Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandoms:

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

Characters:

Zane Boodram, Jean Jacques JJ Dagenais, Luca Haas, Shane Hollander, Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov, Wyatt Hayes, Lisa Hayes, Troy Barrett

Additional Tags:

unwarranted application of Real Hockey Logistics to the gay hockey smut universe, outsider pov, Again, Gratuitous exercises of Switzerland localistion, a tag that I did not expect to use again after YOI

Language:

English

Series:

Part 4 of Series: "I Swear This Series Isn't ALL Outsider POV"

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-10 Words: 6,447 Chapters: 1/1

Five Times A Centaur Went To Worlds

Summary

“Okay. Um. Hi. I wanted to introduce myself.”

“… I know who you are,” Luca said, and then kicked himself internally. Maybe he should have stuck to French after all.

"You're a strong all-round forward," Hollander said, and Luca was actually relieved when his instinct was to blush, or say something - anything - rather than to just white out on the spot. Shane fucking Hollander knew about him. Shane fucking Hollander's team had made the playoffs; they sure as fuck weren't getting top five first-round draft picks; but Hollander knew about him all the same.

"I hope this," Luca said.

"You'll be high in the draft order, I think," Hollander said, and Luca's stomach flipped over. Sure, he had - still had - a Rozanov poster on his wall, and he'd argue with anyone willing to take the other side that Rozanov was the better player of the two of them, but Montréal had the better team (or had, for the past few years; this year, Montréal was out of the playoffs and the Raiders were through to the conference finals). But praise from Shane Hollander was praise from Shane Hollander.

Notes

I saw the thing about the Penguins losing in round two and Crosby pretty much immediately turning around for More Hockey at Worlds and thought: hmm. Maximum Realism About Hockey would have one asking: after the Metros/Voyageurs lose in round one in 2021, why isn't Shane Fucking Hollander going to Worlds? The final scene of this has been percolating in my head since then (I tried out a few different POV options, and those who didn't quite fit for that ended up getting their own, earlier Worlds experience).

Also if it's weird that Shane and Ilya are drafted #1 and #2 respectively and yet neither of them debuts in the MLH the next year, it's even weirder that Luca Haas was number #2 two years prior to the start of TLG and only a new rookie at the start of that year. I have invented complicated backstory.

2017 World Championship, Cologne and Paris

Zane Boodram's second World Championship appearance capped off a damn good year. His performance in the regular season, despite the Centaurs crashing and burning, had been good. It was his break-out year, his second in the MLH. He probably wasn't ever going to be a top contender for the Art Ross trophy, but he couldn't shake the feeling that his goal count could have been higher if management hadn't clearly given up on them around mid-January and traded away Burton, his left-wing linemate. They'd been playing with a solid 2-1-2 offensive strategy, with Zane and Burton compensating for Tremblay's decreasing speed and Tremblay bringing his experience and playmaking up behind them.

Without Burton, that fell apart. (On the other hand, Burton had been kind of a dick, and had definitely expected - for no actual skill-based reason - that he could play the pest and Zane would drop the gloves if needed. Zane didn't miss Burton personally, but he was still a bit mad about the whole situation.) Having clearly given up on securing a wildcard spot - probably fair, Zane had to concede, given Boyle was out on IR for the rest of the regular season - and with new inbound trades and call-ups in the mix, the coaches had clearly adopted a strategy of "throw the lines into a blender and see if anything cool emerges".

Nothing cool had emerged, unless you counted Zane taking a couple of call-ups out to lunch, and one of them stumbling into a table and causing the occupant's coffee to spill into her laptop keyboard. The kid had bought her a new coffee, but Zane had claimed the privilege of replacing the laptop. When that was done - he didn't want it to seem like he was putting pressure on her or anything, he'd got to take her out for drinks. And then dinner, after their next roadie. By some stroke of luck Cassie seemed to want to keep seeing him, so that was actually the coolest thing to happen to Zane all year.

Weird line changes and falling totally, ridiculously, in love notwithstanding, Zane had managed to keep up his points. His name cropped up more often than he'd expected in the end-of-regular-season coverage, usually alongside the phrase "breakout year", although also quite often alongside "despite his team…". So Zane wasn't surprised when his agent checked in about Worlds. He'd been to Worlds' last year; he was on the long list; and it wasn’t like the Centaurs were in for a deep playoff run.

