Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Minor Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov - Relationship

Characters:

Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Svetlana Vetrova's Mother, Sergei Vetrov

Additional Tags:

Aromantic, Aromantic Awareness Week, Jealousy, Insecurity, Coming Out

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of Not the Boston WAGs

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-19 Words: 1,976 Chapters: 1/1

I'll Never Soften My Grip

Summary

Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova does not want to be in love.

She is eight years old, and the rest of the world tells her that it is a foregone conclusion. Not something she gets a say in. Svetlana will fall in love, she will find a handsome boy to make her husband, and she will give him children.

The suggestion makes her so angry that she stomps her foot and bars any mention of love from their house. Her papa agrees. He can never say no to her.

Notes

Happy Aromantic Awareness Week! I had fun putting my aro ace experiences into the sex/romance show. A lot of the conversations with her family, and her feelings about her closest friend leaving her for a romantic relationship come from my own experiences.

Title from Oh, No! by Marina

Edit: putting this into Not the Boston WAGs because I wrote this fic with that version of Svetlana in mind, though there's no mention of the chat or my OCs in this.

Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova does not want to be in love.

She is eight years old, and the rest of the world tells her that it is a foregone conclusion. Not something she gets a say in. Svetlana will fall in love, she will find a handsome boy to make her husband, and she will give him children.

The suggestion makes her so angry that she stomps her foot and bars any mention of love from their house. Her papa agrees. He can never say no to her.

Her mama sweeps Svetlana into her lap and argues that there must be an exception, for she cannot possibly go even a day without proclaiming her love for her perfect daughter. She tickles Svetlana until she concedes the point.

At only eight, Svetlana is fluent in both English and Russian, and has the best grades of anyone at her private Boston elementary school. In skates, she is the picture of perfection. It's not just her papa who says that—her coaches for both hockey and figure skating agree.

With so much going for her, Svetlana cannot understand why people keep talking about love. Keep insisting that she's going to trip and fall in it one day. Why would she want to talk about all the annoying boys she knows when she could be boasting about her backhand, her science test grade, how great she's getting at putting nail polish on Mama's fingers?

"Your husband will love all these things about you, one day." Mama says. "This will be such a good wedding story. Now how about a glittery top coat? And have you thought more about what you want your Valentine's Day box to be for school?"

Svetlana applies the top coat and tells her mama about the box she wants to make, shaped like the Stanley Cup her father has brought to Boston twice since Svetlana was born.

The finished product isn't quite what she had in mind, but everyone at school fawns over it anyway. The put little Valentine's day cards with sweet messages in the bowl of it during their class party.

When she gets home, Mama wants to sit down and read all the cards. Some of them have personal messages scrawled in the messy handwriting that all boys seemed to share. Mama reads them out loud, along with the names. Asks if Svetlana has a crush on any of them.

"No." Svetlana insists.

"Are you sure? I think I remember which boy Benny is. He's pretty cute, right? And his dad is running for State senator this year."

"I would notice if I had a crush, Mama." She's great at noticing things. It's her superpower.

Papa comes home from practice to find them still at the kitchen table, looking at cards and bickering. He has flowers and forehead kisses for both of them. As usual, he has an extra kiss for Mama. One for her lips. Svetlana scrunches up her nose, which makes Papa laugh. "Don't go encouraging her to grow up too fast, milyy, she should stay my little girl forever and ever. Isn't that right Sveta?"

"Maybe."

Being Papa's girl forever is more appealing than belonging to Benny, who has horrid handwriting and hadn't recognized the Stanley cup and is bad at dodge ball.

But mostly Svetlana just wants to be her own girl.

Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova has never been in love.

She is sixteen years old, and many of her friends have been. At least that's what they insist to her. They also insist that they've had their hearts broken.

This, Svetlana believes. Major organ damage is the only logical reason for the reactions most of them have when their silly boyfriends decide that the relationship is "just not working out" and dump them via phone call or by making out with another girl at a party.

First comes the crying. Then the over indulgence. Svetlana likes ice cream and wine as much as the next person, but consuming both in such large quantities just seems…unwise.

Too much wine and ice cream leads to Svetlana holding back hair while the girls (or Sasha, a couple times) throw up. This is the third step to being heartbroken. Some restart the cycle immediately.

Svetlana respects the ones who move get up and move on more. She doesn't get what the big deal is.

In this, and many other things, Ilya agrees with her.

She thinks it's a bit different for him though. Svetlana looks at love like an uninteresting jigsaw puzzle. Ilya looks at it like a loaded bear trap.

Both of them have been having sex for years now—with boys and girls and each other. Both of them prefer to put hockey on before/after/during sex instead of movies about idiots who do stupid things because they are "so in love".

These movies make Svetlana so angry, because she doesn't see what is romantic or comedic about any of the bullshit most of the characters get up to. It's painful to watch. Hockey is much better.

