Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov/Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Svetlana Vetrova, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son

Additional Tags:

Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, KHL | Kontinental Hockey League, Shane Hollander Needs a Hug, Shane Hollander Speaks Russian, Shane Hollander in Russia, Shane Hollander Needs Therapy, Slow Burn, Miscommunication, Newspapers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon Related, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Forced Proximity, Hazing, Racism, Mixed Media, Psychological Drama, Drama

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-23 Updated: 2026-09-14 Words: 67,894 Chapters: 11/17

The Ice Is Colder In Moscow

Summary

Shane Hollander spends the 2010 Prospect Cup Tournament in a small room, being questioned by police. He thinks that telling the truth will save him. Instead, he’s betrayed by his teammates and pushed to the forefront of a scandal that destroys his chances with any NHL team. Only one professional hockey league is willing to look the other way.

Desperate to play, Shane Hollander signs a contract with the KHL, packs his things, and moves to Russia.

 

(Or: As he grapples with a scandal, Shane gives up on the NHL and ends up playing on Ilya Rozanov’s KHL team in Moscow.)

Notes

T/W FOR REFERENCED SEXUAL ASSUALT

Nothing graphic will be described, but it is a major plot point (similar to in Troy's Storyline in Role Model). Not directly based on any real events.

I will post intermittently, it is written up to Chapter 14 but needs some editing, sits at around 60k words currently in my drafts, but will probably go above that by the end.

KHL= Kontinental Hockey League (Russian equivalent of the NHL)

VHL= Vysshaya Hockey League (Russian equivalent of AHL, the league just below the NHL)

OHL= Ontario Hockey League (One of the junior ice hockey leagues in Canada)

This uses a workskin (every chapter begins with a newspaper article) so make sure the 'show creator style' is switched on.

Chapter 1: Chapter One

Six months later

Shane Hollander sits in the airport lounge, and thinks about what it means to be a good person.

He remembers the gold-edged book he used to flick through as a child, looking at the strange gods with their animal heads and conical beards. The page which had fascinated him the most was about what happened after death, how souls were judged for their worthiness. Instead of pearly gates and a saint with a list, there was an illustration of a heart being weighed against a feather. Heavy hearts, ones filled with the pus and decay of every bad mistake their owners had made, were eaten by the crocodile goddess.

Shane is willing to do that, if it would help. He would lie flat on a surgical table, as the doctors sliced open his chest with a scalpel. Cutting through the skin, pushing past the muscles. They would need a saw to get through the breastbone, to spread his ribs apart and reach inside for the organ, their latex gloves staining crimson. Once they had it out of his chest, and beeping machines moved his blood for him, they would be able to put it on the scales.

Then Shane would know for sure how badly he’s fucked up.

Three seats away from him, there is a woman who is trying so hard not to make eye contact that it makes her stick out from the rest of the crowd. He wonders if she actually knows who he is, or if his face is just pinging her internal alarm system.

There’s a bookshop in the airport, about twenty meters to the left of him. It’s filled with tired businessmen buying books about efficiency to read on the plane, but Shane is sure that if he walked over to the stacks of newspapers and flicked through enough pages, he’d find his own reflection looking back at him.

It wouldn’t be an exact copy. The black eye which made the images so striking, that made every newspaper in Canada slap him on the cover edition, has faded over the last six months. Shane thinks that the dull ache he can feel from it is psychosomatic, a word that his therapist taught him last week.

“You’re trying to rationalise your pain,” she had said to him. “Your body is trying to find ways to cope with the stress that it’s been put under.”

Shane didn’t find that particularly helpful, but he supposed that she was doing her best. He wasn’t talkative in the therapy sessions, which he knew was the whole point of him going, to talk about things, even though that was exactly the opposite of what he wanted to do.

He’d talked about what happened to the police. He’d talked about what happened to his parents. He’d talked about what happened to his other teammates, to the ones who weren’t there in the hotel room, and didn’t have the smell of cheap cologne and sweat burnt into their brains. And now he had to do it again, even though every single one of those instances had felt like he was falling into a pit, filled with crocodiles, who wanted to eat his heart.

The flashing board above him blinks, and green letters appear, showing that flight 2481 to Sheremetyevo Moscow is now boarding. Shane tightens the straps of his backpack, pats his pocket to make sure that his passport is still secure, and takes the first three steps towards whatever comes next.

-
The flight is nine hours, and Shane lets himself sit back and relax. While he’s in the air, no newspapers can come out with new stories, and his mother can’t send him texts about where he will live, how he’ll get around, who he’ll talk to. She wanted to fly all the way to Moscow with him, to help him settle in. Shane had told her that he didn’t want that, that he could do this by himself.

He didn’t say what they both knew was true, which was that she couldn’t afford to take the time off work. She needed as many days free as possible for trial dates, and they needed the money now that Shane’s future career was uncertain. Every brand that his mother had coaxed into giving him a chance had backed away, not that Shane could blame them. Money was something else that had been sucked down the drain after that night, along with all Shane’s dreams and respect for his teammates.

It’s also true that he doesn’t want her here, that he couldn’t take the way she looks at him now. Of course, she believes his side of the story. But now instead of pride in her eyes, he can see her anger. Disappointment would have been simpler to handle than the heat of her fury, that everything she had so carefully helped him build has been crushed into the ground.

Shane knows that seeing her anger makes the animal parts of him scratch at the walls, it just intensifies his need to claw at everything around him, drawing blood. It’s not healthy for them to spend time together.

Instead, he’s taking the flight by himself and letting the second-best ice hockey league in the world organise everything else. They will be in charge of what he eats, where he sleeps, and who he talks to for at least the next few months. Perhaps forever, if the trial doesn’t go his way.

The lawyer kept telling Shane that these things were ‘unpredictable’ that the girl’s memory might be faulty, or might latch onto the wrong things. That Shane could still be in trouble, real trouble, even if he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Shane’s first glimpse of Moscow, through the airplane window, surprises him. There’s a large river running through the city, splayed across it like a dark ribbon. Shane knows, in an abstract sense, that most cities are built around rivers, but he had always imagined Moscow as a grey city, permanently frozen over.

The man picking Shane up from the airport has a large nose like an overripe pear. It is crooked, as if it has been broken a few times and not set properly. Shane wonders whether this comes from hockey, or if the man is familiar with other, less sanctioned kinds of violence. Then he wonders whether it’s xenophobic for him to think that. He can’t mentally associate all Russians with Hollywood mobster movies now that he’s going to live here.

“Shane Hollander!” The man lifts a hand up, as if the sign he’s holding isn’t clear enough.

He doesn’t smile when he sees him, but Shane notices that hardly anyone in the airport is smiling, even the people greeting their loved ones. Some of them are hugging, or crying, or talking excitedly in Russian, but very few of them have their lips pulled back in an actual grin.

“My name is Roman Okulov. I will be in charge of you for now, helping you get used to the city. Welcome to Russia.” He sticks out his hand, and Shane shakes it, with the strong grip his mother had practiced with him after he first started getting brand deals.

“Nice to meet you. I look forward to playing with your team. And by the way, I didn’t do it. What they’re saying in the newspapers, I didn’t do it.”

He used to say it emphatically, as if he could perform his way out of the conclusions that they’d already drawn. As if his voice was more convincing than newspaper think pieces, than podcasts calling on the Canadian government to put him in jail already, that Canada’s safest city wasn’t secure with him out on the streets.

Now he says it when he first meets a new person, just to get it out of the way. So that he doesn’t have to watch them work themselves into knots figuring out the politest way to ask.

The man laughs, sharply. “It doesn’t matter. In Russia, what you do off ice, it is not our business. You were the number two draft pick. We’d still hire you if you killed her.” The man says, his face completely plain. Shane has never been very good at guessing when people are joking, and he can’t tell now either.

Roman starts smoking as soon as they get out of the airport, and looks surprised when Shane doesn’t take him up on the offer. Shane gets his first glimpse of the streets of Moscow as the car makes its way through the outskirts and into the city. Shane is aware that it is June, and that Ottawa and Moscow have relatively similar climates. He’s still not prepared for the bright sunshine, the fact that people are wearing shorts.

They drive past a park, and the car pauses in traffic long enough for Shane to see families having picnics on the grass.

Moscow is huge, and much more colourful than the bland Canadian cities Shane is used to. Most of the buildings are white, but often there are buildings that are blue, yellow, or green, like pastel flowers scattered across the city.

In Ottawa it’s clear which buildings are important, because they are the only ones which are old and detailed. In Moscow it seems there are random coffee shops covered in intricate carvings and Greek columns. The car rounds a corner, and Shane is face to face with one of the classic images of Russia, a white church with an onion shaped roof painted in gold.

Eventually they arrive at the apartment building where Shane will be living for the rest of his one-year contract. It’s in a large white complex which doesn’t promise much from the outside, but Roman seems excited to show it to him.

“You are in a very nice area. Good restaurants, lots of museums, bars open during the night. Sergei will be your driver.” He said, gesturing to the man who had driven the car from the airport.

“He will pick you up for training camp every day, but you can call him at any time, and he will take you to wherever you want to go.”

“Am I not allowed to drive myself?” Shane asks, frowning. It seems indulgent, wasteful even, to have a driver. Was this a way to keep an eye on him, to track his movements? Six months of being stalked by newspaper reporters every time he tried to leave the house has made Shane hypersensitive to feeling observed.

Roman’s eyebrows wrinkled. “It is not that we don’t trust you, but Moscow traffic can be… interesting. If you are not used to driving in Russia, we do not recommend it. You are a very important asset for the team, and you cannot play if a taxi runs a red light and breaks every bone in your body.” He hands Shane a card with the driver’s number, which Shane stashes in a pocket.

Roman takes them through three layers of security, up four flights of stairs, and to the door of Shane’s apartment, all the while describing the great features of the building. It has a gym, a sauna and a pool only open to residents of the building. All of the foreign players have apartments there, along with a few of the Russians, and it’s only a fifteen-minute drive from the rink and a thirty-minute walk from the Kremlin itself.

The apartment is a fairly basic two bedroom, with a spacious kitchen and large TV set in front of a black leather sofa. Roman hands him a thick white envelope, and a large colour-coded file. Shane flicks through the file and finds helpful information about where to buy groceries, and who to call if he needs something from the team. Roman gives him one last pat on the shoulder, then lets himself out.

Shane lies on the sofa in his nice apartment in a beautiful city and lets himself have a quick panic attack.

He’d been planning to have one anyway, probably ever since his mother had raised her eyebrows and said, “Russia? Really?”

He’s read lots of articles about how the KHL is a brand-new league with financials that don’t make any sense. Some of the articles had been positive, but Shane was fully prepared for that all to be exaggerated, meant to lure foreign players overseas. The league itself was an exercise in propaganda, a shallow attempt to compete with the NHL using the kind of cold-war posturing that Russia hadn’t quite grown out of.

He was expecting a glitzy farce. The apartment feels real and solid, like somewhere Shane would actually want to live, and somehow that’s much scarier than being stuck in a Soviet building with creaky windows and a toilet that doesn’t flush.

After a while, Shane opens the envelope, because he doesn’t have anything else to do. It is filled with cash, about eighty thousand roubles, which Shane knows is several thousand Canadian Dollars.

The file that Roman gave him has a few grocery stores listed, and so Shane goes to one after a few hours. It is roughly the same experience as a Canadian store, the same too-bright lighting and rows of products, except Shane can’t read any of the labels.

This isn’t a huge problem, because he doesn’t buy much processed food anyway, preferring fresh fruits and vegetables and whole protein like chicken or fish. This works for food, but Shane is dreading when he has to buy sometimes that naturally comes in a container, like shampoo. He recognises most of the brands, but he can’t find Canada Dry, and he’s not sure if ginger ale is popular in Russia anyway. It’s fine, just another thing he’ll have to go without for now.

Back at the apartment, Shane makes himself a cup of tea. He’s never lived alone before, and the thought enters his head that he could just pour it all over the floor, if he wanted. Nobody would scold him, and nobody would care about it being cleaned up. Shane is the one who has to care.

The call to his parents later that evening goes well. They ask him what it’s like in Moscow, and he doesn’t have to lie. They don’t ask him how he is, because they stopped doing that five months ago.

Shane goes to bed early, and lies there for the next few hours. He knows already that the sleep isn’t going to come, but he read an article a while ago that said lying in bed was better than nothing. He still has some of the sleeping pills that his doctor gave him, but Shane doesn’t want to use them all at once, just in case they’re harder to find in Russia. He has an excuse for not sleeping, on his first night in the country. Plenty of hockey players don’t sleep the night before their first practice with a new team.

-
Sergei is there to collect him in the morning as promised, and Shane gives him a quick nod and a privyet. The drive to the rink takes them through more of the city, and Shane is struck again by how much larger it is than his hometown. Eleven million people, a larger metropolitan area than New York. Shane thinks about the populations of different cities for a bit so that he doesn’t have to think about going to training.

“We are here,” Sergei says, as they pull into the parking lot of a large stadium.

Khodynka Arena is large and modern, and Shane feels his chest squeeze as he walks through the doors, and the familiar smell hits him. The KHL plays on Olympic sized rinks, wider than the NHL regulation ones, and the rink seems to Shane to stretch off forever, a sheet of ice that he can skate on to the edge of the earth.

Roman is there to greet him, with another stiff handshake.

“Today you will meet the team, and the medical checks can happen.”

Shane is herded into a room filled with folding chairs, some of them already filled with bulky Russian hockey players. The walls are covered with framed photographs of the team, going all the way back to the 1940s. The players are dressed casually. It might be the most Adidas he’s ever seen in one room.

Shane recognises a few faces from his preparations, but it is still overwhelming. Like NHL training camps, the KHL takes on more players than will fit into the team, and whittles them down until only the most skilful remain. Half of these guys will be sent back down to the VHL, the semi-professional league, at the end of the summer. There is some chatting, but tension is thick in the room, everyone sizing everybody else up.

Shane has developed a sixth sense for aggressive staring over the past few months, and so he waits a bit before turning his head to confront it. The other man whips his head around, but not before Shane recognises him. David Tremblay isn’t a famous player, but he was on the fourth line for the Montreal Metros, the team that Shane was supposed to join in September before his entire life fell apart.

Shane feels the shame curling at the back of his throat, and tries to fight it back. Another Canadian, someone who was supposed to be his teammate, and now still would be in a way that Shane never expected. Tremblay is getting older, and so he probably isn’t here by choice either.

Guys joined the KHL for a few reasons, some just chasing money, others just for stories to tell in the locker rooms. But most of the time it was because they were in danger of not cutting it in the NHL, and didn’t want to find out for sure.

The room continues to fill up, some players greeting each other with the internationally recognised language of bro hugs and slaps on the back. There are about fifty players by the time someone steps to the podium at the front of the room and the room quiets. Through the front entrance walks the man Shane recognised as the General manager, the head coach, followed by the team captain, and the alternate captain.

The alternate captain, Ilya Rozanov.

The general manager makes a speech, welcoming all of them to training camp and letting them know what the next few months will look like. Shane tunes it out so that he can focus his entire attention staring at Rozanov.

His dark blonde curls are slicked back, and he’s wearing a black tank top that shows off his muscular arms. Shane can’t help but feel something curl in his stomach when he looks at Rozanov, the memory of a sweaty Los Angeles gym and a water bottle passed between them. Shane has tried to convince himself that he imagined the hungry look in Rozanov’s eyes, the way he hadn’t flinched when Shane’s gaze wandered over him. The obscene movement his throat made as he swallowed the water they were passing back and forth.

Shane rips his eyes away, because he has pushed that experience into a soft cave in the back of his mind that he does not understand and refuses to explore.

What happened in the shower after Shane got back to his room is not in there, because Shane has already categorized that as a reaction to the high of draft day, and not something to do with Rozanov at all.

Shane does know that Spartak is Rozanov’s team, and that he’d been playing with them for the last year. After they were both drafted, neither of them had started with their teams right away, Shane spending another year with his Junior team in the Ontario Hockey League, and Rozanov playing in the KHL. But the season was over already.

Rozanov should be at home, spending his signing bonus, waiting for the Raiders to call him to Boston for their summer training in September, not enduring seven-hour practices with his old KHL team. Shane doesn’t know much about Rozanov, but he’d heard the rumours that he was a party animal, someone who didn’t take things too seriously. Yet here he is, putting himself through two back-to-back training camps.

Rozanov turns his head, and for one brief second they make eye contact. Shane can’t help the way that his cheeks flush with humiliation. They were primed to become rivals, but while Rozanov goes to take his place in the fight for the Stanley cup, Shane will be stuck in Russia. Shane wonders whether they told Rozanov, whether he keeps up with the news.

Does he know why Shane’s here? Rozanov doesn’t look surprised to see him, so Shane can guess that he was expecting him. It makes sense that the alternate captain would be aware of the man brought in to replace him, so Shane clings onto the hope that Rozanov hasn’t read the Canadian news, doesn’t know what Shane is now famous for.

It’s a vain hope, because Rozanov must have noticed when Shane wasn’t present for the Prospect Cup, probably curious why he was able to get an eight to none stomping out of the Canadian team.

If Rozanov had been missing from the tournament, Shane would have immediately gone home and tried to find out what happened. He knows with a deep certainty that Rozanov would do the same. Whatever connections Shane might be making up in his head, the hockey was real.

The speeches finish, and Roman leads him to a small room where he can start the medical testing. In the afternoon their first on-ice session will take place, and the real test begins.

Fitness testing starts, the Russian coaches making sure they know how high they can jump, how fast they can sprint, how quickly their bodies get tired. He feels a bit like a lab rat, but in a way that is comforting.

The doctors give him extremely clear instructions on what to do, and all Shane has to do is follow them. His body is what is being assessed, and Shane has spent almost his entire life making sure that his body is a trained machine, he’s practiced for all of these tests and he knows he’s getting an A.

When it’s finally time for on ice training to begin, Shane makes his way to the locker rooms with everyone else. So far he’s introduced himself to nobody, doesn’t know who recognises him and who doesn’t. He’s definitely had some looks that suggest other people know, but he can’t be sure.

The locker room is like every other locker room Shane has been in recently, right down to the fact that several people are looking at him with expressions of disgust.

The team captain stands up first, and does a speech all in Russian. Shane nods along because that’s what everyone else is doing, and hopes it’s not important.

Then Ilya Rozanov stands up. He looks directly at Shane, eyes piercing through him.

“Alright, listen everyone,” He says in stilted English. “Everyone know already story about Shane Hollander.”

Fuck. Fuck Shane’s entire life. Shane is going to fucking murder this asshole.

“Here, he is on our team, and we treat him like any teammate. What he did there, it does not matter. What matters is what he does out there,” Rozanov said, pointing at the ice. Some of the Russians start to clap. Shane can feel the humiliation like a hot ache.

“...But I want everyone to know. On my team, we do not hurt girls. In Russia, if teammate do something like that, they do not go to trial. They are found in river.”

Rozanov’s makes eye contact with every single member of the team, then finally lands on Shane, holding his gaze for a beat longer than anyone else. Then he repeats the whole speech in Russian.

Shane can feel it slip away, his one slim chance to defend himself.

The drills begin, and Shane can feel it as soon as the whistles blow and he starts pumping his legs beneath him. He’s slow.

It’s inevitable, not something that should come as a shock, but the betrayal of his own body is still intense.

When the news broke in Canada, he was immediately suspended from his OHL team, and banned from the practice rink ‘pending further investigation’. Shane had tried to argue his case again, to explain to them what actually happened, who was really involved, but the headlines spoke for themselves.

He’d had a private meeting with his coach, the man who had known him since he was fifteen years old.

“Look, I believe you boys. I’m sure that none of you did anything wrong,” he’d tried to reassure Shane.

“Well, you shouldn’t be sure about that. All I’m saying is that I didn’t do anything.” Shane had bit back.

“Right, but Shane, you have to understand what the public perception is. And the public perception is that you were involved. It could do a lot of damage to this organisation if you’re seen practicing in the rink like nothing happened.”

His mother had been heartbroken. “But you know Shane,” she’d kept saying. “You know that he wouldn’t do something like that.”

It hadn’t mattered. Shane wasn’t allowed to the rink, and when he’d driven four hours to a rink on the other side of the province, he’d made it five minutes before they threatened to call security to get him out. Even outside of Ottawa, the news stories had made his face too recognisable. The noose had tightened around his neck, and there was no way to escape.

The only place where Shane could skate safely were on the frozen ponds near to his family’s cottage in Ottawa. The ice was thick in January and February, but months stretched on, and the media buzz refused to die with it.

By March, the ice was thinning, and his mother started begging him on the phone not to go out, to not go alone, to take a life jacket with him. The life jacket wouldn’t fit over his pads, but he wore self-rescue ice pics around his neck every time he skated. Because she asked him to.

Shane created the drills for himself, skating until his hands were numb, frozen into position around his hockey stick. He would take refuge in his car, the heat turned up all the way, shaking the pain out of his fingers. It would be better to train with another person, but the few people Shane called his friends stopped answering his texts in the second week of January, after the story broke.

Sometimes, Shane wondered what it would be like to fall through the ice. It would be loud at first, the ice cracking sharply, his body gasping as the cold seeped through his clothes and onto his skin. For the first minute or so, he would be completely powerless, his body fighting against the shock of the cold water. The experts said that staying calm was the best way to stay alive, and Shane was sure that if it happened he would be calm. The next thing you needed to do was pull yourself out of the water. Shane was less sure that he would be able to do that.

I’m having unhealthy thoughts, is what he thought at the time, and that relaxed him. If he knew that the thoughts were unhealthy, then that meant they weren’t really important. If they weren’t important, then when his therapist asked him if there was anything important she needed to know, Shane could confidently say no.

Shane can feel the tension building as the shooting drill is set up. Missing the Prospect Cup means that he’s only gone against Ilya Rozanov once, and this is his second opportunity to show him that the headlines advertising their rivalry weren’t exaggerated. Even if it doesn’t matter anymore, since the Montreal Metros have dropped him, and he might never play an NHL game.

A puck is fired off, and Shane sprints up the ice to collect it, shifting his attention to the goalie as soon as it meets his stick tape. His skating is slower, but Shane trusts his hands, still trusts his instincts. He decides to wait for a beat, watching the goalie shift slightly to the left, and fires a puck to the right-hand corner.

It pings satisfyingly off the bar, and Shane feels the echo of it through his body like the ringing of a church bell. Shane has never had any religion except for hockey.

When the final whistle of practice blows, Shane can feel the sweat pouring off him, a cavity in his stomach, pain beginning to take hold in his arms. But his shot still isn’t perfect, it hasn’t adjusted to the new rhythm of his feet, and Shane knows that he can make it more consistent, if everyone else gets off the ice, he can just run through it a few more times.

He starts skating to pick up a stick, his feet hurting so badly that he almost trips, until his way is blocked by a large Russian man.

“Hollander. Practice is over, get off the ice.” Rozanov’s tone is sharp, leaving no room for argument.

“I just need to… just a few minutes.” Shane is fighting to get the words out, still struggling against fire in his lungs.

“No. Get off the ice. You are not captain here. Your captain is telling you, get off ice. You will listen.”

Shane looks up at Rozanov, the man who would have been his greatest rival in the NHL, now using the A on his jersey to push Shane around. Rozanov, who hadn’t even given him a chance to try his rehearsed I know you won’t believe this, but I didn’t have anything to do with it speech. Rozanov had stood in front of the room and acted like he was guilty, and that meant Shane’s fate was already sealed.

Shane knew that he probably wouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt, but he had a wild hope that maybe the news hadn’t made it to Russia. That he could just be another hockey player, even only temporarily. It took Rozanov less than five minutes to crush that hope into dust.

The high of a good practice is starting to wear off, and Shane can already feel the dread filling him, of going back to the locker room full of hostile strangers.

He doesn’t say anything to Rozanov, and just skates silently off the ice.

The two Swiss guys are looking at him as they take their pads off, speaking in French to each other.

“I can’t believe they fucking let him play. Bastard should be in jail.”

“I thought he was supposed to be some big-shot. Number two draft pick? Maybe the NHL isn’t what it used to be. That Russian, Rozanov, can smoke him.”

If the team hates him anyway, why should Shane be silent? He is done trying to get hockey players to like him.

“I understand what you’re saying. I’m fucking bilingual, you assholes.” Shane hisses at them.

The taller one rolls his eyes. “Like we give a fuck. You’re fucking disgusting.” He spits, and a wad of brown liquid hits Shane’s shoulder pad.

This is enough for Rozanov to stalk over, half dressed. Shane can’t seem to get rid of him.

“New rule. Talking shit has to be English or Russian. No French. Actually, no French at all, is stupid language, sound like cat throwing up.” The Swiss guys roll their eyes.

Rozanov doesn’t spare a look at Shane, who has to unclench his fists.

It’s fine. He knew going in that he wasn’t going to make any friends here, that this is an experiment in isolation.

Shane already knows that he’s lost everything else. The only thing that Shane cares about keeping now is hockey, and joining the KHL gives him that. It’s worth the nine hour flight, the unfamiliar food, the stories about surveillance and missed paychecks and crazy team owners.

If Shane can have this one thing, nothing else matters.

Chapter 2: Chapter Two

Chapter Notes

TW Referenced Sexual Assault for this chapter, this contains the most intense scene in the whole fic. The assault itself is not shown, but it does describe the aftermath, and it is heavily implied. This section is labelled and you can skip it.

Now

Practice continues like that for the next week. The other foreign imports are hostile, but the Russian coaches are scary enough that nothing actually happens on the ice. It is clear that the Russian captain, Alexander Sorokin, speaks absolutely no English, and so it’s Rozanov’s job to deal with the English speakers. Shane supposes that makes sense, since he’ll be moving to America soon.

It also seems to be his job to be in charge of the locker room. He struts around, usually without a shirt, getting into loud Russian arguments about which players’ sisters he’s apparently fucking, and which of them he could beat at arm wrestling. Shane has managed to resist being dragged into too much of this, because everyone on the team either can’t speak English or fucking hates him.

He also doesn’t know how he would react to having to grip hands with Rozanov, making eye contact and watching him strain and sweat.

Moving to the other side of the world should be a huge adjustment, but Shane finds that he can manage. Hockey is the same, and the only other place he goes is the grocery store next to his apartment. With only those new places, the culture shock is minimal.

As resistant as he was to having a driver, Shane finds that it cuts out a lot of the anxiety he still feels leaving the house. He only needs to make it two steps in the open air, and then he can be safe inside a vehicle with tinted windows that nobody can see into.

Playing with Rozanov is strange. He thought that they would have completely contrasting styles, since the commentators had pitched it that way. The aggressive Russian versus the good boy Canadian.

But after watching six KHL games and only seeing one fight, it quickly became clear to Shane that the KHL doesn’t have fighting as embedded in the sport quite like Canada does.

The larger rink means that Shane has more space to manoeuvre, and he isn’t getting shoved into the boards as much as he’s used to. It means that he can focus on passing and making plays, the parts of the sport that he can do better than almost anyone else.

Rozanov is the first-line centre, while he's the second, so they only play together on the powerplay, but in the few glimpses he gets, they make a perfect team. Shane is used to having to delay a second when he passes to his left wing, to check with them, make sure they’re keeping up. With Rozanov he never has to wait for him to be there, because his stick always finds the position that Shane had planned in his head. The synchronicity is addictive.

It takes three days for him to realise that Ilya Rozanov lives in the same apartment building as he does.

He meets Rozanov in the shared apartment gym, which gives Shane a strange sense of deja vu. Rozanov is running on one of the machines, and Shane immediately gets flashbacks to the last time they were in a gym together.

“Rozanov! Hey, I guess we live in the same building.” Shane says, stupidly.

“Hello Hollander. I am done with workout now,” Rozanov says, and then immediately leaves.

Shane watches him walk out, as if he’ll catch something from Shane, and feels more disgusting than usual. He makes up for it by running for so long that he almost falls off the machine.

The next time they encounter each other, Rozanov doesn’t immediately leave, but he makes zero eye contact even when Shane tries to greet him, and runs at the same speed for the entire session. There is no back and forth, no competitiveness. Shane doesn’t know why he was expecting that, except it happened on draft day and for him it was fun and exhilarating and joyful and Shane wonders how it was for Rozanov.

It probably felt like nothing at all.

He sees Rozanov in the gym frequently, because as it becomes clear, they’re both insomniacs.

Seeing Rozanov at 3am makes him even more wavy and indistinct, but the pattern is the same. They are together. Rozanov refuses to acknowledge his presence.

In the second week, after practice Shane is standing outside the rink waiting for Sergei when the American, Grant Havercheck sidles up to him. He’s in his mid-20s, and Shane doesn’t really know anything about him, other than that he’s a mediocre defender who kept cycling between being called up to the NHL, not making an impression, and then being sent back down to the AHL.

His face is open, almost friendly, which by this point Shane finds suspicious rather than reassuring.

“Hey. Sorry for not introducing myself before, just getting used to everything. Russia is fucking crazy right?” He says, while Shane stands there and wonders how rude it would be to just walk away from this conversation.

“Yeah, I guess.” Shane used to have strict rules that he stuck to about making eye contact with people, but he’s given that up recently. It’s freeing in a way.

“You’re a really great player. It’s a shame how everything went down,” he says, as if that properly expresses the destruction of Shane’s life and crushing of all of his dreams.

“Yeah, I guess.” Shane looks around for Sergei, who should be here soon.

“Look man, I’m on your side. Some crazy bitch tries to ruin your reputation? Fuck her. She should consider herself lucky you even wanted to stick your dick in. Probably just some attention-whore anyway.”

The punch is very loud when it crashes into Grant’s face. Shane hasn’t punched anyone in a long time, and so it comes as a surprise. Grant doesn’t go down, he’s a big guy, at least four inches on Shane. It takes him a few seconds to react, but he’s a defender, used to getting into brawls and so when he hits back it’s mostly instinct. Shane manages to move quickly enough that it only glances off his cheek instead of injuring him.

“What the fuck dude!” Grant growls at him, then has to spit out a string of blood. “You’re a fuckin’ psycho.”

Shane really wants to punch him again, not because he deserves it, but because he can’t punch any of the people who actually do, but then Sergei pulls up directly in front of them. Mechanically, he opens the door, shoves his kit bag into the back seat, gets in and pulls away. Grant is yelling about how he’s going to tell the coaches.

Shane is so fucking done with ‘team unity.’

Six months ago

Thumping bass rhythms were filtering through to Shane’s room, which meant that Connor was playing his speaker at full volume, at 1am, the night before the Prospect Cup final. Shane knew he needed to go and yell at them, but it fucking sucked that this had become his job, to police their irresponsible behaviour.

Some of Shane’s teammates had given him the nickname ‘Captain Crystal’. When he’d first heard it Shane couldn’t explain the jolt of fear that it was about the way he looked, the way he spoke, that they had found something feminine hidden deep down and wanted to poke at it, like a child with a stick pokes a dead rat.

A smirking seventeen-year-old had explained that the real meaning. “Yeah, they started calling you meth-head. ‘Cause the only thing you care about is ice.” He chuckled, like this was a hilarious joke, and not a nickname that could completely derail Shane’s future career.

“What the fuck? That’s so inappropriate, you can’t fucking…”

“Whoah whoah. We know, we can’t go around calling you that. That’s why it got changed, to Captain Crystal.” Shane had almost punched the kid in the mouth, but settled for digging his fingernails so deep into his own palms that the half-moon shapes drew blood.

“That stops now. I’m your captain, nobody is calling me some fucking drug name. I might get drafted in a few months, if it got out to the wrong people… It stops right fucking now. Or I tell coach.” The kids mouth had turned down at the sides, any previous amusement gone from his face.

“It’s just a nickname. You’re the only one who doesn’t have one, Captain Hollander.” The kid managed to make his title sound sarcastic, as if he hadn’t earned the C with his sweat and blood, and fucking skill.

Some captains got nicknames that referenced their records, their specialties on the ice, the food they ate before a game, the clothes they wore. Shane would have settled for anything like that, anything normal, any stupid inside joke as long as it put him on the inside.

Of course what they came up with had an undercurrent of disdain, that even though hockey was supposed to matter to all of them, the way that Shane liked it was too intense, was wrong.

Shane knew that he didn’t fit in with them, that he wasn’t fun. It wasn’t enough that he could shoot a puck between the opposition’s legs and into the goal before they’d had the chance to think about blocking. Dancing around their defences, skating faster and harder and refusing to apologise for it, saying no to every offer to go to a movie or an arcade or a party if it took him away from the ice.

Then there was the other thing, that nobody mentioned directly, but that he saw every time players on opposing teams noticed the shape of his eyes, then noticed the C on his chest, and took a few extra seconds putting those two things together.

So it took some time to decide whether the confrontation was worth it, if the ‘team chemistry’ would be better tomorrow if he let Connor have his stupid fucking party. It wasn’t like Shane was sleeping either, even if he was treating his insomnia by running through play adjustments, instead of with alcohol.

The smash of breaking glass and the laughter that came after it was what finally prompted Shane to stumble next door, not even stopping to put a shirt on top of his basketball shorts.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
(TW- Nothing graphic happens in this scene but you can skip it if you want. Shane goes next door to stop three of his teammates party, finds a drunk girl on the bed, his teammate Connor punches him and he takes the girl to the hotel desk to get help)

Marcus was the one who answered the door, face slackened by the whiskey and shaping into a smile when he saw Shane. The buttons on his jeans were undone, the top of his underwear visible. Shane wouldn’t realise he’d noticed this fact until later, when hard faces were asking him for every detail he remembered.

“Captain Crystal! Come in, join us!” He cheered, slinging an arm around Shane’s shoulders and pulling him further into the room.

“Oh! Hollander, are we being too loud?” Connor’s voice had the edge of surprise, not quite as smoothened by liquor as Marcus’ had been.

“What the fuck are you guys thinking, having a party the night before the finals?” Shane hissed, noticing Matthew sitting on a chair in the corner, smoking a cigarette in his underwear. There was a scratch on his arm, one that was bleeding slightly. This was another detail that Shane wouldn’t pay attention to until later.

“Hollander, we’ll turn the music down, we were just about to go to bed,” Connor said, walking over, alarm registering on his face. Before he could get close enough to shoo Shane out of the room, Shane heard it, pulling his gaze away from his debauched teammates and towards the bed.

Lying flat on top of the sheets is a girl, her short sparkly dress pulled up so that Shane can see her underwear, can see bruises starting to form on her thighs. This is a detail that Shane notices immediately, as soon as he sees it, but he can’t really understand it until later. The girl is crying.

White noise takes over Shane’s hearing, a ringing in his ears that drowns out Connor’s suggestions that Shane should go back to bed, that they were just having a bit of fun, that he should lighten up. He shoves Marcus away from him, the other man stumbling a bit, still unsteady from the alcohol. He walks over to the girl on the bed, sees the makeup smudged all over her face, the snot running down, the way that she’s just lying there crying and not even covering her face with her hand.

He kneels next to her, doesn’t want to touch her. “Hey, are you alright?” She has no reaction, just keeps crying.

“What did you guys do? What the fuck did you guys do?” Shane asks to the room, and only Connor seems to even understand the question.

“Hey, Hollander, think about this. I know how it looks, but she came onto me! She asked for this, she wanted all of us.”

Shane can’t look at him, not when every word out of his mouth is making this worse, making it even clearer that the horrible thing Shane thinks has happened is right.

The girl has started to make different noises now, guttural gasping ones. Shane thinks she might be choking, might be trying to throw up, and she’s lying on her back, and he knows from the first aid course he took once he became captain that it’s not good. He leans over to try to move her, and she flinches when he touches her, and then Shane wants to cry too.

“I’m sorry,” he says to her “I have to move you, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to…” He lifts her up from the bed as gently as he can, while Connor is still making babbled excuses.

He doesn’t know what to do, just that he needs to get her out of this room, because the walls are starting to close in, and he doesn’t want her to be crushed, and so he has to pick her up because he doesn’t think she can walk out by herself.

“I’m getting you help,” Shane says to her, even though her eyes aren’t looking at anything and there are still tears coming out of them.

He walks towards the door, and Connor steps in front of him, blocking his way, hands up in front of him like he’s trying to calm a horse.

“Shane, you need to think about what you’re going to say, what you’re going to tell people. Because it’s not good for any of us. You’re the captain, you need to think about what’s good for the whole team…”

Shane tries to step past him, and Connor follows.

“Connor, let me out of this fucking room, look at her! Just let me out.” Shane is pleading even though a distant part of his mind knows that it’s not the reaction he should be having.

“Shane, if you go out there, I’m telling everyone that… that it was you. You’re the captain, I’ll say that it was your idea, that you made us do it. They won’t draft you if this gets out, you’ll never be able to play again. Is it really worth it, for some whore?” Connor’s voice is like poison but Shane can barely hear him, can just hear the thumping of his own heartbeat in his ears.

He comes towards Connor again, and this time the other man pulls his arm back and punches Shane in the face, so hard that Shane can feel the blood vessels bursting. Shane staggers back, pain rushing through him, trying to keep a tight hold on the girl in his arms. It seems to throw Connor off almost as much as him, and the other man stops for a second to look at his own fist, as if he can’t believe it himself. Shane sees an opening and pushes past him, runs out the room, down the corridor, takes the stairs hard enough that the girl’s head bounces against his bare chest and he has to slow down.

He bursts into the lobby of the hotel, empty except for one man standing in front of the desk and the hotel concierge. Shane doesn’t think about how it looks, a half-naked man carrying a girl with rips in her dress and mascara running down her face.

“She needs help! You need to call an ambulance or something because she’s not alright. She was… she was in my teammates room, the room next door, and I think… I think something bad happened to her.” Shane rushes it out in one breath, and then everything that happens after that is a blur.

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(End of TW)

On Saturday morning, Shane wakes up at his usual time of 6am, trains for three hours in the gym, and then notices that he has a text.

>>>Unknown sender, 9:04am

Shane Hollander, it is Ilya Rozanov, your captain. You have not seen Russia. I will show you today. Meet me outside apartment 1221.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:05am

What the fuck?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:07am

You go to apartment gym, grocery store, and back to apartment. You have not seen any of Moscow, most beautiful city in the world.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:08am

How did you get my number? Why are you tracking my movements?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:09am

I am captain, I have everyone’s phone number. And I talk to Sergei, ask how his day is, he says you never call him. Your driver is very lonely because you are so boring.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:11am

It’s none of your business where I go.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:12am

You do not want to be here. Fine. But you cannot let it cause problem with the team.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:13am

So this is my punishment for punching Grant. Even though he deserved it.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:14am

Grant is asshole, who could not score if they replaced hockey net with football net. But team is team.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:15am

Why do you care? You fucking hate me.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:16am

I am Alternate Captain. Is my job to make sure team is happy. Team says I must take sad Canadian boy for fun day out so that he does not punch teammates in face.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:25am

Fuck, fine. I need someone to come with me to the bank anyway.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:09am

Wow Hollander. Now day out might be too fun.