What he was surprised about was that he ended up on the first line. Team Canada had delayed confirming the captaincy until the Metros were out of the playoffs - very clearly expecting that the Metros would, without Hollander, be out of the playoffs after the first round, and one or both of Pike and Dagenais would be available for Worlds. It turned out Pike's wife was about to give birth or something, so he wasn't there, and Zane was on the top line instead of Pike.

There were plenty of other wingers who could've filled that spot, and the coaches rotated the lines a bit in the early rounds; but Zane held down the left wing on the first line all the way through to the gold medal. Fucking ace.

Later, when he was back home and looking at the coming season, something else would stand out. Somewhere during the preliminary rounds- not early, but not last minute either - JJ Dagenais had put his number in Zane's phone. They'd been at bistro in some weird outer edge of Paris on a non-competition day. Two thirds of the way through the second round of beers, Dagenais had clapped Zane on the shoulder and said "hey, man, congrats on the A". Zane, head full of Worlds, had been a bit slow to recall that, oh, yeah, he'd been made Assistant Captain - after Burton got traded, in fact, because Burton had worn the A and that hadn't stopped management from trading him out.

He probably managed to say something normal in response. Dagenais had said something along the lines of Assistant Captain Bro Club, and put his number in Zane's phone, and insisted Zane put his number in his.

And that was why Zane Boodram was looking at his tablet in September, with his pre-season schedule on the screen, and at the same time his phone was alerting him to group chat notifications. He was in a group chat, now, with JJ Dagenais, and Carter Vaughn, and James who had the A in Nashville, and Nesbitt. Zane knew who Nesbitt was, in hockey terms: D-Man for the Ducks, assistant captain as of last year, but he did have to look Nesbitt up to figure the group chat logic out. Turns out, Nesbitt was Indigenous, First Nations, whatever right term ought to be, and from fucking Ontario at that. Zane gave up on trying to figure out why some coverage said Indigenous and some said First Nations and if one of them was wrong when he found a profile from Nesbitt's Junior years that specified he was Anishnaabek.

The point that Zane was stuck on, a bit, was that this wasn't a group chat of "every player of colour" or even "every assistant captain of colour". It was just Vaughn and Dagenais and James and Nesbitt, and now Zane. Nesbitt was from Ontario, same as Zane - well, no, obviously not the same, Zane's family moved to Toronto when he was like, four, and Nesbitt was from one of the unceded territory areas that Zane didn't normally think about. The thing that Zane kept thinking about was that Dagenais or Vaughn or even James must have made a point of talking to Nesbitt, maybe looking out for him. Maybe he'd put his neck out for one of them at some point and they'd connected over that.

Either way, in hindsight that made Zane appreciate Dagenais and his "congrats on the A, give me your number" strategy more. With the ink dry on his second contract with the Cens, Zane had a bit of space to think about what kind of career he wanted and what kind of guy he wanted to be. A guy with a couple more gold medals to his name, for sure; ideally a Stanley cup or two, but better players than him saw out their whole careers without either.

Maybe he'd like to be the kind of guy Dagenais was - or Vaughn, but he'd never played with Vaughn, whereas he'd just played a whole World Cup tournament on the same power play unit as JJ Dagenais. Playoff exhaustion: never heard of her. Dagenais had dragged the first power play unit for Team Canada together and talked sense into them, got them working together and thinking like a team instead of a bunch of ring-ins. Team Canada hadn't given him the C - that went to Gauthier in the end - but he'd shown up and done the work anyway. The fact that he'd thought enough of Zane to loop him into the Assistant Captain Bro Club probably put an extra shine on how Zane thought about him, but then again, he kind of liked the idea of himself being the guy to reach out like that, down the line.

Cassie was tapping away at her laptop on the other side of Zane's couch - he should really get an actual table, if she was gonna bring her homework over. Zane looked at his training camp schedule again, and then pulled up the list of prospects who'd be starting training camp before the veterans reported back. He was pretty sure he already knew who the strongest prospect was - Holmberg, a d-man who'd been sent back to his junior team last year. Now he started looking at the list again, including the guys on professional try-outs, and wondering who was the most likely to be overlooked or under-estimated.

