it had always been between them. And at the same time it was completely different from anything it had ever been. 

And then Shane shoved him back. 

Hard enough that Ilya stumbled slightly against the wall. 

Shane was breathing hard. His expression completely unreadable. He stood there for a moment, and then he turned around and walked out of the bathroom without a word. Ilya heard the door swing shut behind him, and stood against the wall in silence. 

He was too stunned to move. 

When he did finally emerge from the bathroom he saw Marlow standing there in the corridor, his expression clearly showing that he had seen Shane come out of that bathroom and had put together the relevant information in his own head. 

“Shane?” Ilya said. “I have temporarily misplaced him.” 

Speaking of Shane - where the fuck was he? 

“You said that two hours ago,” Marlow smirked. “It didn’t mean the same thing then.” 

“No,” Ilya agreed. “It did not.” 

Marlow looked at him, assessed him. “What the fuck happened in there?” 

“He kissed me,” Ilya said. “He shoved me and left.” 

Marlow was quiet for a moment, bringing his palm up to his face and massaging his temple. “Did you fucking crowd him in the bathroom, Roz?” 

Ilya didn’t answer immediately. 

“Ilya.” 

“A little?” Ilya said. “I wanted to talk to him. I was not trying to–” 

“I know,” Marlow said. He exhaled slowly. He looked like he had been expecting something like this and he wasn’t at all surprised to see it come to fruition. “Go back to the bar. Let me handle the immediate situation.” 

“What is the immediate situation?” 

“Hollander came out of that fucking bathroom white as a sheet, Roz!” Marlow hissed. “Pike is off looking for him and I need to get ahead of it before one of you fucking morons makes it worse.” He looked at Ilya steadily. “Not you. Me. Now go.” 

Ilya stood in the corridor. 

He thought about the kiss and the shove and Shane walking out. What did it mean? Shane had been the one to cross the space. Shane had been the one to initiate it. Whatever had been decided in Shane’s head tonight had produced something that Ilya had not been expecting - even though he had been hoping for some version of it. 

He nodded dumbly and walked back to the bar. 

Carmichael and St-Simon were sitting together at a round table near the corner of the room. Both looking at him with an alertness of people who had noticed he had been gone and that gone had a palpable quality to it. 

“Well?” Carmichael was bouncing in his seat. 

“He kissed me.” Ilya was still in a bit of a daze. 

St-Simon put his phone down, fully, which was notable. 

Carmichael just stared. “He–wait? Hollander–?” 

“He kissed me.” Ilya said again. “And then he shoved me and left.” 

Carmichael processed this. “He attacked you?” he said slowly. 

“With his mouth,” St-Simon nodded, smirking. 

“He attacked me with his mouth,” Ilya confirmed. And somehow that description was strangely right and completely insufficient to describe exactly what had happened in that bathroom. 

Carmichael put his hands over his face and then lowered them. He was smiling, stupidly. Like he had been waiting for something for a very long time and just watched it arrive in a form he could never have predicted. And he was fucking giddy about it. 

“That’s progress!” He clapped Ilya on the back, hard. 

“He left,” Ilya hissed. 

“Oui,” St-Simon said. “But he kissed you first, non? The kissing first before the leaving - the order matters, Roz.” He picked his phone back up, smirking to himself. “It is progress. Ryan is right.” 

“Operation Hollanov,” Carmichael grinned, mostly to himself. 

“Shut up,” St-Simon chuckled. 

“Fine! You ruin all the fun!” He was still smiling as he picked up his drink. “I won’t say anything else about it.” 

“Good,” Marlow sighed as he reappeared from the direction of the corridor with a strained expression on his face. He looked at Ilya. “He’s okay. He just went back to his room. He needed a minute apparently.” 

Ilya nodded. 

He looked at the bar and thought about the kiss and the shove and the minute Shane needed and the conversation that he was determined now more than ever to have with him. Maybe not tonight, but soon - very soon. He was going to have to make sure they had that conversation before everyone left San Diego on Monday. He felt something akin to hope start to take root in his chest. He could feel it now and it was a glorious feeling that he wasn’t going to let go. He wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip through his fingers. 

He was going to make the most of it. 

It was coming. 

He was going to be ready for it. 