The two of them have known each other since they were very young. They would spend the off-season (known by most in the Northern hemisphere as summer) running rampant in various manors in the Russian countryside.

Now that Papa is retired and the Vetrovas live in Russia full time, Svetlana and Ilya are attached at the hip. They theoretically go to the same school—but Ilya's gone a lot for hockey stuff and Svetlana is prone to skipping if he isn't there to entertain her. Schoolwork is easy anyway. Why should she be trapped in a classroom to learn things from boring teachers that she already knows, or could teach herself?

When they were small, their parents would all tease them. Laugh at Ilya letting her lead him around, joke that Svetlana was training her future husband well.

No one teases anymore. Her papa glares distrustfully at Ilya (and every other boy who dares come within a meter of her) while Ilya's mama…well, Irina isn't around anymore, to tease or to worry about teenage pregnancy rates, as Svetlana's does.

Even though Sasha's father had been coaching Ilya's team for years, it's Svetlana who actually introduces them. She sees the way they look at each other when their circles overlap. With desire and curiosity but also with fear.

"You're not allowed to fall in love and leave me though," She tells both of them, independently, and both boys swear that they will not.

Ilya and Sasha do several stupid things together, but thankfully falling in love is not one of them. Not that Svetlana doesn't want them to be happy. But she does not want to be left behind either. Ilya is her one constant in life—if he started actually dating someone, if he gave her spot in his life away to some girlfriend of boyfriend, even temporarily…Svetlana doesn't know what she would do.

The Sasha thing doesn't move past convenient, exploratory hookups that stop a few months before the International Prospect Cup in 2008. Ilya insists that he needs to focus on hockey.

Ilya doesn't love hockey like Svetlana does. It is not the air he breathes and the blood in his veins.

He enjoys it but he also needs it to get out from under his family's thumb. Out of Russia, just as her father once had. She doesn't think he will come back, though. She starts looking at American universities. Duel citizenship had perks.

Svetlana is at a chess tournament in Samara when Ilya wins gold. If she had been there with him, or had been able to video call him afterwards instead of simply texting him, maybe she would have noticed it.

Not love. Not yet. But the seed has been planted.

Good job, she texts instead. Unless Hollander drastically improves his backhand in the next six months, he'll have to settle for second in the draft as well as a silver metal.

He never responds to that message.

Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova is never going to be in love.

She finds the word for it when she is twenty four. It is a wild relief, to have this label to cling to. To break down the prefix (a, meaning "without" or "not") and the root word (romantic, a term she's always looked down on) and translate them both to Russian and then back to English in her mind.

There are other words and terms that rings bells too. Svetlana offs them to Ilya, who is happy that she has found one that comforts her but is uninterested in one himself.

"I fuck women, I fuck men, is simple." He says. "No label needed."

So she tucks bisexual away for later, and queer platonic.

(And if she had daydreamed that he would jump at the term aromantic, proclaim, "That is you and me both, let's continue living apart but having friendly sex and being the most important person in each others lives forever!" Well. That would have been very foolish.

Ilya loves her the way she loves him, but he also loves his Jane. Svetlana has known this since the first time she saw him answer one of Jane's texts. He'd turned away from her even though they hadn't seen each other in months, even though she'd crossed an ocean for him, even though she was wearing his jersey.)

Having this term does not erase her memories of growing up feeling other and less than and incomplete. It does not undo the hurt of all the men and women who have called her frigid and heartless and a whore after sharing her bed and assuming they'd get more out of it.

But it helps ease that sting. It means that she can look to the future and properly plan. Svetlana does not want to be in love, and she never has been, and now that pressure that one day it will take root in her and choke out everything that makes her Svetlana is off.

She bounces between bi and pan for her sexual label. This one doesn't matter as much to her. Both of their flags are older and prettier than the aro one. She hangs a huge green, white, grey, and black tapestry in her house anyway.

There is a difference though, between being out to yourself and out to the world. Svetlana reads queer theory out loud to Ilya with a hockey game on mute in the background, and she buys merch.

She does not inform her parents that there will never be a handsome husband to lead around or a pretty wedding they can tell embarrassing stories at.

They're already having a hard enough time accepting that she will, under no circumstances, be growing a future hockey/chess/musical/math prodigy in her stupid womb. Svetlana would not even have a womb if she had any say in it.

(If only she could give it to Ilya. If she's right about his Jane, and she is rarely wrong, their genetics combined…the rafters of Boston's stadium would collapse beneath the weight of the Cup banners. She would forgive Hollander for stealing her best friend from her if that happened.)

They wouldn't know what to do if she came out to them anyway. Svetlana knows her parents love her, they would not turn her in to the police for the sex she has with women and it is not against the laws of Russia to simply not fall in love.

It's against their personal codes though. So Svetlana tells only Ilya, who would never doubt how well she knows herself or try to convince her that the right person would eventually come along.

Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova does not want to be in love. She never has been, and she never will be. This is okay.