2018 IIHF World Championship: Copenhagen

Luca Haas wasn’t sure what to expect at his first World Championship. He was eighteen; he was going to the NLH draft in June. He was probably going to be in the top five; it was hard to guess where he'd rank, though, because he hadn’t even finished school - he was missing his matura exams right now, because he’d been made the national team. You don’t turn that down just to sit exams, even if you might end up in the press box most of the tournament.

It was fine. He’d sit the federal exams in autumn. He probably should have switched out to online schooling last fall - a few of the guys in his junior team had been studying that way - but he’d liked the routine of going to school. And, his papa pointed out, if he wanted to play in America he needed the English classes - did he really think online would be as good?

Luca’s English was good enough for watching TV, and getting through the draft. He didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to say about Fahrenheit 451 or The Kite Runner, other than describing what happened but, like. He could read, he knew what happened, and that did put him ahead of some of his classmates.

In hockey terms, doing well at Worlds would be better for him than finishing school, but he knew perfectly well that he was eighteen and had been playing on euro ice all his life. He'd be a development draft. Maybe he should have been setting his sights on Canadian major junior teams at the same time; but he hadn't finished school. Rozanov had played another year in Russia after being drafted. If Luca did well at Worlds and was drafted high, someone in Switzerland would sign him to their senior team, pending NHL contract or no. He could learn from development camp in America, or Canada, and find an off-season specialist trainer the next year.

Neither his perfectly functional for hockey purposes English, nor his career plan, helped when, Luca was hanging back before rejoining his teammates in the stands for the Czechia-Latvia game and Shane fucking Hollander walked up to him and said,

“Luca Haas, n’est pas?”

“Oui,” Luca said, and suddenly wished he’d kept up French beyond the compulsory minimum. In what he was sure was an atrocious accent he added, “Oui, c’est moi.”

Shane fucking Hollander frowned slightly.

Luca stammered out one of the few things that, of everything he could reliably say in French, seemed applicable here. “Est-ce que je pouvais vous aider, Monsieur Hollander?”

Maybe Shane Hollander had lost his keys or couldn’t find his teammates or didn’t know where the bus stop was. Probably not, but maybe.

Luca had already been a week into pre-tournament training when the news broke that Hollander would be joining Team Canada in Denmark (because the Metros had crashed and burned early in round of the MLH playoffs). Hollander hadn’t dressed for the first game, and the strategy was clearly to rest him with less ice time during the round robin stage. Luca understood that.

He did not understand what was going on in this conversation, even when Hollander cocked his head and said,

“Aider? Non, No. Is English better?”

Luca maybe managed to nod. English was better. That probably counted against him in Hollander's estimation.

“Okay. Um. Hi. I wanted to introduce myself.”

“… I know who you are,” Luca said, and then kicked himself internally. Maybe he should have stuck to French after all.

"You're a strong all-round forward," Hollander said, and Luca was actually relieved when his instinct was to blush, or say something - anything - rather than to just white out on the spot. Shane fucking Hollander knew about him. Shane fucking Hollander's team had made the playoffs; they sure as fuck weren't getting top five first-round draft picks; but Hollander knew about him all the same.

"I hope this," Luca said.

"You'll be high in the draft order, I think," Hollander said, and Luca's stomach flipped over. Sure, he had - still had - a Rozanov poster on his wall, and he'd argue with anyone willing to take the other side that Rozanov was the better player of the two of them, but Montréal had the better team (or had, for the past few years; this year, Montréal was out of the playoffs and the Raiders were through to the conference finals). But praise from Shane Hollander was praise from Shane Hollander.

"Maybe," Luca allowed, carefully. "If I do well here, that will help."

"You are down in the draft as a winger," Hollander added, looking at him intently. "But you're playing centre here."

That Luca could answer. He'd been centre in his junior team, mostly, and on the Swiss national junior side. On the other hand, the national senior team had depth at centre already, and a gap on the second line right. Luca was flexible.