He looked across the bar and found Pike there, looking in Ilya’s direction. His expression had changed since their last conversation an hour ago - not the wariness he’d carried all weekend so far, but a more reluctant acceptance - like he’d made a decision that he hadn’t expected to be making and he was going to have to live with it. 

Pike caught his eye. 

He smirked and made his way over to them. 

“Hey, Rozanov.” He said. “You dropped something.” 

Ilya looked at him, he was sure that he wasn’t exactly perfectly fucking composed looking in that moment. 

“What?” 

“Your dignity,” Pike smirked and took a sip of his drink. 

St-Simon might have made a sound that was suspiciously a fucking laugh. At Ilya’s expense. 

Carmichael was beaming. 

Ilya looked at Pike, his mouth hanging open. Then he looked at Marlow - the fucking traitor was actually grinning too. Oh! They all thought this was funny. 

St-Simon looked at Carmichael and shook his head. “Are you drunk?” 

“Nope,” Carmichael giggled and popped the P. “High on fucking life… it’s my default setting.” 

Marlow just smirked into his drink glass again. “I mean, you do look like a puppy that has tangled himself up in his own leash - you're one step away from flopping on the ground and whining until the love of your life walks by.” 

Ilya glared at him. 

But he wasn’t actually mad. He was elated and giddy too, even if he didn’t want to show it outwardly. 

He was not done. 

They were not done. 

He had a chance to fix this. 

He was going to show up - fully - the way he’d never showed up before and he was going to fucking fix this. 

He would keep doing it until Shane believed it. 

That was the plan.

Chapter 10: Everything

Chapter Notes

Shane's POV

 Saturday 

Fuck!  

Shane was pacing his hotel room. Fingers pulling at the strands of his hair. 

Good fucking job, Hollander! Way to just lose it after so long of keeping it together! Real smooth! Fuck! 

He couldn’t fucking believe he’d done that. 

And he was going to avoid Ilya on Sunday, at least until he had his head on straight. 

What a fucking mess. 

Sunday 

And he was going to avoid Ilya today, to an extent. 

It wasn’t like he had avoided him in Boston - that had been a more deliberate and maintained thing that he had chosen and executed with discipline. This was different. This was avoidance simply because he had done something he hadn’t planned to do and he just needed the time to understand what it meant before he could face the cause of the momentary lapse in judgement in person. 

He had fucking kissed Ilya. 

He had kissed him in a hotel bathroom in San Diego and then shoved him back and stormed out of the room like some kind of star from his mother’s feuilleton télévisé shows she watched when she thought no one was looking. He had spent the past eleven hours since - when he wasn’t fitfully sleeping - alternating between sitting with what he had just done and chastising himself for the complete collapse of every plan he had carefully constructed over the past six months. That plan had been a conversation, a real one, structured and on his terms, where he said what he needed to say and asked what needed to be asked and gave Ilya the opportunity to say what he needed to say and show up in a way he hadn’t before. 

That had been the plan. 

Instead he had grabbed the man by his jacket and kissed him like he was fucking furious at his mouth for existing in a space that wasn’t connected to his own. 

Which he supposed, he kind of was. 

Edvardsen had followed him from the bar and up to his room, and watched him while he was pacing, and listening while he was spiraling about what he had done… and the entire time the bastard was smirking more and more, his grin getting wider and wider, until he had started laughing so hard that Shane had to stop and stare at him. 

Because he had seen Niklas laugh before… but this was excessive. 

He had just stared at the usually calm goaltender until he could get control over himself, with a dumbfounded look on his face while his friend had tears rolling down his cheeks at his expense. 

“It’s called being in love, Hollander.” 

And he’d smirked. 

“Love makes us all do stupid things. Wait until Liam tells you the stupid things I’ve done - cause he will.” 

And he had probably been right. 

But that didn’t mean that Shane had to be happy about it. 

He was furious about a lot of things and Ilya had been standing there in that bathroom and looking like everything Shane had been trying to hold at an arm’s length for the last six months and something had just given way. He wasn’t proud of the giving way part. But he was also not sorry about it, which was its own uncomfortable admission to sit with. 

At least that part was out of the way. If Ilya had any doubts in his mind about where Shane’s head was at, those were fucking gone now. If he had an upper hand in this situation then he had just lost it. 