Shane puts on his outfit of a blue shirt and black sweatpants, and knocks on Ilya Rozanov’s door. They’re not just in the same building, but actually the same floor. Rozanov answers the door in a fashionable denim jacket with a T-shirt and black pants, and a pair of what are probably expensive sunglasses. His golden chain is just visible below his shirt.

Shane feels like a child dressed by his parents, which is partially accurate because his mother still buys most of his clothes.

Rozanov looks him up and down.

“You are ready to go? This is what you wear for first big day out in Moscow?” Rozanov asks.

“You’re a fucking asshole. I can’t believe I’m choosing to hang out with you.” Shane says, and Rozanov smirks at him.

“Well, is not really choice.”

They get down to ground level, and Shane looks around for Sergei. Rozanov sees him do it and laughs.

“Shane, did your legs fall off? Come, is nice day, we are walking. Do not be so American, you are in Europe now.”

“Fuck you, I’m Canadian,” Shane says, and starts walking faster than Rozanov, even though he doesn’t know where they’re going.

Rozanov speeds up, until they’re both walking so quickly that they’re basically hopping along the pavement, and nearly collide with a woman who turns the corner suddenly, pushing a baby carriage in front of her.

“See, you are an asshole, you almost killed that lady,” Shane says when they get past her, as if he had no part in it at all. Rozanov snorts back what might be a laugh.

As soon as they get out of the residential area, and into the wider streets, Shane can feel the anxiety start to creep up on him. He hasn’t been outside like this, where people can see him, in months. The hockey rink is different, because he’s supposed to be there, and he times his grocery store visits to the late evening, so the place is mostly empty.

He can feel the throbbing in his chest, and the urge to give up and go back home gets stronger the more people they see. Are people looking at him? He can’t quite tell, but his brain is sure that they must be, because it got used to spotting stares and whispers every time he left the house, and now it can’t get out of the habit.

A man sitting on a bench looks at them, and he does a double take, and Shane freezes. Rozanov notices immediately, coming to a stop next to him. The man on the bench points, and says “Ilya Rozanov?”

“Ah, it is me. Nice to meet you,” Rozanov says, and goes to shake the man’s hand. “You are a Spartak fan?” The man nods.

“Hollander, take a picture of me and my fan,” Rozanov says, grinning at him. The man flips open his phone, and hands it to Shane, who manages to get a grainy picture of Rozanov looking smug with his arm around the man.

“You see, I am very famous in Moscow. Maybe not as famous as you are in Ottawa,” Rozanov says, and Shane’s heart lurches. “I saw all posters when I was there for tournament,” Rozanov continues, and Shane realises that he’s talking about the before, not the after.

“Oh, right,” Shane says, because he can’t think of anything else.

“In Russia, nobody know who the fuck you are,” Rozanov says, and it’s a chirp, obviously, but it’s the most comforting thing that anyone has said to Shane in the last six months.

“They will,” says Shane, because he can’t resist the chance to chirp back.

“Maybe, if you play well. Spartak is very good team, and you will be a good centre. Not as good as me obviously.”

“Obviously.”

Rozanov looks at him a bit more seriously. “Is not the NHL, but is not nothing. Boys in Russia dream of growing up and joining KHL. Do not treat it like it is nothing.”

For the first time, Shane actually does feel like an asshole, because he has been doing that, a little bit. There’s a thing inside him that urges him to be the best, to push himself harder and win more and grit his teeth through the pain. And that is what helps him win, but there’s an arrogance to it too. He’s been turning his nose up at the second-best league in the world, and clearly Rozanov has noticed.

For the next few hours Rozanov takes him through one of the most bizarre sightseeing tours of Shane’s life. He takes him to the Kremlin, past the buildings that Shane has seen in pictures so many times but never in real life. Instead of any kind of historical knowledge, Rozanov describes all of the different places in Moscow which are good for underage drinking, and all of the places that he has spent time with beautiful women.

“You are very lucky, all the most beautiful women in the world live in Moscow.”

“That can’t be true.” Shane looks around, and finds that Rozanov does have a point. He’s not really noticed it before, but the streets do seem to be filled with an unusually high number of supermodel look-alikes.

Shane doesn’t think about the reason that he hasn’t noticed, which is that his brain has been too busy noticing the way that the light glints off Rozanov’s curls, and the masculine tilt of his jaw.

“Anyway, now we go to Gorky Park. It is fountain season, so we have no choice. I would be very bad tour guide if I did not show you,” Rozanov says.

They have just spent the last twenty minutes looking at things Rozanov wants to buy in the Calvin Klein store.

“You are a terrible tour guide. I googled that building you said was an important church where the patron saint of Moscow died, and it’s just some guy’s house.”

“Ahhh so now I have to know every building in Moscow?” Rozanov looks at him with one eyebrow raised, the amused glint back in his expression.

“The customer is not satisfied. You will be getting no tip and a one star review,” says Shane, and Rozanov actually laughs.

They walk around some admittedly nice fountains, and past mounds of giant beanbags with people lounging on them. Shane thinks about lying next to Rozanov on a beanbag, how their combined weight would squeeze them next to each other. He decides to focus on the flowers instead.

Rozanov looks longingly at every dog that passes them. Sometimes the person on the lead will be a hockey fan, and Rozanov will excitedly exchange a picture for a chance to pet their dog for five minutes. He’s childish, rolling around on the grass with them, letting at least three dogs lick his face. After the fifth time Shane is asked to take a photograph, he starts to think that this might have been the real reason why Rozanov agreed to this sightseeing tour in the first place.

They sit in the sunshine, Rozanov eating an ice cream and Shane trying hard not to watch him do it, and instead focus on the ducks in front of him. Then Rozanov’s phone rings and his whole face shuts down.

“Da, papa.”

He talks in Russian for about five minutes, and the only words that Shane catches are the ones for “father” and “money”. Whatever is said, Rozanov is like a different person once the phone call ends.

“Hollander, I have something to do now. I will call a cab, Sergei can drive you home.”

“Are you alright?” Shane asks, because Rozanov looked genuinely happy a minute ago, and now a storm cloud has taken over Rozanov’s features. “We didn’t even go to the bank yet.”

“Hollander, I am not your fucking babysitter, you figure it out.”

Shane sees Rozanov later that night, arm slung around a girl, her giggling loudly. He has one hand resting on her ass, and the other one attempting to open his apartment. The girl is definitely older than him, probably in her late twenties, which Shane personally thinks is weird, but whatever, Ilya is nineteen so he can do what he wants.

He looks absolutely nothing like the boy in the park.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you for reading, let me know what you think!

Another intense chapter. This fic does have a happy ending but it takes a while to get there.

I couldn't find out when the giant beanbags were added to Gorky Park, so if they didn't exist in 2010 that's on me. They look very comfortable.

Every chapter begins with a newspaper article, the workskin is by LostQuill you can find it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84721106

 

Next chapter will be uploaded early next week.

Chapter 3: Chapter Three

Chapter Notes

When Shane arrives to practice, he immediately gets pulled into a side office by one of the coaching staff, and yelled at for punching Grant in the face. Shane shrugs through it, says that he’s sorry and that he fucked up. They don’t actually make him apologise to Grant, which is good because he would definitely refuse.

Rozanov is still ignoring him at practice, but the quality of it feels slightly different. Now there’s something more conscious about it than before, like it’s a specific decision that Rozanov is making.

When his parents call and ask him if he’s seen any more of the city, he describes his little day trip with Rozanov, seeing the churches and the park. For some reason he doesn’t tell them that it was Rozanov taking him around, even though they would probably be happy about it. They would get the wrong impression, think that he’s settling in, that he’s making a friend.

Rozanov isn’t his friend. It’s not quite like that. He is Rozanov’s responsibility, something that he has to manage.

Because Shane has fucked everything up, Rozanov has to come and pick up the pieces, including apparently taking him on a field trip round Moscow.

That week Rozanov isn’t there for practice, because he’s doing some kind of promotional shoot in Canada. He doesn’t expect Rozanov to text him about it.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 10:30am

Do not punch anyone, while I am gone.

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:45am

Fuck off

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 10:47am

You must be a good boy and wait for your captain to come home and save team. I know they are useless without me.

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:48am

You’re an asshole. I scored eight goals in the scrimmage yesterday. Your best is seven.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 10:50am

No, my best is eleven. I have been on team longer than you.

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:52am

How is Canada?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 10:55am

Very boring. Also, they are making me do commercial with Korogyi.

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:57am

…Who’s that?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 10:58am

Haha. I know you remember man who was standing next to you at the draft. Number three. It would be you here, if you left that girl alone.

Shane doesn’t actually remember putting his phone down, which means he might have dropped it. He forgot that Rozanov has the ability to do this, to draw him in and then land hits harder than a heavyweight fighter.

The worst part is that he can’t even argue, can’t defend himself. It’s not a quip or a joke or even an insult, really. Just a factual statement, based on all the information that Rozanov has. It shouldn’t make Shane feel like he’s been pushed into icy water, and he’s clawing at the air, struggling to get to the surface.

He doesn’t text Rozanov back after that, hopes that he got the message. Rozanov sends him three more texts about random things. A dog he saw in the street that apparently looks like their coach. The fancy sink in his Toronto hotel room. The number of times someone has said sorry to him in the last hour.

He means to not respond at all, but the next day, Rozanov texts him again.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:15am

Do they have Dunkin Donuts in Canada? I want donuts

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:25am

You should not be eating donuts. But if you’re going to, Tim Hortons is 1000x better than Dunkin.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:27am

Hmmm but in Boston they tell me Dunkin is best. This was very important American culture lesson, America is the best at everything. So who is lying?

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:28am

They are lying. They are taking advantage because you are young and new to the country.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:50am

Canada is maybe best at one thing.

Rozanov attaches a picture of him eating one of the donuts. It’s gross, his mouth is gaping wide, and there’s powdered sugar on one of his cheeks. Shane can tell from the glint in his bright blue eyes that he’s smiling. Shane keeps looking at it, then goes to delete it, then stops himself. For some reason, deleting it makes him feel more uncomfortable, because it’s just a stupid photo and so Shane should have no reason to do that.

Looking at the picture gives him a swooping feeling in his stomach, which Shane decides is an outpouring of his Canadian national pride.

After Rozanov’s little tour of the city, Shane feels slightly more comfortable going outside. He’s started to run on the streets instead of always on the treadmill, going a bit further every day, but the progress is still slow and frustrating. Sometimes it feels like being trapped in a video game. The places he knows, places he’s been before are lit up. Safe. But everything outside of that is dark and dangerous, and he needs to explore it carefully, uncovering a bit at a time.

Shane doesn’t really have anything else to do, so learning Russian takes up most of his free time. He has a Russian dictionary, and there are quite a few helpful YouTube channels dedicated to beginners. If he’s going to be in Moscow for a year, then he wants to at least be able to handle the basics.

Learning the Cyrillic script is a lot trickier, and Shane isn’t as concerned about doing it, but there are obviously some important words like ‘pharmacy’ or ‘danger’ that he needs to know. One of the first words that he looks up outside of that is the word for ‘ginger’. Moscow apparently does have ginger beer, but no Canada Dry, so he buys all of the ones that he can find to see if he can match the taste.

Shane quickly hits a problem with his language learning progress, which is that at the moment, there’s nobody Russian who will talk to him.

Most of the Russian guys on the team stick together, and don’t make much of an effort to speak to him, even if they do know some English. They might be taking cues from Rozanov, who barely acknowledges him during practice. Then there’s the fact that he gave a black eye to the first person who actually tried to be nice to him.

Also, Rozanov told the whole room on the first day that he was probably a sexual predator.

Shane’s been trying to put that to the back of his mind, but it gives him a hot rush of humiliation every time he thinks about it. It also means that none of Rozanov’s behaviour makes any sense to him at all.

Why would Rozanov text him pictures, and take him to see the city, if he thought Shane was such a scumbag? He claimed that was just due to captainly duty, but surely someone else could have done it. Maybe it was all in Shane’s head, but Rozanov seemed to actually enjoy himself, to let his guard down a little.

It’s extremely confusing, and Shane doesn’t have an answer, so he decides to work on problems that he can fix instead.

If he wants to get better at Russian, then he needs a conversation partner. It feels rude to corner any of the staff members at the rink, even though they would probably be willing. Shane already has anxiety talking to new people, and the idea of doing that in a language he’s not fluent in is terrifying.

He could just hire a teacher, but he wants a more casual interaction than that, something that will force him to try to have an actual conversation. Shane decides the best option is to get a haircut.

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:31am

Do you know any good barbers in Moscow?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 11:40am

What, your mother cannot fly over and cut your hair?

>>>Sent by Shane, 11:45am

Fuck off, I just don’t want to come out looking stupid.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 11:47am

You do not want stupid haircut? Shane you should say this six weeks ago when you got last hair cut.

>>>Sent by Shane, 11:48am

Fuck. Off.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 11:50am

I have good barber. He does not speak English. Does good job, I do not think you can afford him.

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:52am

What’s the shop called?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 10:55am

Is called Chop Chop. Show your barber this: Пожалуйста, сделайте мне такую же стрижку, но чтобы она выглядела хорошо

>>>Sent by Shane, 10:57am

What’s that?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 11:01am

It says, ‘Please give me same haircut, but actually good,’ this is what you want no?

>>>Sent by Shane, 11:02am

Fuck you.

Shane shouldn’t be asking that asshole for recommendations. There’s a chance he’ll send Shane to a shithole just to humiliate him. But the idea of going to a completely new, unknown place also sparks his anxiety. His brain has latched onto the fact that Rozanov showed him around and nothing bad happened, and now it wants Rozanov to tell him which places are safe.

Shane has kind of a thing about getting his hair cut, which started a couple of years ago. He can get a bit startled when the clippers turn on, so he really needs someone who is willing to do it slowly. It’s all stupid and irrational, but his therapist told him that sometimes fighting the irrational thoughts made things worse.

Instead, it was better to gently work around them. That’s why he still regularly gets haircuts even though it makes him a bit uncomfortable every time, like exposure therapy. Listening to Rozanov’s recommendation will make things feel a bit better, so he should just do that. Also, as annoying as he is, his hair always looks good.

He can tell the haircut is going to be expensive before he even walks in because of how many artsy tattoos the barbers have. It’s so typical of Rozanov, exactly the kind of place that he would usually avoid, but the barbers here will probably take their time, which is what he wants. Plus, he does actually need a trim anyway.

Rozanov was right, the last person who cut his hair was his mother. Not because Shane doesn’t know how to find a good barber, but because it was seven weeks ago, and seven weeks ago Shane didn’t leave the house.

He doesn’t think Rozanov was trying to pick at that wound, but it still hurts.

The man in charge of Shane’s hair has a carefully trimmed beard, and a pair of large plastic glasses that he probably doesn’t need. He looks reliable enough, so Shane shows him Rozanov’s message, because he definitely doesn’t know enough hair-related words in Russian to describe what he wants otherwise.

“Hello. I am friend of Ilya Rozanov. He said to show you this,” Shane says the sentence that he rehearsed four times in the car on the way here.

“Ok, I can do that.” The barber replies, then takes Shane over to wash his hair.

“There is weather today. It is rain,” says Shane, because he just practiced the part of his English to Russian textbook that describes the weather.

The barber smirks a bit. “Do you like rain?” He asks very slowly.

“Yes. I think rain is good. Do you like rain?” Shane manages to ask.

The barber seems to know what is going on, and does a valiant job of talking with Shane about the weather, what he likes to do for fun, and the different types of animals on a farm. It probably feels like having a conversation with a particularly chatty three-year-old, but Shane doesn’t care because he manages to practice almost all of the vocabulary in the first four sections of his textbook.

Shane pays and then schedules another haircut for two weeks time, for when he has finished the next set of example sentences.

-

-

Team pictures happen that week, which makes Shane even more glad he decided to do something about his appearance. It takes up a whole afternoon practice, which is annoying, but the photographer seems interested in having Shane in her camera lens, and that can only be a good sign.

Clearly, the team didn’t want to pay for a photographer until they knew who was going to make the team, and who was going to be cut. No official announcements have been made, but it’s obvious already which rookies need to work on their edges, and which of the veterans are getting too slow to skate three periods. Shane could draw the lineup easily and probably get it 95% correct. The fact that the photographer is interested proves that Shane was not a wasted investment.

Even though Shane missed months of training, his talent is still worth something. He can still be a star on this team, even if Canada doesn’t want him anymore.

After all of the group shots, there is time for individual and action shots. It’s almost physically painful watching Grant miss two shots on an open goal with zero pressure. He’s a defenceman, but Shane thinks he should still be embarrassed. Instead he’s skating up to the photographer and commenting on how cool he looks in his poses. Shane doesn’t like how close he’s standing to her, how much he’s crowding her space.

Rozanov starts making exaggerated kissy noises at them, which makes Grant take off a glove and give him the middle finger, then skate back to take more pictures.

The session ends with the photographer asking for more shots of Shane and Rozanov together. Although Rozanov won’t be on the team in the next season, he will be playing in the exhibition matches happening in the next few weeks. Rozanov is still a crowd draw, even if he’s leaving the team, and so they want some pictures of him with Shane to show the old and the new, the lead and his replacement.

The coach tells the rest of the team that they can go home, until it’s just him and Rozanov left on the ice.

The photographer tells them to skate towards each other, with a lot of intensity. Shane looks across at Rozanov, and does his best to school his expression. They get to the middle three times successfully, until Rozanov whispers nice haircut and Shane breaks, his face cracking into a smile.

The next three runs are equally unsuccessful, with either one of them unable to hold their expressions. The photographer is starting to get exasperated, and Rozanov apologises to her in a way that’s obviously flirtatious.

“We are sorry, you are professional, you try to do your job, I am sorry. Hollander, this beautiful woman is trying to take pictures, and you are making fun? It is no good,” He tuts, as if it was all Shane’s fault.

When everything is finally wrapped up, Shane goes to get changed while Rozanov says something that makes the photographer laugh, and then gives her his phone number.

-

Shane stands under the warm spray, letting it run through. Another person walks into the showers. Shane looks over, tense, and he sees that it’s Rozanov, naked and choosing a shower head two away from Shane’s.

And Shane- it’s about safety, he tells himself. He’s alone in the shower and he needs to make sure that Rozanov isn’t going to do anything fucked up. So Shane has to look at him, and there’s water pouring all over him, so of course Shane sees his body.

And Shane- Shane hasn’t got hard for a month, probably. He can’t remember the last time. It’s been so long that he’s forgotten that his body is capable of betraying him, of putting on a show.

Shane must make a noise, some kind of noise because Rozanov sees. He sees him looking and he sees what was happening to Shane’s crotch. He gets an eyeful of Shane’s pathetic desire, which Shane thought had withered and died with all the other non-essential parts of his personality.

Rozanov’s face shifts immediately, his eyes wide with alarm. Shane tries to stumble past him, to get out, but Rozanov grabs his wrist, and Shane braces for the impact, for whatever’s coming, and his heart is beating so fast, breath coming out all at once.

“Hollander, fuck, wait a minute.” Shane sinks to the floor of the shower, still trapped in Rozanov’s grip. His breath is coming shallow and fast, he feels a heavy weight in his chest. “Hollander, is just us here. I am not going to… I will not tell anyone.”

“Fuck, shit, fuck…” Shane can’t seem to form any actual words other than curses.

“Hollander, you need to calm down, yes? Is just me. We will talk about this somewhere, not here. At the apartment we will talk.” Shane’s breathing is still coming fast, but Rozanov hasn’t punched him yet.

“I’m sorry, I don’t even know why that happened I just…” Shane knows that excuses aren’t going to work, that he’s already made himself vulnerable in the worst way possible.

He’s let his body control him in Russia, where this kind of mistake could be the last one he makes.

“Shane, look at me.” Shane doesn’t want to look at him but finds that he’s doing it anyway. “It’s ok, because we have same secret, you understand? I will not tell.” His tone makes it clear what he means by the same secret.

Shane’s mind is immediately racing. Rozanov likes men? He can’t help the immediate spark, the little bit of thrill that goes through him before his brain has time to properly process it. It’s stupid, because Rozanov liking men doesn’t mean he likes Shane, especially since he’s just proved that he’s a fucking idiot.

Rozanov lets go of him and walks out the shower, even though Shane can see chunks of shampoo still stuck in his hair.

When Shane is finally able to pull himself together enough to finish washing and get out of the shower, Rozanov is already gone from the locker room.

It kept coming up while Shane was researching what it was like to live in Russia. A strictly traditional society with strongly negative attitudes towards homosexuality. He hadn’t thought it was important, that it applied to him. He wasn’t LGBT or whatever, he just had… weird thoughts occasionally.

Most people did, probably.

Shane has always been so good at controlling his body. What to put in it, how hard to train, when to keep pushing, when to stop. Ever since he saw Rozanov in that gym, sweat dripping down his body, Shane has known that these thoughts are another thing he needs to control. 'You become whatever you believe you are', one of his coaches had said.

At the time, he believed that he was disciplined, and strategic, and a good team player. A dutiful son, one that his parents could point to and be proud of. He believed it, and everyone else believed it too, and that was the same as becoming it.

Now the picture is all warped, too many people have pulled at the edges and ripped parts of it away. He doesn’t know what he believes about himself anymore, now that the outline is gone, he’s not sure what’s left.

He walks around with pieces missing, big holes that everyone can see. And still, Rozanov had reached in to find a deeper cavity and tore this out.

Rozanov has reached into him, and found something that’s not even part of the picture, but it’s still there.

The thoughts are still there.

Shane sits in his apartment for ten minutes, wondering whether he should pack a bag and go to the airport.

There’s a knock on the door.

Shane keeps sitting on the couch and pretends he doesn’t hear it. One more knock, and Shane forces his legs to move. He looks through the peephole in the door, and Rozanov seems to be standing on his doorstep alone, running his hands through his hair. The only thing he can really do is open the door, so that’s what he does, and Rozanov takes two steps inside then stands there, looking awkward.

“Hollander, put on some music,” Rozanov says, not making any eye contact.

“What?”

Rozanov keeps running his fingers through his hair. “Jesus, fuck, you are so bad at this. I do not want our neighbours to hear anything, so put on some fucking music.” Shane just stands there, and so Ilya stalks over and switches the TV on to some Russian version of MTV.

The loud pop music is completely inappropriate, so distracting that it actually takes Shane out of the situation for a second.

“Rozanov, why are you even here?” Shane asks. He’s feeling so detached from this conversation that he actually isn’t as stressed as he was earlier.

“Because you are being stupid and you are going to get into trouble. Bad trouble, not the fun kind.” Says Rozanov. “If you can’t control yourself, you don’t do that. Shower at home or something.”

It’s like a punch to the gut, the reminder that Shane can’t control himself sexually, that Rozanov thinks that he has some kind of horrible sexual perversion. The way that he looks at Rozanov doesn’t feel perverted, it feels inevitable the way looking at any beautiful thing is.

“I can control myself, I’ve been in a hundred locker rooms, and that has never happened before. I don’t even know why it happened,” Shane lies.

Rozanov rolls his eyes. “Well, it happened because you want to fuck me, which is fine. Is not fine trying to do that in public place. This is Russia.”

Rozanov’s tone is deadly serious. With one word he tells the whole story of what Shane read about in his research, the story of intolerance and hatred and gay bashings that end in brain haemorrhages. Shane tries to process the horror of that, what would happen if it had been someone else in the showers. His family, thousands of miles away, never knowing what really happened to him.

“Oh god. Fuck. Should I just go home? Maybe I should just go home.” Shane knows that his home doesn’t really exist anymore, that home means silence and panic attacks and people trying to find out his address so that they can put death threats through the letterbox.

“No, you do not need to go home. You need to handle it. Find a way to get what you want so you do not get hard in shower like fucking idiot.”

Shane looks at Ilya, pacing through Shane’s apartment, running his hands through his perfect curls, wearing one of those stupid tank tops that show off his arms.

Shane thought everything he wanted had already been taken away from him. His home, his reputation, his dreams of a Stanley Cup. But now Rozanov is offering him a new thing to want, and it’s a fucked-up thing, and Shane wants it so badly it hurts. Shane knows there’s a debt coming because there always, always is but he’s willing to pay it.

So he walks to Rozanov, puts his hands on his face. Asking.

He’s not stupid enough to think that Rozanov would want him, but he might let him have him. Just a bit of him, if it helps. Rozanov said he has the same secret, so maybe he also wants to handle it. Maybe he could handle it with Shane, they could do it together.

Will Rozanov let him have this thing, even though Shane is who he is?

“This is a bad idea,” Rozanov says, and then his lips are on Shane’s.

Every nerve ending in Shane’s body switches on, Rozanov managing to light him up with desire all at once. The chemistry that Shane thought he imagined, thought he dreamt up in a gym in Los Angeles.

Rozanov’s tongue slides against his and Shane groans, reaches his hands up, wants to touch him, can’t quite bring himself to. Ilya reaches out and gently guides his hands onto his body, then puts one hand underneath his shirt.

A part of him still thinks that Rozanov might punch him.

“Tell me what you want,” Rozanov says, after they’ve been kissing for a while, and Shane’s thoughts are like balloons floating away, he has to fight to catch them.

“I don’t know,” Shane says, which isn’t really true because he wants to touch more of Rozanov’s skin, and put his hands in his pants, and stroke him, and put his mouth on him, and watch him come, and do so many other things with him.

Rozanov pulls away again, then puts a thumb on Shane’s bottom lip instead, like a test. Shane opens his mouth and sucks it inside, looking into Rozanov’s eyes and seeing uncut desire in them. He knows what he wants but it’s like a mirage in the desert, he’s worried that if he reaches out to grab it he’ll find out that it never really existed.

“Can I… can I suck your dick?” Shane hears himself ask.

“From there? No, I don’t think so. Maybe if you get on your knees,” Rozanov says, and smirks at him.

“Fuck off, you know what I meant,” Shane says, and telling Rozanov to fuck off and watching him smirk back makes it seem like maybe this isn’t the end of the world.

“I want you to,” Rozanov says in his ear, and pulls his shirt off.

Shane’s used to not really knowing what he’s doing during sex so it’s nice that Rozanov is so clear.

Shane drops to his knees without really thinking, and he’s still not thinking when Rozanov pulls his hard cock out of his underwear. He taps it against Shane’s lips, and Shane opens just like he did a minute ago for Rozanov’s thumb. Rozanov waits for a second, just running his fingers through Shane’s hair, looking at him like he can see something precious.

“Hollander, you are being so good for me.”

Shane takes this as an invitation, lets himself slowly lick the length of Rozanov’s cock and hear him groan slightly. He sucks on the head, tasting Rozanov’s clean skin. He clearly took another shower in between coming here.

He takes Rozanov in as far as he can go, and tries to think about how to please him, but the memory of every girl who has ever tried to get him off is hazy and indistinct, and so he just relies on his own instincts and the rhythm of Rozanov’s breathing. Shane can feel how his own cock is getting harder every time Rozanov grips his hair, until eventually the other man pushes him away.

“Ohhhh stop, stop.” Shane pulls back immediately, panic flashing through him. He’s obviously fucked it up, because Rozanov doesn’t want him and he’s so bad at sex. He knew that he was already but it hurts to see it again, that fucking Rozanov thinks it too.

“Sorry. Fuck, sorry I shouldn’t have…” He needs to get away before he does something even more embarrassing.

“No! No Hollander, do not apologise. Is okay, just… it was too much.”

“Too much? Fuck, I’m really sorry, I thought that it would be okay…” Rozanov gently grabs his face to stop him talking.

“Hollander! It is ok. Just… I was going to come so quick, like… a fucking virgin, and I did not want to do this, so I stopped you. I did not think you would have panic attack about it.”

Shane looks up at Rozanov, who seems to be blushing slightly, his pants messily undone and a small pink mark on his neck from where Shane was kissing it earlier. He looks so handsome.

“Oh. Really?”

“Yes, really, you are happy now, making me say these things?”

The fact that he’s not the only one finding this embarrassing makes everything better.

“Oh. So you liked it?”

“Yes Hollander, I liked it a lot. What about you, did you like sucking my cock?” Shane thinks that Rozanov might be making fun of him again, but his expression isn’t teasing.

“Ah. Yeah, yes.”

“Good. We both like it, and nobody is upset. Now show me your bedroom, so I can lie down and let you do it some more.”

Shane leads him into the bedroom, which at least isn’t messy.

“Wow, so boring,” Rozanov says, looking around.

“The rooms are all the same. Your room looks exactly like this one,” Shane says.

“So neat. My bed is bigger,” Rozanov says.

Instead of responding, Shane pushes Rozanov onto the bed, which is okay because it makes Rozanov smile, like Shane is doing the right things.

“Take your clothes off, I want to see you,” Rozanov says, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to Shane, but it will stop them from getting dirty so it’s a good idea.

Shane can’t stop himself from folding the clothes into a little pile as he takes them off.

Rozanov strips off too, and Shane gets to see the hard planes of his abs, the fluffy hair trailing down to his thick cock. Shane’s not sure that he deserves to have sex with somebody so gorgeous, but since Rozanov is for some reason willing, he’ll take what he can get.

He lies down next to Rozanov on top of the bed, the awkwardness seeping back in for a minute. Rozanov leans over and kisses him again, then runs his hand down his chest, going lower and lower.

“Is this okay?” Rozanov asks, and Shane is too helpless to do anything but nod. Rozanov takes him in his hand and it feels so good, everything that he has never let himself imagine. Often when he touches himself he doesn’t think about anything specific, but sometimes hands are touching him. Shane’s always known that they were big hands, strong ones, and now it’s blindingly obvious that they’re Rozanov’s. The hands he brushed his fingers against in a gym in Los Angeles.

Shane gives in to the feeling for a minute, then remembers why Rozanov got him on the bed in the first place. Quickly, he pushes Rozanov’s hands away, leans down and goes back to sucking his cock. The sounds Rozanov makes are obscene, strings of barely coherent Russian, and maybe he’s praying because he can hear the words “oh god” repeated.

Eventually Rozanov pushes him away, finishes into his own hand, and the face he makes as he comes is the hottest thing that Shane has ever seen. Rozanov lies there for a second, breathing heavy, then leans over and kisses Shane again, hard.

“Ok, well this was fun!” Rozanov says, sitting up and wiping his hand. Shane looks over at him, the most aroused he’s ever been in his life, and lets that settle. Rozanov told him that he needed to handle it. Maybe what he meant is that he should handle it by himself.

“Okay,” Shane says, waiting for him to go.

Rozanov looks at him like he has two heads. “You will just let me leave?”

Shane can’t quite figure out his tone, so he just decides to be honest.

“Yes. You can go if you want.” This is already so much more than Shane thought he would get, and he’s going to guard the memories of it jealously.

“You think I am asshole,” Rozanov says, decisively.

“I know you’re an asshole,” Shane says, because it’s true. “But sure, leave if you want. I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“No! Shane, I want to do it. I want to show you how to do this, properly.” Rozanov says, then rolls over and takes Shane’s dick in his mouth, sucking hard.

Shane feels his eyes roll back in his head. He lasts for about five minutes of Rozanov taking him in deep.

It’s the first time he’s come in months, and there’s so much of it, and Rozanov swallows all of it with a proud expression on his face. He looks like he doesn’t feel ashamed at all, like this is another way he’s beaten Shane, making him come so hard he sees stars.

They both lie there for a second, and Shane wants to kiss him again, even though Rozanov might think it’s a bit gross considering where his mouth has just been. He decides to just do it anyway, and Rozanov responds, kissing him back. It feels so nice, like a warm buzzing in the back of Shane’s head.

The picture he had of himself before was obviously wrong. He can build a new one in Moscow. Shane Hollander isn’t a good team player, or a good role model so what is the fucking point in pretending. He controlled everything, and everything went to shit anyway.

He can’t control wanting to touch Rozanov, so he’s not going to. Maybe Rozanov will even let Shane do it again. Rozanov is only a few doors away, and there are other things that Shane has been curious about, that he wants to try.

Quite a large part of him had believed he was never going to have sex again for the rest of his life. Every woman in Canada who knows who he is despises him, and now even the idea of trying to flirt with a girl fills him with a cold fear. He’s seen how easily actions can be misinterpreted, and so a part of him had already decided that it wasn’t worth the risk. He’d just go without it for the rest of his life.

Rozanov has provided something new, shown him a way out. Rozanov is bigger than him, and probably stronger too. If he doesn’t like what Shane is doing, he can push him away. Plus Rozanov is so direct, so clear about what he wants from Shane, there’s no chance that he’s misinterpreting things.

If he can have enough casual, non-terrifying sex with Rozanov then maybe, eventually, he’ll get enough confidence to try it with a girl again. It’s exposure therapy, like the haircuts. Except exposure therapy is supposed to make you feel bad while you’re doing it, and everything he’s done with Rozanov felt amazing. So maybe it’s not quite the same.

Even if it’s something that Rozanov only wants occasionally, Shane will take it. He’s willing to wait if he gets to have this again, the feeling of their bodies together in a way that is so different from the ice, but synchronised in the same way.

“Fuck,” says Rozanov. He sits up fully in bed, his mouth a tight line.

“Hollander, I need your phone, give me your phone.” Shane hands it over, and Rozanov starts flicking through it.

“What are you doing?” Shane asks, sitting up now, like a bucket of cold water has been tossed over him. Is Rozanov going to text someone, tell someone, was this all just a really fucked up way to punish Shane?

“I need… our texts. When you ask about hair cut, I need to delete it. And before, from Canada. We do not call, we do not text, unless it is strict team things.” Rozanov says, thumb moving through Shane’s phone.

He could have just asked Shane to do it, but obviously he doesn’t trust him.

“Are there any men in your phone?” Rozanov asks, point blank.

“What?” Shane is still adjusting to reality, there’s still fucking cum on his hands, and now Rozanov is interrogating him like he’s committed a crime.

“Men. In your phone. Did you ever do this with any other men?”

Shane feels stripped bare, like the experience he’s just had means less than nothing. While it was happening it felt like something they were exploring together, something new and exciting. Rozanov was so attentive, checking in on him, making it feel like sex could be safe and fun. It was a stupid thing, a stupid thing he wanted and thought he could have, and now Rozanov is proving to him that he can’t have it.

“No. Have you ever fucked a man before?” Shane asks, and Rozanov bites his lip and looks down at the phone.

“Yes. And I was young, and not careful enough. This time I am careful.” Rozanov has his own phone in his hand now, obviously deleting the messages on his end of the conversation.

Shane thinks about all the girls he’s seen Rozanov kiss in the doorway of his apartment, the girls he’s touched in front of Shane. Even today, asking for the photographer’s phone number, calling her beautiful. Rozanov doesn’t need to be careful with any of them, and Shane feels the shame of it, that he has to be Rozanov’s dirty secret.

“Do you record your calls?” Rozanov asks, flicking through Shane’s phone again.

“No. Why would I do that?” Shane asks.

“Hollander, someone like you who has trouble from police, you should be recording calls anyway.” Rozanov doesn’t make any attempt to soften it, just says it plainly.

Shane feels like he’s been slapped. The thing that’s in the back of his mind all the time, the voice that tells him that everyone he meets despises him, thinks he’s disgusting. For just a bit, Rozanov had managed to make the voice go quiet. It feels cruel now, for Rozanov to touch him so gently, to tell him that he’s good, when this is what he really thinks.

It’s Shane’s own stupid fault, because it’s not like Rozanov has ever pretended to believe him. He’s never heard Shane out, or given him the benefit of the doubt. He’s been clear from the start, but somehow that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Rozanov said that someone like him should be recording his calls. Someone dangerous, someone who’s a criminal.

“I will put thing on phone, it makes sure calls are recorded. Someone find out, someone try to blackmail you, ask you for money, at least it is recorded.”

Shane thinks about what it means that ‘blackmail’ is one of the English words that Rozanov knows.

“But what if you call me, and…” Shane doesn’t even really want to finish the sentence, but Rozanov interrupts so he doesn’t have to.

“I will never call you. We are nothing to each other. We are teammates who live in same building.”

“So, we do this one time and now we can’t be friends anymore?” Shane asks.

He sort of wishes that Rozanov had told him the options at the beginning. They could talk and text and go out into the city, or they could do this. They don’t get to do both. He’d still pick the sex, but it would have been nice to know what he was giving up.

“We were never friends.”

“Well, I fucking know that, but in English we don’t have a word for when someone is a huge asshole to you all the time but also texts you pictures of donuts. Maybe there’s one in Russian,” Shane says meanly.

“Hollander, this is serious. I am just trying to be realistic.”

“So we’re never doing this again?” Shane asks, and Rozanov pauses, looks pained.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I shouldn’t, because you are so…”

Shane thinks he can fill the words in for him. Because Shane is so grotesque, someone who did something so terrible, Rozanov never should have risked putting his hands on him. Obviously Rozanov regrets it, thinks it was a huge mistake. It was Shane who had gone after him in the first place, Shane who had walked up and basically begged Rozanov to touch him.

“Ok. No, you don’t have to say it.”

Rozanov puts on his clothes and leaves, doesn’t even say goodbye to Shane.

Now that Rozanov has left, Shane has the space to freak out, have another one of his panic attacks. Two months ago in Ottawa he had one when he went to buy milk, and an old lady looked at him for too long.

Comparatively, Shane should be losing his mind now. He’s just had sex with a man, with his teammate, and if it got out it would completely ruin his life. It’s one of the biggest mistakes he’s ever made.

Except… Shane thinks about what a mistake is. A mistake is something that, if you could, you would go back and fix. Shane doesn’t want to fix this. He would gladly go back, but only so that he could watch Rozanov's face as he comes, one more time.

Shane’s life is already ruined. His name has been so thoroughly dragged through the mud that Rozanov barely makes a stain. Shane has been through enough already, he can let himself have this one thing, and not feel guilty about it.

If Rozanov hates him so much, then he shouldn’t have kissed Shane in the first place. He knew exactly what he was getting, right from the beginning.

Shane still doesn’t quite sleep through the night, but he only wakes up once, and his brain is calm enough to drift back to sleep.