Hollander nodded, like that was good news. "Ottawa is my home town, you know," he said, and Luca blinked for a moment, trying to figure out what that had to do with anything. "They are not very good right now - not for a few years. They will have first or second draft pick, I think. They have a strong left wing - young, he will only get better; but they are weak at the centre."

Oh. Holy shit, was Shane Hollander giving Luca advice on which team might want him? Had he spotted Luca as a prospect and decided Luca absolutely would go high in the draft, so he was hoping his home town team would be the ones to get him? And of course Luca knew that being drafted high meant going to a team at the bottom of the ladder, becoming an investment they could rebuild around. That was the dream, after all. But if Hollander thought Luca could boost a team's fortunes as quickly as he or Rozanov had… well, there was the whole thing where he hadn't finished school yet. Whoever drafted him, he was going to be actively asking to return to Switzerland for the next season.

"It's hard not knowing where you're going to end up," Hollander said, sympathetically. "And then, well. At least I knew Montréal, it was basically next door. And I spoke French well enough. Guys come in from Europe not knowing anything about the place they're ending up."

Luca was about to protest that he followed the MLH, he knew all the teams; but his brain caught up with what Hollander was actually saying. If he got drafted to, say, the Jackals, he would know fuck all about Phoenix, Arizona. And, now that he thought about it, he wouldn't be able to just go online and ask, unless he wanted to give away who he was and what team he'd been drafted to.

Hollander actually patted him on the shoulder. "You'll do fine, wherever you end up. The Euro guys in the league look out for euro rookies." He looked around the stands and then shrugged. "Pity Berzy got that elbow injury." Berzy wasn't a name that Luca recognised, at least not how Hollander pronounced it, but one of Montréal's d-men had been taken out rather spectacularly in round one.

"Pity for Latvia, mostly," Hollander went on, and that filled in the gap in Luca's memory. Bērziņš, second-line d-man for Montréal as of this season, Luca knew his name because he was the lynchpin of the Latvian national defence at the last couple of World Cups. "But if he was here, I'd try to introduce you."

Then Shane fucking Hollander patted Luca on the shoulder again, said goodbye and good luck in the tournament, and went about his business.

Luca made his way back down the stands to his team. "Hallo, milchgeschict," Lüschi - his linemate, normally first or second line centre for HC Davos - said, elbowing Fournier beside him. "You look like you have seen a ghost. Or maybe a pretty girl tried to talk to you?"

Lüschi was at least three years older than Luca. He sure as hell hadn't been there when Luca had been at some national pre-event gala before the Winter Youth Olympics and the girl his teammates had been elbowing each other about (a figure skater. Tiny, even though she was older than Luca, and as terrifying as she was attractive) swooped in on him and decided to flirt. He'd frozen. Most of the time if people were flirting with him he missed it, but in this case it had been obvious, and he'd had no idea how to react. He wasn't good with surprises: see, for instance, surprise encounters with Shane fucking Hollander. One of his teammates had swooped in and diverted her attention, and it seemed like he'd never live that incident down. Apparently, the story had spread to the whole national team.

"Not a ghost," Luca said, rolling his eyes. "Just Monsieur le Capitain du Canada." he exaggerated the French. "He wanted to test my French, I think." That got him eye-rolls from Lüschi, and set Fournier off on the perennial topic of how he could say more in German than either of them could say in French, and no one remembered to talk about Luca's milk-face reputation, or about Hollander, after that.

2019 IIHF World Championship, Slovakia

There was no question of the Centaurs making the playoffs. Even Ilya Rozanov couldn't turn a team around that fast. As Sveta had pointed out to him when he told her, the Centaurs were in a deep slump. Now here they were in the spring, and the Centaurs were sinking in the league tables. Boston were doing well, and weirdly, for Sveta's work, the early playoffs would be a quieter period. All the brand partnerships were locked in, and new ones wouldn't be on the table until after the playoffs.

Ilya hadn't called her since New Year. Their message thread was running dry - even Sveta sending clips of Hollander being Shane fucking Hollander in recent games didn't always get a reaction. A picture of Hollander in practice gear and absolutely hideous Crocs did get both the eyeroll and a text response saying "so fucking Canadian". As far as she could tell, that meant Ilya was still as into Hollander as he had been last year.