But that was fine, because if he truly wanted something real with Ilya then neither of them should have an upper hand going into a conversation like the one they were bound to have to go into sooner now rather than later. There was a time and place for competitive edge and this was not one of them, even Shane could admit that. 

He lay awake for a long while in his hotel room, looking at the ceiling, and ran through the previous night's events in his head - he needed to, before he was ready to face the day ahead. He thought about the bathroom, the walk across the tile, the grabbing, the kiss, the shove, the door swinging shut behind him - and he arrived at the same conclusion he had arrived at eleven times over the past eleven hours - which was that he had completely and thoroughly abandoned the plan. 

The plan had been good. He had spent six months building towards it. He would have said things, on his terms, and then given Ilya the opportunity to respond like a person who actually thought about what he should say before opening his mouth. It had accounted for variables. It had not accounted for Ilya standing in a hotel bathroom, and had not accounted for Shane’s complete and total lack of self control when faced with his face in close and private proximity. 

He stared at the ceiling some more. 

He still wasn’t sorry about the kiss. 

That was the problem. 

He had spent three hours telling himself he should be sorry - constructing a reasonable argument for why the kiss was a mistake, why it had set back everything he had been building toward, why it had handed Ilya something Shane had not decided to give him yet. The argument was sound. But he believed none of it. 

The kiss had been real and he had meant it and the only thing he was actually sorry about was the timing and the location and the manner of it, none of which he could do anything about now. 

He got up. 

He showered and made coffee with the hotel machine that was never quite right and stood at the window and looked out at the San Diego morning and thought about what the day was going to ask of him. 

His phone had a text from Hayden. Zoo. Ten o’clock. Jackie says you’re coming. Non-negotiable. Arthur needs to spend more time with his Uncle Shane. 

Shane looked at it for a moment. Then he looked back out the window at the city. 

He typed back: I’ll be ready at nine forty-five.

Hayden responded in approximately four seconds with a string of emoji’s that communicated deep personal satisfaction, followed by: Jackie is making faces at me and telling me to stop acting like a teenage girl. She says to bring sunscreen. 

Shane put the phone down and finished his coffee and didn’t think about Ilya for the next twelve minutes, which was the longest stretch he’d managed since last night. 

The San Diego Zoo was exactly what he had expected it to be - large and warm and full of enough sensory information that his brain had no choice but to be in it rather than somewhere else. Ruby and Jade had opinions about every animal they passed and communicated those opinions loudly - like they believed that everyone within a fifty foot radius needed to be informed. Arthur was asleep in his carrier, that Jackie had lovingly strapped to Shane’s chest, small and warm and entirely unconcerned with the zoo or anything else, and something about having the sleeping infant close to him grounded him in a way that he never realized he needed before. He stood next to Jackie, who looked at him for a long moment - and she smiled. 

“He’s very small,” Shane said. 

“He was smaller a month ago,” Jackie smiled. “It’s terrifying how fast they get bigger.” She looked at Shane sideways. “You look good with him like that. Domestic. You can relax a little, he won’t break.” 

“I know he won’t break.”

“You’re holding him like he might.” 

Shane looked at Arthur and the way he was holding him against him, at the way he was holding himself so carefully and he hadn’t noticed it until she pointed it out. “I’m fine.” 

“You’re nervous about a one-month old.” 

“I’m not nervous.”

“Shane.” 

“I’m cautious,” he said. “There is a difference.” 

Jackie smiled and placed a hand on Shane’s shoulder. Arthur briefly stirred and then settled, his face doing a complicated series of expressions - the kind that very small babies made in their sleep - it looked like he was working through something very important. 

Shane stood very still, and then he relaxed. 

“See?” Jackie said. “Not broken.” 

“He’s heavier than he looks,” Shane observed. 

“They always are.” She took a photo without announcing she was going to, and Shane accepted it because Jackie had always operated this way. Arguing with her about it had never once produced a different outcome, so why start trying to now. “He’s been waiting to meet you,” she said. “Hayden talked about you so much during the pregnancy that I’m pretty sure Arthur will think you’re his second father.” 

“That’s a lot of pressure,” Shane smiled. 

“You’ll manage.” Jackie went to collect Ruby from in front of the giraffe enclosure, where she had apparently decided that the giraffe was her personal property and she was trying to explain it to a group of strangers. 

Hayden appeared at Shane’s elbow, coffees in hand, watching Jackie negotiate with Ruby. 