Chapter End Notes

Let me know what you think!

I nearly split this into two because it grew so much during editing, but have an almost 8k chapter instead! Unclear whether the sex has helped the angst, or added more additional angst. Next chapter should be out by the end of the week hopefully.

 

Notes about homosexuality in Russia in 2010:

At this time, there's not really any specific laws against homosexuality, because the 'propaganda law' that bans 'promoting homosexuality' comes into place in 2013. Russia is one of the few places which has gotten worse for LGBT people in recent years. However, pride parades were not allowed, and in 2006 when activists held one anyway a lot of people got attacked and or arrested by authorities: https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/06/01/russia-investigate-attacks-gay-pride-march

Chapter 4: Chapter Four

Chapter Summary

Previously on The Ice is Colder in Moscow… Shane has moved to Moscow to play hockey in the Russian league after allegations he took part in a sexual assault the night before the Prospect Cup. Shane was not involved and instead tried to help the girl, but nobody knows that, including Ilya Rozanov, Alternate Captain of his new team. Despite this, Rozanov has shown him around Moscow, repeatedly texted him, and the two hooked up after Shane got hard in the showers. This mutually enjoyable hookup ended with Rozanov deleting their messages and implying it should not be repeated.

Chapter Notes

Shane wakes up at five thirty in the morning. It’s his usual time, and he begins his usual routine.

He makes his coffee, black no sugar, and carries it through his apartment so that he can drink it sitting on his sofa. He does not think about how yesterday, in the middle of this room, he got on his knees and took every inch of Roznanov’s cock. If he thinks about it too much it’ll drive him crazy.

For the last six months his world has been whirling around on its axis. Yesterday, for the first time, it feels like Rozanov was able to press his finger onto the surface and stop the spinning. Kissing Rozanov was stupid and dangerous, and one of the most natural things he’s ever done.

Even when Shane did things that were supposedly enjoyable, often some part of his body disagreed. Concerts were supposed to be fun, but his ears didn’t like how loud the music was. Fast food upset his stomach. Nightclubs gave him a headache.

Every single part of his body, from his toes to his skin to his bones hummed in agreement that kissing Rozanov felt good.

Practice starts later, and Rozanov treats him exactly the same as usual, with his blend of competitiveness on the ice, and contempt in the locker room. Shane makes sure that they shower at different times.

It’s selfish, and extremely stupid, to hope that at some point Rozanov will touch him again.
Clearly Rozanov regretted the whole thing, if his enormous freak out is anything to go by. He doesn’t even like Shane.

Which is not exactly a surprise, considering Rozanov thinks he’s a sexual predator.

It should cause Shane some kind of distress, but Shane kind of fucking hates him too. Rozanov is getting everything that Shane wants, the career, the money, the chance to play. They might be teammates for now, but in a few months Rozanov will fly to America, and Shane will probably never cross his mind again.

Someone else will be Rozanov’s big rival, will fight against his team for a spot in the playoffs. Soon there will be a shiny new player and everyone will forget about Shane Hollander, the wunderkind who never got his chance in the show.

It reminds Shane to call his lawyer, and ask whether there are any updates. He was supposed to do it yesterday, but his brain was too scrambled from everything that happened with Rozanov to think about doing anything professional. That plus the fact that yesterday he was feeling his first uncomplicatedly positive emotions in months, and was reluctant to disrupt that.

“Hello. This is Shane Hollander calling, could I speak to Mr Ryder please?” The receptionist types some things, and then puts him through.

“Shane! I was expecting you to call yesterday!” His lawyer says, in a tone that’s far too upbeat. In every single conversation they’ve had Shane has been filled with dread.

“Sorry. I got caught up with something. Hockey stuff.” Shane lies, unconvincingly.

“No worries, no worries. Anyway, how is Moscow treating you?” He asks in a friendly tone.

“Fine.” Shane says. He knows that these phone calls are billed at his lawyer’s regular rate of three hundred dollars an hour. Thankfully the Canadian Hockey Association is paying the bill and not him, but it still feels rude to waste their money.

“Alright. Well, I have some news about the case. Remember how before I explained that the civil case might not end up going to court?”

Shane doesn’t remember that conversation particularly well, because it happened in their first meeting, weeks after the day of The Incident, in the period where Shane was losing touch with reality and having panic attacks every day.

“Yes,” He says because it’s easier.

“Well, now it’s looking more like we will be going to court.” His voice has a note of frustration in it.

Shane can feel the fear hit him, that he will have to sit in front of a judge and explain everything, that they won’t believe him.

“And… what does that mean for me?”

Shane knows that innocent people go to jail for things they didn’t do all the time. It’s going to be basically impossible to find an unbiased jury, because his name and face were on the front of every newspaper in Canada. They will walk in, already deciding that he’s guilty, and it won’t matter what he says or his lawyer says because everyone has already agreed on the truth.

“Well, what you need to remember is that this is for the civil lawsuit. Miss X is suing the Canadian Hockey Association, not you. Until the police charge you with something and the criminal case starts, you’re not in direct legal trouble yourself.”

Shane had been paranoid about being charged by the police for months. It seemed inevitable that he would be, that police would look at the crime scene, and assume that he was involved, and needed to be punished. Then months passed and nothing happened.

“Yeah, you’ve explained that before. Is there any update on when the criminal trial will start?”

“Shane, that’s really not information that I have access to, it entirely depends on what the police decide to do. You could get lucky, and they might end up not charging anyone at all.”

Shane hadn’t even considered it, the idea that the police would just what, shrug their shoulders?

His stomach churns at the idea of going to trial, rolling around like the grey interior of a cement mixer. A trial is his worst nightmare, having to stand in front of people and explain everything that happened. To be questioned by a lawyer, who would undoubtedly make him look stupid, like a liar. The stress of saying the wrong thing too many times, of not trusting his memory, of disappointing everyone.

But the sweet relief of not going to trial is corrupted by the smell of that room, the tang of sweat and whiskey and fear, so thick it seeps into his lungs and chokes him. Not going to trial means sweeping away everything that happened; he won’t have to go to court but neither will his teammates. He can’t put it all in a pile in the corner of his mind, and pretend that it never happened. He doubts the girl can either.

“What do you mean, they might not charge anyone? They’ll all just get away with it?”

His lawyer is sighing at him again.

“Cases like this, it’s very difficult to get enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Depending on what the police were able to get, there might not be much hard evidence. It could be a case of ‘he said, she said.’ One person’s word against another. The bar for evidence needed for criminal cases is a lot higher than for civil ones.”

“But what about the truth? What about what actually happened to her?”

The truth is like the flaked over skin on a scab that won’t go away. Picking at it will hurt, but he has to do it. He needs to know whether what’s underneath is pink, healed over skin that looks worse than it is, that he can stop worrying about. He has to know, even if when he looks, he finds a wound that’s still bleeding.

“You’ve told me that you don’t know what happened to her.”

“I don’t, but clearly something fucking happened.”

His lawyer sighs again, and Shane can imagine the man sitting in his office, pinching the lines in between his forehead.

“Okay. We’re starting to get off topic here. Shane, you have a very strong sense of justice. That can be a good thing, but in this case, do you really want your teammates to be punished for something when you’re not even sure what happened?”

Shane is silent, can’t think of a response that would be appropriate.

“At the moment, we don’t know if there will be a criminal trial, and it’s not up to us. First is the civil trial. The civil trial is not about establishing your guilt or anyone else's, it’s about whether or not Miss X deserves financial compensation.”

“Oh. She does, probably.” The high cost of therapy was something he’d learnt himself, the hard way.

His lawyer sighs bigger. “Shane, I need you to absolutely never say that again in front of anyone else. It’s not your job to speculate about the outcomes of cases. You’ve done a really good job so far not talking to the press, and it’s more important than ever now.”

His lawyer has insisted from the beginning that he not talk to any newspapers, and holding it in has been so difficult when all he wants to do is scream that they’re all wrong, that he’s innocent. Then he described how it could hurt the case, hurt the girl, and Shane has managed. Sometimes it feels like he’s been stabbed, and he’s holding in bits of his internal organs, keeping the slippery bits of flesh from falling out. But he’s managed.

“Alright, yeah. That makes sense.”

“So, under ideal circumstances we wouldn’t go to trial at all in this case. The Canadian Hockey Association is very keen to get an out-of-court settlement. That means that Miss X still gets her money, without all the bother of a trial. But, she doesn’t seem to want to do things the easy way.”

Shane can’t help thinking good for her, for fighting. For not letting them pay her off without admitting why in front of a judge.

“Right. So when would we be going to court? What would I need to do?”

“Going to court is still a way off. At the moment the case is about to enter what we call the ‘discovery’ phase, which means that both sides are collecting evidence about what happened, to help with the trial. It’s very likely that you will be asked to give your testimony as a witness.”

He’d researched giving testimony before, when he’d assumed he would be going to court a lot sooner. It seemed deceptively simple, just describing exactly what happened in his own words.

“Ah. Will I have to do that in person?”

“Not necessarily. It’s just part of the evidence gathering, so it can be done over video call. I would be there, along with Miss X’s lawyer, and a Court Reporter. Her lawyer would ask you questions about what happened on that day.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

“What’s important, is that testimonies are done under oath. After you swear, just like in court, you cannot lie. Lying is a crime called perjury, and it’s punishable by up to fourteen years in prison.”

That hits Shane like a high stick to the face, cracking through his jaw. He can feel his chest getting tight, his breathing starting to get shallower. The lights in this room are too bright, and he feels hot.

“Fuck. What if I lie by accident? What if I don’t remember things right and I have to change my story later?”

His memories of that night are clear in some parts, but foggy in others. He remembers the room well, seeing the girl, what Connor said. But after he got her out of the room, everything gets a lot more blurry. It’s like his brain clicked into such high focus for that part of the night, that everything that happened around it has become indistinct.

“Relax Shane. Breathe. It’s only a crime if they can prove that you lied on purpose, specifically for your own gain.”

Shane starts doing the breathing that his therapist recommended, letting the air fill his belly before letting it go.

“I’ll just tell the truth. Whatever they ask me, I’m just going to tell them the truth.” Shane says eventually.

His breathing has mostly settled now, but there’s still a sharp arrow of fear poking into his lungs, making everything feel like it takes more effort.

“Of course! But, you also need to be careful. What you decide to say, or not say, could get your teammates into serious trouble. So you need to be absolutely certain about every detail. Now, this is a bit more difficult, because you already spoke to the police when you got arrested.”

“Right. Of course.” At the time, Shane hadn’t even fully realised that he had been arrested.

He’d been sitting in the hard plastic hospital chair, outside the girl’s room. He hadn’t asked to go in, because he was too worried that she would freak out when she saw him. He probably shouldn’t be there at all, because he couldn’t help with any of it. He hadn’t been able to help with the questions on the emergency call, or in the ambulance, because he didn’t know anything about her.

The police officers said that they had questions, and that it would be better if he answered them in the station. They mentioned the word ‘detained’, and Shane didn’t know what that meant, and he was more tired than he’d ever been and barely in touch with reality, so he’d just nodded. They hadn’t put handcuffs on him, or told him that he had the right to remain silent, like police did in American TV shows.

They just said that they needed to interview him. Which seemed reasonable at the time. They had mentioned lawyers, at one point. What they’d said was, “If at any point in our interview something comes up that you feel you want to talk to a lawyer about, then just let us know.” Shane wasn’t sure what kind of things you were supposed to talk to lawyers about. They said they needed his help with what happened that night.

You were supposed to help the police out, that was part of being a good citizen, he thought.

They’d taken his phone away, when he got to the station. He’d asked, beforehand, if he could call his parents, and they said he could do it later. That he could call a lawyer if he wanted, but not anyone else.

Shane didn’t know any lawyers.

So he’d just sat in the little room and waited around, until they came and asked him questions. He’d given the most honest answers he could think of. And by the time they were finished, he’d missed the tournament, missed his chance to appear on the world stage, missed his chance to get even with Russia.

Missed seeing his teammates again and having to come up with something to say to them.

“Your story needs to stay exactly the same,” his lawyer was saying. “If you change things, then it could affect your credibility as a witness. We don’t want you to seem unreliable. I know that’s very difficult, so we’re going to practice.”

Talking about it makes Shane feel like he is pulling his skeleton out of his own body, which he supposes is a difficult feeling.

“Right, that makes sense.”

“Ok. Tell me everything that you told the police officers when you were questioned about The Incident,” Mr Ryder asks, in a commanding tone.

Shane goes through it all again. It breaks him a little bit again.

-

He goes for a run after the phone call, to try to get some of the nervous energy out. Moscow is cloudy today, and so everything has a slightly dull, grey look to it. Despite that, the buildings manage to be as beautiful as always. He makes his way down to Gorky Park, the first place that Rozanov took him to on their one strange day out.

It’s a perfect place to run around, with long trails and clean air. He’s come here several times since Rozanov brought him, and every time the fear of being recognised gets swallowed slightly more, like a lump that’s no longer in his throat. Shane has been making his way around the city much more, visiting some of the churches and museums and trying out more than just his one grocery store.

The month has gone by so quickly that Shane can barely believe that he’s spent that much time away from home already.

On the phone last night, his mother asked him whether he thought coming to Russia had been the right decision.

In April, when the KHL scouts first started getting in contact, she had flatly told them Shane wasn’t interested. She was certain that soon enough, the real story would come out, the newspapers would stop printing horrible things about Shane, and he’d be able to slot himself back into the world of the NHL, where he always belonged. Joining the KHL felt like giving up, she said.

Shane had already given up on lots of things, including going outside and consistently brushing his teeth. He wasn’t sure what more he could possibly give up.

He asked for the number of the scout, and called them himself. It was a strange conversation, because Shane could feel them trying to convince him when he was sure it should be the other way around. He would do anything to keep playing hockey, even if it meant going to Russia.

The scout said that since Shane hadn’t taken part in the World Juniors, they would need to see his skills in person. It had been excruciatingly embarrassing to tell the man on the phone that he was banned from virtually every rink in Eastern Canada. He assured Shane that this wouldn’t be a problem. Shane was sent the address to a small rink about thirty minutes outside of Ottawa, with a Russian owner who let him in without a second glance.

Shane had almost cried when the familiar smell hit him, and from the moment he pushed off the ice he knew that it was a done deal. The NHL was the biggest, richest, best league in the world. The Montreal Metros still claimed to be ‘very interested’ in Shane’s future.

But the KHL had given the ice back to him.

He spent half a day doing shooting drills for an unimpressed audience of three Russian men in black suits. At the end of the day, they started drafting paperwork, but warned him that he was still behind their expectations, and that he would need more consistent practice in order to get there.

The Russian owner was willing to let him train an hour before everyone else arrived, and two hours after everyone had gone home for the night.

They gave him a copy of the key, and Shane treated it like the precious gift that it was. After a few weeks of arriving at 6am for his first session, and then again at 9pm, Shane realised that nobody was actually checking, and started arriving at 3am instead.

Shane became a nocturnal creature, hunched inside watching tape of Russian players, the TV glow reflecting off his sallow skin. Sometimes there were subtitles that he could read, but most of the time it didn’t matter, because hockey was something he understood no matter which language it was in.

Still, he expected to struggle, alone in Moscow. On the expat forums that Shane’s mother liked to read aloud to him, many Canadians talked about how Russians were cold compared to the people back home. People online complained about the lack of Canadian friendliness, how Russians don’t smile at strangers or ask them how their day is going.

Shane finds the lack of small talk incredibly liberating.

The loneliness he feels here has a different texture to how it was in Canada. There, his social network had been attacked, the wires sparking as they were cut away. The boy he thought of as his best friend, leaving all his messages unread. Someone who had attended his sixteenth birthday party describing to the press how there was ‘always something off’ about him. Shane never wants to go through that again.

In Moscow, nobody knows him, and the indifference feels like freedom.

By the end of the month, Shane still has some of the envelope money left over, but he doesn’t want to have to rely on it. Payday means walking into the boss’ office, a man Shane has never once met.

A large man sits behind the desk, smoking. Two security guards stand behind him, wearing sunglasses. It is completely ridiculous, like something out of a movie. Shane walks in apprehensively.

“Good afternoon,” Shane says, in his best Russian.

“Ah, the kid speaks Russian! I knew I liked you,” The man replies, gesturing at Shane.

“Little bit. Thank you for having me on the team,” Shane says, a sentence that he had practiced with his barber during his second haircut, until his accent sounded right.

“This is yours,” the owner says, handing Shane an actual silver briefcase full of money.

Shane isn’t sure whether it’s rude to count it in front of him, but the man is looking at him expectantly, so Shane decides to do it. By now his brain has adjusted, and he can convert Roubles to Dollars without really thinking about it. Even without his brain’s calculations, he can tell that the briefcase is too full.

“This is lot of money. I think… not good?” Shane says slowly.

“When we got you, you were cheap. Because Canada hates you. We thought maybe you would not play well. But you are playing very well. There is some extra.” The owner says slowly, probably deliberately choosing words that Shane will understand.

“Thank you. I can keep?” Shane asks, just to be absolutely sure.

“Just don’t spend it all on women,” The owner laughs, and Shane takes his cue to walk out the room.

Shane sits outside the room for a bit, texting his mother. She is still at work, but he wants to double check that keeping the extra money is okay. He probably wouldn’t spend it anyway, but he doesn’t want to end up in some kind of tax trouble with the Canadian government. Having a mother who works for the Bank of Canada has some advantages.

While he’s sitting outside, Rozanov walks into the room. Shane isn’t listening until the shouting starts.

He can’t understand every bit of the conversation, but Rozanov sounds desperate. “My money! … bastard… I need it.”

The owner’s voice is harder to understand, and Shane has to strain to hear it. “No… not yet… matches… score goals, get money.”

“Bullshit! We had a deal…”

Rozanov storms out into the hallway, grabs one of the plastic chairs, and smashes it into pieces. Then he picks up the pieces and walks over to the trash can, dropping them into it. He looks over, sees Shane, and does a double take.

“Why are you here, Hollander? Is private. Go the fuck home.”

His eyes are wide, an expression on his face that Shane hasn’t seen before. He looks stressed, desperate, younger than usual. With how smooth Rozanov acts on the ice, Shane sometimes forgets that he’s the older of the two of them.

“Sorry. I just wanted to check with my mom that the salary is ok. What happened in there?” Shane asks. Rozanov doesn’t look like he wants to talk about it, but Shane might as well try.

“What do I say Hollander? Do not fucking talk to me.”

Rozanov storms off, still muttering curses in Russian. Shane might not be able to ask what time it is, but a few weeks in a locker room has given him an encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian bad language.

It’s hours later, that Shane gets a text from Rozanov.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 7:30pm

I will knock on your apartment at 9pm.

>>>Sent by Shane, 7:45pm

What makes you think I’ll open the door?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 7:47pm

You have problem, I have solution

>>>Sent by Shane, 7:48pm

What problem do I have?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 7:50pm

You are desperate for cock.

>>>Sent by Shane, 7:52pm

Asshole. Fuck you.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 7:55am

Maybe later, if you are very good boy ;)

Shane puts his phone down and paces around his apartment. He can’t actually believe that he’s considering doing this again. It’s crazy, for the obvious safety reasons, and the less obvious losing-his-mind reasons.

It’s been what, a week since the last time? And now Rozanov wants it again. He can’t help the desire that sparks in the base of his spine.

After his freak out, Shane had been almost sure that it would be the only time, that Rozanov would never touch him again. It was so monumentally stupid that he could barely believe that it happened in the first place.

Rozanov seems to have no problem picking up girls, beautiful Russian girls. From what Shane has seen they like him, always giggling and touching his arm. If Rozanov has a steady stream of sex already, then it seems unlikely that he will go to Shane instead of getting it from the easiest source.

Then again, Shane probably offers something different to those girls. He’s a man, for one thing, and Rozanov obviously likes men on some level. He’d said that Shane wasn’t his first time with another man, so it must be something he wants at least occasionally.

Then there’s everything else about Shane. On the team, Shane is the only person who can match, or sometimes out-skate Rozanov. Does Rozanov get the same thrill as he does from hockey? Perhaps the sex is just an extension of the tension that they have on the ice.

Then there’s the final explanation, the one that makes him want to scrunch up into a ball and hide.

Rozanov thinks that he did something terrible, that he hurt a girl. Maybe this is his way of making sure that Shane doesn’t do it again. If Rozanov is the one fucking him, then there’s no way that Shane can go out and do something awful. And maybe he gets something out of that too, that he gets some kind of sick revenge in calling him desperate, making him get on his knees.

Whatever Rozanov’s real reasons are, Shane knows that he’ll open the door anyway.

At 9:07pm Shane is basically vibrating out of his skin, when he hears the knock at the door. Rozanov walks in wearing his usual uniform of sweatpants and black tank top, showing off his powerful shoulders. He closes the door behind him, then just like before he walks over to Shane’s sofa, grabs the remote, and turns the channel to Russian MTV.

He turns around, and Shane crashes into him, gripping those strong biceps with his fingers. Rozanov responds immediately, smiling against his lips. He flips them around, shoving Shane onto the couch. It stokes the fire in Shane’s belly, that Rozanov can move him around so easily.

“I was right,” Rozanov says, pausing to look at Shane, hair messed up and red faced. “You are desperate for cock.”

Shane growls, and pulls him down onto the couch on top of him. Rozanov is heavy, but Shane is just as strong, and it feels good to have so much of their bodies touching, rubbing against each other.

“You’re such an asshole. You’re the one who has a different girl every week.”

“Mmmm, just one a week? Now you insult me.” Rozanov says, wearing that infuriating smirk.

He starts kissing Shane’s neck, sucking lightly enough that it won’t leave marks. Shane can feel his pants getting tighter already at the stimulation. He reaches up to pull Rozanov’s tank top over his head, and catches another glimpse of his gold chain necklace. It’s an orthodox cross, a symbol that he sees everywhere now, in churches and the windows of houses and on pamphlets handed out by religious people. He thinks of Rozanov every time he sees it.

Rozanov pulls off his shirt, and puts a mouth on his left nipple, biting and sucking at the skin. Shane can’t help the moans that come out of him, and he strokes a line up Rozanov’s strong back. It’s like touching one of the statues in a museum, slightly forbidden in a way that makes him ache.

“Bed. Now,” Rozanov says. Shane stands up, and Rozanov waits. “You go first. I want to look at view,” he says, slapping Shane on the ass.

Shane huffs as he makes his way to the bedroom, even though the compliment pings the pleasure centers of his brain. He pulls off his sweatpants and tries to arrange himself on the bed in a way that looks appealing. He’s sure that it just comes off forced and awkward, but Rozanov pounces on him anyway.

He’s shed the rest of his clothes, showing off miles of golden skin and a cock that’s already half hard. Rozanov must be sensitive, if kissing someone he doesn’t even particularly like can get him that fired up. Not that Shane is any better, and he watches Rozanov’s eyes crinkle as he notices, as he takes Shane’s underwear off like he’s unwrapping a present.

Rozanov kisses him deeply, licking inside of his mouth and rubbing their tongues together.

“Get on your stomach,” Rozanov says, and Shane does it immediately.

He keeps touching Shane’s chest, but his fingers wander lower, grazing across Shane’s hole. Shane can’t help the way he flinches away from it slightly.

“Have you ever?” He asks, and Shane shakes his head. Rozanov makes a loud “hmmmm’ sound, almost a purr, as if Shane has given him the right answer. It sends a shiver through him.

“I’ve… touched it before. But never with anything more.”

“Is ok, I will be very gentle. And you will like, I think,” Rozanov says.

“Are you going to… put it in?” If Shane is prepared for what’s coming, then he can do it. He’s a hockey player, so he’s used to pain. He can grit his teeth through it if he needs to. Rozanov probably won’t care.

Rozanov hums. “I do not think you are ready. If I fuck you now, you will not beg me for more. I will just use my fingers. We will do it next time.” Rozanov gives his ass a little pat, like everything has been neatly decided. It’s degrading, being treated like something that might break, but it means that at least Rozanov doesn’t want to break him.

Shane still hadn’t been sure there would be a next time, if Rozanov had managed to get his fill of Shane already. Perhaps fucking him is the goal, and once Rozanov has done that he will finally be satisfied, and he’ll go back to his girls.

“Stay,” Rozanov says, like Shane is a dog he’s training. His muscles freeze, and Shane can’t help the way his body wants to listen to Rozanov, to obey him.

He comes back holding a packet of lube.

“Oh. I have some too,” Shane says, nodding to the dresser. He doesn’t expect Rozanov to go and open it, and take a look.

“It is Russian. You bought it here. For me?” He asks, and Shane wants desperately to deny it, but he can’t.

“Yes. Fuck off,” he says, feeling his cheeks heat. Rozanov smiles and then goes and kisses him some more, first his mouth and then across his neck, shoulders and back. He runs one finger, now slippery and smooth over Shane’s hole, and Shane can feel himself tense up again.

“How did you find it? Did you ask the person in the pharmacy for help?” Rozanov teases him, still making slow circles around Shane’s entrance.

“No. Fuck, I looked the word up in my dictionary before I went, ok?”

Shane manages to make his voice sound annoyed, but at the same time Rozanov slides the tip of one finger into Shane. He goes slow, making sure that Shane is adjusting as he works his way in. It feels strange at first, but different to all those times Shane has tried this by himself.

“я хочу купить смазка. This is how you say in Russian, I would like to buy some lube. For next time.”

Shane obediently repeats him, and Rozanov nods as he says it.

“Very good boy. Here is reward,” he says, and slowly works another finger in.

He pumps them in and out a few times, then curls them together and finds a spot inside Shane that makes him groan. He’s relieved that Rozanov put on the music, because it’s impossible to keep his moans in when Rozanov really starts going, rubbing against that spot inside him with one hand, and his cock with the other. The pleasure builds much faster than he thought it would. His own fumbling is nothing compared to Rozanov’s talented fingers, thick and unyielding, pressing harder every time he lets out a noise of enjoyment.

Rozanov is clearly enjoying this too, because he can feel how hard he is against Shane’s leg, rubbing himself slightly as he works the pleasure out of Shane. Rozanov manages to get a third finger in, and it takes an embarrassingly short amount of time before Shane is surrendering to the heat that’s been building inside him, releasing a load all over his chest and Rozanov’s hands.

“You liked that,” Rozanov says, and Shane can hear the satisfaction in his voice. He says something in Russian that Shane will not be looking up in his dictionary.

“Can I have this?” He asks, tracing a finger over Shane’s lips.

Shane opens his mouth, and sucks on Rozanov’s finger again, already determined to do a better job than their last time.

Eagerly he shuffles down, and takes Rozanov deep, trying to copy what the other man had done to make Shane feel so amazing. Rozanov grabs a handful of his hair and pulls, and Shane’s brain goes into the floaty state which makes it impossible to remember anything except the reality of the hard cock in his mouth.

This time when Rozanov is close and tries to pull away, Shane tightens his grip on his thighs, making sure that he releases all of it into Shane’s mouth.

“Oh, fuuuuck Hollander. Good, you are so good,” Rozanov pants out as Shane swallows all of it.

He flops backwards onto the bed, and Shane tentatively lies next to him, as they both get their breath back.

Shane’s been thinking about it since Rozanov walked through the door, and he knows that he shouldn’t ask, but the thoughts are starting to cloud his head again, and it means he’s losing focus on the nice feelings.

“Can I ask a question?” Shane says, before he can think about it too much.

“Yes. Maybe I will answer it, maybe I will not,” Rozanov replies, unhelpful as usual.

“Why me? Why not go to some club, find some girl?” Rozanov looks at him with an unreadable expression.

Shane can feel his body tense, like it’s expecting a blow.

“Hollander, you were there when I did not get paid. How can I go to the club, I don’t have any money?”

Shane considers the fact that the only reason Rozanov got into bed with him was because he can’t afford to go out and find a girl. It makes all of the overthinking about Rozanov’s psyche feel stupid.

It’s also a complete fucking relief. Rozanov is an asshole, but a regular asshole, not one who gets something out of punishing Shane for his fucked up past. He probably orders him about because he thinks Shane is bad at sex.

“Why won’t they pay you? Is that even legal?” Shane asks. He’s read about how shady the KHL can be, but he thought those stories were exaggerated.

Rozanov gets up and finds a cigarette and lighter in his discarded sweatpants. Then he lies back next to Shane as he flicks the lighter on. Shane hates the smell of smoke, but he can feel that hot strip of skin next to him again, so he doesn’t complain.

“Is because we are still training. They say they will pay when I play games, but not for just training. Is not what we agreed, but…” Rozanov shrugs.

Shane thinks about the extra money in the briefcase. He has a fleeting wild impulse to give it to Rozanov, which would be a terrible idea for so many reasons.

“That sucks, I’m sorry.”

“Is okay Hollander, I can cry into your big tits.”

Rozanov takes the opportunity to bury his face between Shane’s pecs. Shane can’t help the laughter that bubbles out of him as Rozanov does it. Rozanov’s laughing too, he gently puts one of Shane’s nipples between his teeth and pulls on it. Shane bites his lip, and Rozanov leans up and kisses him some more, dirty and with a lot of tongue the way that Shane likes it. He reaches a hand down to grab a handful of Shane’s ass again.

“Hmmm this is so nice. Such a good ass,” Rozanov says.

“What, looking forward to next time,” Shane says, which is risky because he’s not sure whether Rozanov was joking.

“Yes, so much Hollander, I want to fuck you,” He says, and the neediness in his voice should be off putting but instead it’s charming.

“What if I’m bad at it?” Shane asks.

“I will be so nice and gentle, you will like it so much. You came already from my fingers today, if I can make you moan like that with fingers, you will love my cock. Will be good, I promise.” Rozanov says, punctuating his statements with long kisses at the end of each sentence.

“Okay. And you’ll tell me if I’m being weird, if I’m not doing the right things?” Rozanov looks genuinely confused by this question.

He isn’t able to answer because his phone rings, and when he looks at it his face changes, takes on the wax figure look that he gets sometimes.

“Fuck, my brother.” He gets out of the bed, walks to the end of the room. The baby crying in the background means that Shane can’t understand anything on the other side of the phone, just Rozanov’s side of the conversation.

“I don’t have anything to give you. No, you fucker I… yes, it is payday. But they did not pay me! I can’t do that… ten thousand? The money I gave you already? You spent it on…I know you have a child!” Rozanov is running his hands through his hair, pulling on clothes so quickly that he takes one of Shane’s T-shirts instead of his own.

“Ok, ok. I am coming.” He hangs up, and looks at Shane, still naked on the bed.

He bites his lip, then leans over and kisses Shane one more time, all tongue and teeth.

Rozanov hasn’t asked for his phone this time, but Shane deletes their messages anyway.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments.

There's a fair bit of legal stuff here, which is hopefully understandable enough. I am not a lawyer, so if anyone reading has more expertise, let me know if I got any details wrong. I had to read a lot about Canadian law to get this together. Basic difference between civil law and criminal law everywhere is civil law = you vs a person/company (you did a crime and now you owe them money) while criminal law = you vs the government (you did a crime and the government needs to punish you).

The way that Shane gets arrested is completely legal. Police do not have to use the word arrested as long as they say that you are being detained, you do not automatically get a phone call to anyone in Canada (you can only call a lawyer) and they may phrase it deceptively eg "If there's anything that comes up while we're talking that you want to talk to a lawyer about, let us know." (I got this phrasing from a police interrogation video). Never talk to the police without a lawyer, because it is their job to get you to say as much as possible, and they're often good at it.

I based the description of Shane getting paid on what NHL players have said, and that's pretty much how they describe it. Also the KHL is kind of notorious for being shitty about pay so them stiffing Rozanov unfortunately tracks.

Next chapter out later this week! It is shorter but happier(?) ish for Shane.

Chapter 5: Chapter Five

Chapter Summary

Previously on The Ice is Colder in Moscow... Shane calls his lawyer, who says that since the victim is suing the Canadian Hockey Association, he will likely be asked to be a witness in the civil case, and needs to get his story straight. It’s payday, and Shane gets paid extra, while Rozanov doesn’t get paid at all. Shane and Rozanov end up hooking up for the second time, and Shane overhears part of a conversation Rozanov has with his brother afterwards.

Chapter Notes

Shane sits on the bench, his lungs burning and chest heaving. He’s already played seventeen minutes of this game, and he can feel it in his muscles. The adrenaline is stronger though, the roar of the crowd and thwack of the puck against the boards creating music more beautiful than any symphony. Shane wants to get back on the ice, wants to get himself a hat trick in his first KHL game.

His first goal had been a classic one, a sharp pass from his right winger, and Shane taking the puck just past the angle where it would be a sure thing, throwing the goalie off enough that he could get it into the top corner. Dynamo had responded by tailing him tighter, having their defencemen hound Shane like a hunted fox.

It didn’t matter, because Shane was faster, and the second goal had been practically handed to him after a bad pass put the puck two feet in front of his stick. Sometimes a goal wanted to be scored, and Shane had felt it the moment the puck touched his tape, even before he’d raced down the ice to slot it between the goalie’s pads.

His Russian linemate, Kablukov had rushed over and clapped Shane on the back, bonking their helmets together in celebration. When he’d gone back to the bench, every guy on the team fist bumped him, including Rozanov, breaking his no-contact policy.

For the last six months Shane has felt like a fish caught on a line, wriggling helplessly and struggling to breathe. Playing and winning, doing the thing that he does better than almost anyone else, is like finally being released into the ocean.

Now he can see that Dynamo is playing rougher, likely not wanting a shut-out in the first game of the pre-season. Koledov, their third line centre has the puck, and he’s taking it around the goal when he gets brutally cross checked by one of the Dynamo defenders, both hands and his stick shoving into him from the side. Koledov goes flying down into the ice, and the ref calls it immediately, as the defender throws his arms up and tries to protest.

The ref calls a two-minute penalty, and the defender slopes off reluctantly to the penalty box. Shane is up, ready to go on for the power play. The blood is fizzing in his veins, and he looks over quickly at Rozanov. His face has that predatory focus that means he’s out for blood. The power play is the only time that they get to play together on the ice, since Rozanov is the first line centre, and Shane is the second.

Six on five should make a goal guaranteed, but Dynamo had managed to hold out and kill the first two penalties. Shane is determined that this time they will be unsuccessful.

The game is reset, and Shane hops onto the ice. Rozanov is taking the face off, and Shane can see his lips moving, chirping in Russian. Rozanov taps his left foot twice, and Shane gets into the position that they’ve practiced.

The puck drops, and Shane can only hear the smack of sticks hitting the ice but instinct tells him the moment when Rozanov wins. He slides the puck over to where Shane is in exactly the right movement, and Shane doesn’t have to think before he takes off. He can feel Rozanov on his left side like a sword hanging in its scabbard, ready to strike at any danger.

Shane makes it around Dynamo’s centre, but his legs can’t keep up with his ambitions, and he sees the hit from the defenceman coming. A second before he goes down on the ice, Shane bats it off to where he knows Rozanov must be now. The crowd roars, and Shane feels the vibration through the ice, and as he pulls himself up onto his elbows he can see the moment that Rozanov sinks it.

Rozanov skates over, his face split apart in a grin as he clasps hands with Shane, helping him to his feet.

Dynamo can’t hold it together for the rest of the period, and when the final horn sounds, the whole team is on their feet, Shane getting hugged on the bench by the backup goalie, all of his pads making it feel like being enveloped by a giant sweaty marshmallow.

The team is jubilant in the way that hockey teams always are, and a bottle of vodka is cracked open immediately. Someone pours a shot into everyone’s mouth, and the locker room is pounding with some rap song that Shane should probably recognise.

Shane wonders how easy it will be to get out of the team celebrations. It’s their first win, but it’s only pre-season, so it means basically nothing. In his experience, hockey players just like having an excuse to party, and this definitely gives them one. As the top scorer of the match, he should probably be involved in any festivities, but surely they can just let it go?

The captain, Sorokin, comes and claps him on the shoulders, and says something that he can’t understand. Shane’s Russian is getting better, but there’s too much noise around him for him to have a hope of understanding. The guy must see his confusion, and so just starts miming drinking and then giving Shane a thumbs up. Shane shakes his head a few times, until the guy looks disappointed but lets go of his shoulders.

He looks around, probably for Rozanov to translate, but can’t find him and so Shane is able to quickly put his game day suit back on, and make it out of the locker room.

On his way out of the building, he spots Rozanov in a side room, an older man talking to him. Rozanov has his head hanging low, a tight, pinched expression on his face that Shane’s not used to seeing. In fact, he’s only seen it once, and that was on the day of the draft.

Shane looks closer at the older man and realises that he has seen him before, that this must be Rozanov’s father. His face is snarled up in a haughty expression, and he’s talking loudly, but not expressively, hands tight to his sides.

Rozanov is nodding, not contributing anything to their discussion. He doesn’t look like a man who has just won a match, he looks like a prisoner accepting their sentence.

Shane imagines how his own parents will react when he calls them and tells them about the match. It’s not easy to find English-language information about the KHL online, but his mother will have hunted it down like a bloodhound, so she might already know about their win. But they’ll still press him for every detail, getting more and more excited as he describes the highs and lows of each period.

If they were here now, his dad would probably finish by ruffling his hair, while his mom smiled and said how proud she is of him.

The only words Shane thinks he can understand are Rozanov’s final ones, because he says them so slowly.

“I’m sorry, father. I will be better next time.”

It feels like a mistake, because Rozanov scored a truly beautiful final goal, the kind of highlight reel clip that Shane will save and watch over and over.

Even before he joined the team, Shane watched a lot of clips of Rozanov, because it was good research. Because Rozanov was their best player, and Shane was coming in to replace him. Not because watching him skate made his gut clench, straining his eyes to see Rozanov’s face when he took his helmet off. He had really good reasons to watch videos of Rozanov, and so the vague feeling of guilt he always got afterwards made no sense.

Shane moves before Rozanov can leave the room and see him loitering, because Rozanov has made it extremely clear that they should spend zero time together, and it is pretty weird to hang around while he talks to his father. Shane wishes he could erase the look off his face because he looks absolutely tortured.

-

Shane does his usual routine, of getting ready to go to bed even though he still mostly doesn’t sleep. The excitement of winning is starting to wear off, and instead he’s feeling itchy and unsatisfied. He reminds himself that whatever he and Rozanov had is probably over, because Rozanov must have been paid, now that they’ve won a match.

He’d said there would be a next time, but he’s probably out at some club now, celebrating properly with drinks and models and the rest of the team. He doesn’t need Shane anymore.