Hell, Sveta had thought Hollander was hot, before she figured out that Shane Hollander was Ilya's Jane. She still thinks he's objectively hot, on the TV, but the Shane that has Ilya wrapped around his finger… well, she knew Ilya was neck-deep in love, because otherwise the only explanation would be that he was single-handedly inventing a fetish for dorky white-passing Canadian behaviour.

Probably there were better ways to deal with whatever this friendship crunch point was, but after Ottawa played in Boston and Ilya didn't text her until after the game, and then only to apologise for unavailability, Sveta bought tickets to the World Cup in Slovakia. Then she sent her flight info to Ilya by email.

Better ways be damned, the strategy she chose resulted in Ilya calling her.

"Why do I need to know your holiday plan?" he said, brusque.

"Because you will be taking me out to dinner," Sveta said. "And probably watching some games with me. Ones you are not playing in, of course."

Silence from Ilya. That wasn't what Sveta was used to. Usually he fought back until they found common ground.

"Ugh, I'm not expecting to fuck you," she said, as crude as possible. "I know you're all in love and whatever. But you can still take me to dinner and tell me I'm pretty."

"You're always pretty," Ilya said, and even from the other end of the phone Sveta could tell something was awry. Of course it was. Something had gone awry in their ride or die but never talk about it directly relationship. She could blame Jane - Shane - but she could also blame herself for having actually directly addressed that elephant in the room, after Grigori's funeral.

"Great, that's a date then," Sveta said. "Text me when you know your game schedule."

"You are assuming I am going to the World Cup." Ilya's voice was flat - and he often sounded flat in English, but not usually in Russian.

"Your team are not making it to the playoffs," Sveta told him, but then she gave him a little slack. "Even if you did, you would be out in round one, still in time to go to the World Cup."

Ilya's breath sucked in before he spoke again. "Svetka, I am not going back to Russia."

"Good news, the World Cup is in Slovakia!"

"And if I don't care? If I don't want to?"

Sveta briefly entertained the mental image of Ilya playing supportive wife throughout Hollander's playoff run. That only lasted a few seconds before she remembered that Ilya fucking knew playoff hockey, in his bones. Probably Ilya's playoff boyfriend fantasy looked different to the league-wide WAG script; but if Hollander actually made it through to the cup final playoffs, Worlds would be well over by then and Ilya could still set up ice baths or whatever it was he planned on doing.

It wouldn't be a problem to the All Hockey All The Time boyfriend script if Ilya was exhausted and strung out from Worlds, she thought. Or it ought not to be. If it was a problem, she'd think less of Hollander.

That was not what she said to Ilya. What she said was,

"I know Ottawa is a shithole, but they have a decent beat reporter, and you will have to do pre-season media, and league media, next year. Are you planning to tell them no, I did not go to the World Cup, because I am defecting from Russia, because I am queer?"

"You sound like Shane," Ilya said.

"Because he's a smart guy," Sveta fired back. She'd met Hollander. He didn't like her, or he didn't like meeting her as Ilya's date at the MLH awards, or both. Sveta didn't need him to like her, or even really to know him personally, to know that after all the media coverage of Ilya's inexplicable move to Ottawa, if Hollander cared as much about Ilya as Ilya did about him, he wouldn't recommend Ilya make another inexplicable career move.

If Hollander was the kind of guy to get into a relationship with his only real generational competition, he'd probably be as turned off by that guy turning down a chance to cap off a shitty hockey year with a decent showing at Worlds as Sveta would be - was. Not that it mattered if she was turned off by Ilya.

"Ilyushka. Your season will be over in April. You train to play through to June." Sveta made a frustrated gesture that knocked her notepad off her kitchen island. "Fuck's sake, Rozanov. Go to the World Championship and win a few games."

"A few?" Ilya said, immediately rising to the bait. "I am not going for less than a gold medal."

There was her Ilyushka. Sveta smiled to herself, and started looking up hotel options. Shane Hollander could thank her later.

2020 IIHF World Championship, Switzerland

Any game Wyatt got to start in the net was a good game; and it turned out that when you were having a great year as starting goalie on a team that sure as fuck wasn't going to make the playoffs, you got the alternative option of the World Championships. Wyatt probably wouldn't be starting goalie if they made it to the medal rounds, but with three goalies on the roster and none of them nursing an injury, they were pretty evenly spread through the preliminary rounds.