“She’s going to be a lawyer one day,” Hayden said, the conversation automatic. “Or a dictator.” He looked at Shane holding Arthur. “You look good with a baby.” 

“Don’t.” Shane sighed. 

“I’m just saying.” 

“I know what you’re just saying and I’m telling you don’t.” 

Hayden smiled and drank his coffee and let a comfortable silence settle between them the way that comfortable silences settled between two people who had known each other like Hayden and Shane did. Around them the zoo did what zoos did - children, animals, noise, smells [some good… and others not so good]. It was a lazy Sunday morning in San Diego and had absolutely nothing to do with anything that Shane had been thinking about since the bathroom at the hotel. 

“You look tired,” Hayden said eventually. 

“I didn’t sleep well.”

“Because of last night?” 

It wasn’t a question, not really. Shane looked at him. 

“You came out of that bathroom white as a sheet, buddy,” Hayden said. “I was looking for you and then I saw you.” He tilted his head. “What exactly happened?” 

Shane looked down at Arthur, who had found his own fist and was making a considered effort to put it in his mouth. “I kissed him,” he admitted. 

Hayden was quiet for a moment. “You - you kissed Rozanov.” 

“In the bathroom. He was - he walked in and I was there and I–” Shane stopped. “It wasn’t the plan.” 

“No,” Hayden said. “I imagine that it wasn’t.” He drank his coffee. Shane could feel him working through his feelings about it in real time. Hayden’s silences were different when he was performing an internal calculation. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” Shane admitted. “I think so.” He paused. “I’m not sorry about it.” 

“Okay,” Hayden said carefully. 

“I know you have feelings about it.” 

“I have many feelings about it,” Hayden confirmed. “I’m choosing which ones to say out loud.” He watched Jackie with Ruby and Jade for a moment. “Do you know what you want to do about it?” 

“I want to talk to him,” Shane said. “Actually talk to him. There are things I need to say and things I need to hear and I have been waiting for six months to have this conversation, and I think I’m actually ready to have it.” 

Hayden looked at him. Not the wariness he had been carrying all week, but something that had shifted toward something else - he looked like he had been worried about something for a long time and was now cautiously revising his assessment. 

“You seem ready,” he said finally. 

“I am.” Shane took a drink of the coffee that Hayden offered to him. “I know what I want. I know what I need. I know what I’m willing to accept. And I know what I’m not.” He looked at Arthur, who had given up on his fist and gone back to sleep. “I just need to say it all out loud to the right person.” 

Hayden was quiet for another moment. Then: “If he hurts you I will absolutely follow through on the shovel thing.” 

“I know,” Shane smiled. 

“I mean it in the most supportive way possible.” 

“I know that too.” 

Hayden clapped him once on the shoulder. “For what it’s worth he was absolutely wrecked looking after he came out of the bathroom. I’ve seen a lot of looks on Rozanov’s face, and that was by far the best yet. Good job.” He went to help Jackie with Jade and Ruby - who had now moved on from the giraffe and was talking to Jade about the merits of the elephant enclosure versus the reptile house. Shane stood there with Arthur and watched his best friend’s family move through the zoo with a smile on his face. 

He wanted this. 

The simplicity of it. 

He was ready. 

He pulled out his phone. 

He opened the text thread with Ilya. 

He hadn’t sent a message in it since Vegas. He’d received messages, dozens of them, he’d read every single one and hadn’t responded to any of them. He stared at the thread for a moment - all of Ilya’s messages down one side, all of those read receipts, the long months of one-sided attention that he had been sitting with and processing slowly, carefully, coming to believe he was actually paying attention. Actually cared about him in more ways than just as an object. 

He typed: Can we talk tonight? Just talk. I’m ready.

He looked at it. 

He sent it. 

The response came back in under a minute. 

Yes. Tell me where.

Shane looked at the message and felt something settle in him. Not resolved, not fully, not finished, just settled. 

The beach. By the hotel. Eight o’clock?

I will be there. 

Shane put his phone in his pocket and went to find his goddaughters, who had entered the reptile house. He chuckled as he watched Ruby explain to a tortoise why it needed to move faster. He placed a hand on Arthur’s head and gave the infant a kiss. 

“You’re in for a long childhood, kid.” He smiled. “In all the best ways.”