Shane tries to not let the thoughts get to him, and spends an hour practicing the future tense in his textbook.

The words blur on the page. He had a big win tonight, so why can’t he give himself something that he wants? He deserves a reward.

He goes to the cupboard and digs out the one form of alcohol that he has in his house, a large bottle of vodka. He didn’t buy it himself, it came with the apartment as a gift from the team, and he has to undo the red ribbon around it as he opens it. He goes to the fridge and gets out a lime, and some Schwepps ginger ale, the closest thing to Canada Dry that he can find.

Drinking vodka alone in his room would be sad, but making himself a Moscow Mule to drink in Moscow feels more like having a cultural experience. The bottle must be expensive, because even with the generous amount of vodka, the cocktail is sweet and smooth, it goes down easy. By the time he’s finished it, Shane can feel a slight buzz, so he makes himself another one and drinks that too.

Shane sits on his sofa and thinks about how it felt when Rozanov touched him. He goes to the shower, switches it on, and brings the lube with him.

His own fingers aren’t as skilled as Rozanov's, but he imagines that they don’t belong to him at all. What if Shane hadn’t freaked out so much that day in the showers? Maybe Rozanov would have reached out and touched him, put his mouth on him, slid their bodies together.

Now that the idea of ‘next time’ has been put into his head, Shane can’t stop thinking about it, keeps jerking off to the idea of Rozanov pushing him down and shoving it all into him, biting his neck while he fucks him, claiming him. Shane thinks about Rozanov’s big hands gripping his hips, bruising him, and comes hard onto the shower tiles.

-

The knock at the door comes half an hour later. Shane definitely shouldn’t be awake, but he is, reading his most uneventful hockey book to try to force himself to sleep, even though the words on the page are making less sense than usual. Only one person ever knocks on his door, but Shane still doesn’t let him hope. There’s probably a power outage or something.

He opens the door, and Rozanov is standing there, clearly fresh from the club, wearing a ridiculous silk shirt with a tiger pattern. He grins when he sees Shane standing there in his underwear, reading glasses still balanced on his nose.

“What are you doing here?” Shane asks.

Rozanov steps inside, and shuts the door behind him, then immediately pushes Shane against the nearest wall, stealing his mouth. Shane can’t help but respond, gripping onto his hair tightly and pushing their hips together. Rozanov starts running his hands all over Shane’s bare chest, and Shane pulls away for a second.

He walks over and grabs the remote, switches it to Russian MTV. It’s the middle of the night, and any neighbours they have are probably asleep, but he can’t let go of the routine.

“You play so well today. But you do not come out and celebrate. As captain, is my job to give you your reward.” He comes back over to Shane, stroking his fingers over his stomach.

“Rozanov, are you drunk?” Shane asks, looking at his bright eyes.

“No. I had a few drinks. I am Russian, is not so much for me.” Shane looks at him carefully, assessing. It’s weird that Rozanov is here, but he doesn’t seem too intoxicated.

“You’re sure?” Shane doesn’t want to have to explain that it is very, very important to him that Rozanov gets these questions right.

“What, you want me to say alphabet backwards? Prove I can walk in straight line? I am all good, watch this.”

To prove his own coordination, Rozanov hooks his hands under Shane’s legs and hoists him up, carrying him in a perfectly straight line to the bedroom. He does it easily, as if Shane doesn’t weigh basically the same amount as him, and the display of strength makes Shane’s cock throb in his pants.

He throws Shane on the bed, and pulls his underwear off, looking like an excited puppy.

“Hollander, you wear glasses? You never show me before.” Shane’s hand flashes up to his face as he realises.

“Fuck, I forgot.” So Rozanov abandoned a club full of beautiful women, to find Shane looking like a stupid nerd. Shane takes them off and folds them carefully, and puts them on his bedside table.

Rozanov immediately grabs them, and puts them back on his face, nearly poking one of Shane’s eyes out in the process.

“Glasses stay on.” Rozanov hasn’t taken any of his own clothes off, and the imbalance feels slightly embarrassing.

“You should take your clothes off too,” Shane says as Rozanov starts kissing his thighs.

“Ah, I do not need to, is special reward for you. Score goals, get your dick sucked, is new performance system I am trying. I think it will be effective,” Rozanov says, reaching up to squeeze one of Shane’s pecs, lightly pinching his nipple.

“But I want to seeee you,” Shane whines. Rozanov looks up at him. Shit.

“Hollander, are you the one who is drunk?” Rozanov asks delightedly. His eyes find the glass that Shane was drinking out of earlier, and before Shane can stop him he grabs it and sniffs it.

“You were drinking! And you were trying to tell me off earlier. Hollander, you are so bossy, is so cute.”

“I just had a couple of drinks to celebrate, same as you. Are you going to take your clothes off or not?” Shane folds his arms commandingly, even as Rozanov licks a big stripe up his dick and makes him shiver.

Rozanov pulls off him, and takes off his shirt, letting it fall to the floor. It’s easy not to think about how wrinkled the silk will be, because now Shane gets to see all of his smooth skin and the muscles that make his mouth water. He takes his pants off too, and Shane can see that his dick is bulging in his underwear, just from sucking Shane off.

As soon as he gets his clothes off, Rozanov goes back to sucking, taking Shane’s cock deep and humming around it, the vibrations feeling amazing against his skin. Shane starts bucking his hips and tries to stop it, but Rozanov looks up at him, encouraging him, until Shane is moaning and gripping Rozanov’s hair, and coming down his throat.

“Ah, Hollander, your face when you come. I wish I could take a picture,” Rozanov says, looking at him fondly.

Then he picks up his shirt, and puts it back on.

Shane immediately reaches down, pulls it off, and throws it across the room.

“What are you doing?” Shane demands. Rozanov looks up at him surprised. Shane can still see the outline of his hard dick in his underwear.

“I thought we were going to… We had an agreement,” Shane says.

“Oh. Yes, well this one does not really count, is just special reward from captain for scoring me lots of goals.”

Rozanov makes a hand motion as he says it, like Shane shouldn’t worry about it. Shane is very worried about it. In fact, he feels like if he doesn’t get what he wants now, he is going to explode.

“What if I want it to count? They were my goals, shouldn’t I get to choose my own reward?” There are stars in Rozanov’s eyes, and Shane can tell from the way his lips are twitching that he is fighting a smile.

“Your own reward? You are so greedy, Hollander. I already suck your dick, what more could you want from me?” Rozanov asks, coming up above Shane on the bed so that his body is draped over him, their faces inches apart. Shane leans over so that he can whisper in Rozanov’s ear.

“I want you. I want you… to fuck me. Now.” Shane’s cheeks are already flushed from the alcohol, but he can feel himself going bright red.

Rozanov groans, and instead of answering, he brings their mouths together, tongue licking inside Shane’s mouth. With his thigh, he pushes Shane’s legs further apart, and brings a hand down to fondle Shane’s dick, which is already starting to wake up again. He breaks the kiss for a second so that he can put his fingers in Shane’s mouth, and Shane makes sure to trace his tongue over them as he gets them wet, feeling what’s about to be inside him.

He circles Shane’s hole like last time, reaching for the lube with his other hand. He squirts out some lube and slips a finger in.

It goes in much easier than last time, probably because of the fun Shane had in the shower earlier. He feels the need to confess to Rozanov.

“I touched it a bit… earlier. In the shower.” He’s watching what Rozanov is doing, because it’s so hot to see his face tense in concentration.

“Really? Without me? So eager,” Rozanov tuts at him.

“I didn’t think you’d… I didn’t think you would come.” Shane moans out, as Rozanov continues to undo him with his fingers.

“Hmmm but you have been so good for your captain. Scoring two goals for me, and now opening up your hole for me too,” says Rozanov.

“Ohhhh fuck,” Shane moans, the way Rozanov is talking turning him on.

“Did it feel good, doing it by yourself? Or did you miss my fingers?” Rozanov whispers into his ear.

“Mmmh, it felt good. But… not as good as your fingers.”

“Good. I always want you to be thinking about me, when you fuck yourself with your fingers. So slutty.”

Rozanov says that word with reverence, like instead of an insult it’s the highest praise he can give.

“I think you are almost ready for me,” Rozanov says, pressing a kiss to the head of Shane’s cock.

He goes to slide a condom onto his dick, and Shane expects him to go straight in, but instead he pulls Shane’s legs up so that they’re almost by Shane’s head, and puts his tongue against him, kissing and sucking Shane’s hole.

“Fuck! Fuck Rozanov what are you doing?” Rozanov pulls away.

“You don’t like it?” He looks at Shane’s dick, a bead of precome dripping out of it. “Oh, you like it.”

He watches Shane’s nod, then goes back in, with his whole tongue, making out with Shane’s hole.

He pulls away for a second and slicks up his condom covered dick.

Shane glances down again, at the thick, dripping thing that Rozanov wants to put inside him. He’s imagined it so much, but the reality is different. Rozanov can definitely feel him tense up.

“You are scared,” Rozanov says, losing the teasing tone, and pulls back slightly, making eye contact with Shane.

“Fuck off, no I’m not,” Shane tries to deny. He’s not sure how convincing it is.

“It’s ok to be. We don’t have to, if you don’t want,” Shane squints, and tries to work out if Rozanov is being genuine. His face is plain and unguarded.

“I can keep eating you out, see if I can make you come from this like a girl,” Rozanov says, grinning again.

Hooking up Rozanov has a specific purpose, for Shane to be less fucked up about sex. That’s the whole point of all this, to have some sex he really wants to have with someone he really wants to do it with. Is Rozanov a smart or safe choice? Absolutely not, but Shane wants him. And Rozanov, for some reason, seems to want to make it good for him. So maybe it is a smart choice after all.

“I do want to.” Shane’s voice is even and sure, because everything that they’ve done so far has turned out better than he imagined.

“It’s ok Hollander, I will go easy on you. Such a sweet hole, I will be very good to it,” Rozanov keeps stretching him, his fingers brushing against Shane’s prostate and making him close his eyes in surrender.

Rozanov circles a finger again, and then presses the head of his cock against Shane. For a moment the pressure is strong, and then Shane can feel him slide in, filling him, while Rozanov groans. He stays there for a second, letting Shane adjust, before he gives him more.

It’s overwhelming, the hot sensation of the connection between them, the slide of Rozanov’s cock reaching places inside Shane that have never been touched before.

“Okay?” Rozanov asks.

“Yes. Very okay,” Shane feels that his voice is strained, still getting used to the pressure and stretch.

Slowly, Rozanov starts to move, watching Shane’s face. He grins when he sees Shane drop his mouth open in pleasure, and leans down, giving him open-mouthed kisses. His thrusts are achingly gentle, and Shane has never felt anything like this before. It’s so different to fingers, the sensation of being totally filled, his nerve endings lighting up.

Rozanov pulls out a bit again, and pushes in slowly, this time reaching a hand down to stroke Shane’s cock at the same time. The next thrust hits that spot that already made Shane moan when it was just fingers, and Rozanov quickly realises, beginning to target it with his thrusts.

“Still okay?” Rozanov asks, thrusting harder, using his powerful hips to force embarrassing sounds out of Shane.

“Fuck Rozanov, give me more,” Shane hears himself moan.

Shane can feel the floaty, unreal sensation start to take over as Rozanov starts pounding Shane into the mattress. His hands are on Shane’s hips, and part of Shane hopes that it leaves bruises, something he can prod at by himself when Rozanov leaves. It’s unlikely, because his hands are not tight at all, he’s still treating Shane too preciously.

Shane didn’t know that sex could feel so good, that it could quiet the pressure in his head, and leave him breathless and begging. Rozanov seems determined to drive him insane, and Shane can feel it growing in him along with his orgasm, which Rozanov is going to force out of him if he keeps thrusting like… fuck.

Shane bites into his own forearm because no Russian pop music could cover the noises he lets out as he explodes onto his own chest, leaving streaks all over his sheets.

“Oh god Hollander, did you… fuck, so hot,” Rozanov groans. His thrusts become gentler, and he holds Shane tighter for a minute, as he releases into the condom.

Slowly, he pulls out, and flops down next to Shane on the bed. Shane looks over and admires the curve of his face, the perfect swell of his lips. Rozanov is beautiful in the way of a Greek statue, and Shane can already feel himself flying too close to the sun.

He’s the only person in Moscow that Shane has really had a conversation with.

“Now the bed’s all dirty,” he says, in a slightly whiny tone before he can stop himself.

“What? Shut up Hollander,” Rozanov says, then leans over and sticks his tongue back down his throat. He pulls away panting.

“You have killed me, Hollander. I am dead. Sorry to team, you will have to be captain now,” Rozanov pants out, sweat covering his body.

“Fuck, Rozanov. If this is your reward for two goals, what happens when I get a hat trick?” Shane manages, when the room has stopped spinning quite so much. Rozanov laughs a little at his lame joke. He’s probably still oxygen deprived from the exertion.

All of his sexual experiences before Rozanov ended with him anxiously wondering whether he’d done it right, if he’d fucked up somewhere. Maybe it’s the alcohol talking, but for once, Shane feels like he hit all the buttons right, got a perfect score. He doesn’t have to wonder about whether Rozanov enjoyed himself because it’s so obvious he did. Rozanov is straightforward, he says things as they are, and he said he liked it.

After a minute, Rozanov’s chest has stopped moving so heavily, and he looks sideways at Shane.

“Is very hot, watching you play hockey. I get to fuck Canada’s golden boy,” Rozanov says proudly.

Shane tenses a bit, but Rozanov doesn’t say it in a way that’s mocking. “I’m not that. Not anymore.”

“They’ll be back to loving you soon enough,” Rozanov says, yawning.

Shane wonders whether that’s true. If his lawyer is right, and they settle the lawsuit and there’s no criminal charges given out. Maybe, eventually, if he plays hockey well enough they’ll forgive him. It’s better than nothing, but it still leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

“Maybe,” Shane says.

Rozanov looks over at the way his expression has gone tight.

“Hey, remember when I made you come hands free? Such a good trick,” Rozanov says, grinning wolfishly.

“Fuck off,” Shane pushes his shoulder away. Maybe this will happen every time they win a game. He’ll just keep playing good hockey and having sex that feels like someone has poured out his brain and put it in a candy floss machine, twirling it back together all floaty and full of air.

“Next game, with the team… you maybe have to come celebrate. Sorokin was very unhappy that you were not there tonight.” Rozanov says.

Shane forgets sometimes, that even with how much Rozanov plays the captain dynamic up in the bedroom, he’s just the alternate. He doesn’t really have much power.

“Hmmm. I don’t really like going out. And the team hates me.” Shane already didn’t like nightclubs, but he can’t explain how much worse the fear is now. Full of drunk girls. Girls who don’t know what they’re doing, and Shane being forced to drink too, making some kind of mistake.

“Is not untrue, but…look, with the team, is all performance. It’s for show. You understand that, right?” Shane nods, because he does get that.

“Especially for men like us.” He looks at Shane meaningfully.

Rozanov is right. Guys like him and Rozanov, the ones who are the star players, are supposed to set an example. Part of that means that he should be joining in during social events, it’s something that his mom has always talked about with him, something he’s never really listened to. From that conversation with his dad, it seems like Rozanov's family puts a lot of pressure on him too. Shane scoring two goals and then not joining the party makes the team look less cohesive, and key players should not make the team look bad.

“No, I understand. You’ve played your part, I need to do mine,” Shane says.

Rozanov has built up a reputation at Spartak, and now Shane is coming in to replace him. Even if the team has good reason to hate him, to not want to spend any time with him, he still shouldn’t be isolating himself more than necessary, messing with the team chemistry. The captain wanted him to come out with the team, and he should have just listened.

Rozanov looks relieved. “I am glad is all ok. I should go. Clean up in my own bathroom,” he says. He leans over and kisses him, sweeter than usual. Shane can’t help but chase his lips as he pulls away.

There’s a nagging, gnawing feeling in Shane’s stomach that’s growing every time Rozanov kisses him, every time he chooses to be gentle even though he knows Shane can take it, and shouldn’t care either way. There’s a chasm between what Rozanov thinks of him, and how he actually treats him, and Shane’s finding it harder and harder to ignore.

Chapter End Notes

A good chapter for Shane! He won a hockey game and had some good sex! (don’t kill me when chapter 6 comes out) Anyway still lots of mystery but the slow burn tag is there for a reason. We will get an Ilya POV chapter eventually, but for now we’re still with Shane.

No specific notes, let me know if any of the hockey stuff doesn’t make sense, I’ve done my best but I am not an expert. Also it goes without saying but fuck Ai, I am personally writing all these fake newspaper articles. They were missing in my original draft but I think it adds something.

Next chapter out soon so stay tuned, I love hearing your comments so let me know what you think!

Chapter 6: Chapter Six

Chapter Summary

Previously on The Ice is Colder in Moscow... Shane's KHL team, Spartak Moscow win their first exhibition match. Shane sees Rozanov talking to his father afterwards and is curious about their relationship. Rozanov goes out to celebrate, but then comes back and him and Shane have penetrative sex for the first time. They both find the experience extremely enjoyable.

Chapter Notes

TW: Hazing, F-slur, racism

Rozanov is still a huge asshole. On the ice, his chirps are constant, even in practice matches. Shane’s starting to understand more of what he says to the Russian players, and he’s frankly surprised nobody has decked him. Instead of relying on crude jokes and slurs, like most other players, Rozanov instead comes up with brutally accurate takedowns.

He’s started to chirp Shane more often, which is both reassuring and annoying.

After Shane had just sprinted down the ice, “Hollander, your face is so red! Looks like Soviet flag.”

After the Swiss defender hooked him, and he fell to the ice, “Hollander! So graceful, you know Bolshoi is looking for new dancers, you should give them a call!”

After some sloppy stick handling, “Hollander, you can see ghosts? No? But just now, you pass to invisible man.”

Shane thought that once Rozanov had actually fucked him, he’d get bored. Somehow the opposite has happened. It’s dangerous, how often Rozanov knocks on his door, and even more dangerous how Shane’s ears prick up every time, like a dog waiting for his owner.

Shane’s stopped caring about why Rozanov does this, because he hasn’t felt this good, this consistently in a long time. Rozanov can read him in the bedroom just like he reads him on the ice, and so he knows when to go harder, when to give him orders, and when Shane’s too fucked out to listen.

His original plan, of ‘exposure therapy’, of getting himself used to sex again, is progressing in a direction Shane hadn’t anticipated. He’d thought that if he could just have a few casual, low pressure experiences with Rozanov, then it might help his anxiety in the future. It was just supposed to be practice, like doing an extracurricular activity to round out his resume.

Shane has now had more sex with Rozanov than he has with everyone else put together, and all of it has been new and exciting and transformative.

Sex is like swimming. He already knew how to do it before Rozanov, and he thought he’d figured out the depths of it, because he could see the blue tiles at the bottom. Doing it with Rozanov has shown him that the pool he was swimming in was next to an ocean.

Shane never thought of himself as someone who wanted things rough. The idea of doing that with a girl would be completely mortifying, but he can’t help the way that he groans when Rozanov slaps his ass, or shoves his fingers in his mouth. It makes his brain go quiet, when all he has to do is listen to Rozanov, that there isn’t some invisible set of standards that he’s failing to meet.

Shane almost wishes he could ask his therapist about the probably-fucked-up psychology of it, that he hates the way Rozanov bullies him on the ice and in the locker room, but loves it when the two of them are alone.

Maybe the difference is that in the bedroom, Rozanov checks in before every touch, and afterwards he brings glasses of water and kisses.

The two Swiss players, Cohen and Courtois are sitting in the locker room, listening to it. The video played intentionally loud on Courtois’ phone. Shane doesn’t recognise the voice immediately, but the dread starts right away, so maybe he does, in some deep part of himself.

“Yeah, obviously I feel a lot of regret,” he’s saying. “There’s no excuse for any of us that were there that night. We shouldn’t have even been partying in the first place.”

Shane can feel the blood running out of his face, and he needs to leave, but he can’t. It’s Connor’s voice, and he’s describing what happened that night.

“Of course, you had the Prospect Cup finals the next day! There must have been a lot of pressure.” The interviewer says, with a sympathetic tone that makes Shane’s stomach turn.

“The pressure was huge, and obviously, we’re all so young, we’re just teenagers. And Hollander… he’s very intense. He was the captain in 2009, when the Russians beat us, and so obviously this time he really needs us to win.”

“Was Shane Hollander an intimidating captain?” The interviewer asks.

“He could be,” says Connor. “He gets in your head. Makes you feel like you have to do what he says, like you have no choice. Makes you do things you don’t want to do.”

Shane can’t do anything but stand, even though he already knows what Connor is going to say, because he’s heard the interview before. It’s an old one, from probably three months ago.

There was so much speculation, after Shane was missing from the Prospect Cup, and then the pictures emerged of him leaving the police station with a black eye. But it wasn’t until Connor started doing interviews that the story reached the stratosphere.

A fucked up hazing ritual, gone wrong. It was a neat framing, one that everyone understood. Most Canadians had heard some version of the story before, and so the think pieces wrote themselves. Each one unearthed new details, digging Shane’s grave a little bit more.

Shane knows what everyone says about him, what they think but it’s different hearing it here, in this locker room. The Russian players are starting to warm up to him a bit, they give him pats on the back and congratulations when he makes a good goal.

Listening to Connor talk, he’s back in his parents kitchen, begging them to understand that everything Connor’s saying is wrong, that nothing like that happened.

They had no idea, because he hadn’t told them. He said that something bad happened, he said that he talked to the police, but the words were too choked up inside him to explain what did happen.

Connor’s version was the first one that they heard.

He’ll never get it back, the chance to tell people his side of the story first, before they had their interpretations coloured by what Connor said.

Shane can feel the way that his breath is coming faster with every word that Connor speaks.

Rozanov walks over from the other side of the room, grabs the phone, and smashes it against the bench. The screen cracks in spiderwebs and the Swiss defender stands up, furious.

“What the fuck, dude!”

“Hollander will buy you new phone,” Rozanov says, in a voice that’s completely calm.

“You have no fucking right to smash my phone!” Courtois says.

“I am Captain. Is my job, as the captain, to make sure team wins games. How many goals did you score in last game? Zero,” Rozanov sneers.

“What, I don’t score goals and you smash my fucking phone?” His face is bright red, and Shane thinks he might fight Rozanov. Shane still can’t move, can’t get closer.

“Hollander scored two goals. He win us game. But he will not score goals if he has distraction. Look at his fucking face. You think he will score goals now?”

Rozanov points at him, and Shane can’t hide. He knows that his face will be completely white, that everyone can see his breath coming in shallow little gasps. He doesn’t want them to see, to recognise how weak he is now. That a few words can ruin his focus.

“Of course, Hollander did very bad thing. We all know this. But it is done now. No more videos in locker room. Or I smash phone again.” Rozanov says, holding the phone up threateningly.

“Now, get on the fucking ice.” Rozanov says, commandingly. Shane feels his feet move, so used to hearing orders and obeying them, even though his chest is clenching and if he tries to skate now he feels like he might have a heart attack.

“Fuck, not you Hollander. You are missing knee pad. What, you forget how to put on pads? I know seven-year-olds who can do this.” Rozanov barks.

Everyone else clears out of the locker room, probably not willing to risk having their phones broken by Rozanov.

It shouldn’t hurt so much to hear Rozanov talk about the “very bad thing” that Shane did.

Rozanov never, ever brings it up, when it’s just the two of them together, and they’re discovering new ways to give each other pleasure. Obviously Rozanov doesn’t want to confront it, this thing that he thinks Shane did. It probably makes it easier to fuck him if he forgets about it.

There’s a heavy sense of disappointment, and Shane can’t figure it out, until he realises it.

Shane wants people to believe him when he says that he didn’t do it. But he doesn’t really expect them to. Because if the situation was reversed, and he heard that a teammate was questioned by police about a crime, he’s not sure he would give them the benefit of the doubt.

But Rozanov is different. Even though they don’t really know each other, there’s something deep down that is desperate for Rozanov to see him properly. Sometimes when they’re on the ice together he feels like Rozanov can read his mind. In the bedroom, Rozanov’s fingers know every inch of his skin, where to press in hard and where to gently caress. It hurts that Rozanov can touch him like that and still believe that he’s a bad person.

From the information he has, Rozanov should hate him, should find him disgusting.

Maybe he does, and that’s what the sex is about. It probably makes it safer for him. If anyone ever caught them, he could just say that Shane forced him into it. People would believe him.

Shane stands in the locker room and does the breathing exercises he’s practiced with his therapist, but he can’t get his mind off the interview. He’s watched it so many times that he knows it word for word, and it plays in his memory.

“So that night, did you feel like you had a choice?” the interviewer had asked Connor next.

They gave her a stupid prop notebook, as if this was a genuine attempt to get information. Connor’s dad is an executive producer at the television studio which airs that news show. Shane knows this because he bragged about it all the time in the locker room. One day after Shane became the first Asian captain of a Prospect Cup team, and was interviewed by a local news crew, Connor’s dad organised for him to get his own television interview.

“No, I didn’t. Hollander was our captain, and he was the one who said that we needed to do it. We were all drunk, Marcus was so drunk that he almost couldn’t play in the tournament, he stayed on the bench for most of it.”

“Was Shane Hollander drunk too?”

Connor looked right into the camera when he said it.

“No. Shane was completely sober. He doesn’t drink, anyone can tell you that. We were all drunk, and he was sober.”

“So Shane Hollander, the captain of the team, gets all of you drunk. Would you be able to tell me a bit about what happens next?”

Connor pauses at this point, probably for dramatic effect.

“So Hollander is saying that there’s something we need to do, that it’ll keep us more together as a team. That we need to find a girl and… all together. You know what I mean. And I’m like, dude that’s fucked up! But he says that we have to. He says it’ll help us win.”

Shane wonders how much time he spent rehearsing this, how they figured out the exact words that were close to the truths that were already out, but would leave Connor with the smallest amount of responsibility.

“So you’re the one who first talks to Miss X?” The interviewer asked.

“Yeah, I’m the one who found -----.” They put a bleep in, so obviously Connor just said her name, in front of a journalist, in a room that was probably full of people.

Shane only found out her name when he was being interrogated by the police.

“Yeah. I meet her at the bar, and I buy her a couple of drinks, and here’s the crazy thing, she actually agrees to it! She says for her, it’s like, a fantasy.”

“Really? So Miss X knew exactly what was going to happen?” The interviewer asks. Shane thinks that he hears a touch of skepticism in her voice at this point, but she doesn’t dig into it, she just nods at what Connor says next.

“She knew everything, she agreed to all of it. But Hollander says, oh we should give her more drinks, she’s probably nervous, and she ends up getting a bit drunk.”

“Right, so you admit that Miss X was intoxicated?”

“Well, sure. A bit. But I was too, remember! We were all drunk except for Hollander.”

“And what happens next?”

Connor sighs deeply. “Everything that happened between me and the girl was totally consensual. But it’s still something I’d rather not talk about in any detail. I’m sorry. I’ll have to skip to the end.”

He took a big sip of water at this point. Shane wondered whether that was scripted, like the rest of it.

“Alright, that’s understandable. This was a difficult experience for you.”

“So later on, Hollander does something to the girl that she doesn’t like, and she punches him. You can see it in all the pictures, he’s got this big black eye. And that makes him freak out, like, that’s when he realises that he could get in trouble.”

“So you think that Hollander was worried about getting caught?” She asks.

“Well, that must have been it. Because he was the one who planned it all, who made everyone do it. It was his fault we got ourselves in that situation. I’d already told him before, like, maybe we should get this girl some water or something, but she’s fine really. She’s not that bad.”

“So you’re saying that Miss X was only mildly drunk?” the interviewer asks.

“Yeah, exactly, she wasn’t that bad. But Hollander’s panicking, so he just grabs her, runs down to the reception and gets the front desk to call a whole ambulance for her.”

“You don’t think the ambulance was necessary?” She clarifies.

“I mean no. Everything that happened with us and the girl, she was totally into. Like she consented. And then later on she gets a bit drunker, Hollander tries to mess with her, and she punches him. He feels like he needs to cover his own back so he calls this ambulance.”

“And what were you doing at this point?” She asks.

“Well, obviously I’m just relieved that Hollander is gone, you know, that maybe the whole nightmare is over, and all I really want to do is sleep, so like, that’s what I do.”

“And you still played in the Prospect Cup the next day?” She asks.

“Yeah, Hollander was the only one who got arrested that night. They got him at the hospital. I think he was there to intimidate the girl, to try to make sure she didn’t say anything. But I knew that I couldn’t let my country down, even after such a difficult night.”

“Well, it was brave of you to still compete after such a traumatic experience.”

“Thank you,” Connor said, and the interview was over.

Shane is eventually able to get himself together enough to go out on the ice. He’s late so the coaches make him do extra laps, which is exactly what he needs. Simple action, simple consequence. How things should be.

He’s thought a lot about calling the ambulance. He doesn’t remember that part of the night well, just that it seemed like the right thing to do. When someone needed help, you got them an ambulance, right?

His lawyer had asked him about that a lot. He said it was a very important part of the case. Shane, are you sure that she seemed bad enough to warrant an ambulance? You say that you were extremely stressed at this point, so is there a chance that your own mental state clouded your judgement? You’ve been diagnosed with a panic disorder, haven’t you? Were you having an episode at this point of the night?

Shane can admit that he probably was having some kind of episode because everything from the time he got her out of the room is so hazy, he can’t even remember if it was him or the hotel concierge who dialled the number. But maybe it was him who called, and she didn’t need it, and he could have just let her go home, instead of putting her through a whole unnecessary hospital visit.

He remembers her being confused, surrounded by paramedics, asking where she was, where she was going, who all of these people were.

So maybe Shane had done the wrong thing, yet again, and put her through more needless trauma.

“Did you call the ambulance because you genuinely believed she needed it, or was it because you were panicking, and you wanted to feel like you’d done the right thing, to make yourself feel better?” His lawyer had asked.

And Shane didn’t have an answer for that.

Shane had talked to his therapist, about Connor’s interview. How it made him feel to hear himself painted like that to the rest of the world. How he should calm himself down if he heard about it. Then she’d asked him about hazing in general.

“You don’t sound surprised that other people believe Connor’s side of the story,” she’d said in one of their sessions.

“Well, Connor said that it was like, some kind of hazing. And hockey hazing can be really bad.” His therapist had leaned back when he said that, and looked at him with her intense eyes.

Shane fucking hated it when she looked at him like that.

“Do you have any personal experience with that?” She asked.

“Well, obviously. Everyone’s had some kind of hazing, it’s part of hockey. You have to get yelled at, or drink a beer out of someone’s shoe, or eat something someone’s spat in.” Shane says, because that’s obvious, everyone knows that.

“All of those things happened to you?” She asks.

“They happen to everyone. Including me, I guess, with my team in Kingston. You just don’t think about it. But our team wasn’t even that bad, compared to the shit that happens on some other teams.”

“So it wasn’t that bad?” She asks.

Shane can’t make eye contact with her anymore, because the thing about hazing is that you don’t talk about it. That’s the golden rule, that it stays in the locker rooms or the team bus or hotel rooms in away games. If you talk about it, then you put a target on your back, and Shane’s not fucking stupid.

“No. Not really. There was one thing, where all the rookies had to have their heads shaved. You didn’t know when it was going to happen, but they’d pick a random day, and all the older players would you know, pin you down, and someone would shave all your hair off.”

Shane thought about his first three months on the team, when he was fifteen years old, constantly looking over his shoulder. It wasn’t the shaving that was bad, it was the anticipation of it, the knowledge that it could happen at any time. Shane liked his routine, and unexpected things sometimes made him freak out, more than other people. It was his own reaction that scared him, that he would end up doing something that marked him out as weird.

It started affecting his hockey, his shooting percentage going down. One of the veterans had yelled at him about it after practice, and Shane had to push down the need to scream at him to just tell him when it was going to happen. That everything would be fine if he could just prepare for it.

It happened a week later, and Shane had almost fought back, which would have been really bad because if you fought back they shaved off your eyebrows too. But luckily the first guy who jumped on him was Petrovic, the Serbian freak of nature who was seventeen years old and six foot eight, and so Shane was so completely unable to move that his freakout died before it could really begin. Instead, he’d managed to let the curtain come down and keep his performance intact.

“So they just shaved everyone’s heads.” She said, as if confirming something.

“Well, it was a bit more than that. They would yell stuff at you, while it was happening.”

Everyone was supposed to be involved in hazing, that was the point. The easiest way to get everyone involved was to make them yell.

“What kind of stuff?”

“You know, insults. Call you a pussy. Gay stuff. When it was my turn, um, they said some stuff about me being Asian.”

Sometimes it felt like being Asian was something that he was getting away with. Nobody really mentioned it to his face, and Shane made sure that he didn’t like, emphasise it. White bread sandwiches for lunch instead of onigiri. Never really talking about his mom’s side of the family. So for the most part, he could almost forget that he was different from the rest of the team.

That day it became crystal clear that none of them had forgotten he was different.
“That sounds difficult.”

Shane suddenly felt like he was lying to her, or misrepresenting himself or something. Sounding like a victim when he really wasn’t.

“But I did it too. Two years later I was made captain, and we did exactly the same thing to the rookies. I held some kid’s arm down while someone shaved his hair off.”

It hadn’t felt like he had a choice at the time. Even though he was dreading it a bit, there was absolutely no way he could voice that. Most of the other guys on the team were excited, to get their own back. It was only fair. They’d had it done to them, so now they needed to do it to someone else.

It was like one of those physics models, with the little balls clinking together. Once one was pushed, all the others moved along with it. They had to, to distribute the energy between them. That was the natural law, the state of the universe.

“And how did that make you feel?” she asked.

“I don’t really know. I didn’t like it. Some of the guys thought it was super funny, especially if a kid was freaking out.”

In his first year taking part, one of the kids had cried. And Shane found out later that it was because one of the older players had spent weeks telling him about much worse things they were going to do to him.

“You didn’t think it was funny.”

Of course Shane didn’t fucking think it was funny. It was all the worst parts of the sport he loved, the bits he tried not to look at too deeply. Hockey was beautiful and smooth, it was sliding a perfect pass across the ice and knowing that your liney would sink it. It was catching a guy off guard and stealing the puck right from under him, without even needing to check him first. It was deking past a goalie and feeling the adrenaline rush of the shot going in.

Those were the parts of the sport that Shane had been addicted to since he was six years old and first beat another team on the ice. But doing hockey at the level Shane was at also meant other things.

It meant that the team was an entity, rather than a group of kids. Training for hours, missing school, driving for hours to matches, spending thousands on equipment and coaches and ice time. It meant moving away and living with a billet family at fifteen or sixteen years old.

Most billet families were great, like the one Shane had. Sharon and Mike cooked full meals every night, they asked how Shane was getting along with his schoolwork, and drove him to every practice. He went home most weekends, unless he had a game. He’d also heard stories of billet families who barely acknowledged the teenager living in their house and were just doing it for the stipend the league paid them.

Some of his teammates were across the country from their parents, couldn’t see them for months. Lots of players made a natural switch, and replaced family with team. You couldn’t go against your family, you couldn’t go against your team. If your team did something particularly fucked up to you, that was just the price of entry.

“No, I didn’t think it was funny. And second year, there was this kid Jameson. His mom was Caribbean or something. And I was really worried about the kind of shit they were going to say to him.”

Jameson was a good player, had a high hockey IQ just like Shane. Except, the coaches never described him that way. They always talked about how he was a strong player, a physical one. Even though he was smaller than half the team and never made bad checks.

“You didn’t want him to go through the same thing that you did.”

And then Shane gets really uncomfortable, because that should be the reason. That should be why he was worried, because he’d been in Jameson’s shoes and understood what he was going through. That was the good answer but it wasn’t the truest one.

“Well. I was worried that it might come out some day. That I’d go pro, and then someone would talk about it to a journalist, and everyone would think that I’d like, called him the N-word.”

It had stressed Shane out so much that he’d almost, almost called his mom and asked her what he should do. But you didn’t talk about hazing, even though everyone knew that it was part of hockey. And Shane knew that it would break her heart if he asked her how to stop his team from calling someone else slurs, because then she would read between the lines. Realise that if he was asking now, it was already too late.

“So what did you do?”

“I said that to the team. I said, I’m getting drafted next year and none of you fuckers are getting in the way. If anyone says some shit to Jameson that makes me look bad, then they’re getting their eyebrows shaved.”

Shane hadn’t been sure that they’d listen. But his alternate, Tommy, who’d been on the team longer, had backed him up. Tommy wasn’t as talented as Shane, but he knew where to get a good fake ID and he was staying with a billet family that let him throw parties, and so that became the rule. You could call a guy a faggot but you couldn’t say anything racist.

“Did you ever think about telling someone about what was happening? Like the coaches.” She said, which made Shane laugh.

“You think the coaches didn’t know? I think Coach Wilson walked in on it like, six times. He used to tell us stories about what hazing was like in the 80s where guys would get, like, stripped naked and have all their body hair shaved off.”

Shane heard that it still happened on some Juniors teams, especially the ones at those psychopathic boarding schools where boys were crammed in together all the time.

His therapist didn’t say anything for a while, just let his words settle in the room.

“Do you think it affected you, or anyone on your team, that your coach would casually describe acts of sexual assault to you?”

Shane flinches hearing it described like that.

“We didn’t think about it that way. It wasn’t a sex thing. Or like a gay thing. It was just kind of… a joke.”

The words sit horribly in his chest. Shane doesn’t know why they’re talking about this, because it’s not even relevant really. They’re here to talk about The Incident, not to go over every time he’s felt uncomfortable in a locker room.

The hazing thing was a lie, it was just something that Connor made up to explain what happened, to try to weasel out of punishment for whatever really happened.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Shane said, because his therapist had told him in their first session that he could say that at any time.

-

Later, alone in his apartment Shane cooks a meal for himself. Chicken, broccoli, potatoes. Ingredients that he can easily identify, that he’s used to putting together into a meal that has the right nutrients for a professional athlete. Safe and balanced, one less choice for him to make.

He eats it at the table, while he tries to complete exercise 6b in his Russian textbook.

The words aren’t really going in like they usually do, so he forces himself to read the same line four times in a row until he can remember it.

His phone buzzes on the table next to him

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:30pm

I have no plans tonight. You could come over.

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:45pm

I don’t think so.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:47pm

It’s a very bad interview. Should not play in locker room. Will not happen again.

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:48pm

Yeah haha, not after you broke Courtois phone. Thank you for doing that.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:50pm

You should not say thank you. You’re the one who is buying him a new one.