Back home, Lisa was one of three specialists and they weren't so much spread evenly as spread thin. Hockey was pretty fucking demanding, but Wyatt had married not just a solid 10 but a sense of perspective, and he was determined to enjoy the fuck out of Worlds.

So far, enjoying the fuck out of Worlds had included bonding with Team Canada, and enjoying the fact that with the Guardians about to go into the third round, none of his former teammates were here. Zane Boodram was here, which meant that Wyatt wasn't even the only person fielding questions about what the hell Ilya Rozanov was doing in Ottawa and what his whole deal was. According to Bood, the same thing had happened last year.

"I don't know what to tell you, man," Wyatt said, to Flett, who was the third guy to ask. "He's a great player. A shit-stirrer, sure but he doesn't put up with bullshit." But why was he in Ottawa? "Maybe it's our charm and good vibes," Wyatt said, and Flett - who was playing for Buffalo, so really had no leg to stand on - rolled his eyes.

"Rozanov's business is Rozanov's business," Wyatt said. And then for some reason he added, "I did ask once. He said he was getting into birdwatching, and Ottawa was a great base for that."

Flett looked at Wyatt like Wyatt was obviously making it up. Wyatt wasn't: that was something Rozanov had told him right to his face. Rozanov had obviously been joking, but Wyatt could not for the life of him figure out why birdwatching had even occurred to him.

Rozanov himself was at Worlds, and it turned out that - at least in the preliminary stages - one of the ways Wyatt could enjoy the fuck out of Worlds was getting to observe his own teammates as opponents. Koskinen, for instance - he was a solid third-line grinder for the Centaurs, and a pretty physical player. On the bigger European ice and on Finland's second line, he was a different kind of guy altogether - still not making many shots on goal, but driving the offense from the penalty kill and setting up plays in a way that the Cens system never asked of him.

Rozanov at Worlds? Weird. For a guy who almost never hung out with the team at home, he was pretty damn proactive about meeting up in Switzerland. Hence Wyatt and Boodram were in the stands with Rozanov watching Switzerland play Finland. According to Roz, they weren't even there to support Koskinen, because team Switzerland's second-line centre, Haas, was our guy as well.

Wyatt remembered Haas from training camp, although Haas had been let go early, back to Zurich for another year. Wyatt quite specifically remembered that Haas had been right wing in the pre-season game they'd both been assigned to, and the way the coaches talked Wyatt had assumed he was a career winger with a knack of face-offs. But here he was at centre for his national team. Interesting.

Well, actually, interesting might be why Haas had been sent back to Zurich two years running. On the one hand, he'd clearly shaped up in terms of defensive responsibility if Team Switzerland had him at centre. On the other hand, he still had an adjustment to the MLH rink and physical game ahead of him. A two-way contract which gave him some time in the AHL would be ideal, but the kid was nineteen, so that was a no go. But he'd been drafted second overall - the only reason Wyatt could think of not to bring him on board and shape him up in-house would be if it was a toss-up between him and someone more reliable who could anchor a playoff run.

The Centaurs had picked up Tanner Dillon last summer. Not a bad guy; strong defensive awareness, which Wyatt appreciated in a forward. He wasn't a game-changing player, though, and more to the point, the Centaurs already had Ilya Rozanov.

Wyatt had tried to explain this to Lisa, and by this time she knew enough about hockey that she'd just laughed at him.

"Babe, are you asking me why people who are fine, but make no sense given the colleagues you already have, get hired?" Wyatt had shrugged, because, yeah, he was asking that.

"Plenty of academic studies have been devoted to this question," Lisa had said. "But I have no fucking clue." She'd grabbed his hand and squeezed it, and added, "Anecdotally, the kind of management that keeps hiring like that does seem to be likely to pass up on a good fit who'd need more mentoring early on." Maybe that explained the situation with Haas. "Management" in Lisa's terms wasn't the same thing as hockey management, but if Wyatt wanted to know the fine details of how much input coaches vs scouts vs the GM had into hockey hiring, he'd have a degree in, like, sports business or something instead of a career as a goalie.

"You're saving lives," Wyatt had said, poking Lisa in the shoulder. "And hockey players get paid millions. I was hoping one of those things would make a difference."

"Nope," Lisa had said, popping the P obnoxiously.

"Well, fuck."

That left Wyatt with the more famously unanswerable Centaurs question: Ilya Rozanov. Wyatt happened to be starting in the preliminary Canada v Russia game, which meant that he was last goalie up for warm-ups. He skated up to the red line while the forwards took shots against Thompson, and Roz caught sight of unexpected goalie movements and skated up to meet him.

"This is no fun," Roz said, somewhat unexpectedly, given he had seemed to be having fun attending games and getting into the vibe so far.

"Any game I'm in the net is fun," Wyatt answered him.

"Pfft." Roz seemed to actually pronounce pffft: Wyatt could practically see the speech bubble over his head, with pfft in italics. "This," he gestured toward Wyatt's teammates on the ice, "is not Canada. Is second-best Canada."

Wyatt rolled his eyes. "Unless you can convince your pal Hollander to move to Buffalo, this is the best team Canada you're gonna get for the next few years."

Rozanov's face did something funny, like he wasn't used to people calling Hollander his pal. Weird. They were running (or, realistically, figure-heading) a non-profit together.

After a second or three, Rozanov reset. "Second-best Canada does have best goalie in Canda," he said, flashing his shark-like smirk. "And I take shots against him all year, but he has never been in the net against me before. Maybe this is fun, after all."

The funny thing, Wyatt thought, the thing that Rozanov didn't get and probably none of the star forwards really got, not unless they went on to coaching, was that facing shots from Rozanov was a thrill. You blocked the shot, or he made the shot. Same with Hollander, and Hunter, and Kent, and all the rest of best. Wyatt had trained with Rozanov for more than a year: that meant he knew Rozanov's tells better than any goalie in the world except for Morin, the backup for the Centaurs. Rozanov knowing his tells was a challenge, sure, but Rozanov was one guy. Did his Russian linemates have what it took to back him up? Could the second, third, fourth Russian lines keep up the offence and wear Wyatt down?

Wyatt found himself laughing and reaching out to fist-bump Rozanov across the red line. "Sounds like fun to me," he said, and Rozanov's eyes lit up as he laughed back at Wyatt.

2021 IIHF World Championship, Riga

The call for Worlds blindsided Troy. He'd had some kind of conversation with his agent, before he'd even come out, about the Cens being dogshit but in that context Worlds being a good opportunity. Troy had said sure, great, put them straight through to me. His agents' job was to negotiate his pay, but the purpose of the World Championship, if he was going back to Worlds, was the same as it had been when he was a rookie. Another chance to prove himself - and now he knew that wasn't just about scoring, but about whether or not he could adapt quickly to a new team, new linemates, a whole new system. By the time Martin called him Troy was pretty sure he didn't want to leave the Centaurs, at least not as fast as he'd initially thought, but he still wanted to prove all that.

Shit changed. Martin had been pretty chill when Troy came out. He hadn't kicked up a fuss about not seeing the video beforehand; he'd asked a few questions about how Coach and management viewed all this, and when Troy told him that Coach had broached the subject first by telling him to formally declare his relationship with Harris, Martin seemed to think that covered everything. He definitely hadn't asked how Coach knew to ask that. And Troy hadn't told him about the call from Crowell.

Troy had skimmed a couple of emails after he'd come out - the gist was Martin was his agent, for hockey, not his publicist, and was turning back gay media (and media, misc, gay interest) enquiries. If Martin had an opinion on Rozanov and Hollander Troy didn't know about it, Martin hadn't told him about it, and that definitely was how Troy liked it. Troy hadn't really thought about - aside from the social media stuff that Harris was wrangling - whether he needed a game plan for the Rozanov-and-Hollander Are Out Hockey Players world. In his defence, he was busy playing hockey.

He'd been busy playing playoff hockey right up until two days before he took the call from Danika or Danielle or Denise or whatever her name was, enquiring if he was both in shape and willing to join Team Canada in Latvia. Daniella or possibly Daria kind of implied, without explicitly promising, that he'd be Assistant Captain if he did sign on.