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:52pm

I would buy the whole apple store if I never had to hear that interview again.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:55pm

That guy, the interview, he is shit player anyway. In final match, I win every face off, he cannot keep up with me. He skates like spider trapped in bath.

.
>>>Sent by Shane, 8:56pm

Haha. You’re right, he skates like his legs are too long for his body

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:57pm

He skates like he has just been pooped on by bird.

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:58pm

He skates like he wants to ask for directions, but he is not confident enough to ask.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 8:59pm

He skates like his parents are getting divorce, and they told him just before he got on the ice.

>>>Sent by Shane, 8:59pm

Jesus.

It feels so good to talk like this, because Rozanov’s right, Connor is a shit player. Shane is sure about that, because unlike the rest of the guys on the Prospect Cup team, Shane actually knows him. The Prospect Cup team was hand selected from the best Canadian Hockey League players, from all the U-20 teams across the league. Most of the guys there Shane either didn’t know very well, or had played against a few times. But Connor is different, because Connor was on the same U-20 team as Shane, the Kingston Frontenacs.

They’ve played together for three years. For the last two, he’s been one of Shane’s Alternates.

Connor was never very good, but his dad got him the best coaches, the best summer programmes, and the best equipment, to make sure that his son ended up on the first line. That meant that he was playing on Shane’s wing. Playing on Shane’s wing meant he had the third highest number of assists in the whole league, and that was enough to secure him a spot in the Prospect Cup team. Shane can say with total certainty, that he never would have made it there without Shane.

So in a way, the whole thing is partly Shane’s fault.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:05pm

We can talk about it, if you want. Real story, not fake interview story.

He supposes that Connor’s lying was so bad that even Rozanov must have figured out that it didn’t happen like that. Maybe Shane being a big intimidating captain is too much of a stretch for Rozanov’s imagination.

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:10pm

I don't want to talk about it.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:11pm

Ok. Do not have to, is just option.

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:15pm

My dvd player is broken :(

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:16pm

Ok?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:18pm

We have same apartment so I know you have dvd player. Maybe I come over and borrow yours. We can watch movie together, is good Russian practice for you.

.
>>>Sent by Shane, 9:20pm

What movie is it?

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:21pm

Fast and furious

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:22pm

…That’s an American movie

>>>Sent by Ilya Rozanov, 9:23pm

Yes, but we will watch it in Russian

>>>Sent by Shane, 9:25pm

Fine, come over and borrow my DVD player, if that’s what you really want.

When Rozanov comes over, he has a six pack of beer and a bag of chips with him. Usually they start kissing as soon as the door is closed, but Rozanov doesn’t move to touch him, he just goes and sits on the sofa. Shane’s expecting Russian MTV to come on, but instead the loading screen for the DVD player comes up.

“We’re actually watching a movie?” Shane asks suspiciously.

“Yes Shane, what you were expecting something? I am here as your captain, not your fuck buddy.” Rozanov says, rolling his eyes.

“Oh. Okay?” Shane wonders who even taught him that word.

Rozanov pats the sofa next to him, and Shane sits down warily. Rozanov doesn’t make any move to touch him or pull him closer, just noisily opens the bag of chips and starts eating them. Shane relaxes into the mindless action on screen, letting the bright visuals take over all of his thoughts. Rozanov makes comments through it, pointing out which cars he thinks are the coolest. Shane eats four sour cream and onion flavoured potato chips.

Shane’s still expecting things to escalate, for Rozanov’s hands to start wandering, until about halfway through the movie. It’s not that he would mind, he usually loves Rozanov’s hands, but tonight he’s feeling slippery and wrong and something about having to push Rozanov away and say no is uncomfortable.

He never has to, because Rozanov just watches the movie, like he knows that it’s what Shane needs.

Usually Shane doesn’t like the sound of other people eating, but every time his mind flicks back to the interview, Rozanov crunches on another potato chip, and his mind gets so distracted it can’t hold onto the bad thoughts.

Near the end of the movie, Shane must have fallen asleep, because when he flutters awake he’s slumped against Rozanov’s side. One of Rozanov’s arms is wrapped around him, and before Shane opens his eyes Rozanov presses a kiss to his forehead.

Shane keeps them closed for a bit longer after that, because he’s realised that pressed so close together he can feel the steady thrum of Rozanov’s heartbeat.

Eventually he has to feign blinking awake. Rozanov pulls away when he has his eyes fully open, straightening up so that only their legs are touching. Shane misses the contact as soon as it’s gone.

“I should go now. Let you have beauty sleep,” Rozanov says, patting Shane on the shoulder as he sits up.

Shane was thinking that he’d need to take one of his sleeping pills tonight, but it doesn’t seem as important now. He’s already fallen asleep once, so his body can probably be persuaded to do it again.

“Ok. I’ll see you at practice,” Shane says, voice still sleepy. Rozanov leans towards him, and for a moment Shane thinks he’s going to kiss him, but Rozanov pulls back instead, and just claps him on the shoulder.

“See you at practice, Hollander.”

Chapter End Notes

Notes: Hazing is a big problem in youth hockey culture, and the stuff depicted here is mild compared to some stories. Sometimes ‘hazing’ can be straight up physical and/or sexual assault. Akim Aliu is well known for the extremely violent and racist hazing he went through (at one point he had seven teeth knocked out by an older teammate). Dan Carcillo, a former NHL player tried to sue the Canadian Hockey League over the horrific hazing he and others went through while he was a junior hockey player. Hazing culture has supposedly improved since the early 2000s, but this year there’s an ongoing case of hazing related sexual assault, so clearly there are still problems.

Anyway, another angsty chapter, but also some progress. Let me know what you think, the next chapter is already edited so should be out in a few days!

Chapter 7: Chapter Seven

Chapter Summary

Previously on The Ice is Colder in Moscow... Shane and Rozanov have been regularly hooking up with each other, and Shane has been settling into his Russian team. However, a video of his former teammate talking about the alleged assault brings up bad memories. Rozanov tries to console him by going to his place, and the two watch a movie together.

Chapter Notes

Now that the exhibition matches have started, practice is even more intense, and so Shane doesn’t have time to do much apart from eat, work out, and call his parents. But even exhausted from training, he still wonders about Rozanov.

It’s like Rozanov is four different people. There’s the cocky, asshole captain that he becomes in the locker room. The one who smashed up Courtois’ phone just for playing a video. There’s the teammate who skates better than anyone Shane’s ever played with and can read him like a book. There’s the sexy lothario who takes him apart in bed, but checks in before every touch and always leaves the wet thing in his stomach demanding more.

Then there’s a fourth person, who only comes out occasionally. Shane saw it first when Rozanov gave him a tour of Moscow, and when they were texting each other, before Rozanov shut the texting down. That version disappeared when they started sleeping together, but he was back again last night, watching a movie with Shane, keeping him company.

Shane thinks he finds this one the most confusing of all, because he doesn’t know what he wants from Shane. The captain and the teammate want good hockey, and the lothario wants sex. This other person, Shane can’t tell.
It makes him wonder which one is the real Rozanov.

Because that version, the one he sees only occasionally, who laughs with him and makes him feel better, seems like somebody Shane can trust.

When they were texting about Connor’s interview, Rozanov had asked for the ‘real story’. Shane had said he didn’t want to talk about it, and that’s partly true.

There’s a kind of safety in not discussing it. At the moment, Rozanov doesn’t believe he’s innocent, because he has no reason to. Shane has never denied it in front of him, never talked about it at all. But if Shane tells him the whole story, pours out his heart again, and at the end Rozanov thinks that he’s a rapist and a liar? That would be so much more painful.

But maybe Shane has to be brave again.

-
One week later they have another exhibition game, this time with Moscow CSKA. It’s much closer than their last game, and CSKA play heavily defensively, so Shane has less space to manoeuvre. CSKA has clearly watched tape on them, and so they position themselves carefully, making sure not to leave the smallest gap open for him to exploit.

The game stretches into overtime, so it’s three on three, him Rozanov and Kablukov. Shane wants to feel the rush of a goal again, eager to prove that his first game wasn’t a fluke. The crowd is smaller than last time, but the CSKA fans are loud, and the tension is high as Shane squares up for the faceoff.

“You… are… pussy.” Chirps the Russian center, in halting English. He probably deserves points for trying.

“Пошлая свинья,” Shane says back to him, which throws him off enough that he wins the faceoff.

He gets it to Rozanov, who makes it down the ice but loses it in a puck battle with two CSKA players. Ten seconds later, Shane is chasing the CSKA center and checking him into the boards, gliding around the back of the goal to give himself a moment to breathe. His legs are screaming that it’s time for a shift change, but Shane fires off down the ice anyway.

Rozanov is ahead of him, and Shane can feel the connection between them. It’s not just thin strands of awareness, it’s thick and fleshy, like an umbilical cord, and when Shane shoots the puck to Rozanov he feels the tug of it. Rozanov sinks it past the goalie’s left shoulder pad, and Shane barely waits for the goal horn before ripping off his helmet and crashing into him.

In the locker room afterwards, the vodka is flowing and the Russian rap music that Shane is starting to recognise is blaring. Sorokin, the captain, hands the bottle to Shane, who manages to take a swig without wincing. He goes and grabs Rozanov, and drags him over to translate.

“He says, today you must come out. Last game you did not come out, even though you played so well.”

Rozanov is rolling his eyes as he translates, that same reluctance he always treats Shane with in the locker room.

“Tell him last time I had a family emergency. Today… do I really have to come out?” Shane just wants to go home, call his family, and sleep. He didn’t even score any goals in this game, so his contribution was minimal.

“Yes Shane, will be very rude if you do not. Also I already told him you were sick last time, so you need to stick to this lie. He says you played very well again today. Not as good as me obviously.” Rozanov boasts.

“Fine, I will come out. Я приду на вечеринку,” He says to Sorokin, thanking him for inviting him, and he looks at him delighted, and says something very fast in Russian in response.

“Your accent is still terrible,” Rozanov says, then goes off to drink with two of the defencemen.

After a while the mood in the locker room shifts, and people look more ready to start heading out. Rozanov stands in the middle of the room to make an announcement.

“All you fuckers get ready, we are going out.” He says it in English first, then in Russian. Most of the room cheers. Then he turns and looks directly at Shane.

“Hollander, you are not allowed to talk to girls. I see you talking to girl, dancing with girl, drinking with girl, you are fucking dead, understand?” Shane nods, jerkily. He says it loud enough that everyone in the locker room hears him say it. He doesn’t bother to repeat it in Russian.

The bar they’re in is loud and dark, with neon lights that are going to give Shane a headache. He’s already been forced to drink four shots of vodka, and the Russian players show no signs of slowing down. Rozanov is wearing a ridiculous silk shirt and his usual tight black trousers. His hair is slicked back, and there are already a couple of women orbiting him, like bees hovering around a flower.

-
Shane sits squeezed next to one of the Russian defencemen, who is having a loud conversation that is too fast for him to follow under the thumping music. He makes himself sit through two more songs, focusing on peeling the label off his beer bottle, and when every scrap of white paper is picked off the glue, he allows himself to go outside for some air.

When he makes his way out to the back area he sees Sorokin standing outside, smoking. He waves Shane over.

“Hollander! I am happy you are here!” Sorokin says to Shane in Russian.

“Yes, sorry. Not coming to party after game before,” Shane says, the Russian harder to find in his mind now that he’s slightly drunk.

“It’s okay, you were sick. You should come out again! Not just when we win,” Sorokin says.

He’s keeping his Russian very slow and simple, so that Shane can understand him.

“Last week, I want to invite you to party at my house, but Rozanov says no, no, do not invite him, he’s a bad guy. But you are okay, not bad guy, I think,” Sorokin says, clapping a hand on his back.

“Oh. Thanks, Sorokin,” Shane says on autopilot.

There’s a sick feeling in his stomach, and Shane just wants to leave now, get out of the bar.

A week ago Rozanov let him snuggle up with him on the sofa, so close that he could smell the shampoo in his hair. But he thinks Shane is a bad guy.

Shane doesn’t give a fuck about team bonding or keeping up appearances anymore, he just needs to be home, so that he can be in his own bed.

His steps are so shaky as he walks out that he bumps into a girl with long brown hair, colliding with her so hard that it knocks his phone out his hands, and the girl goes down.

He reaches down to help her up.

“Sorry, sorry, are you okay?” He asks in Russian. She looks at him and gives him a big smile.

Once he’s helped her up, she throws her arms around his neck, and gives him a kiss on the cheek, mumbling something in Russian that Shane can’t hear.

She’s drunk, leaning on him, and Shane looks around for where her friends are, and instead makes eye contact with Courtois, the Swiss player whose phone Rozanov smashed last week. He’s staring at Shane like he has been watching him for a while, and Shane realises suddenly how it looks, that he’s holding onto a girl who is clearly incapacitated.

Courtois has been furious with Shane ever since his phone was smashed. He’s been looking for an excuse, and Shane has just given him one. Shane watches him stand up, and tries to look for another exit, because he’s been fucking stupid, coming out with the team, and now he’s going to get his face caved in, and it’s all his own fault.

Shane watches horrified as Courtois comes towards him, and so he’s not expecting it when he gets shoved into the door, hitting the handle painfully on his elbow, the back of his head thudding against the wood.

Rozanov’s face is full of violence. “What did I say, Hollander? You don’t fucking talk to girls.” Rozanov is gripping him tightly, and he’s pushed Shane into walls before.

The other times he’s been smirking, it’s been shared between them like a joke. It’s not something that he does to Shane, it’s something that they do together. The pushing and being-pushed are both their own separate actions. Shane didn’t even realise how playful it was until he had this as a contrast. Rozanov isn’t playful now, he’s murderous.

“I’m sorry, she fell over, I was helping her up, I just…” Shane manages to stammer out.

“You don’t fucking speak.” Rozanov is gripping his shirt, twisting the fabric up in his fist.

“Hollander, you need to fuck off home. I make rules very clear, and you don’t listen.”

Courtois storms over, the other Swiss player behind him. Rozanov is watching them closely. They stop beside Rozanov, and the Swiss player steps forward, but Rozanov sticks his arm out to stop him. There’s a drink in his hand, and he tips it over Shane’s head, the brown liquid soaking into the material.

“Get the fuck out Hollander,” he hisses, and shoves him out the door.

Shane stumbles through, trips and almost collides with the Moscow sidewalk. From over his shoulder he can see that Rozanov has slung an arm around the shoulders of both the Swiss players, and he’s dragging them to the bar to buy them more shots.

Shane’s phone is still on the floor of the bar somewhere, so he can’t even call Sergei. He walks three blocks through the dark, shivering without a jacket. The alcohol is soaking through his skin, and all of the streets look the same. Eventually he sees a payphone, covered in graffiti and stinking of piss on the inside. He picks up the phone, and then realises that there is nobody he can call. Everyone he loves is back in Canada, and he doesn’t have Sergei’s number memorised. The only other Russian number he has is Rozanov’s.

Rozanov, who obviously hates him. Rozanov, who spat in his mouth the last time they had sex with each other. At the time Shane had swallowed it and moaned, asked Rozanov to do it again, but now it makes him feel sick. The smell of the alcohol soaked into his shirt is so strong that it’s making Shane a bit dizzy.

He won a hockey game tonight. That’s the only thing he came to Russia to do, and he’s done it now. And it was supposed to make him happy.

Shane puts the phone receiver down, and keeps walking. If he can find another bar, he can get them to call him a taxi, and then he’ll be able to get back to his apartment, and then he can lie on his sofa for the next two days.

There’s a building with lights on, not a bar but a snooker club. It’s open and there are people inside, and that’s good enough for Shane. Shane walks inside, past the men drinking beers and laughing with each other, up to the desk.

“I need phone. Call taxi. I can pay?” Shane asks, in his usual broken Russian.

“Sure. Do you know the number, or should I just call one for you?” The person at the desk asks slowly.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand. Taxi?” Shane asks helplessly.

“Ok, ok. I help.” The man reaches over for the phone, has a short conversation in Russian, and turns back to Shane.

“Ten minutes. You understand?” He says slowly. Shane nods. “Maybe, you also need shirt?” The man asks, pointing at the shirt Shane is wearing, clinging to his chest and stained with whiskey.

“It’s ok,” Shane says, but the man is already rummaging through a box underneath the desk. He produces a bright red shirt with a picture of a snooker table and something written in Cyrillic underneath.

Shane tries to give him money for it, but the man keeps shaking his head.

“No, no. No money, is just team shirt. You wash, bring back, okay?”

It’s what finally breaks Shane, this stranger being kind to him. He can feel the tears welling up in his eyes, and so he quickly makes his way over to the bathroom, stripping off his disgusting shirt and replacing it with the new one, trying to distract himself enough that the tears don’t fall.

Eventually, he makes it into the taxi and back to his apartment, so that he can lie on top of his bed staring at the ceiling.

Two hours later there’s a knock on his door, and it’s fucking Rozanov, and Shane shouldn’t let him in but he does it anyway. Rozanov’s drunker than him, his eyes slightly too bright like he might have taken something. He comes forward and Shane has to step back quickly so that he can’t touch him.

“Rozanov, what the fuck are you doing here?” Shane can’t even get the energy to sound angry, he’s just tired.

He shouldn’t be surprised anymore, that Rozanov wants to come and blur the lines between them.

He’s following the pattern, the same one they’ve had all along. Rozanov does something fucked up, Shane pretends that it doesn’t bother him and lets him fuck him anyway.

“I like this shirt. You look very pretty,” says Rozanov. He’s silent for a moment, just looking at Shane.

“I shouldn’t have pushed you, in the bar. I’m sorry,” says Rozanov, looking at the tiny bruise on his elbow and frowning. It’s the only time that Rozanov has ever apologised to him.

Shane has bigger bruises from their practice match last week, when Rozanov checked him hard enough into the boards for his teeth to rattle. The coach hadn’t been pleased, told Rozanov to knock it off. Coach had yelled at Shane too, when he crashed into Rozanov ten minutes later.

“I should have found another way. I shouldn’t have… I hurt you,” Rozanov says, and reaches out slowly enough that Shane could move away again. He gently runs his finger over the bruise, even though usually Rozanov is delighted by his bruises, usually pushes into them during sex because he knows it makes Shane groan.

Rozanov seems disgusted by this one, and it throws Shane off, that he notices the difference. Clearly, Rozanov feels like he’s crossed some kind of line, and Shane didn’t know that he even had one, when it came to Shane. His face is pained, mouth pulling down at the corners, touching Shane like a broken vase he needs to put back together.

Shane hates it, actually, the way Rozanov is looking. It’s just going to confuse him, and make him forget what they are.

“Well. You had to get me away from that girl,” Shane says, dully.

“Ah, of course. Because you are so dangerous around girls,” Rozanov says, like it’s a joke. Shane takes a step back.

It’s an even lower blow than he was expecting. Rozanov has always acted disgusted when what Shane did comes up. He’s never done this before, joking about everything that happened as if it was a funny misunderstanding and not something that rips Shane open every time it’s even mentioned.

Shane starts the conversation, even though it’s completely the wrong time to have it, and it’s going to hurt him.

“You’ve never asked me whether or not I did it. Everyone else asks.”

Shane knows why Rozanov hasn’t asked.

It probably ruins it for him, whatever thrill he has fucking Shane. Rozanov is the one who gets to tame the beast, who can make Shane get on his knees and repent for the horrible thing he did, exacting some kind of sick revenge. Maybe asking about it makes it too real, makes Rozanov disgusted with himself, infected by association.

Rozanov cocks his head to the side. “I don’t need to ask, I know you didn’t do it.”

It makes Shane so angry, he almost can’t see straight.

“What are you talking about? Don’t fucking lie to me, tell me what you actually think. I can keep sucking your dick either way, I just can’t deal with this fucking bullshit anymore.”

There must be some way that Rozanov has rationalised it to himself. That Shane did it, but it wasn’t that bad. Or that he did it, but he wasn’t the one in charge, or he did some of it but not all of it.

Everyone has their own theories about what happened, and Shane sometimes hates that he has to convince people one way or the other, when he doesn’t even have any tangible proof. Even if he explains everything and gets believed, it feels like Rozanov is judging him for his worthiness. Like Shane has forced him to pick a side.

Rozanov grabs his hand, eyes wider than Shane has ever seen them. “Hollander, look at me. You think I would ever touch you if I thought you did something like that?”

“So you don’t think I did it?” Shane asks like it’s an accusation.

“Hollander, I don’t think anything, I was there, I saw what happened. You know that I was there.” Rozanov says, looking at Shane like he’s gone crazy.

“Oh, right. You were also at the Prospect Cup. Playing for Russia,” Shane says. He hadn’t really thought about it before, that the Russian team was staying in the same hotel, that they probably heard all of the rumours the next day.

“No, I was at hotel. At the desk. When you carry in the girl, said that she needed help. I called the ambulance.”

Rozanov’s eyes are wide and he doesn’t look like he’s lying, but he has to be, because Shane would remember that. Surely. Even if he was having a panic attack, and it was all a blur, he would have noticed Rozanov.

Shane has replayed those thirty minutes in his mind every day, he sees them in his dreams, and never, once, has Rozanov been there.

His thoughts spiral back to that night, and he tries to recreate it in his mind, clearing away the clouds of panic. There was him, the girl in his arms, there was the hotel concierge, and there was… there was one more person. There was a man standing at the hotel desk.

A tall man, wearing a hat pulled low over his hair. The dread was so thick that he had barely taken his eyes off the girl, but now that Rozanov is in front of him again, Shane tries to put him into the picture and realises that he fits.

“You… You were there too. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that?” Shane is still trying hard to wrap his brain around everything.

“I thought you remembered! I thought you knew but did not want to talk about it, so I never say anything. ”

“You just decided to never mention it? You didn’t think it was important enough to have a conversation about the fact that you were also there on the worst fucking night of my life? Shane is yelling at him, and Rozanov is just standing there, frozen.

Rozanov’s voice is low when he eventually speaks.

“You think I wanted to fucking talk about it? Oh, Hollander, great sex tonight, also by the way remember that night where you had panic attack in hotel lobby, and you are carrying girl who looks like she might fucking die so I also have panic attack and I have to call ambulance for her because fucking incompetent hotel worker is too slow? Let’s talk about it, so we can both have panic attacks again, but this time with our dicks out.”

Rozanov pauses to take a deep breath in, but he’s not done.

“And I know that you never talk about it. I check, after that night. I check on the internet and I check in the newspapers for when you will say what really happened, and you never do it. So no, I did not think it was a good idea to bring it up.”

Shane takes a really deep breath in, because Rozanov is still being an asshole, but not in the way that he usually is. He’s snapping like a fox with its leg caught in a trap. He’s baring his teeth but it’s the pain making him mean.

“I want to talk about it now. What do you remember?”

Rozanov’s whole body slumps down.

“The ambulance people, they had questions. What is her name? How much did she drink? What was she doing? You didn’t know any of the answers. You wanted to tell them, but you didn’t know, you just kept saying you found her with your teammates and she looked like she needed help. You looked so scared.”

“I was terrified.”

“Yes, but you were scared for her, not for you. Even though your eye was bleeding.” Rozanov reaches up and touches the space next to Shane’s eye very gently, running one finger across his eyebrow.

“My eye was bleeding? I don’t remember that,” Shane says.

“The punch. It was a very hard punch, someone want to hurt you. I know everyone say girl punch you, but I see girl. She cannot even sit up, cannot punch like that.”

Rozanov is still touching his face, cupping his cheek now instead. His pupils are huge, so big that Shane can almost see his reflection in them.

All of Shane’s anger is being replaced by something else, and Shane doesn’t have time to figure out what it is. It’s so confusing, but he needs to get the truth from Rozanov first, and then he can think about his own emotions afterwards.

“It was Connor. When I took the girl away, when I said I was going to get her help. He was trying to stop me, that’s why he punched me.”

“Is this asshole who blame you for everything? The one in the interview?”

Rozanov’s voice has changed now, full of contempt.

“Yeah. That’s Connor.”

Rozanov nods understandingly, eyes still dark.

“If I ever meet him, I will kill him. You saved that girl, and all he did was lie.”

Shane feels a wetness on his cheeks and realises he’s started crying properly now. He hadn’t realised it was coming quickly enough to stop the tears. He’s replayed that night so many times, thinking about everything he did wrong. Not getting help quickly enough. Scaring the girl, not carrying her right. Not having the right answers for the ambulance people.

“So… you think I helped her?” Shane asks, voice wavering. “The ambulance, you think she needed it?”

“Yes, Shane, of course. I was watching her, while you talk to ambulance people. She is very sick, I don’t… It was bad.” Rozanov’s looking a bit shaky now too.

Something loosens in Shane, when he hears that. Rationally, he was sure that he’d done the right thing, but it was so difficult to get himself to actually believe it when the world was treating him like a monster. The headlines and news articles and questions from his lawyer burrowed into his brain, making him sure that he must have fucked up somewhere. Surely doing the right thing couldn’t be this painful.

Rozavov has fully wrapped his arms around Shane now, and it’s comforting, but he still has questions.

“Rozanov, if you knew I wasn’t a bad guy this the whole time, why do you treat me like shit?”

“I don’t treat you like shit. Do I? Is that what you think?” Rozanov has gone really still.

“Rozanov, you just pushed me into a door for talking to a girl.” Shane can feel how he recoils.

“Yes, because I panic, because the Swiss guys were going to beat the shit out of you. I’m sorry, it was not right, but I was thinking it is only option.”

“Ok, well, you were the one told everyone that I did it. On the first day. Why the fuck did you do that when you’ve know all along that I’m innocent?”

Rozanov frowns at Shane’s words, looks genuinely upset.

“Because if they think you did it, they don’t figure out other thing.”

Maybe Rozanov did take something, because he’s not making any sense.

“The other thing?”

Rozanov doesn’t say anything, just leans down and gives Shane a very soft kiss. He wraps his hand around the back of Shane’s head, and strokes his hair. Maybe it’s the drugs, but he’s looking at Shane incredibly tenderly.

It clicks, suddenly. “You’d rather they thought… that I did that, rather than this?”

Rozanov looks upset again, his face falling.

“Yes, Shane! You are in Russia. In Russia it is safer to be a rapist than to be gay.” Rozanov says it like it is something very obvious, that Shane should know already. Maybe Shane did know in the back of his mind.

After all, it might be true in the NHL, too.

“Well, I’m not gay .” The word still stings, even though some part of Shane knows it shouldn’t.

“Fuck, Shane, it does not matter. If you look at one of them the way you look at me, I cannot protect you.”

It’s all so obvious now, why Rozanov couldn’t just leave it alone, why he had to keep bringing it up. He was doing it on purpose. From the first day, he had made sure to draw attention to Shane, make sure that everyone in the room knew exactly what Shane did. He’d known already what Shane was, probably before Shane knew himself. Rozanov must have had him all figured out from the moment a year ago when Shane let his eyes drift passing a bottle of water.

Every interaction he’s had with Rozanov is reshaping in his mind. The first thing Rozanov ever did as captain was make Shane get off the ice. Shane thought he was doing it to push him around, but maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was just that Rozanov could see he was exhausted, that he might collapse if he kept going. Rozanov had been an asshole about taking him around Moscow too, forcing Shane to go. But then he’d spent the whole day trying to make Shane relax, trying to make him happy, and it had worked.

The memories are coming faster now. Rozanov, smashing Courtois’ phone when he tried to play the interview, and then watching a movie with him afterwards to make him feel better. Rozanov, maintaining the illusion that Shane was a predator so that nobody looked too closely at what he really was.

The change is so sudden his brain is struggling to accept it.

“But…no. You sent that text… when you were at the photo shoot, you said, ‘it would be you here if you left that girl alone.’ that wasn’t in the locker room, you only sent that to me?”

Rozanov looks surprised, hearing the words that still grate on Shane, still dig a little bit of flesh out of him even now it’s him saying them.

“Well, is true, no? If you did not try to help her, you would not be in all this fucking mess. Was very brave to help her anyway. I thought maybe after I send that we would talk about it, but then you did not reply, so I think ok, he does not want to talk about it.”

Rozanov seems genuine, which pisses Shane off more than if he was trying to make him angry.

“So, this whole time, you’ve been doing, what, a fucking one man play where you pretend I’m a rapist in front of everyone so they don’t figure out I want to fuck you? Rozanov, that’s fucking insane, why couldn’t you just tell me that’s what you were doing?”

“I thought you knew! All this time, I thought we were on same page about this. We pretend for the team, but it’s ok because we were there, we know what’s true. And I did talk about it. I said to you, for men like us, in the locker room, it’s all a performance. And you said you understood that. It’s dangerous for people like us, Shane. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“Well, I thought you were talking about something else.”

Shane can still feel some anger left in him. That Rozanov thinks that this thing he’s pushed down and hidden for his whole life is so obvious, that he needs to make an entire plan around it, so that Shane doesn’t give himself away.

He’s angry at himself too, for not pushing harder. The way that Rozanov treated him in bed, and the way he treated him in the locker room were worlds apart, and yet Shane had never properly asked him why. He’d been too scared of what the answer might be.

Rozanov is silent for a bit, and then starts stroking his hair again. “So you didn’t know anything? This whole time, you thought that I was just some fucking asshole?”

And the anger goes away again, because Rozanov just sounds sad. It’s stupid that Shane didn’t know any of it, but he thinks about how much effort it must have taken, to keep up the lie.

In this strange city at the worst time in Shane’s life, while his teammates left him to rot, Rozanov has tried so hard to protect him.

“Well… okay, not all the time. When it was just us, you were never really an asshole. But I thought that was because you wanted to fuck me.”

Rozanov makes a noise, but he doesn’t say anything at all.

“But we didn’t even know each other before I got here. Why did you do all of this stuff? What was even the point in trying to help me?” Shane asks.

“Because it is not fair. You do a good thing, so it is not fair that you are here, in Russia. You should be in Canada, being second-best player, waiting for me to come and beat you at hockey.” Rozanov is stroking little circles on his back now, and it feels good.

“So… what about the sex? Where does that fit into the plan?” Shane asks.

“Oh. This is not in plan, this is just because I think you are hot. Was an accident.” Rozanov looks a little bit embarrassed by his own answer.

“Right. Well, I guess that’s better than it being like, a revenge thing,” Shane says distantly. Rozanov’s forehead crinkles when he hears it.

“Hollander, I sleep with you because you are sexy. Is very simple. I do not know what happens in your brain, you are crazy I think. I need to lie down now.”

Rozanov goes to Shane’s bed and flops on it, then pats the space next to him. Shane curls up next to him, lets himself wrap his arms around Rozanov. They are pressed tightly together, and Shane can feel his breath on his neck, and the warmth of his chest.

Shane is being held by one of the only people in the world who actually knows what happened, who doesn’t just believe Shane because of blind faith, but because of indisputable evidence. Rozanov was there too, he saw the girl with his own eyes, and he thinks Shane did the right thing.

The horrible clawing thing that has been wrapped around his throat loosens slightly, and the sensation is so visceral for a second that Shane touches his own neck, as if he can feel it.

Shane lets himself drift away to the familiar smell of Rozanov’s aftershave. For the first time in months, he sleeps all the way through the night.

Chapter End Notes

Ilya POV next chapter. Thoughts? :)

Chapter 8: Chapter Eight

Chapter Summary

Previously on... The Ice Is Colder In Moscow. Spartak wins another hockey game, and so Shane goes out with the team. However, his teammates spot him talking to an intoxicated woman, and so Rozanov pushes him and then yells at him. When Rozanov comes to his apartment to talk at the end of the night, he reveals that he was in fact in the hotel lobby when Shane rescued Miss X, and was the one who called the ambulance. He knew all along about Shane's innocence, and assumed that Shane was aware that he knew. He has been acting hostile because he thinks it is safer for Shane to appear as a predator so that the team don't figure out his attraction to men. The two argue, but ultimately reconcile and fall asleep together on the bed.

Chapter Notes

TW: Unsafe drug use (party drugs- do NOT mix alcohol and ketamine, or take anything from strangers)

Important: When it gets to a certain point there’s some fun coding added, your computer/phone/eyes are not broken, that’s just me experimenting, also it might not work in darkmode so you might need to switch that off/miss a little bit.

Also any Cyrillic will translate if you click/hover on it. It's Ilya's POV so the newspaper article is Russian.

Ilya is so completely fucked.

He should be used to Shane Hollander ruining everything by now, but it still comes as a
shock every time.

His old coach had been obsessed with Shane Hollander. He never used his name, instead he was exclusively referred to as ‘The Canadian.’ Every time Ilya flubbed a pass, his coach would comment about how The Canadian had flawless technique. Ilya might be the fastest skater on his team, on every team he’d ever been on, but The Canadian was just as fast, and he had a higher shot percentage.

The Canadian didn’t miss practice because he was hungover. The Canadian didn’t even drink.

The Canadian didn’t get into fights on the ice. He was always calm and sportsmanlike.

By the time he first met Hollander in that parking lot in Saskatchewan, Ilya was already sick of the perfect Canadian.

Two handshakes and thirty-eight freckles were enough for Ilya to throw all of that out the window.

Instead, when he thought about The Canadian, he pictured soft brown eyes, and the heat of his hand as they passed a water bottle back and forth. The nervous way that Hollander maintained eye contact, sometimes letting his gaze drift down and hover on Ilya’s lips. It was embarrassing that a bit of sweat and staring so often made it into Ilya’s jerk-off fantasies, overtaking some of his most extreme real-life sexual experiences.

By the time January rolled around, Ilya had been looking forward to seeing him again, he’d been planning the chirps that he would use at the face off for months. Instead, his next encounter with Hollander was in a hotel lobby at 2am as The Canadian had a shirtless panic attack and, apparently, didn’t even recognise him.

It was a night that Ilya didn’t want to relive either. Two o’clock in the morning, and Ilya had woken up freezing cold because the heater in the room had chosen to die. The useless woman at the hotel desk was dialling their emergency repairman when Hollander had run into the room, yelling for assistance.

The desk woman had completely frozen, eyes flicking around the room like she had no idea what to do, and so Ilya had been the one to pull out his phone and dial for the ambulance. He’d been sure that he’d fucked it up at first, because on instinct he’d put in 9-1-1, the phone number from all the movies. It was a stroke of luck that Canada and the USA used the same one.

As soon as they started asking questions, he’d handed the phone over to Hollander, who hadn’t even looked at him as he took the phone, because he was standing over the girl laid out on the couch, bleeding out his eye socket, and completely freaking out.

The minute he had a phone in his hand, Hollander started pacing, so Ilya focused on getting the girl into the recovery position. It was difficult to look at her, flickering in and out of consciousness, eyes unfocused. It brought up memories that Ilya really didn’t want to think about, couldn’t think about and stay present, stay with the situation at hand.

He started by rolling her onto her side, stretching out her arm so that it was palm up. He put her other hand underneath her cheek, supporting her head. This meant that if she did throw up, she wouldn’t choke on it. He bent her leg into the right angled position, and sat back, making sure that it looked correct. It was unnecessary, probably. The ambulance would be here soon, and they would be able to take better care of her. Ilya couldn’t stop himself from doing it anyway.

He’s used this skill twice before, both times on teammates who got too drunk or too high on nights out. He hadn’t yet learnt how to do it the one time he really needed it, when he was twelve years old, but he’s almost sure it wouldn’t have made a difference.

That almost kept him up at night sometimes.

The ambulance people were asking a lot of questions, and Hollander didn’t seem to know the answers to any of them. He kept pacing around, repeating the same thing, that he’d found her in his teammates room, saw that she didn’t look good, and immediately grabbed her to go and get help. His voice was completely desperate, and he kept coming to check on her, then flinching and looking away. It was alright, because Ilya kept his eyes locked on her the whole time, even when Hollander started freaking out again and disappeared for a few minutes.

It took about ten minutes for the ambulance to come, and Hollander flattened with relief once they finally showed up. He asked to go with them, to look after her, and the ambulance people had easily agreed. Probably so that they could give him some medical care too, rather than because they thought he was going to be useful, but it seemed to help calm him down.

“Is there a coat you can give him?” Ilya had asked the hotel desk woman, and she scrounged up something from lost property, handing it to Hollander. Otherwise it seemed likely that Hollander was going to try to go to the hospital in the middle of a Canadian winter without a shirt, because he was so worried about a girl he didn’t know.

Two minutes later, the emergency repairman had shown up, and Ilya had been taken back to his room.

Ilya had initially kept up with what the newspapers were saying, but reading about it made him feel nauseous, and so he hadn’t paid too much attention. Besides, Canadian newspapers were supposed to be reliable, and absolutely none of it made sense at all. The story they came up with, in which Hollander was a sociopath who forced his teammates into doing something unspeakable, was so obviously wrong that Ilya couldn’t believe anyone would entertain it. Surely he was reading some kind of edited version of the truth. He must just not have access to the proper newspapers, the good ones that got things right.

Hollander, for some reason, hadn’t denied any of it. He’d quietly allowed the rumours to expand and become the truth, and then run away to Russia. It was such a bizarre decision that Ilya found himself fascinated.

It was odd, and it wasn’t fucking fair. Hollander was his rival. He was supposed to be there, battling for who could score the most points, whose shooting average was better, who could win rookie of the year. They were supposed to do it together.

But Hollander had been suspended from the NHL and his contract with the Metros, and so he’d signed a KHL deal instead. To Ilya’s old team. Whom he had reluctantly decided to train with over the summer, because his brother had already snorted half his signing bonus, and if he continued to play for the team, then they’d keep paying for his apartment, and he wouldn’t have to go home.

It was supposed to be an easy way to make money.

Instead, Hollander had turned up with his big sad eyes, and his big obvious secret. The secret that he could probably hide in Canada, where people didn’t see what they weren’t looking for. But in Russia, there were dangerous people who would take great pleasure in sniffing him out just so they could stomp his face in. Hollander was blood in the water. Dead on arrival.

That shouldn’t be Ilya’s problem, but of course he couldn’t just let it go. Ilya had invested a lot of time and mental energy into ensuring that nobody looked twice at him, while Hollander stood out like an antelope with a big red x painted on. Ilya would have to teach him not just how to hide, but how to draw the attention away.

Ilya did it by being the biggest, loudest asshole in the room.

That obviously wasn’t an option for Hollander, but ‘guy who avoids girls because he’s a creep’ was pretty good cover. Hollander had accidentally created the exact conditions that would let him survive, and all Ilya had to do was reinforce it.

The other thing Ilya needed to do, was keep his hands off him.

Things were already complicated enough, what with them being rivals and teammates, so no matter how pretty Hollander was, it absolutely was not worth it. Ilya just needed to resist.

Of course he hadn’t been able to do it.

But he’d been so sure that they were on the same page, that Hollander understood. And once they started, Ilya had been thinking that it was nice, to share another secret. They’d been through something together in that hotel lobby, and so even though it was stupid, it wasn’t so surprising that they’d end up in bed together. Like those people who survive an earthquake together and then get married.

Not that him and Hollander were similar to those people at all, really, because it was just sex.

He was sure his plan was good, even though it meant that Hollander didn’t make any friends on the team. It didn’t matter so much because any day now the real story would come out, and Hollander would be sent back to Canada where he belonged, and the world would turn the right way up again.

And Ilya had thought… obviously Shane must have lots of people around him, who believed him. Clearly not in Russia, but back in Canada Ilya had been certain that Shane must have a lot of nice boring friends to support him. Other Canadian boys who liked ironing their T shirts and talking about hockey statistics.

Shane was so handsome and kind, and good at hockey, he probably had his own little fan club, with plenty of nice girls that he’d gone out with before, cheering him on. Nobody who had ever been intimate with him could possibly believe that he was capable of something like that.

Only he’d done more research, since that horrible fucking interview played in the locker room, and it hadn’t seemed that way at all.

Ilya started reading more and more articles, and he kept searching for the ones that were on Hollander’s side. He read interviews by three of his former ‘close friends’ and one of his girlfriends, and none of them were saying the obvious truth, that it was all bullshit and Hollander was innocent.

It seemed like, rather than supporting him, they’d left him completely alone.

So Ilya had flicked back through all of the conversations they’d had, little snippets naked in bed together, cooling down after sex, the times he couldn’t help himself from trying to reach out to Hollander. He mentioned calling his parents, or his lawyer, but he never once talked about his friends.

Ilya wanted to test it, to see what Hollander did if he acted purely like a friend. He thought maybe Hollander would laugh in his face, at the idea that they would just spend time together with all of their clothes on. But Hollander hadn’t laughed at him at all. He’d seemed so happy to watch one stupid movie with Ilya.

Ilya could feel the bigness of that swelling in his chest, and he’d had no idea what to do with those feelings. He’d thought that maybe it meant that Hollander wanted more, or at least he was capable of wanting more. Of seeing Ilya as more than just a quick fuck.

And then it had all come out, that Hollander hadn’t known anything at all.

Whatever soft feelings Ilya projected onto him were obviously wrong, because until a few hours ago, Hollander was convinced that Ilya thought he was a sex offender.

Hollander thinks so little of Ilya, that he genuinely believed he would fuck a criminal as long as it was convenient.

All of the cruel things he said to him, every time he laughed at a joke about Hollander someone had made in the locker room, Hollander thought that was real. That Ilya was disgusted by him, and still fucked him anyway. Hollander had accepted it all not because he liked Ilya, but because he was so fucking lonely.

It makes Ilya feel like the biggest piece of shit in the world.

Hollander had come to a new country, scared and vulnerable, and Ilya had preyed on that weakness for his own gain. It’s disgusting, the way that Ilya has used him, and instead of telling him to go fuck himself, Shane had snuggled into his chest and gone to sleep.

One thing is absolutely clear to him, which is that he needs to stay the fuck away from Shane Hollander, before he hurts him even more.

Ilya looks over at the messy dark hair spread out on the pillow next to him. The one saving grace of his fucked-up sleep schedule is that he’s managed to wake up before Hollander. He gently rolls him so that he slips away from him, and then lies for a second, making sure that he hasn’t woken up. Hollander’s face stays smooth and beautiful. His fingers drift over to the other side of the bed, and he lets himself stroke Hollander’s freckles, just once.

He can’t stop himself from leaning over, his lips brushing the skin on his forehead, light enough that Hollander won’t even realise he’s been kissed.

Ilya’s used to moving around rooms quietly, not advertising his presence. He manages to find most of his clothes, and slip out the door all without Hollander stirring.

His own apartment is much too close, and Ilya is in a masochistic mood anyway, so he goes to visit his father.

It’s awful in all of the usual ways.

His father tells him that he needs to get a haircut, which is usual for him, but telling him five times in one visit is slightly out of character. Grigory has always said that if a man is respected enough, he shouldn’t have to repeat himself.

Ilya leaves before he can be forced to sit through an awkward dinner conversation. The thought of going back to his apartment alone lies heavy in his stomach. Avoiding Hollander is not possible, because they have team practice in two days. The only thing he can do is try to get it out of his system, and Ilya can only think of one way to do it.

Ilya has to check the number before he calls Sasha. They haven’t seen each other in over a year, and Ilya privately thought that they might never sleep together again. He hadn’t counted on Hollander.

“Sasha, it’s me. Come over,” he says.

Sasha laughs down the phone. “What am I, your bitch? Come out, we’re all at some oligarch’s house, his girlfriend let us in. He has a fucking pool in the basement.” His voice is slurring slightly, and Ilya can tell that he’s high. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, Sasha is always high when he calls now.

“I am not coming to a party, I want to see you, not your fucking cokehead friends.”

Ilya can hear laughter down the phone,

“Did you have a fight with Sveta again? You know she doesn’t mean it when she blocks your number.”

Ilya has been avoiding Sveta for the last few weeks, for reasons that he can theoretically justify. He keeps telling her that he’s out with the team, and she hates spending time with the team.

“No, I did not fight with her.”

They will definitely have a fight when he finally picks up the phone and has a proper talk with her, but that’s not his problem yet.

“Then why are you calling me when you’re upset? Call her.”

Sasha’s capacity for emotional intimacy is even smaller than Ilya’s. He also doesn’t do romance, but he barely does friendship either. Most of the people he hangs around are practical, they have something that he wants like money or influence, or they look good next to him.

Ilya fits into both categories, but he doesn’t count because he’s an old friend, one who sees through Sasha’s bullshit. Ilya was there when Sasha was just a confused kid trying desperately to hide, before he’d realised he was fighting a losing battle.

“Sveta doesn’t have what I want.”

“Wrong. She has an asshole too,” Sasha says laughing. Then he lets his voice get just a bit more serious. “You can come. I’m with party friends, not real ones.”

Sasha doesn’t say aloud what they both know he means, which is his gay friends. At one time they were Ilya’s friends too, exploring Moscow’s nightlife together like moths fluttering around a flame. After Ilya started getting properly noticed, it stopped being possible for him to see them. He can still party with Sasha, but only if there are other people there, and he has a wall of heterosexual plausible deniability between them.

He feels the ache of it still sometimes.

Ilya knows that he belongs on the ice, with his team, scoring goals. He belongs in the locker room discussions afterwards, telling dirty jokes and picking fights. Hockey gets him money and recognition, and it’s the pathway to a different kind of life in America. Choosing it makes sense.

But he belonged there too, and sometimes it hurts that he had to choose.

Ilya gives in to Sasha’s whining for him to come out. “Fuck, fine. Where are you?”

Sasha sends him an address, and a picture of his cock. Ilya deletes it immediately.

Sasha tries to keep talking to him, because he’s on coke and so there’s zero chance of him shutting the fuck up.

They’ve already been kicked out of the oligarch’s house by the time Ilya catches up with Sasha and his friends, and instead they’re in some bar with sticky tables and lots of dark corners. Sasha is holding court in the middle of the room, in a silk shirt that’s buttoned halfway down.

“Ilyusha!” He says, looking slightly surprised that Ilya’s here at all. Ilya sits next to a girl with bright pink hair extensions.

“How do you know Sasha?” She asks, eyeing him up.

“We are old hockey friends,” Ilya says. Sasha’s group are not the kind of people who recognise hockey players, something Ilya appreciates on his nights off.

“Ilyusha plays for Spartak. And in September he will join the NHL. Number one in the draft!” Sasha reveals to the whole table, who now look at Ilya with more calculating eyes.

He’s gotten used to hanging out with other players, or with Sveta, who doesn’t need to display his achievements like a designer handbag. This is probably why Sasha insisted on him coming out in the first place, to boost his standing with this group of trust-funded nepo babies.

The night bleeds away, from bar to bar to club. Each bar is busier, noisier, has more lights, and more people dancing than the last. He knows that his little breakdown is getting expensive, but Ilya’s stopped tracking prices because he can’t fucking hear the bartenders anyway.

The club that they end up in is one of the worst kinds, a techno place that’s less about the experience of clubbing and more about the experience of being on lots of drugs. The bathrooms are clogged and disgusting, and there are no fancy lights, no exclusive tables, no shot girls. There are two dark sweaty rooms, with two different DJs both playing the same repetitive non-music.

Ilya likes clubs where the shots all have names and funny colours, and there’s multiple dance floors and big LED screens, and the room is dotted with leather booths lined in chrome, that he can flop into once he’s finished dancing. Sasha has brought them to an industrial estate in the outskirts of Moscow, to dance to synthesisers and become intermittently paralysed.

One of Sasha’s friends is explaining to him what the perfect cocktail of party drugs is. “So, you have a couple of drinks yeah, and then you take the ecstasy. But it totally bums you out afterwards, right, so that’s why you need the ket the next day, to like, wake you back up again. It completely kills the drop, it’s a total game changer.” She pops another piece of gum in, and goes back to loudly chewing it.

“Riiight.” Sasha’s friends are the kind of people who think any problem can be solved with the right combination of substances. She could probably recommend a combination of pills for a trip to the zoo or a child’s birthday party just as easily as a rave.

“Hey, do you want some E?” A guy wearing the tightest pair of skinny jeans he’s ever seen shouts into his ear. Ilya can’t tell whether he’s offering or selling, but the answer is the same either way, so he just shakes his head.

Ilya doesn’t feel like blowing all of his carefully accumulated happy chemicals in one go. He has few enough of them to go around as it is. Hollander had a hand in producing most of them, and it almost feels like a betrayal, to waste them on this night. If he takes a pill, then he’s using up Hollander’s smile, and the feel of his hair, and the goal they scored together against SKA, and last week in practice when Hollander chirped at him in Russian.

“You should come out with us on Sunday, there’s a rave at this place next to the river,” someone suggests.

“I have a game on Monday.” Ilya says. None of Sasha’s friends seem to have jobs, or at least, they have the kind of parent funded side hustles that still let them get blackout drunk every Thursday night.

“What kind of game?”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “Hockey.”

“Oh. You ever skated while on acid? Me and some friends did it once, it’s like, sooo trippy. We think that’s how Maria got that scar on her hand.”

Ilya has a few more conversations like this, can feel himself getting more drunk and argumentative.

He sees a girl on the dancefloor, dark hair and freckles dusted across her cheeks. He can’t stop the way his feet move towards her, drawn in like a magnet. She’s dancing with her friends, but when he comes close enough to touch her she doesn’t pull away. She laughs, and puts a hand on his arm, and he kisses her.

It tastes wrong, because she’s wearing lipstick. Shane is militant about dental hygiene, and he always brushes his teeth before Ilya comes over. Ilya wants to watch him do it one day, to see exactly how he moves the brush to cover every space, see how he spits into the sink. Ilya would wrap his arms around his waist while he did it, press kisses into his neck and feel Shane squirm, insist that he’s distracting him.

But he can’t do that because that’s not what they do. They fuck, and then Ilya leaves.

Ilya moves his hands down the girl’s back, towards her ass, and she takes a step away. He pulls away completely, gesturing that he’s sorry.

Ilya slopes off to the smoking area, because it blocks out some of the boring techno music. The one saving grace of clubs like this is that the combination of chemicals makes everyone in the smoking areas extremely friendly. Ilya gets into three different conversations about the ethics of threesomes in non-monogamous relationships.

A woman sitting next to him is stroking the hair on his arm, but Ilya can tell that she’s treating him like a puppy, rather than trying to flirt. If he leaves and replaces himself with a rug, she’ll touch it just as eagerly.

Someone offers him a bump of white powder, and he can tell as soon as it hits him that it’s not coke, which is exactly why he shouldn’t snort mysterious things from strangers.

“What the fuck was that?” He asks, mouth forming the consonants slowly.

“Oh, it was ket. Like, ketamine?” The girl says, laughing indistinctly.

“Yes, I know what fucking ket is thank you.” She frowns at him. He isn’t being particularly charitable towards someone who just gave him free drugs, but he can stare blankly at a wall in his own time, he doesn’t need any chemical assistance to get him there.

The lights in the club are hazier than they were before. The music doesn’t seem so annoying now, instead it moves through his body in waves. He closes his eyes, and he can see in his head the patterns that the music is making, forming into indistinct shapes and colours. He’s calmer than before, can feel the way his body is slowing down.

Ilya has to see Shane tomorrow. He could see him today, too, if he wanted. Shane always comes over when he calls, always happy to bend over or get on his knees.

“It’s not a revenge thing?” Shane had asked.

Ilya is the one who needs revenge, some kind of psychological compensation for how much Hollander makes his head spin.

He could ask Shane over, but it wouldn’t be enough. It’s never enough, because he is so greedy when it comes to Shane Hollander, he wants the whole cake even though all he’s ever been promised are crumbs.

Ilya doesn’t deserve any of Shane Hollander, really, which the man is going to realise at some point.

Soon, the newspaper reporters or the lawyers or someone is going to start doing their jobs properly. And then Canada will realise that Shane Hollander isn’t the monster that they’ve stuck together with half-truths and misinterpretations, he’s the knight in shining armour.

Not only did he save the girl, but he let the press drag his name through the mud just to stop the story. Shane, the most squeaky clean man in the world.

Ilya should be thanking all of them, for delivering him onto his doorstop already broken because there’s no way Shane would touch him otherwise.

This is the only version of him that Ilya will ever be able to have, the one whose self-esteem is so low that he’ll let someone like Ilya get his greasy fingerprints all over him.

When someone offers him a key and a plastic bag of powder Ilya takes it, hands familiar with the action.

The club is full of a shining mess of people, reflecting light like the carapaces of beetles, moving with the rhythm of a hive mind.

Everything seems a bit funnier, a bit more impressive, a bit stupider. Sasha tells someone that Ilya can juggle, and it turns into a bet involving some shot glasses, and Ilya's pretty sure he breaks at least one of them by accident, which is probably going to be fine because he slips the bartender some of the cash in his wallet.

One of Sasha's friends wants to see if they can sneak onto the roof. Ilya thinks it probably won’t be too difficult, but

One of Sasha’s female friends wants to take a photograph of everyone together, even though Ilya doesn't fucking know these people so who cares

They're someone else now and someone is touching him and he doesn't really care who it is.

Sasha and his friends are walking in big zig zags through the streets. Ilya wants to go and grab Sasha. Is that right? Is it Sasha that he wants to grab or someone else?

The sky is dusty pink, and it reminds Ilya of before-school practices. He used to get so excited in the car that he'd start bouncing in his seat and make his mother laugh

She had a really beautiful laugh

He's trying to picture every detail of it now because usually he doesn't let himself think about her at all

On the streets a man in a high vis jacket slurps a cup of coffee, and has to step into the road to get around three of Sasha’s friends, who are too hazy to get out of the way in time. Their laughter is loud and obnoxious, Ilya wants to apologise to someone but he doesn’t know who so

Later, Ilya is smoking a cigarette on the balcony, when someone comes and wraps their arms around him from behind. Sasha’s eyes are big, and he rubs himself against Ilya, letting his hands drift across his body. He blows a line of smoke across the top of Ilya’s shoulder, and the funky smell hits him immediately.

Ilya does some math, and then holds his fingers up for the joint. The NHL won’t test him for another two months, so he’s still safe. The KHL tests when the season actually starts, and even the concept of them drug testing is a hilarious joke anyway, so he won’t be in trouble there either. The smoke curls through his brain, he can feel it filtering through, softening everything, closing any drawers he doesn’t want to look inside right now.

Sasha smirks and lets him finish it, then brings their mouths together, shoving his tongue inside. It’s different to the kisses he’s gotten used to over the last few weeks. Shane is as polite with this as he is at everything else, and the first time they kiss he always waits for permission, wiping his feet on the mat before going inside. He gets messy and desperate later, which is endearing in its own way.

Sasha lets him push him off the balcony and into his room. Ilya falls backwards onto the bed with less coordination than he would like, and Sasha climbs into his lap, pulling both of their shirts off. Ilya does a quick scan of the room, and the door is closed, but there’s a man passed out with a pillow behind his head on the floor. Sasha’s already unbuttoning his pants and pushing a hand inside, and Ilya has to stop him, tilting his head to the man on the floor.

“Who cares, he can watch if he wakes up. You like having an audience anyway,” Sasha purrs even though it was Sasha who always wanted to blow him in inconvenient locations when they were teenagers. Mostly Sasha.

Sasha feels good, and it’s nice having a man’s hands on him, feeling the push and pull. Sasha’s more cooperative than Shane is, who always wants to prove himself. Shane fucks like he’s a participant in the gay sex awards, and if he does it just right they’ll give him a gold star and a medal. Ilya half thinks he deserves one by the end.

Sasha chases his own pleasure, he’s bossy about the positions and how fast Ilya should be going. Halfway through he pushes Ilya’s face away because he’s trying to kiss him too much.

“You’ve been practicing without me,” Sasha says, when Ilya finally pulls out. They share another joint afterwards, both content to lie in sticky sheets, the ash leaving black smears behind. Shane would already be shoving him towards the shower, desperate to change the bedding.

“Who is he?” Sasha asks, not jealous, just curious.

“He is nobody. Nothing.” The buzz in his head has died down a bit.

After sex with Shane, Ilya feels like he’s participated in a great work of art. They’ve built a cathedral together, and it stands in his mind until his more acidic thoughts start to erode the brickwork. That’s why it’s so addictive, they have to keep rebuilding it, adding new hallways and passages made of shared spit and soft touches.

“If you didn’t like him, you wouldn’t need to call me,” Sasha says, raising an eyebrow.

“He’s a bad idea.” Sasha just fixes him with his flat stare.

“Usually that doesn’t stop you.” He doesn’t quite go so far as gesturing to himself, but it’s implied.

“I’m not talking about him,” Ilya says, because the weed has made him stupid and he’s already said more than he meant to by confirming there was a ‘him’ at all.

“By the way, how’s your brother?” Sasha asks with a cruel smile, and that’s enough for Ilya. Sasha laughs as he picks up his clothes and walks out the door.

When he was sixteen years old, Ilya took a bad hit on the ice. Broken leg, snapped in three places. Intense recovery, the potential for complications. The long and short of it was that he couldn’t play, and if it didn’t heal right, he might never play again. Even if he did, he was losing out on months of training at the age where the margin between good and great was as thin as the skin on the eyelids. Blink and you miss it.

Hockey was the thing that he lived and breathed. It was his ticket out of Russia, into a new life where he could be cool and famous and buy his way out of all his problems. At that age he also needed hockey because of the physicality of it. The shadow of violence lurked behind all of the men in his family, and Ilya knew from an early age that he needed something to channel it.

Hockey gave him a safe place to put all of his anger. Hitting Alexei would make everything worse, but hitting the kid who had knocked over his team’s goalie would get him claps on the back and respect from the locker room.

That season Ilya needed something other than hockey to put himself into, something new and exciting that could distract him while he waited for his leg to heal.

Even though Ilya couldn’t play, he was still made to attend all of the team practices, so that he could ‘internalise strategy’ and ‘keep his head on the ice.’ It basically meant that he had to waste hours of his life in the rink sitting on the bench, watching kids with less talent practice skills he’d already mastered.

It also meant that he spent a lot of time sitting on an uncomfortable chair next to the coach’s son.

It took a while for them to get talking, because Sasha usually spent their practices drawing in his notebook. At first, he didn’t let Ilya see, which was really annoying, but after a few weeks of Sasha refusing to even acknowledge him, he finally let him look at his sketches. It was all hockey players, and Ilya had immediately been struck with how much movement he’d managed to inject into something that was so flat.

Sasha told him that he was building a portfolio, so that he could go to art school. Ideally somewhere else in Europe, because he wanted to get the fuck out of Russia as soon as possible. Ilya hadn’t needed to ask why.

Sasha was quiet, but there was a confidence in him that Ilya could admire even at sixteen years old. He’d played hockey as a child, and he’d been good at it. He was taller than Ilya, and his hockey coach father ensured that he had good hands and clean passes. But every minute he spent skating was a minute he wasn’t holding a pencil, and for Sasha that wasn’t a sacrifice he was willing to make.

Hockey didn’t make him happy, and so he told his father he was quitting.

One player, Sasha sketched more than all of the others. Nikita was a charismatic forward, he had straight blonde hair and long eyelashes. Him and Ilya weren’t really friends, but they had played both together and against each other many times over the years. He called Sasha a faggot every day.

At the time it hadn’t made sense, but this was before Ilya knew how much Sasha enjoyed being the centre of the room, in the rooms that allowed it. His brain treated all attention the same, and Nikita gave him a lot of it.

There was one particularly bad day, when Sasha had tried to talk to Nikita, and would definitely have been punched if his father hadn’t been standing nearby. Practice had finished, and they were smoking skinny hand-rolled cigarettes behind the rink, not really talking to each other. All the other boys had already gone to change or go home, and Ilya decided to finally comment on it.

“You know, he’s a bad choice.”

Sasha had whipped his head around immediately, as if Ilya had hit him.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Ilya hadn’t imagined the slight shake in his hands, the deep inhale that he took a second later.

“Nikita. He’s a bad choice. He’s never going to look at you that way.” Ilya hadn’t managed to actually look at Sasha when he said it, just kept staring at the glowing end of his cigarette.

“You think I don’t fucking know that?” Sasha got madder than Ilya had ever seen him, angrier with him for that than for all of the slurs carelessly thrown his way.

“I’m saying that if you want to fuck a hockey player, maybe there are other choices.”

His heart had raced when he said it, but it felt dangerous in the way that he liked. There was something here, and if he couldn’t get it from hockey, then maybe he could get it from this. Sasha had looked at him sideways, and studied him, double checking. Ilya had just stared back.

This started all of it, the furtive kisses in the equipment room, the first few fumbling attempts to get closer to each other. Ilya already knew that he liked sex with women, and he’d been aware for a long time that looking at some men gave him the same excited feeling as looking at women. The things he did with Sasha were just confirmation, more ticks in boxes.

Now, Ilya had even more people to potentially have sex with. That seemed like an undisputed win in his books, no matter what anyone else said. The fact that his brother went on frequent rants about how degenerates would ruin their beautiful country, only reinforced his position.

No opinion Alexei was passionate about had ever been correct.

It turned out that Sasha enjoyed the thrill as much as he did, and they started pushing each other into more risky situations. Public bathrooms, parks, one very memorable time in the team locker room before the cleaners had even left.

Ilya got him a fake ID, started bringing him out, and that was where the flashing lights of the nightclubs made Sasha bloom like a flower. Sveta liked him a lot more than any of Ilya’s teammates, and she never commented on whatever was going on between the two of them, just raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow whenever they came back from a smoke break with mussed hair.

It all had to come crashing down somewhere, but every reckless thing led to more adrenaline flooding Ilya’s system, an addictive downward spiral. His leg was still stubbornly refusing to heal, and it was starting to look like he might not make the Prospect Cup Team. The NHL scouts who had been excited about him were losing interest, and there was nothing Ilya could do to fix things.

Stealing Alexei’s car was the opposite of fixing things, but they were both drunk, and young, and stupid.

It started as a way to have yet another place to fuck. Sasha insisted that they weren’t going to drive anywhere, just find the closest secluded spot, and then put it back exactly where it was. Ilya had refused six times, but one night Alexei was at a policing conference, and so his father had spent the entire dinner talking about what a disappointment Ilya was, how they should have known all along that he wouldn’t achieve his potential. As if the broken leg was just an excuse for his laziness.

Of the two of them, Sasha had more experience behind the wheel, since his father considered it an essential skill, and so he’d sat with him while he made wobbly circles around the parking lot of the supermarket. Sasha passed all of this knowledge on to Ilya, who stalled it three times in a row before pulling it away from his house. He’d refused point blank to let Sasha anywhere near his family home, and so he had to be the one to pick the car up.

He picked Sasha up two streets away, the other boy seeming surprised that he’d managed to get anywhere at all. The roads were pretty much empty at four in the morning, and it didn’t take too long for them to find a space opposite from a closed up furniture store, underneath some trees that offered further cover from the street.

Ilya had his own shirt off, and his hand in Sasha’s pants when there was a knock on the window.

The cop probably thought it was the car of a homeless person, and was just trying to move them on. Instead he got two boys in a stolen car doing something they absolutely shouldn’t be. Something that wasn’t technically illegal, but meant the cop was not going to ignore everything else. Two boys out joyriding was healthy teenage fun. Two boys doing that was disgusting.

Ilya could see it on his face before he even started talking, the lists of slurs cracking like a whip into the night air. He was young, only a few years older than them, and Ilya could tell from the stripes on his shoulder that he was a junior member of the militsiya. His brain whirred with calculations, thinking about how much there was in his wallet, whether it would be enough to pay him off.

The cop paused what he was saying to gesture at the window. “ID documents. Now.”

If he’d asked for a driver’s license, Ilya might have made it out ok, handing over the fake and coming up with some explanation for everything. But the cop had asked for their identity cards, and the only one Ilya had was real.

He sat motionless in the car for a moment, feeling a crushing weight sitting on his chest. Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov. Even if he didn’t recognise the surname, the patronym might jog his memory. The long hand of his father, interfering with Ilya’s life again.

The recognition in the cop’s eyes as he looked at Ilya’s ID told him everything. “Fuck. You’re Alexei’s brother! This is his car.”

The look in Ilya’s face must have been absolutely murderous, because the cop had pulled out his gun at that point. Sasha had grabbed his hand, squeezing it so tightly that Ilya had bruises the next day. The moment hung in balance for a moment.

“He said I could take it. I lied, I told him I wanted to see my girlfriend, but he said I could take it,” Ilya begged. “He knows about the car, but he doesn’t know anything else.”

“Fuck.” The cop looked confused. A few months training had not equipped him to handle this situation.

“Call him. Call him and he’ll know what to do,” Ilya had said, because the gamble was worth it. Elite hockey prospects had done worse and still got themselves drafted eventually, but if Sasha got a criminal record, then no foreign art school would let him in.

The cop walked away to call Alexei, and Sasha had cried onto Ilya’s shoulder, whispering that it was a stupid fucking idea and that he was sorry, over and over again.

The policing conference was what saved them. Alexei was sober when he picked up the phone, and that meant he was able to stick to the script every Rozanov got taught as a child. It’s a family matter. I’ll sort it out myself. Don’t bring him down to the station, I will deal with it.

Alexei had dealt with it by beating Ilya so badly that he broke two of his ribs. Ilya hadn’t fought back, just let Alexei take out all of his frustration. The only thing that stopped him from revealing Ilya’s secret, other than the shame, was Ilya’s promise that if he told, Ilya would never get into the NHL. No fame, no million dollar contract. Instead he would be stuck in Russia, making more problems for Alexei.

Alexei’s greed outweighed his disgust.

His brother tried to twist the knife, by telling Sasha’s father. Sasha was banned from hockey practice, his art equipment taken away, his father not talking to him for weeks. But eventually things thawed, and Sasha was back sitting in his uncomfortable chair, now on the other side of the rink to Ilya.

It ended up hurting more than the broken ribs, watching Sasha’s father refuse to stop loving him.

Now, Ilya walks through the mid-morning sun, still slightly unsteady on his feet. He takes the metro back to his apartment, pulling a hat he borrowed from Sasha’s floor low enough that nobody can recognise him. Finally he makes it back to his apartment building, trekking up the stairs. He sticks his head around the corner of the gym, and he doesn’t know why, except he does.

Because Shane’s there, cycling on one of the machines. And when he sees Ilya he smiles, and Ilya feels a rush stronger than anything they could make in a lab for him to snort up his nose.

So, nothing worked and he’s still fucked.

He doesn’t smile back, he just goes back to his apartment so that he can slink down to the floor. He can’t un-fuck him, but he can start to be what Shane actually needs. He can be his friend.

It's the right thing to do, but Ilya is stupid and fucking selfish, and so he needs some distance first, so that he can push his feelings in the correct little boxes. He knows already that it’s time, so he slumps down further with his back against the door, and dials Sveta’s number.

Chapter End Notes

I am aware that we finally ended on a happy note last chapter and that this chapter is pretty not happy but I think Ilya’s crash out is deserved. We’ve heard from Mr anxiously depressed so now here’s Mr self-loathingly depressed, my two lovely unreliable narrators.

I realise we’ve gone off-canon here (which- look this story is canon compliant for 8 minutes of show runtime) but I do think their backstory is quite relevant to Ilya’s behaviour, and this is kind of what I always imagined for the Ilya/Sasha story. I know some people have their relationship as more complex sexually, but I’ve gone for ‘teenagers fooling around and being stupid’.

Also sorry this update took longer, I wrote another fic to procrastinate releasing chapter 7 and to get better at HTML coding so that this fic could be better and then it went viral on twitter and now has 10x the hits of this one, which I am soooo normal about. I do love that fic too but this one is my baby. This chapter is like 9k words so not too bad.

 

There will be more talking between Ilya and Shane next chapter! POVs will mostly alternate from here on out, so next is a Shane chapter.

Chapter 9: Chapter Nine

Chapter Summary

Previously on... The Ice is Colder in Moscow. Ilya tries to bury his emerging feelings for Shane by going on a bender, going to a club and taking drugs. He also reminisces about his previous relationship with Sasha, in which their teenage fumbling was discovered by a police officer who told on him to his brother. Ilya sleeps with Sasha again, but is still thinking about Shane, and so decides to call Svetlana.

Chapter Notes

Shane hasn’t seen Rozanov since the night he confessed everything and they slept in each other's arms. They’ve had a couple of days off since the last game, and Shane has been checking his phone obsessively. He had to ask Sergei to drive back to the bar Rozanov kicked him out of to get it, but thankfully it had been picked up by a cleaner.

It’s not like they text each other outside of Rozanov telling him when he’s coming over, but Shane wonders if they could. Before they started sleeping together they had that one day out in Moscow, where Rozanov took him shopping, and to the park.

They’re teammates, so it wouldn’t be so weird for them to do it again. It seemed like Rozanov had a nice time, walking around in the Moscow sunshine. Maybe he could find a dog park or something for them to visit, something that Rozanov would have to say yes to.

The cloud that had been hanging over their every interaction is gone now. It’s not a mystery anymore why Rozanov seems to hate him in the locker room, but then happily kiss the inside of his thighs when they’re alone. Before, Shane had been sure that everything Rozanov did with him was a chore, and he had to make an effort to hide the hostility that he felt towards Shane. Now, he feels his body alight with possibility.

He needs to talk to Rozanov again, and find out the full details, when he’s not drunk off his ass. Had Rozanov spoken to the police after everything went down? Should he tell his parents, his lawyer that there’s another witness, someone else to verify his story?

Shane pictures that for a minute, calling his parents and telling them that it was Ilya Rozanov who helped him that night, talking to the paramedics and keeping an eye on the girl. It seems like a strange coincidence, but it somehow fits into the pattern of them. Shane remembers the day of the draft, both of them being drawn to the same gym in the middle of the night.

The Prospect Cup, the draft, and now ending up on the same team in Russia. Rozanov has been there for all of the most significant moments of Shane’s life, so it makes a sick sort of sense that he was there for this too.

Fuck, what if Rozanov has to go to court?

They might ask questions about them. Now that they’re teammates, it’s public knowledge that they have a connection, and so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the court to be interested. That was a standard question, wasn’t it?

What is the nature of your relationship with the defendant?

Shane might be setting Rozanov up for a situation where he has to lie, in front of a court. Commit an actual crime, just for someone he’s barely interested in.

Shane feels the walls rushing in again, a cold sensation taking hold in his gut. He’s already ruined his own life, and his parents’ lives with this. They’ve never talked about it, but Shane knows that it eats away at them, like a cancer, getting the silent treatment from everyone they know.

Shane knows that when people look at his mom now, they wonder where she went wrong. How she could end up raising a son like him.

He can’t let Rozanov be dragged through that too, he’s got enough problems as it is with the pressure of being attracted to men in Russia, the brother that screams at him over the phone, and whatever mysterious money problems he seems to have. He’s already done so much for Shane, things he didn’t even think to ask for.

The only thing Shane can think of to do is call his lawyer.

“Hello Shane! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon!” His lawyer says brightly.

“Yes. I’ve been thinking a lot about that night. And something just occurred to me, that I didn’t really think about before.” Shane paces around his apartment, picking at the scrap of skin next to his thumb.

“Ah, I understand. I’ve been wondering if you were going to make this phone call, since I let you know that we were going to trial. I thought that might put things in perspective, in terms of your teammates.”

His voice sounds very serious, but Shane doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
“My teammates?” Shane asks, confused.

“Yes. Now, I know that we’ve already gone over what you said to the police. And a lot of that doesn’t sound great. Some of it is close to incriminating. But they interviewed you at a highly stressful time- plus you had a head injury! Your testimony can’t be fully trusted.”

This conversation isn’t going the way that Shane expected it to, but something is telling him to keep his lawyer talking, because it seems important.

“Right. Yeah, I wasn’t my usual self.” It’s starting to hurt now, but he can’t stop digging into the flesh next to his thumbnail.

“Exactly! You were not your usual self. So if, for some reason, you remember things a bit differently now, the court will understand.”

Shane isn’t good at picking up on subtext, but this doesn’t sound right. He wants to get back to talking about the man in the lobby.

“Well, what I told the police is pretty much the same as what I remember now. I wasn’t drunk, remember. There are some gaps in my memory, but the parts I do remember are really clear.”

As stressed as he was that night, constantly reliving things in his dreams means that he knows it down to the smallest detail, even if he doesn’t really want to.

“Alright, well, if you’re sure.” His lawyer sounds disappointed for some reason.

“Right, yeah. So you said that I might be called as a witness. Do you know if there are any other witnesses? I was just thinking that night, there were two other people, the woman at the desk, and the man who called the ambulance.”

“Ah! Yes, that’s a good question. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a definite answer. I believe that the police did take statements from two civilians, but I don’t know whether either of them will be called on during the trial. It depends on the strength of the other evidence.”

“Right.” The relief floods through him. Rozanov has talked to the police already. It’s not news to anybody. Shane doesn’t have to do something crazy like find a way to call the Ottawa police department and beg Rozanov to talk to them.

He wonders what other evidence there is. He took the girl to the hospital, so maybe they got DNA or something.

If Rozanov has talked to the police, that has to be a good, thing right? Rozanov thought he was innocent right from the beginning. There’s a chance that the police will listen to what he said. It might not be enough on its own, but it’s the first hopeful piece of the puzzle that Shane has gotten in months.

“Was that the only thing you wanted to know?” His lawyer asks meaningfully.

“Uh, yeah, that’s it, thanks.” Shane says, imagining the numbers adding up on a huge bill even if he's not technically the one paying.

“Okay. Well, Shane, I want you to know that you can call me any time. And remember, legally I’m not allowed to tell anyone else what you say to me. You can tell me whatever you want. Your final statement to the police is the only one that matters.”

“Yeah, no. I know that,” Shane says. He’s read up a lot about attorney-client privilege. Theoretically, he could tell his lawyer every detail of his sordid affair with Rozanov, and he wouldn’t be able to breathe a word of it. He still doesn’t want to though.

“Just remember that the trial is going to get a lot of attention. Whatever you say, I want you to think about your career and be really sure that you’ve done the best you can. I’m on your side, Shane, remember. We want to get the best result possible out of this.”

“You mean we want to get justice, right?” Shane pushes. “That’s the best possible result.”

“Of course. Of course it is,” his lawyer says, with a laugh that sounds slightly forced.

“Then I've said everything I can,” Shane says.

Shane still has the strange sense that his lawyer is holding something back from him. Maybe Shane’s memories are still not clear enough, and he’s hoping for something that will lead to a new breakthrough in the case. He’ll be waiting a long time if that’s the problem.

He really needs to talk to Rozanov properly, to find out exactly what he remembers, and who he’s talked to about it. Maybe when he’s sober, Rozanov will have an even clearer recollection, and he might actually be able to help Shane out by jogging his memory in the right way.

He texts Rozanov that they really need to talk. He doesn’t get a response for the rest of the weekend.

Shane makes his way to practice, Sergei giving him the usual silent drive to the rink. He’d tried to talk to Sergei a few times by now, but the man never really seems interested in conversation, even though Shane’s attempts at Russian have to be getting better by now.

There’s a low buzz of excitement in Shane’s stomach at seeing Rozanov for the first time since the night they spent together. Obviously Rozanov still isn’t going to acknowledge him in the locker room, but at least Shane knows why now. It’s not evidence of his cruelty, it’s strategy.

Shane takes his usual cubby, and gets his equipment on. The drills are starting to feel smoother, and he realises that he’s finally got his speed back to the point it was at before everything came crashing down.

He makes more shots than Rozanov, and goes to chirp at him, but Rozanov is looking into the stands. There’s someone sitting there, alone, watching. Shane can only make out a big halo of hair.

They’re getting ready for a scrimmage, when he hears two of his Russian teammates talking.

“Finally she’s here again,” one of them says.

“She’s so hot. Lucky bastard,” his linemate Kablukov adds.

“Who are you talking about?” Shane asks, in Russian.

They both look at him with wide eyes, and Shane realises that he rarely speaks Russian in front of them, so they probably don’t realise that he can understand any of what they’re saying.

“Shane, you understand Russian?” Kablukov says, punching him on the arm. He says something else that Shane doesn’t quite get about him being a traitor for not telling them.

“A little bit. Not really. I’m getting better,” Shane says. He doesn’t really know why he’s so embarrassed to try talking to them in Russian, but he also can’t get rid of the feeling.

“The girl is Svetlana. She’s Ilya’s girlfriend,” Kablukov says helpfully.

A stone drops into Shane’s stomach. He knows that Rozanov likes girls, if the stream of them coming in and out of his apartment are anything to go by. But he never saw the same ones twice. It’s different somehow, to see evidence that Rozanov can go steady, if he wants to.

“Oh. Right,” says Shane. “Девушка, like his girlfriend?” Shane knows that in Russian there are two different words, and that one is romantic, and the other one is used for a female friend. He’s pretty sure Kablukov said the romantic one, but he needs to be sure.

“Yes, девушка not подруга. Why does it matter? If you try to talk to her, Rozanov will fucking kill you,” Kablukov says, laughing.

“True.” They laugh again, and slap Shane on the back like it’s all a big joke.