A part of Troy's brain thought he should probably ask some kind of question like even though I'm gay as fuck?. Probably not in those exact words, but he kind of expected that to be his first concern: either asking it, or going with the flow while he figured out how to ask it.

What he actually said was, "And did you call Hollander?" Before Daria or possibly Doris came up with a nice professional answer to that, Troy was just… fucking saying things, apparently. "Because I've got social media and I've got, like google alerts for hockey shit." The words tumbled out of his mouth without checking in with his brain, which definitely demonstrated why his usual strategy of saying as little as possible was smarter. "I saw the training roster, and you know I know Hollander's been out of the playoffs for longer than me, and my google alert keeps pinging to tell me that ESPN or some hockey podcast or something wants to speculate about why Shane Fucking Hollander hasn't been tapped for Worlds."

It only dawned on him that he'd said Shane Fucking Hollander like that was his full name when Doris or possibly Dorothy sighed in a way that gave Troy the mental image of her pinching the bridge of her nose.

"I'm not able to comment," said Dorothy or possibly Dahlia, "On discussions between Team Canada and other players."

"Oh," Troy said, and he felt himself deflate like a punctured balloon. Harris would have predicted that. "Of course. Yeah. Sorry."

"Troy," said Dahlia or possibly Dania. "Normally this conversation is a quick one, but this year has been… a big one. For hockey in Canada, and for you."

Troy wasn't clueless enough to miss that subtext.

"We'd like you to join us in Latvia. You might want to talk to some of your…" and there was a weird pause, like Dania or possibly Delilah's script was glitching. "Your colleagues. Teammates, or… whoever," she said. "How about I call you again this time tomorrow?"

Troy agreed to that. Then Troy looked around his weird pre-furnished flat, and considered going straight to the rink to talk to Harris. It had been news to Troy that Social Media Guy work continued after the team crashed out of the playoffs, and he had a feeling that Harris was a bit pissed at him because that was news to him. He considered calling Hayes. He briefly contemplated texting Haas.

He bit the bullet and actually called Ilya.

"Oh shit," Ilya said, when Troy explained why he was calling. "Shit. No, he told Farah to tell them he's unavailable for personal reasons."

"So it's not the gay thing then."

"Obviously not, Barrett, if they're calling you."

"Yeah, well. I'm one gay guy, there's… they could have a thing about him and you. Rival national teams and whatever. I don't wanna look like I'm endorsing that, you know. The playoffs bullshit was bad enough."

Ilya barked out an odd sort of laugh. "No, that's not a problem."

"I take it you're not going either?"

"No, Barrett. My national team is not calling me up, not after this year."

Oh, shit. Russia. Right. Troy knew about that. Harris had said something about it when Troy came out, actually; Roz publicly supporting Troy could make things tricky for him with the FKR, even if he never set foot in Russia again. And now he really wouldn't be hearing from them, and probably couldn't go home.

"Shit, Roz. I'm sorry," Troy said. "That sucks."

Ilya sighed on the other end of the phone. "Is not so bad. We are both a bit tired of hockey at the moment, I think. We will, what's the phrase, stay low? Stay low for the summer, let people talk about Worlds and the Cup and whatever else, come back strong next year."

"Good plan," Troy said. There probably wasn't much of an alternative, but it sounded good.

"Go to Worlds, Barrett. Enjoy it while you can; Team Canada will have to do without you when we are in the Cup Finals."

"Don't jinx next season before it even starts," Troy warned.

"No jinxs, just facts," Ilya assured him. "Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to lie in the sun with my fiancé and think about absolutely nothing for the afternoon."

"Good for you," Troy said. It was hard to imagine Ilya lying around doing nothing, but it was probably good for him.

"Bye, Troy." A split second, and then just before Troy could hang up, Ilya added, "Oh, and Barrett? Gritzenko is a little slow on his glove side. Old injury, often gets worse by end of season."

"I'll keep that in mind," Troy said, and went to call Harris. Maybe Harris could swing time off for a trip to Latvia. Troy's Mom and Charlie hadn't touched Eastern Europe on their world tour; maybe they'd like to see the sights of Riga, too.