Shane wonders whether it is true. Would Rozanov care, if Shane talked to his girlfriend?

They’ve established that Rozanov doesn’t see him as a creep, but then how does Rozanov see him? Rozanov likes to call him all kinds of things in bed, sometimes in English and sometimes in Russian, and none of them are particularly kind.

Rozanov likes having him as a teammate, and he likes having him in his bed. It’s lucky, for Shane. When he first came to Russia, he wasn’t sure if he’d get the first from anyone, and was certain he wouldn’t get the second.

As he’s waiting outside the rink for Sergei, Rozanov drives by, with Svetlana sitting in the passenger seat. She gives Shane a dirty look as they go past. Rozanov has his arm around her headrest, possessive. Doesn’t even bother to make eye contact with Shane.

The rest of the week continues with more practices, and a game against a visiting team from Magnitogorsk, which Spartak wins. Svetlana doesn’t come to any more of their practices, but Shane runs into her on his way back from the gym, when he’s sweaty and red-faced. She gives him another extremely dirty look, and then goes into Rozanov’s apartment. She can do it without him even opening the door, because she has a key.

Rozanov doesn’t text him back for the full week.

On Friday night Shane can’t get the energy to go and buy eggs, even though he needs them and the convenience store is only a few blocks away. Instead, he just sits on his sofa and watches Russian TV, feeling a weight on his chest. All of the actors talk too fast for him to understand more than a few random words.

On Saturday, he talks to his parents, and they ask whether he’s heard anything about the trial. He’s pretty sure that this is a more complex way of them asking how he is, because they can tell that he was doing better last week and now he isn’t anymore. In their minds, the only reason for that would be some kind of bad news from his lawyer.

He almost wants to tell them. “Don’t worry. My career still hasn’t been completely destroyed, and I’m potentially not going to jail. But the guy that I’ve been fucking- Ilya Rozanov, you’ve heard of him- hasn’t texted me back, and it’s driving me almost as insane for reasons that I don’t even understand.”

On Sunday, he puts off sitting and staring at the TV by doing laundry, and he finds the shirt that he wore that night, from the snooker club. He still doesn’t really want to leave the house, but he should give it back. He promised the person at the desk, and it was decent of them to lend it to him without asking for money.

Thankfully, the shirt he borrowed has the name of the snooker bar on it, and so it’s not too difficult to get Sergei to drive him there. It’s a Saturday night, so the place is busy, filled with groups of students egging each other on, and a few more serious players tilting their heads to measure angles of the table. Shane watches a ball ping off the side at an improbable angle, and slide into one of the pockets.

He goes straight up to the desk, relieved that the man sitting there is the same as one week ago.

“Hello,” Shane says in his awkward Russian, the plastic bag tight in his hands.

“Hello. Would you like a table?” The man asks, absently flicking through a big paper book.

“No, I just came to give this. This is yours,” Shane says, handing over the red shirt.

“Ah, you were the one here last week! The sad boy,” The man says, which is not a particularly flattering description, but probably accurate.

“Uh, yes. That’s me. Thank you for give it to me.”

“Don’t worry, it is just a club shirt. Have you ever played snooker?”

Shane has, mainly because playing pool is a good way to avoid taking shots or having a conversation when you get dragged out to a bar by your teammates.

“Yes. But I am not good,” Shane says.

A man with a large moustache on one of the tables has been watching Shane intently. Shane has been trying to ignore it, to push down the part of him that insists other people are always judging, waiting for him to make a mistake.

Then he points at Shane. “Spartak Moscow!” He says. “You played last week, no?”

“Uh. Yes.” Suddenly the man is cheering, and so are all five of his friends, talking in rapid Russian. Someone hands Shane a beer, and three people start trying to talk to him in Russian at once.

Shane lacks the ability to do anything except go along with whatever is happening now.

“Sorry, I do not understand. My Russian is very bad,” Shane keeps having to say, but the men don’t really seem to notice.

Someone hands Shane a snooker cue, and after a lot of hand gesturing, they manage to persuade him to play with them. Shane has never tried playing on a big table like this, but his natural hand-eye coordination means that he doesn’t embarrass himself. The whole table celebrates when he gets a ball in.

The men congratulate him every time he manages to ask them a simple question, like “What are your jobs?” or “Are you married?”

It’s difficult, in the beginning, because Shane has never been very good at talking to strangers, but the language barrier somehow helps with Shane’s anxiety. The awkwardness is inevitable, and he’s not good enough at Russian to make any of the small, subtle mistakes that other people pick at him for, like being too direct, or being too sarcastic. Instead, he’s making huge glaring mistakes, but the men just seem to think his bad Russian is funny.

“Important question,” says the man with the large moustache, whose name Shane eventually finds out is Oleg. They’re watching two of Oleg’s friends play now, and Shane has just won even more goodwill by buying everyone a beer and a shot of vodka.

They had tried to not let him pay for anything, even though his KHL salary was probably close to what all of them made put together, and so he’d had to pretend to go to the toilet, and then ask the man at the desk to help him secretly pay for the drinks.

“Who is the best Russian hockey player of all time?” Oleg looks at him expectantly, and Shane can tell that this is a turning point in their potential friendship.

“Ahhh this is bad question. You want me to look like a silly. You think I say Sergei Federov, and I will not remember Kharmalov. But I am not being so stupid!” Shane says, and Oleg actually laughs. Shane’s never been able to tell a joke in Russian before.

“Good, good! You know history.” Oleg looks at him approvingly.

“I am reading book. About uh, Super Series, 1976.” Shane doesn’t know how to say ‘Super Series’ in Russian, but Oleg seems to understand anyway.

“Oh! The game against Philadelphia. What do you think about the hit?” Oleg mimes a hockey check, and Shane knows immediately what he’s talking about.

They have a full ten minute argument, using Shane’s bad Russian, Oleg’s basic English, and a lot of hand gestures, about whether Ed Van Impe deserved a penalty in the finals of the 1976 Super Series. It’s the kind of obscure hockey fact that usually only Shane cares about, a conversation he never would have attempted to have with his former teammates.

There’s something vaguely embarrassing about the fact that Shane feels like he has more in common with a Russian train driver, than he did with the other eighteen year olds on his major junior team, but he’ll take what he can get.

Eventually, it gets late and Shane has to say goodbye to the group of middle-aged Russian men who had briefly adopted him. He has practice in the morning, and he’s worried that if he stays they will keep trying to buy him vodka, and then he will get drunk, and knock on Rozanov’s door and pathetically throw himself at him while his girlfriend laughs. Oleg hands him a piece of paper with his phone number on it before he can walk away.

“Shane Hollander, call me! We will play again. You can call me Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and we play, and we talk about hockey!”

It might be the most appealing friendship offer he’s ever had.

A few days pass, and Rozanov is still ignoring his texts. This time Shane breaks it up a bit by getting another haircut. It’s only been a week and a half since his last one, but his barber is good at answering questions for babies, and pretending that a grown man with very short hair needs regular touch ups.

"Hello Vitaly," Shane says, as soon as he's sat in the chair.

“What do you want today?” He asks Shane, looking at him in the mirror. Today he’s wearing a red flannel and stylish skinny jeans, as well as a pair of bright green glasses.

“I like your new glasses,” Shane says, because he needs to stall a bit, and he just learnt the word glasses. He looks at the haircuts on the walls to see if he can find any inspiration.

“Thank you. Do you see anything you like?” He asks, getting out a big book of hair.

“Can you do something that takes a long time?” Shane asks, because he’s run out of pretending.

“Uh, okay. I can just do whatever I want?” His barber asks, looking at Shane with a new appreciation in his eye.

“Yes. Also, next week I will play a game of hockey. What will you do next week?”

His barber gets through a full hour of discussion about things they will both do in the near future, and Shane leaves the shop with a geometric design shaved into the side of his head. He likes it so much that he gives his barber some tickets to their next home game as a thank you. If his mother was here she would complain about how it would affect photoshoots and branding opportunities, but that stuff doesn’t matter anymore.

He texts Rozanov again, trying not to sound desperate.

Shane: Rozanov, I need to speak with you about urgent team business. Specifically, strategies that you used during the Prospect Cup Tournament.

Shane: Just talking. We don’t need to play any music if you don’t want to.

Shane: I know you’re probably listening to lots of music with your girlfriend.

Shane hopes that it’s subtle enough that Rozanov will understand what he means, and won’t freak out on him.

It takes another three days, but Rozanov finally replies.

Rozanov: Ok. I will come at 9 to discuss team strategy.

He doesn’t address the music, which Shane is taking to mean that he’s understood.

Shane tries to dress down, to make it clear that this isn’t a hookup, so he answers the door wearing his comfiest hoodie and his nerdy glasses.

Rozanov seems to have the same idea, because when he knocks on his door, he’s wearing long sleeves. Shane didn’t actually know he owned anything that covered up his arms that much. It’s considerate on his part, Shane loves looking at his shoulders.

“Shane, you are planning on reading a book to me? It is story time? Take the glasses off,” Rozanov says immediately once Shane lets him in. Rozanov being rude is both annoying and relaxing.

“Fuck off. I was looking at my notes, I need them for my lawyer.” Shane says.

“Ok. So we are doing this, talking about it?” Rozanov’s face has grown serious again.

“I think we kind of have to. It might help, a bit. But obviously if you really don’t want to talk about it, then we won’t,” Shane offers.

“No, no I can talk. I don’t know very much though. It will probably be same as what you have.” Rozanov sits down on the sofa, putting his hands on his knees.

He goes through everything he remembers, and it’s almost exactly the same as what Shane has, except with a few more details about how the girl was doing, and what Shane said. He thinks he remembers Shane asking for the police, on the phone, but he’s not sure. That’s something that Shane’s lawyer has asked about, because it might make him look less guilty.

“So… what happened after?” Rozanov asks, looking at Shane curiously.

He realises that he’s never actually told Rozanov the story. Rozanov probably doesn’t even understand how he ended up in Russia, and he’s never asked before.

“Well, I went to the hospital with the girl. I was worried about her, I didn’t want her to be by herself. And that’s where I got arrested.” Ilya nods along, like he’s read up on some of the details.

“The funny thing is, I didn’t even realise that I’d been arrested.”

“What?”

Rozanov looks at him with wide eyes, which makes Shane feel even more stupid.

“Yeah, I didn’t know. They just asked if they could ask me some questions, and so obviously I said yes, because I wanted to help.”

“Hmmm, ok, and what did your lawyer say?” Rozanov asks.

“I didn’t have a lawyer yet, this is when the police were just asking questions.”

“You talk to police with no lawyer?” Ilya’s eyes were bugging out, as if Shane had said he’d taken a shit on the steps of the Kremlin. “Shane, you do not do this! How could you not know this, did your parents never teach you?”

Shane thinks about the things that his parents have taught him.

In tenth grade, when Shane’s math teacher handed out their test results, she had paused before giving Shane his paper back. “I expected better from you, Shane. I thought that your people were good at this kind of thing.” When Shane had replied with “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he was sent straight to the principal’s office. His mother had been so upset, not just at what the teacher said, but that Shane had got himself in trouble. Respecting teachers was important, she had said, and by reacting so strongly he might end up singling himself out, and making things worse.

In his first year of juniors, the dentist commented about Shane’s teeth, that there was some acid damage. He’d told the dentist that sometimes their new coach made them skate so hard that players threw up afterwards. It had happened once with the old coach, but now it was happening two or three times a week. His dad had seemed concerned, and he must have had some kind of discussion with the coach, because it stopped happening. But they never really talked about it. Shane went on listening to the man, because he wanted to be the best, and the best players listened to their coaches.

“Well, maybe in Russia that’s not a good idea…” Shane starts to say.

“No. Shane, look at me. This is true in every country in the world. My father is police, my brother is police. When you think ‘maybe I will talk to police’ think of my brother Alexei, who cannot go ten minutes without snort cocaine or scream at his wife. That is who you are talking to.” Shane tries not to react to that new bit of information, that the brother who yells at Rozanov down the phone might be on drugs. Rozanov probably told him by accident, since he hates talking about anything personal.

Shane frowns. “So did you have a lawyer then, when the police asked you about me?” He asks.

“Yes, of course. As soon as police say they want to talk, I call him, he listens to everything. Friend of my father, he has lots of friends like this.” Rozanov doesn’t go into any more detail about why his father is apparently friends with lots of lawyers, and Shane knows that if he asked, Rozanov probably wouldn’t tell him anyway.

“Okay, well, I talked to them. And I told them everything. And by then, it was too late. I’d missed the tournament.”

If the Prospect Cup had taken place anywhere apart from Ottawa, he might have been able to keep things quiet. But the mystery had taken over the city. Where was Shane Hollander, Ottawa’s hometown hero, and why would he miss the most important tournament of his career so far?

According to the people of Ottawa, Shane Hollander was a missing person, except nobody needed to put up posters because his face was already all over the city. Billboards and advertisements and a carboard cutout at the Ottawa Easy Clean Car Wash ensured that even non-hockey fans could recognise Shane Hollander from fifty paces. So of course he was recognised leaving the Ottawa police station, while in an arena on the other side of the city, the Canadian Prospect Cup Hockey Team let in a seventh goal.

His mother talked about how unlucky he was to be photographed leaving the police station. Shane wondered whether she felt any kind of guilt. It was her careful work that meant Shane was so easy to spot.

In the photographs he looked tired and shellshocked, a dark purple bruise forming over his eye. They probably would have sold to a newspaper for lots of money, but the teenager who took them immediately posted them on twitter instead.

Speculation started before the medals were even put around the Russian player’s necks, and the tidal wave gathered speed until it was inevitable that it would hit the shores and crash over Shane’s life.

“You missing the tournament, I remember this well. Eight goals, most boring game of my life without you there.” Rozanov says.

Shane stops spiralling for a bit so that he can chirp Rozanov.

“What, you missed me? Wasn’t as fun without me?” Shane teases.

“Yes! Hollander, your team is terrible. As people, but also at hockey. I am so ready for big challenge, and instead, they play hockey like crocodile with no teeth. Look scary but no bite.”

Shane smiles, then lets it fade.

“Well, obviously everyone noticed that I wasn’t there. Someone took a photo of me leaving the police station, it went viral on the internet, my life was ruined. Connor started talking to anyone with a microphone about how everything was my idea, and so I was the one who got most of the blame.”

It comes out easier now, a smooth explanation that doesn’t show the nights without sleep, the tears, the panic attacks, the thawing ponds of an Ottawa spring.

“Ok, this part I understand. But why did you let him say this? Why not tell the newspaper what actually happened?” Rozanov asks incredulously.

“Well, I wanted to, obviously. But my lawyer said that it would be better if I didn’t. He said I might harm my case, or the girl, if I talked too much. So I just… I just didn’t say anything.”

He can’t explain to Rozanov how much that silence had cost him, because it would reveal too much, and that’s not the relationship that they have. Shane usually doesn’t like to be touched when he’s upset, but he thinks he would let Rozanov do it. If Rozanov tries to put his arms around him now, he will lean into his chest.

“Hollander, this is awful,” Rozanov says, staying where he is.

“Yeah. I had to get away from Canada, all the newspapers trying to get the next part of the story. That’s why I wanted to come to Russia,” Shane says, which is partly the truth.

He didn’t want to come to Russia, he needed to come to Russia. Shane had lost everything else, and he couldn’t lose hockey. It was quite obvious that the options were, play hockey or stop existing. Some part of Shane thought it was too soon to give up, and so he’d chosen to exist again.

“And Russia is okay?” Rozanov asks, looking at him like he can see into Shane’s thoughts.

“Russia is okay. I can play hockey, and nobody knows who I am. That’s what I wanted.”

“That’s good. I know Russia is not perfect, but for you, now, maybe it is okay. Just need to keep head on ice. And I am thinking maybe, in Russia, you are also needing a friend.”

“I’ve been working on that! I made some friends last week. Maybe. We play snooker together.”

“Really? I did not know you liked to play snooker. And I see you are letting Vitaly do experiments on you," Rozanov says, looking at Shane's hair. If it was any other time, Shane would probably touch it self-consciously, but he really likes the pattern, and three Spartak players told him it looked cool, so Rozanov doesn't get to judge him.

“Me and Oleg talk about hockey. He knows loads of things about hockey, actually, he’s a big fan.” Shane has played snooker with Oleg and his friends three times now, and each time the conversation has gotten easier.

“Hmm okay. I am sure snooker Oleg is great. But actually I was thinking…maybe we could be friends.”

“You want to be friends?”

“Yes. And maybe since we are friends, the sex should stop.” Rozanov sort of mumbles the last part.

“Oh.” Shane had been expecting this, hadn’t he? He can’t just expect Rozanov to cheat on his girlfriend for him, that’s ridiculous.

Shane is just someone he fucks sometimes. Judging by the amount of people going in and out of his apartment, Rozanov fucks a lot of people sometimes. The fact that Rozanov knows he isn’t a rapist doesn’t mean that he actually likes him. It just means that Rozanov’s not a colossal asshole, and he thinks Shane is hot.

Shane tries really, really hard not to be disappointed and then fails as soon as he looks up and makes eye contact with Rozanov. His blue eyes are so beautiful, Shane has always thought so.

“Oh. Well if that’s what you really want. I don’t want things to be weird between us, with the team or whatever. I know you’re with Svetlana, and I respect that.”

“I am with Svetlana? This will be news for her,” Rozanov says jokingly.

“Well, ok. I guess I don’t really know what you two are. But if you want to stop whatever it is that we’re doing because of her, that’s ok.” Shane is saying this to the floor rather than to Rozanov directly, because it makes it easier to say, and he’s a coward, maybe.

“Okay, well, is not really because of Svetlana. She does not care who I have sex with.”

“Then why? Do you not like it?”

“Fuck, Shane, of course I fucking like it.” Rozanov runs a hand through his hair frustratedly.

“Ok, then why? If you like it, and Svetlana is okay with it, then we can just keep doing it. Sometimes. If you still want to fuck a man occasionally.” Shane realises that he sounds pathetic, but he’s beyond caring. For some reason, Rozanov has a face like Shane has slapped him.

“I just… is not a good idea. We are teammates, it is complicated. And regular, normal friend, I think you are needing this more than the sex. So maybe we should be stopping the sex.”

“Rozanov, are you trying to fucking friendzone me? You realise that every time you say the word sex you’ve looked at my dick? This is stupid. You’re being stupid.”
Shane reaches out and kisses him, and Rozanov leans into it immediately, letting Shane lick into his mouth, and then pushes him away.

“I do not know this word, friendzone. I don’t think it is stupid. It was stupid before, when I did not talk to you about that night, so you thought I didn’t know. You think I am an asshole, but I do not want to make you feel bad like that.” Rozanov looks like a kicked puppy.

“Rozanov, I don’t feel bad when we have sex, and I don’t want to stop. I think the sex was actually helping a bit, because I was really worried about it, after everything, and doing it with you was okay because it’s just casual, so it’s okay if I did things wrong.”

“Oh.” Rozanov looks incredibly relieved after Shane finishes talking.

“I’m not going to stop having sex with you just because you feel guilty or whatever. I know you fuck people all the time, but I’m not exactly drowning in options here.”

Rozanov looks into his eyes for a while, maybe to work out whether or not he's lying, and then seems to reach some kind of acceptance. “Okay, good. Is probably good we sort this out before we go to St Petersburg.”

After playing most of the other Moscow teams, Spartak has a couple of exhibition matches in St Petersburg and Sochi. They’re still not too serious, so they'll have a bit more time off outside of the games. Shane has been looking forward to seeing a bit more of the country that he’ll be living in for the next year.

“Of course, you probably have a girl in St Petersburg already or whatever. It’s not like you can sneak into my room while we’re on the road,” Shane jokes.

“I do not have any girls in St Petersburg. But I will not need to sneak anywhere, because we are sharing room,” Rozanov says.

“You know the room assignments already?”

He hasn’t had time to worry about it yet, but it was a potential risk, what with how much certain members of the team hated him. He’d been coming up with a contingency plan that included begging, bribery, and just buying a second room in the same hotel.

“I am alternate captain, I decided the room assignments,” Rozanov reveals.

“Of course you did. And you chose me as a roommate because you didn’t think Kablukov would let you fuck him,” Shane says.

“No, I chose you because you do not leave sweaty socks on floor of the room. And you are very boring and will not play loud music or throw up in the toilet at 3am.”

“Right, sure.” Shane rolls his eyes.

“No, is true. I decide room assignments a month ago, before we started fucking.”

Shane can’t help the way that blooms in his chest, the knowledge that Rozanov had chosen him. On his Juniors team he often ended up with a room to himself, which was treated like a privilege, but he knew that part of the reason nobody objected was because none of them wanted to share a room with him. Even if it’s for stupid reasons, Shane likes that Rozanov wants him, was willing to use his power to get him. It’s pathetic, the scraps that Shane will take.

“Oh. Well, you can still go and meet hot Sochi girls or whatever, just don't bring them back to the room. And I do like your idea of being friends. We can be sex friends. Where we have sex but also we hang out and watch movies or drink vodka or whatever you want to do. But it’s still just sex.”

“Right. Sex friends.”

“Yeah, so would you want that? Because it’s okay if you just want to stop anyway. Like if I’m not doing it for you. I know I’m not like, sexy. Or good at sex really.” Shane is gripped by the fear that he’s missed a social cue again, and Rozanov has been trying to gently let him down, and Shane’s made everything more complicated by proposing his stupid sex friend idea.

“Hollander, you are being stupid now. You are very, very sexy, you know that I think this. Maybe even more now that you let Vitaly do crazy things to your hair. Also, you are good at sex.” Shane blushes a bit.

“Do you really think that?”

“Yes Hollander, you are very good. Do not listen to what silly girls say in articles, is not useful. Newspaper should not have been allowed to say lies like this.” Rozanov trails off, and looks a bit embarrassed.

“You saw that?” Shane asks incredulously. Rozanov’s cheeks are definitely rosier than before.

“Okay, maybe I google you. You are new teammate, I am captain. Maybe I read some stupid article from girl who does not know what she is talking about.”

“Right. So when we have sex, I don’t seem like I’d rather be playing hockey?” Rozanov looks at him and he’s obviously trying to hold in his laughter.

“Hollander, when we have sex you seem like I could set the room on fire and you would keep riding my dick. I think article girl is just bad at sex. She is not an expert like me. Does not know how to make you shine.” Rozanov reaches out, and strokes a thumb over his freckles much too fondly.

“And you know how to make me shine?”

Rozanov doesn’t answer, because he is too busy kissing him, but he doesn’t need to, because Shane feels it. He feels himself shine.

Chapter End Notes

Finally, they are communicating! (Kind of) Also Shane made some friends. Anyone who has moved to another country as an adult knows sometimes you end up with a very weird assortment of friends, so that's the logic behind Oleg the train driver. We will get more of Svetlana eventually, but for now she's sadly still in the background.

Next chapter is the start of the road trip! It will come out next week hopefully because it's mostly done, just needs some edits.

Chapter 10: Chapter Ten

Chapter Summary

Previously on... The Ice Is Colder In Moscow. Shane calls his lawyer again, and is starting to have a bad feeling about him. Shane meets and makes friends with a group of men at a snooker club in Moscow. Ilya appears to be dating Svetlana, and then visits Shane to ask that they become just friends. Shane accepts the offer of friendship, but insists that they maintain their sexual relationship.

Chapter Notes

TW: Click to show TW (mild spoiler)

Attempted drugging with performance enhancing drugs

By far the worst part about playing in the KHL is the road trips. Ilya’s not afraid of flying, but the team uses a decomissioned soviet-era military plane for road trips, and he's pretty sure it has fake safety paperwork.

He really shouldn’t sit next to Hollander on the plane. But equally, he doesn’t really want anyone else to, and the flight is only two hours.

It was a good idea, to make things clear with Hollander. Whatever he might want from the other man, it’s better for both of them if they understand exactly what their arrangement is. Begging Svetlana to come to practice was probably overkill, but it was a lot easier than trying to tell Hollander himself. His big brown eyes made everything rational fly out of Ilya’s brain.

Ilya is going back to the USA soon anyway. They can be friends for a few weeks without getting arrested. It would be even better if they could be completely apart, but Ilya is a realistic man. He already screwed himself over when he made sure that he was sharing a hotel room with Hollander.

Hollander is looking around with that crinkle between his eyes, tension in his whole body. He gets out his phone and fires off a few texts. Probably saying his goodbyes to his friends and family, just in case.

“I don’t like this plane,” Hollander says, biting his lip. Hollander spends far too much time looking anxious, Ilya hates it.

“What, you were expecting private jet? Champagne and pretty flight attendants to tuck you into bed?”

“Fuck off. It’s just… it looks pretty old.”

“Ah, is not old. Is military plane, so they don’t spend a lot of time making it look pretty. Very safe though. Pilot was in the air force, so he can land even in bad conditions. I have been on this plane many times now, we will be fine.”

Sometimes it makes him feel guilty, how good he is at lying to people he cares about, but right now it’s useful. Hollander nods, and gets out some kind of thick hockey book from his bag. Ilya has only moments to prepare before he puts his glasses on.

He thinks he would have liked the glasses regardless, but Hollander was wearing them the first time they had sex, and there must be some kind of Pavlov effect going on, because Ilya wants to devour him now. He’s not sure if Hollander is intentionally teasing him (sexy) or if he has no idea what effect he has on Ilya and is being irresistible by accident (also sexy).

It’s only been a week since he last had Hollander, but it feels like a decade. They’d kissed a few days ago, but out of some twisted desire to pretend that all he really wants from Hollander is friendship, Ilya had stopped things there. The hotel they’re staying in has green wallpaper, with little white flowers dotted across it. Ilya wants to make sure he’s pushed Hollander against every inch of it before the end of their trip. He goes so easily, Ilya can’t believe it. At least Ilya pretends to not be desperate for him.

Hollander makes that little surprised noise, when Ilya attacks his mouth. He can’t help himself from opening up though, especially when Ilya puts his thigh in between his legs.

“We have to be quiet. The team is right next door,” He whispers.

Ilya turns his head so his lips are pressed to Shane’s ear. “Mhhhm, I can be quiet. You, not so much. Always begging me, Rozanov give me more, more, fuck me harder,”

Hollander drops to his knees and then it’s Ilya who has to suppress a groan, which was probably Hollander’s twisted little plan.

Ilya is embarrassingly chubbed up already, and Hollander licks him through the sweatpants. He pulls them down, and sucks him in. He can get Ilya so much deeper now, all the way into his throat. Hollander’s dedication extends to this too, his strive to improve, to be the best. Or maybe he just really loves it.

“Hollander, you take me so good. So good for me, so perfect.”

“You like it?” Hollander asks, pulling off for a second. Ilya pushes him back down where he belongs.

“So much. Hollander, I missed your mouth so much.”

It’s true, which is exactly why he shouldn’t say it. He’s spent a week pushing Hollander away, making it clear that they don’t mean anything to each other, not that Hollander doesn’t understand that already because he’s not pathetic like Ilya, and now he’s in danger of revealing too much already.

“Really?” Hollander seems genuinely surprised.

“Shhhh, you are being loud, no more talking,” he says, even though he was the one who started it.

Hollander skillfully brings him over the edge, and then lets him manhandle him onto the bed so that he can return the favour. They have a game tonight, so it’s probably not a good idea to do anything that might make Hollander too sore. He licks Hollander’s hole a bit, just to say hello to it. They’ll be seeing more of each other after the game.

Afterwards, they take separate showers, because regardless of what Svetlana says, Ilya does in fact learn from past experiences.

“Some of the team is going for lunch. Just some of the Russians. You should come with us,” Ilya offers.

Ostracising Hollander was a strategy that made sense in the beginning, both to establish his reputation as an abuser, and to make it clear to the team what Ilya’s expectations were. He didn’t want any of his teammates seeing him get too friendly with an accused rapist and getting the wrong idea.

That was when Ilya had been sure that it would all blow over, and that Hollander wouldn’t actually be stuck in Russia. Now, it looks like Ilya was wrong about that, and so he has to think more long term. He might be leaving for Boston soon, but Hollander has a full year’s contract with Spartak. If he has nobody, then he’s going to have a very difficult time. Ilya doesn’t want him to struggle, after he’s gone.

Hollander can’t speak much Russian, but Ilya has heard him get through simple conversations before. Going out with the team will help him learn, and some of them are curious about him anyway.

Hollander comes out of the bathroom, a towel around his waist. “You’re sure?”

Ilya looks at his wet muscles and is suddenly a lot less sure. Hollander shouldn’t be going anywhere at all, actually, he should just stay in Ilya’s bed. Has Ilya traced the lines of every one of his abs? He must have by now, but he still feels the need to double check.

“Yes, but we have thirty minutes.” He doesn’t let Shane put clothes on, just pulls off his own shirt. He wants to cover Shane’s pretty skin with hickies, but even he knows that’s not a good idea.

They make it to lunch only ten minutes late, since Ilya never bothered to escalate things beyond lazily making out on what he described as the ‘no-sex’ bed. He’d explained this system to Hollander, who had nodded along. Hollander hates sleeping in dirty sheets, so it makes sense to designate one bed for sleeping and one for sex. It’s just a road trip. It doesn’t matter if they sleep curled up together on a road trip, because that doesn’t really count.

The menu at the restaurant is in Cyrillic, so Ilya has to strategically read aloud some of the menu items as if he’s going to order them.

“Hmm, maybe I will get the cod cutlet with rice… or the buckwheat and roasted mushrooms. Or the chicken cutlet with mashed potatoes.”

None of the others seem to notice what he’s doing, which is good, even when he orders the beef stroganoff for himself, like he always does in Russian restaurants. Shane manages to order the cod successfully in Russian, and he looks pleased with himself afterwards.
The restaurant is cute, not overly fancy but it has a good view of Kazan Cathedral. He can see that Hollander is admiring it through the windows, and it reminds him of the day out they had in Moscow, how impressed Hollander had been with all the buildings. Maybe after they’ve eaten, they can take a walk around and look at St Petersburg.

Ilya pinches the inside of his own thigh to try to stop himself from thinking about things he can’t have.

Hollander manages to talk to Kablukov a little bit about how he’s excited for the game. He must hear hockey terminology so much every day that he’s picked some of it up, and so Ilya doesn’t have to worry about him for a bit. Kablukov does a fairly good job of slowing down and sticking to small words, and Hollander’s eyes are brighter than usual.

The talk on his side of the table is about whether the girls in St Petersburg or Sochi are hotter, and how easy it will be to find out while they’re on the road. It’s probably something that would make Hollander uncomfortable to talk about anyway. Ilya voices his opinions and gives Hollander one pat on the thigh underneath the table.

At the end of the meal Ilya orders the Napoleon cake, which is delicious, and some of the others head off to do some shopping. There’s still a few hours before they need to be at the hotel for a meeting, and to get transported to the game.

“Are we going back to the hotel?” Shane asks expectantly.

Ilya should agree. He should lean over and whisper in Hollander’s ear that they can probably get another round in before the game.

That would be safer than what he actually does.

They don’t walk around St Petersburg, like a couple of friends on a day off. They rent bicycles. Ilya unsuccessfully tries to convince himself that this is just exercise, and is therefore less romantic than walking.

Unfortunately, St Petersburg provides relentlessly gorgeous visuals, as they glide past the winter palace, and Hollander gasps when he sees the blue and gold building. Ilya barely knows his way around, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because Hollander has stars in his eyes even as Ilya accidentally takes them down a boring side street so narrow that a man yells at them as they ride past.

Eventually Ilya decides that following the river is a safe bet, and it takes them through a park, and towards a Cathedral with a bunch of tourists standing outside it. Hollander stares at it so intensely that he almost rides into the railings, and so Ilya decides it might be worth taking a closer look.

They chain the bikes up next to a cathedral, and go to buy tickets from the entrance desk.

“Are you over eighteen?” The bored looking woman asks.

“Yes. We are nineteen,” Hollander says in Russian, before Ilya can stop him.

“No no. Sorry, he is confused, he does not speak Russian. We are seventeen, and therefore entitled to the Youth price. Hollander, you are mixing up your numbers again.” Hollander frowns at him. The desk woman rolls her eyes, but hands over the tickets.

Hollander lets them walk a few steps before he asks. “Did you lie to that woman to save us three dollars?”

“No. I lied to her to save us two hundred roubles. Surely worth it, that is so many roubles.”

Hollander grins. “Asshole. You know that’s not how currency conversion works. You might as well say that you saved us… forty thousand Indonesian Rupiah.”

“I did? That sounds like a lot. I must be very impressive.” Ilya wonders whether that’s actually true or if Hollander made it up. It probably is, because Hollander is the kind of person who knows smart things like that.

They make it inside, so they can see the Cathedral walls, which are covered in mosaics of saints. Hollander’s mouth drops open, seeing the intricate work, the vivid blues and gold halos. Ilya can’t imagine how long it must have taken to place all of the individual tiles. It’s the kind of place that he would never go if he was alone, big teenage ego getting in the way.

“You lied to me,” Hollander says about halfway through the trip. “You told me that Moscow was the most beautiful city in the world.”

He gestures around at the parks and the churches and the statues. Ilya just looks at Hollander’s face, the way his freckles show up in the sunlight, his own personal world heritage site.

“Ah, St Petersburg has too many canals, is cheating. Any city can look nice if you add enough rivers and bridges. Moscow has drama, she is beautiful like old ballerina, she is graceful but she has some battle scars.”

Shane laughs, and picks up the speed on his bicycle, then does some kind of cool move as they come to a traffic light, sticking out a foot so that the bike skids horizontally to a stop.

Ilya stops his bike normally, with the brakes, and then gives him a round of applause, not entirely sarcastically. “Hollander, what was that? You can do cool things now?”

“Oh haha. It’s stupid. Something I used to do as a kid, it’s from an old Japanese movie, I used to love watching it. You might like it actually, it has motorbikes in it.”

“Hmmm yes, I want to see. Is it like Fast and Furious?”

Ilya loves those movies, with the sexy cars and the bad acting. He’s always imagined that when he’s an NHL star, he’s going to have cars just like the ones they drive, and beautiful girlfriends to sit in the passenger seat.

That has to feel better than bicycles and Shane Hollander but Ilya is struggling to imagine how.

“A bit, but set in the future. It's called Akira, it's pretty famous in Japan. Also it’s animated. I know some people say that cartoon stuff is just for kids, but it’s actually a very deep movie, and really artistic…” The traffic has started again, and Hollander is looking both ways and biting his lip.

“Hollander, you do not have to sell me on cartoon movies, I love Monsters Inc. This movie sounds great, I want to watch it. I will see if I can find DVD.”

He just manages to restrain himself from saying that they should watch it together. It was a mistake, the last time. Shane just seemed so sad, hearing that stupid fucking video played in the locker room. Usually when his teammates went through something, he organised a movie night, and so in his head this was the same. Except it wasn’t the same because Shane was so pretty and vulnerable and he’d fallen asleep on Ilya’s chest and the whole thing was intimate in a way it hadn’t been when Sorokin’s dog died.

“Really? My teammates always said it looked dumb.” Shane has gone that slightly pink colour that means he’s pleased.

For the one thousandth time, Ilya wants to kill the entire roster of the Kingston Frontenacs Major Junior Ice Hockey team. They got to have all of Shane Hollander, they got to see him happy and unrestrained, before there were shadows lurking behind his eyes. They didn’t deserve him.

Ilya insists on a race, which Shane wins, narrowly. They hop off the bikes and flop onto a bench, and Shane’s big thighs are quivering and sweaty, so Ilya needs to look somewhere else before he gets turned on. He passes a water bottle to Hollander, and it reminds him of the moment they had together in the gym, except this time they're not in Los Angeles, and so Ilya isn't brave enough to let their fingers touch.

They make it back to the hotel just in time for the pre-game meeting, pulling on their game day suits without even stopping to touch each other. Ilya manages to get one kiss in just before they leave the room, which makes Hollander roll his eyes, the smile he thinks Ilya can’t see tugging at his lips.

The meeting is in a random conference room, and Ilya is still thinking about movies and bicycles and how soft Hollander’s lips are to notice the important things before it’s almost too late.

There are a few other members of the team waiting outside, and none of them are wearing suits. Koledov raises his eyebrows when he sees them, and rubs a spot on his arm.

Fuck.

Ilya has fucked up in his duties. It should have been one of the first things he did, explaining this to Hollander, but maybe he’s been in denial, hasn’t wanted to think about it. Maybe every time he sees Hollander’s big brown eyes, all the useful thoughts fly out of his head. He grabs Hollander’s arm and starts pulling. He’s lucky that Hollander is used to going where Ilya takes him. Ilya thinks that maybe he wouldn’t even need to grab his hand, maybe he could do it with just a look. Or maybe it’s only him who can feel it, the thread tying them together.

Ilya is easily able to pull him into the closest bathroom. Maybe another player will raise their eyebrows if they notice, but Ilya can’t care about that right now.

“Hollander, you have a medical condition. Something… I don’t know, make something up,” Ilya says quickly, heart beating like a rabbit.

“What are you talking about?” Hollander asks, his eyes wide.

They don’t have a lot of time, because one of the smarter trainers might be calling for them soon. Someone has probably noticed them going into the bathroom together. He should have planned out a cover for this, some reason for them to be in the same place at the same time.

“You need to tell them that you have a… a blood problem or something. It doesn’t affect your skating, but it means that you need, ah a special doctor or something. All your medicine needs to have your special doctor look at it.”

“Ilya, what the fuck? What is happening right now?” Hollander still looks so confused.

Ilya reminds himself to be patient, that Hollander’s safe Canadian world doesn’t have things like this. He’s not expecting it. Despite all of the shit that has been thrown at him in the last few months, Hollander still believes in law and order and the tooth fairy and playing by the rules, even if it costs you two hundred extra roubles.

“Tonight we have an important game. SKA St Petersburg, they are Spartak’s rivals. So coaches will want everyone to be better, to skate a little bit faster, be a bit stronger. In the KHL, they have a solution for this.” He mimes an injection, just to really get the point across.

“What, they’re going to drug us?” Hollander’s face is twisted in horror.

Ilya hates being the one to teach him harsh lessons. It’s the rotten system that he was raised in, and so he doesn’t notice how filthy it is until Hollander steps into frame, the man without a speck of dirt underneath his fingernails.

“Yes. In that other room, they have… the needle, and the bag of water, but the bag, it has something in it, some kind of drug that makes you better. They will say it is vitamins, but it is not. Whatever is in there, I think you don’t want it. You need a story, so that you do not have to do it.”

Shane Hollander doesn’t even eat candy. Ilya has seen him check the ingredient lists of everything, including the lunches provided by the team nutritionist. Sometimes it shocks Ilya that Hollander lets him inside his body, when he’s so careful about everything else. He likes that, to be Hollander’s one indulgence. His guilty pleasure.

“Fuck. Fuck!” Hollander’s breathing is getting a bit faster, and so Ilya put his hands on his face, grounding him.

“It’s going to be okay. This is easy way, that I am suggesting. If they are still arguing, you still tell them no. You can do this, because you were very expensive, they do not want to lose you over something like this. If they are still insisting, then we do things hard way, and I punch a doctor. I do not want to do this, so you need to breathe, and tell them about your big health problem.”

Hollander relaxes, like he does every time Ilya gets his hands on him, which is going to drive Ilya insane if he thinks about it for too long.

“Okay. Yeah, maybe I can do that. I have… Antithrombin Deficiency. It doesn’t affect me but means I need to be careful, maybe.”

Ilya can see the gears spinning in Hollander’s big brain. Now that the problem has been properly explained, he can come up with a plan. Ilya has seen how Hollander comes up with strategies, watching hours of tape until he hits on the thing that most people miss, and then targets it with military precision.

“Did you just make up disease?” Ilya asks, not sure if he should be impressed or concerned.

“No, it’s a real thing. It means that you get blood clots more easily. I was researching deep vein thrombosis, because I know that in the KHL we have to take a lot of long flights, and that can be a problem, and this one website said that if you have Antithrombin Deficiency then you should be really careful, so I wanted to know if I could have it, but it’s pretty rare so probably not.”

Hollander is so boring. So smart and boring, Ilya wants to make him do that little speech again in his glasses, and then kiss him.

“Ok. You can tell doctor you have… anti blood thingy.”

“Sure. What are you going to do? Do you have an excuse?” Hollander asks him, looking concerned.

“Ah. Maybe I can say no now, just in case of NHL testing.” It’s not something he’d put much thought into, but he would prefer to say no, if he has the option. The IVs weren’t particularly strong, but he still always felt a little weird the next day.

“So you’ve done it before? That’s so fucked up, I’m sorry,” Hollander says.

Ilya wants to make a joke, to say that putting mysterious substances into his body is just the sign of a good Friday night for him. He’s not convinced he can make it land right.

Hollander’s disgust at the idea of the IVs is so palpable, because he lives in a world where his body is his own. One year ago, Ilya had just sat there and let them push the needle in, because he had never really felt like his body belonged to him. It belonged to his father, or to Russia, to shape like wet clay into the right image.

“I will go first,” Rozanov says, not able to resist brushing his thumb against his freckles. He blows some imaginary lint away, as if he needs an excuse to touch Hollander.

Ilya walks in. There’s a line of chairs, some nurses milling around, already three guys hooked up to the IVs. Ilya gives them a nod. Nobody looks particularly unhappy with what’s happening because they’re used to it, it’s just part of the game. He tells one of the doctors his name, and then quickly explains that he can’t, because Boston might want to drug test him.

The doctor tries to tell him that it’ll be alright, that it doesn’t stay in the system very long, and that it won’t show up on tests anyway, but Ilya just keeps shaking his head. The guy sees that he can’t be convinced, and crosses his name off the list.

It’s so easy that he feels stupid for not trying before.

Ilya keeps an eye on the other side of the room, where Hollander is trying to explain his made-up medical condition in a combination of English, Russian, and hand gestures. He’s got a good poker face, and so if Ilya didn’t know better, he’d believe that Hollander was annoyed instead of scared.

It takes about ten minutes, and Ilya waits for Hollander to ask for help with his eyes, but he manages to communicate enough that the doctor shrugs his shoulders, and flicks his hand, letting Hollander know that he can go.

They walk out the room together, shoulder to shoulder, back to the room that they’re sharing.

Hollander sits down on the bed heavily, running a hand through his hair. Then he has a panic attack.

Ilya doesn’t know what to do to help him, as Hollander gasps for air. All he can do is stand there, not wanting to touch him, and it reminds him of the other times he’s seen Hollander panic, in the locker room, and in the hotel lobby, and it’s just as awful every time.

After about ten minutes, Hollander’s breathing finally slows down. He keeps his eyes closed for another minute, and then squares his shoulders and stands up.

“We need to get to the game.” Hollander’s face is totally changed, set into the hockey mask that takes over when he plays. Usually Ilya finds it sexy, and kind of terrifying, but now it just makes him worried. Hollander doesn’t usually need to put it on until right before a game.

Ilya doesn’t move. “You are okay?”

Hollander avoids eye contact. “It’s not your job to look after me.”

Ilya kind of thinks it is, and that maybe if he wasn’t so shit at it, then Hollander might think so too.

Chapter End Notes

Apologies that this chapter is later than I anticipated. However, we finally have a chapter count! I was struggling with the last third of the fic, and since a lot of things need to be properly set up or have satisfying payoff, it made it difficult to publish this until I was totally sure about how to get where we need to be. The happy ending will come, I promise! Relatedly, I've been doing this without a beta so far but if anyone is willing to do some beta-ing that would be super helpful. I edit myself but it would be useful to have, just someone to basically bounce ideas off, and read and tell me it all makes sense.

Oh also there's not going to be a plane crash in this fic, the plane is sketchy because I read a bunch of articles about the KHL and their sketchy planes. I realise that sometimes I accidentally add ominous details and people become stressed about them because I do set up many ominous events on purpose too.

Also the Cathedral they visit is the 'Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood', and the restaurant is 'Katyusha Restaurant' in St Petersburg.

 

Notes:
If you know anything about the KHL, or Russian sport culture in the 2000s in general, you maybe could have seen some of this coming. Forced doping was/is a huge problem for Russian athletes. Several NHL players who went to play in the KHL have talked about IV setups similar to what is in this fic, or substances being delivered through oxygen masks. This type of doping got nicknamed the “Russian gas” (although I think that nickname might just come from one hockey podcast? not sure.) Now, it's unclear how exaggerated this is, and what exactly is in the IVs (could be something relatively harmless like extra fluids), but I've seen enough players talk about it that it seems like more than an urban myth. https://morning-skate.com/2023/08/17/what-is-the-russian-gas-an-investigative-piece-on-what-makes-russian-hockey-players-have-super-powers-on-the-ice/

I should also mention that this isn’t a problem exclusive to Russia. Although straight-up doping doesn’t happen in the NHL (that we know of), there have been reports of a huge problem with painkiller overuse. In the last ten years many players were given strong and highly addictive opioid painkillers, without being properly told about side effects. Even the less addictive alternatives used today still have their problems. Here’s an article if you want more on that: https://thehockeywriters.com/nhl-prescription-pain-killer-problem/

Chapter 11: Chapter Eleven

Chapter Summary

Previously on... The Ice Is Colder In Moscow. Shane and Ilya are growing closer. They depart on a road trip, beginning by visiting St Petersburg. They hang out together, first with their other Spartak teammates, and then just the two of them. They visit some tourist sites, and enjoy each others' company. When they get back to the hotel Ilya realises that the team has set up drugged IVs they are expecting them to take. Both manage to avoid taking the drugs, but Shane is shaken.

Chapter Notes

The final horn goes off, and the arena jumps up and down in celebration. Music starts playing, and in the most expensive seats, champagne corks are popped.

Shane spits his mouthguard out. They’ve lost the game. SKA St Petersburg took it 3-1, and it wasn’t even close. The whole game hadn’t felt real, like he was playing it in a fish tank instead of an arena. Usually his thoughts were as fast as the pace of play, flicking through shooting positions and predictions about the puck, but tonight his brain could only replay images of white coats and IV bags.

He even managed to catch a minor for fighting, after a brawl broke out in front of the net and Shane was too close to avoid it. He had thrown one half-hearted punch at one of the SKA players, and picked up a two-minute penalty for roughing, even though it had glanced off his helmet, not injuring him at all.

Shane sits silently in the locker room, as the coaches scream at them. It’s in Russian, and nobody bothers to translate it because the meaning is clear. They all fucked up, and their next game, against Sochi, they need to be better. Some of the team goes out afterwards, but Shane shares a taxi with Rozanov back to the hotel. They don’t speak the whole way.

As soon as the door to their shared room is locked, Shane shoves Rozanov against the wall, kissing him desperately. He needs something, anything, to distract him from what a shitshow the last few hours have been. Ilya has an uncanny ability to make his mind go blank, and usually Shane loves that, but right now he needs it.

One loss isn’t so bad, especially in the pre-season, but Shane can’t help the thought buzzing around his head.

Shane flicks through the game in his mind, considering everything that he could have done differently. He will watch it back as soon as he can, track his progress, look at what SKA did to secure the win.

He needs to win the next one. What if the coaches think he’s not performing well? They might start giving him fewer minutes on the ice. He’ll have no chance to prove himself.

The hockey is the only reason that he’s in Russia in the first place. If the hockey isn’t going well, then what is there left?

Whatever he did wrong, he’s sure that he can fix it. He can be better, he can be perfect. It itches under his skin that there’s nothing he can do now, in this hotel room, to improve his game. All he can do is forget about it for now, think ahead to the game in two days time.

“Can you just stick it in already?” Shane’s not properly prepped, so it’s going to hurt, but it doesn’t matter.

He just wants to get there already, that place Rozanov can take him to where it’s just hands and mouths and pressure and pleasure so strong it blocks out everything else.

Rozanov keeps pumping one finger in and out of Shane, still slow and careful, like he thinks Shane is fragile.

“Just fuck me already,” Shane says, because his body has aches in so many places anyway after a game, so it’s not like it’ll change anything if he adds a few more.

Rozanov leans down and kisses the curve of his ass. “No, you are not ready yet.”

“I don’t care, just fucking do it. It’ll go in if you shove it in hard enough. You can make it fit.”

Rozanov pulls his finger out and sits back on the bed. “I am not doing that.”

Shane can’t help the way his chest convulses, shame flooding him. Rozanov has never said that in the bedroom before. Shane never has either, because Rozanov is so talented, and everything he does feels so good that Shane has never come close to refusing anything.

“What do you mean? We have rough sex all the time, just do it,” Shane argues. It’s not their usual style of bedroom argument, where there’s a teasing lilt to his voice, all wrapped up in pretend outrage and real desire.

“Not really. You like a big strong man to throw you around a bit. I do, because you are strong too, it is not painful for you. This is not same.”

“Okay, well, now I’m asking for it like this. I don’t know why that’s difficult.” Shane can hear it in his own voice, that he’s trying to sound demanding, and it’s not coming out quite right.

Shane can’t believe Rozanov is being an asshole again, making him say all of these embarrassing things. Rozanov is frowning at him, and Shane can feel every inch of distance between them on the bed. They’re not even touching anymore.

“Usually, you ask because you think you will like it. Today, you are asking because you think you won’t like it. You are trying to punish yourself for losing game. You’re trying to make me hurt you.”

Rozanov’s making so much eye contact that it starts to unsettle Shane and he has to look away.

“That’s not what this is. Don’t try to psychoanalyse me, you’re not my fucking therapist!” Shane spits out at him.

What right does Rozanov have to judge him? They have sex. That’s all it is, and all it ever will be, and now he’s not even giving him that.

“Hollander, you are using big words, maybe you think you can confuse me. I know what is psikhoanaliz, it is similar word in Russian. You try to make this complicated, but is very simple. Some things I do, some things I do not do. Fucking someone who is not ready? This I do not do. You played a beautiful game, but we lost. It happens sometimes.”

Shane feels anger rushing through him again. “That’s not true. My positioning was sloppy, in the first period. It let SKA take possession, and they got the momentum they needed.”

“Your positioning was not sloppy, Kablukov’s was. I have better view from the bench, he was further left than he should have been. Coach told him this, I think, is why he was better in second.”

“I had three shots on goal that could have connected. I should have known to target his top right, that’s how you got one in.”

He can’t keep the slight note of bitterness out of his mouth, that Rozanov got a goal and he didn’t. He should have known where to shoot, could have seen it on the tape, if he’d spent enough time studying it. For the last week he’s been distracted, always thinking about Rozanov.

“I have played against Dmitri three times, and I did not know this. Was lucky accident I got one in.”

“I should have skated harder. Some of those SKA skaters were fast, I was trailing.”

This isn’t quite accurate, because Shane had kept up apart from at the very end of his shifts, but usually he didn’t have such a hard time. He was used to being the fastest skater on the ice, not being constantly challenged like that.

Rozanov throws his hands up in the air. “Those players are on drugs! You know this Shane, you have seen it already, yes? They have their own medical team with their own needles putting who knows what in to them, of course it is hard to keep up.”

It makes sense, but somehow Shane can’t see it as a proper excuse.

“Well, I still could have played better. We lost.” Shane says, like it explains everything.

“Ok, yes! We lost. Does not mean I will fuck you like animal. I am not just big bad Russian you can fuck to make yourself feel worse.” Rozanov keeps his voice even, but Shane has known him long enough to be able to tell there’s a layer of hurt underneath.

“That’s not what I think. I don’t see you that way at all. You always make me feel good.”

Rozanov pulls away fully, and puts his underwear on. Shane has messed up the routine. They always fuck after games, it’s just something that they do, and now Shane is ruining it by being stupid and needy and weird about sex. But the thing is, they’ve always won before. It’s been a reward that Shane gets for performing properly, his treat for a job well done.

“Shane, Canada is behind Russia, no?” Rozanov says, lying on his back next to Shane, not touching him at all still, but not getting up either.

“What do you mean?”

“The time is behind. They are to the West, so in Canada, it is not so late? Afternoon maybe?” Rozanov asks, which is a weird question. Shane’s still not sure how they got here from there.

“Right. Yeah. It’s like midnight and they’re seven hours behind, so it must be… 3pm. Why are you asking me this?” Rozanov is looking carefully at the ceiling.

“I am asking, because you are upset. Was a very hard day, for you. Very scary, probably, to see those doctors and not be sure if you will have to take something. And then we play, and we lose, and you are very perfectionist. You want to be the best.”

“Fine. Yes, it was scary. That’s why I wanted you to fuck me, so that you could help me take my mind off it, but now you’ve decided to do this weird bullshit instead.”

Rozanov still doesn’t move, just puts one hand on Shane’s arm, a slight pressure that makes him feel settled.

“For me. If I have something really bad happen, I always wish I could call my mother. Maybe it is same for you.”

There’s a horrible gnawing sensation in Shane’s stomach.

“I can’t tell her about the drugs. I just can’t. She’ll want me to come home if she hears about that. She didn’t want me to go all the way to Russia, nobody did. My parents, or the lawyer, even my fucking therapist didn’t want me to go.”

Everyone told him that it was going to be so difficult, that Russia had a completely different culture, and that he would get lonely being so far away from his friends and family. Shane had to bite his tongue not to mention that he already didn’t have any friends. Being at home, doing nothing, not working not studying not going outside not playing hockey was killing him.

“If you don’t want, don’t tell her. But maybe you can call anyway. And say, mama I lost a hockey game and I am feeling sad. This is true, no? And maybe it will help little bit.”

Shane looks over at him. Part of him expects Rozanov to be laughing, that this is some elaborate way to make fun of him. Hockey players are not supposed to act like this. Either you win, and you get drunk and go out and celebrate, or you lose, and you break your stick in frustration, or punch a wall, or get even drunker. You don’t tell another player to call their mom.

They lie there for another minute, and then Shane gets up and puts his briefs back on, because it’s not as if he’s going to call his parents lying naked in a hotel bed next to his rival.

He sends a text, asking if they’re around, and his mom responds instantly, which tells him that she probably knows already that they lost the game. He goes into their small shared bathroom, and sits on the floor, his back against the wall.

“Hey mom,” Shane starts.

“Hey honey! You said you were in St Petersburg, is that right? Your dad’s on the line too.” Shane hears his dad say a more muffled hello.

They’re sticking to the script that Shane established with them months ago, when he almost stopped talking completely. Keeping things light, letting Shane take the lead. Not even looking at the elephant in the room unless Shane mentions it.

“Um. Mom, I lost a hockey game, and I’m feeling sad,” Shane says quickly. It shouldn’t be a big deal, except for all the ways that it is. Because he hasn’t told his mom how he’s been feeling for the past seven months. In the beginning, because he didn’t even know what he was feeling, and it felt too difficult to describe, and after that because he did understand what he was feeling. And he didn’t want to worry her.

“Oh Shane, I’m so sorry. But Shane, you know that we’re always proud of you, right?” His dad echoes her in the background, ‘So proud.’

“Yeah. But today, in the game, I was just so distracted, and there were some openings I didn’t take advantage of, and I didn’t score any goals, so I basically didn’t do anything on the ice at all.”

“Do you want to walk us through the game?” His mom asks, like she always used to after he had a bad game in juniors.

Shane spends forty minutes leaning against the bathroom door, describing the game that he just played in clinical detail. It wouldn’t work for most people, to dissect a failure like this, but it does work for Shane. And maybe the bit at the beginning, helped too, where he told his parents what he was feeling, and then the world didn’t end.

Shane’s mom was able to catch some clips of it, so sometimes she can reassure him that his crossovers didn’t look forced, and the goal was on target, but the SKA goalie was just too fast. Weirdly, she also mentions that Kablukov’s positioning was off in the first period. Shane has to restrain himself from telling her that Rozanov said exactly the same thing.

He ends up talking about Rozanov anyway, because eventually he runs out of things to say about the hockey game, and he remembers that before everything went to shit he was having a really nice day. He describes the bicycles, and the rivers, and promises to send them some pictures of the beautiful cathedrals. There’s still half a day to go in St Petersburg, and then a full day in Sochi tomorrow before he has another game, so Shane promises that he’ll make the most of it while he can.

By the end of the conversation, he’s starting to feel normal again, and not like the entire weight of his future career hangs on the result of this one game. Talking about going to touristy places, and practicing his Russian makes him feel weirdly normal, less like an exile banished to a foreign land, and more like one of those rich kids who take a year off to travel.

“We’re so glad you called us,” His dad says, at the end of the conversation.

“Yeah, thanks. Love you guys,” Shane says.

“Love you too!” They both say it at the same time, and then Shane hangs up the phone, and he feels the same way he does after an intense shower. Like he’s scrubbed off a whole layer of skin, and there’s something pink and new underneath, and it was always there, he just needed to get to it.

When he finally comes back into the room, Rozanov is snoring lightly. The other bed is empty, and so Shane could easily sleep there, and have no risk of waking him up. Quietly, Shane makes his way across the room and slides in next to Rozanov. The heat of another body is so comforting that he drifts off in less than a minute.

When Shane wakes up the next morning, he’s tangled in Rozanov’s arms. He tenses up for a second, and then lets himself relax again. It feels incredibly indulgent to just lie there and be held, and Shane just appreciates the feeling for a while. Eventually he hears the change in Rozanov’s breathing, and a hand reaches over and squeezes his pec.

“Good morning,” Shane says, voice a little scratchy.

“Morning.” Rozanov starts to pull away, and Shane reaches out and pulls him back.

“Last night… I want to say thank you. For making sure that I didn’t have to take anything, and then for asking me to call my mom. I know I was being weird, I just… I get like that when I’m really stressed.”

“Is okay.” Rozanov says, yawning.

“And, what you said about how I was using you to make myself feel bad. I don’t want you think that’s like, the perception of you that I have, because it’s really, not and...” Shane shifts back slightly and feels something poking him.

“Rozanov, are you seriously hard right now?” Rozanov rolls his eyes.

“Is not my fault! It is morning, and you are pretty, and you are touching me!”

Shane tries not to laugh. “I’m trying to talk about something important.”

“Yes, you were saying how I am so nice and great. Look, I bet you are hard too, let me see.” Rozanov gently pulls him over onto his back, and looks underneath the covers. Shane doesn’t even bother to hide his own morning wood.

Rozanov looks a bit too triumphant, so Shane leans over and kisses him before he can say anything else annoying. They both have a bit of morning breath, which should probably be disgusting, but Shane decides he doesn’t really care. They make out on the bed, and grind against each other, and then Shane asks for the opposite of what he wanted the night before, so Rozanov opens him carefully and then rocks his hips slow, until Shane is coming onto the hotel linen and Rozanov is groaning and following a minute later.

It doesn’t feel like a desperate way to release stress or a prize for good behaviour, it just feels like a nice way to spend a morning.

“We should have blini for breakfast,” Ilya says, once they’ve both showered and stretched out in the bed.

“What’s that?” If Rozanov likes it, chances are it will not fit into Shane’s diet plan.

“You never eat? Shane, you have been in Russia for two months now!” Rozanov splutters. “We are going. Is not choice, you must eat. This will be important Russian culture lesson. If you do not go, is insult to my people.”

Shane thinks about it more, and decides that if other athletes can inject mysterious substances into their bodies, he can have whatever Russian junk food Rozanov wants to eat.

Blini turn out to be flaky little pancakes. Rozanov orders his covered in strawberries and condensed milk, which he makes several disgusting jokes about, while Shane gets plain ones with lemon. They are definitely not macrobiotic, but Rozanov manages to convince him.

“Hollander, we are on vacation. We can eat pancakes, will not explode.”

“We’re not on vacation, this is a roadie. We’re here for work, so technically it’s more of a business trip.”

“Oh? Mr Businessman,” Rozanov says, with a glint in his eye.

Shane is happy he let Rozanov convince him, because when they arrive, the pancakes are delicious, soft and not too sweet.

“Do you like it?” Rozanov is watching him slightly more intensely than usual.

“Mmmm it’s good, I’m glad you made me get them.” A smile splits across Rozanov’s face.

“These are good, but not the best,” he declares, finishing off his plate and looking like he might try to lick it.

Shane delicately eats another bite. “Where can I get the best ones?”

“You cannot. The best ones were made by my mother,” Rozanov says, staring down at the plate.

“She doesn’t make them anymore?”

“She can’t, she is…not here.” Rozanov looks at the sky, instead of Shane, and he feels a sinking sensation in his stomach.

“So last night, when you said that sometimes you wish you could call your mother…”

“I wish that very much. But it is not possible.”

“I’m sorry. That’s really shit, I don’t… sorry.” Shane doesn’t know what to say. He’s never really lost anyone like that. He reaches out, to take Rozanov’s hand or something, because he can’t think of the right thing to say, but before their fingers can touch, Rozanov flinches slightly.

It really hits him then, suddenly, what a big thing it is between them. How much Rozanov is risking. He can’t even hold his hand in a friendly way, after Rozanov’s told him something so difficult, just in case someone saw them and got the wrong idea. Even though Shane would do it for anybody. Rozanov probably wouldn’t even have flinched if it was Kablukov or Sorokin, but with Shane, he can’t step out of line for even a second. He shifts his hand to his coffee and takes a sip of that instead, even though he can’t taste it anymore.

Rozanov snaps his head up. “Sorry, I don’t know why I said that.”

“No no, it’s okay. You should be able to talk about her whenever you want. I’d like to hear more about her,” Shane says.

“Ah, Hollander, this is not good breakfast conversation. For our game tomorrow, do you think that we should keep the same power play formation, or focus more on the left side? Sochi’s goalie is weaker there…” Ilya interrupts him

They spend the rest of the meal talking strategy for their upcoming game, and Rozanov doesn’t bring up his family again. Kablukov texts Rozanov asking if they want to join later for some shopping, and so they make their way back to the hotel.

As soon as they make it into the room, Shane’s phone rings. It’s the ringtone he has specifically for his lawyer. In the past, Shane has almost always been the one to call, but his lawyer had insisted that he put in his number so that if there was an urgent update, Shane could be told right away.

“Hey, Rozanov, it’s my lawyer. I’ll try to be quick, but I really have to answer it. You can go and meet the others if you want,” Shane says.

“No, I will wait for you. If you take too long, we meet them there,” Ilya confirms.

“Hello Shane,” his lawyer says, voice extremely serious.

“Hello Mr Ryder. This isn’t a great time for you to be calling to be honest, is it something really urgent?” Shane asks. He can hear his lawyer sigh down the phone.

“Shane, I saw some coverage of the game. You got a penalty for fighting?” Something cold runs down the back of Shane’s spine.

“I got a two minute penalty for roughing. Not fighting, I wasn’t in a fight, so you don’t…” Rozanov taps Shane’s shoulder and then mouths something to him. Shane mutes the call for a second.

“Can you put on speaker? I want to hear,” Rozanov says into his ear. There’s a big frown on his face.

“Why do you want to hear me talk to my lawyer?”

“Because is weird. Why is he asking about penalty minutes? And you tell me already, you don’t know much about lawyers. Maybe I listen, see if he is any good.” Shane tries to think of a reason to refuse, and can’t. Honestly, with the bad feelings he’s been having about his lawyer recently, it might be good to have an unbiased opinion.

“Shane? Are you still there?” Shane clicks the button to put the call on speaker. He also checks the little recording symbol, but it’s there in the corner. Whatever his lawyer says, at least Shane will have a copy of it afterwards.

“I’m here. Sorry, I was just saying that it was only a roughing penalty, not a full fight. There was a scrum, so lots of people were involved. I barely touched the guy.”

“Shane, you threw a punch. There’s a video of it on the internet, and I can clearly see you try to punch somebody. Shane, you have to understand how this looks.” His lawyer’s voice is serious, like a disappointed parent.

“What do you mean, how it looks? It’s hockey, things like that happen sometimes.” Shane frowns at Rozanov, and is relieved to see that he also looks confused.

“Yes, but you of all people, should know better. You’ve been accused of a violent crime. Our whole strategy is based on the fact that you aren’t a violent person, to show why you weren’t involved in the incident.”

“But it’s not… I didn’t even really hit him,” Shane says.

“It doesn’t matter. A jury looks at that, and what do they see? They see a violent, intimidating man. Now, in light of this, it might be necessary for us to shift directions, in terms of your statement.”

“What do you mean? I get a penalty in a hockey game, and you want to change the way you defend my case?”

His lawyer is being ridiculous, and Shane has that feeling again, that there’s something he’s missing.

“Not completely. But there are a few key details which might put you in a better light, if the trial doesn’t end up going our way.”

“Okay… can you explain that a bit more?”

“So, from what you’ve told me, you removed Miss X from the room because you were concerned about her wellbeing, correct?”

Shane has told his lawyer this probably a hundred times already. “Yeah. She looked really bad, I just knew I had to get her out of there.”

“Well, see the problem with this is that if the jury doesn’t believe your story about trying to help her, then that looks very bad for you.”

“You think they won’t believe me? One fight, and now you’re saying a jury isn’t going to believe me anymore?” Shane’s keeping his voice flat, even though he can feel the anxiety start to build again.

“I don’t know what the jury will think. It’s a possibility. If they don’t believe you, then what do you have? A woman you admit was too drunk to consent, and four men saying that you had intercourse with her. That’s going to be very difficult to defend.”

Shane grits his teeth. “That’s why we have to make sure that they believe me.”

“That’s one option. But there’s another way we could do things. A plan B, if you will. You could change your wording in your statement just a little, and things don’t look so bad. For example, you could say that you overreacted. Miss X wasn’t really unwell, but you weren’t thinking straight, and so you made a mistake, and called an ambulance that she didn’t really need. The story changes. You’re just a young man who made a error and tried to fix it.”

Before Shane has a chance to respond, Rozanov’s finger hits the mute button on the call. Shane turns to look at him, and his eyes are very wide.

“Shane, this is your lawyer? You need to fire him, right now, get new lawyer.” Shane is freaking out.

“Fuck fuck, I promise, he’s not said anything this bad before. Did you hear that too? Did he really just ask me to fucking lie in front of a court?”

“Yes. This is so dangerous, he could get you into even more trouble. Is crazy, where did you even find lawyer like this?”

“I didn’t find him myself, The Canadian Hockey Association is the one paying him. They’re the ones who organise the Prospect Cup, and so they called the day after I got arrested. They told me that they’d got someone from a big expensive firm, but maybe that’s not even true.”

“I remember Prospect Cup. Terrible food, and changing rooms did not even have soap. Makes sense they would not want to spend money on this either. But is okay, because you can find your own lawyer.”

The phone flashes. “Shane? Are you still there?”

“Should I even keep talking to him?” Shane asks.

“Yes. I think is a good idea. Will be good for your next lawyer, to hear exactly what he thinks you should do, even if it is bad advice.”

“Ok. Yeah, we’re recording him anyway, so might as well hear him out,” Shane says to Rozanov, and then un-mutes the phone.

“Yeah, sorry. You were talking about me changing my witness statement?”

“Well, of course the statement comes from you, I’m not telling you that you have to change it. But if you were to make another change… So, for example, you said in your police interview that Connor didn’t seem that drunk, like he was aware of his decisions. Now obviously, that makes things a bit difficult for him.”

Of course it makes it difficult for Connor. Shane wants things to be difficult for Connor. Frankly, Shane wants to run Connor over with his car. At least the vehicular manslaughter charge would be justified.

“Well, he wasn’t. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

“Okay, but if you’re still sticking to your original story, that you only got there at the end, then you can’t know for sure how many drinks Connor had.”

Shane wants to scream. He’s not sticking to a story he’s telling the truth. Can his lawyer not see that? Or has this guy always assumed that Shane was twisting the truth. Maybe he doesn’t even think of it as asking Shane to lie, because he thinks what Shane’s saying is all bullshit anyway.

“...that’s your perception. You can’t know for sure how many drinks Connor had, because you say that you weren’t there until right at the end..”

“We played for the same Juniors team. I know what Connor looks like when he’s drunk, he wasn’t drunk.”

“Right. Okay. But as we’ve said before, you weren’t in a good mental space that night. So hypothetically, you could say that you’ve changed your mind. That now you’ve thought about it, Connor was drunk that night. Blackout drunk, too drunk to really know what was going on. And hypothetically, if your story changes a little bit, then Connor’s might change a bit too.”

Shane mutes the call immediately, and looks at Ilya again. Ilya just does a rolling hand motion, to indicate that Shane should keep him talking.

“What do you mean, Connor’s story will change?”

“Well, if we decide to cooperate, to smooth things out, then Connor might decide to cooperate too. Remember, we all want the same thing. To see you compete again.” Shane decides not to mention, that this is not at all what he wants.

“How do you know that? Are you Connor’s lawyer too?” He hadn’t even considered that, the CHA might cheap out enough to hire only one lawyer for all of them. He’s been so stupid.

“Of course not, that would be a conflict of interest, I wouldn’t be allowed. But obviously, The Canadian Hockey Association has a longstanding relationship with my law firm, Richards and Harding, and so myself and my colleagues are representing all of the members of your team involved in this incident. You’ve known that from the beginning.”

Shane probably had been told that. Or he could have assumed that the Canadian Hockey Association wouldn’t have multiple law firms on their books. Of course they’re all being represented by the same company.

“So… you know his lawyer. You can talk to his lawyer. You want to make some kind of deal with him,” Shane says.

“Well that’s not how I would phrase it. Not a deal, nothing formal like that. Ultimately, your statement comes from you, it is your decision. But like I’ve always said, it’s something you should think about very carefully.”

“Okay. I will think about it.”

Shane puts down the phone. He feels numb. His lawyer doesn’t believe him. Even though Shane had told him every detail, and he’d hummed and agreed, he never really believed him. And now, he was trying to convince Shane to lie because he didn’t think that the truth would be convincing enough.

Shane knows that the way he speaks comes out as flat, sometimes. He’s worked on it, and the media training helped, but a lot of the time it’s not something he does consciously. Perhaps that was why his lawyer didn’t think he was believable. Maybe his lawyer thought the story was made up because it made him look too good, like he was some kind of narcissist.

Shane doesn’t think that his side of the story makes him look good. It makes him look stupid, and naive, a captain who has no idea what his teammates are up to. He didn’t even really check on the girl when he grabbed her, and he panicked so much that he doesn’t even remember talking to the ambulance people, so he probably gave them useless information anyway. In the end, he barely helped.

Or maybe, his lawyer has had boys like Shane sat in front of him before. And so he knows what to tell them, the magic words they need to say to make it all go away.

Shane is uncomfortably aware that part of the reason that the story gained so much traction was because it was interesting. The hazing angle made it salacious, the kind of story that ended up as a slickly produced TV drama. Without that, the story was flat, boring. Hockey players get a girl drunk and take advantage. That’s not a story, because that kind of thing happened all the time.

He could see the gross logic of it. Kill the media circus by making it boring, and hope that the newspapers and the podcasts and the people on twitter lose interest. A jury would be much easier to convince if they hadn’t made their minds up already, so it probably would work. And Shane wasn’t going to do it, because even if he tried to sit in a courtroom and say something perfectly scripted to save him, the truth would be bitter in the back of his throat, and he’d sick it up whether he wanted to or not.

“Fuck. This is bad,” Shane says.

Rozanov’s face is stony. “Yes, I think it is.”

“He wants me to make a deal with Connor. He believes Connor instead of me,” Shane says dully.

“Hmm, I would not say that. Sounds like he thinks both of you are lying. He just wants you to tell the same lie, to make his job easier. Maybe if the lie is good enough, none of you go to jail.” Ilya’s face is scrunched up, like he’s thinking very hard.

“That’s still fucked up. And Connor… obviously I don’t know exactly what happened. But, maybe he fucking deserves to be in jail.”

“Of course. And this is why you will get new lawyer, who does believe you, and does not ask you to lie in front of a judge. This guy is the one who told you not to talk to the newspapers, right?”

“Yeah. He said it could harm the case.”

“Okay, well, you get new lawyer and maybe they will tell you that you do not have to do this. Maybe you can tell your side of story, and people will see that what Connor is saying is wrong.”

For a brief moment, Shane lets himself imagine that. Doing some kind of interview, where he gets to actually tell his story properly. Letting everyone know that he wasn’t the monster they all thought he was. Having to talk, in front of more people about what happened. Still with no actual proof. Rozanov might have been able to back him up now, but it’ll just look like another case of a teammate defending another teammate.

“Why did you not get your own lawyer before?”

“My mom thought about it. She went to see some. But they said that if it went to a criminal trial it would cost, like, between twenty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars. And I haven’t even been charged with anything yet. We could spend thousands of dollars and it all be for nothing.”

“Shit.”

“But also, the Canadian Hockey Association said that they had things under control. They’d pay for the lawyers, and the therapy, and help fix everything.”

“So you trust them, these hockey people?” Ilya is looking at him skeptically, because he doesn’t get it.

“Look, I don’t know how things work in Russia, but in Canada, they are hockey. I’ve been in CHA teams since I was four years old. I’ve been to five different countries on trips they organised. I moved away from home when I was sixteen years old, to go and live with strangers, just so that I could play hockey, and that was all checked and vetted and organised by the CHA. If I can’t trust them, what does that say about my whole fucking life?”

Shane pauses, because he’s getting out of breath.

“And even then, my family doesn’t have that kind of money just… lying around. My parents spent thousands and thousands of dollars getting me to this point. New skates, equipment, hockey camps, extra coaches, media training. Because I was supposed to be this big star, I mean, my mom quit her job to manage my hockey career.” And now she’d had to get a new job again, but they’d only given her part time hours.

“Is a little same for me. My family also spent a lot of money, because they think I am good investment. They know one day I will pay them back.” Rozanov looks at him understandingly, and Shane starts to nod before he really processes what Rozanov has said.

“Well no, not exactly? They’d never expect me to pay them back for it, they did it because I loved hockey so much. After she talked to some lawyers, my mom said they could get the money together, but they’d have to sell the cottage. And I just… when it first happened, that was literally the only place in the world I felt safe.”

They’d had a big fight about it actually, one of the only fights in the last few months. Before, Shane used to regularly argue with his mother. Little things, like about his diet, or what to pack on a trip, or how much time he should spend watching game tape instead of doing normal teenager things like going to parties. Then, after everything happened, they stopped having those little arguments, because Shane stopped caring about anything enough to fight over it. Somehow that seemed to build up, until it all spilled over into the cottage argument, both of them screaming at each other.

He’d asked her, if she didn’t trust the Canadian Hockey Association, then why did she let him do any of it? Why would she let him play hockey for fourteen years, train in buildings funded by their money, play on teams and for coaches on their payroll, all when he was just a kid?

“What about your advance money from the Metros, do you have any of it left?”

“Left? Of course I do, I have most of it. But the contract has a morality clause, and I haven’t played a single game with them. I’ll probably end up having to pay all that money back.” Shane is sort of surprised that they haven’t asked for it already, but he is still technically under contract, just suspended.

“But you can afford now, probably. Spartak are paying you well?”

“Yeah. The money wasn’t that good, because I didn’t play for months, and because of the bad press. They refused to pay me anything in advance, but it’s been okay since then. But I mean… I saw what happened to you. When they didn’t pay you. So when I first signed, I didn't know if I could rely on that.”

“Fuck.”

“It’s just… everything went to shit. And then the Canadian Hockey Association called, and they said they’d fix everything. I went for this meeting in this super fancy lawyer’s office, and when I told Mr Ryder what happened, he said that he believed me, and that he’d get me out of it, so it was going to be okay. And he was the first person who said that, that it was going to be okay. So maybe I’m stupid, and he was lying to me, but I just… I really wanted to trust him.”

“Shane,” Ilya says, very seriously, taking both of his hands. “Your lawyer is a piece of shit who should have license taken away. I am not like him, I do not make a promise I can’t keep. So I can’t promise you that everything is going to be okay. But I will try, and your parents will try, and new lawyer will try, and we will all work so hard together for you, Shane. This, I can promise.”

Chapter End Notes

The development so many people have been waiting for! Finally we have some progress. This is also the sad-mom-stuff chapter (sorry).

Big thanks to my new beta reader @ronbin who has been super helpful in planning and beta-ing! They have some great fics on here too. Also thanks to everyone else who offered, that was really nice of all of you!

Notes:

The figure for sexual assault lawyers being $20-100k is real, that specifically comes from KruseLaw.ca, it's a Canadian Law Firm, they've been pretty useful for information about the Canadian legal system. (Also that's 2010 money, it's up to 150k now). Other sites were giving me similar numbers.

Statistically, in Ontario 60% and in Quebec 75% of criminal cases are done through legal aid, which means that when they are accused of a crime, most people do not get a lawyer and pay themselves. Lawyers cost hundreds of dollars an hour, and they will charge you for every single bit of time they spend on your case, regardless of how meaningless it is. Your $500 an hour lawyer spends ten minutes writing you an email about the case? They will charge you $83 for that email. Sexual assault cases are complicated and can involve hundreds of hours of a lawyer's time, which adds up quickly.