Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Duncan Harvey

Additional Tags:

Spoilers for Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Past Child Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, Autistic Shane Hollander, Canon-Typical Violence, Time Wimey Shenanigans, Non-Linear Narrative, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Angst with a Happy Ending, Therapy, Found Family, Time Loop, Grief/Mourning, POV Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, Power Imbalance, Outing, Slurs, Homophobia, Dallas Kent Being an Asshole, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Misogyny, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, still canon-compliant-ish?, technically not a soulmate au but they are soulmates your honour

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-10 Completed: 2026-05-12 Words: 92,100 Chapters: 11/11

if you're scared of wolves

Summary

In another life — or maybe the next one, or maybe the one before — Ilya Rozanov learns that some roads only lead to one place. No matter how you take them, the wolves are always waiting at the end.

Maybe that's why, in December 2008, Ilya wakes up with the distinct, inexplicable sense, that he has already lived this life before.

Some things, it turns out, are inevitable. The question is whether he is.

Notes

This work deals heavily with depression, grief, and suicidal ideation. If any of that content is difficult for you, please look after yourself first. The 988 Suicide Prevention and Support line is available in Canada and the US. For those outside of Canada / US, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory of resources.

I, along with some of the beautiful early readers of this story, have curated an if you're scared of wolves playlist for your listening pleasure! Chapter-specific song recs can be found at the end of each chapter. It is mostly Very Sad TM. But hey, you read the tags and you know what you're in for!!

More notes to be found below! None are mandatory reading before starting your journey, but may be helpful context for what this fic entails:

The Author Often Has a Lot to Say and Hides Their Ramblings Here

I, like many of us, came to this fandom completely unprepared for the chokehold it would have on me. The seed of this fic, in particular, was planted by the slew of Hollanov edits to Charli XCX's Everything is Romantic. (Could've been this one or this one or perhaps this one). If any of these are your doing, your spectacularly edited montages to the "falling in love again and again" lyric have been living rent-free in my brain for months. Consider this my eviction notice.

Additionally, I hail from an ancient, long-forgotten realm also known as the Mass Effect Fandom, where I first read this premise used (in 2012!!!! y i k e s) to great (and highly relevant) effect in servantofclio's Variations on a Theme, with Tank and Gunfire. I would be remiss not to give credit where credit is due here. Obviously, our contexts are highly unique, but it is a fantastic fic worth reading if you've ever felt the need to send Shepard to die and come back again until she gets it right (iykyk).

This fic operates on a blissfully lawless interpretation of Hollanov canon. Book and TV characterizations are used interchangeably. From the series, I've only read The Heated Rivalry and The Long Game, which means some (most, or all possibly?) of what I think I know about canon has almost certainly been replaced by fanfiction osmosis at this point, and I've made my peace with that. Since we do trend into Long Game territory, and because my worst characteristic is that I'm a hockey fan, I'm relying on the Game Changers NHL instead of Tierney's MLH. That said, critical to note that Ilya is absent the bear tattoo here.

I don't speak Russian and I'd rather not do a disservice to the language by deploying Google Translate and hoping for the best. Please assume Ilya is speaking Russian with his Russian friends and family. Otherwise, with very few exceptions, Russian is largely sign-posted in the dialogue (i.e. "...." he said in Russian).

I was born in the 90s when we used our em dashes to walk uphill to school both ways in the snow, which is just to say: Generative AI was not used in any shape or form the making of this work.

on with the show (again and again and again and—)

Chapter 1: the dream of the life I already lived?

Chapter Notes

Ilya Rozanov wakes up.

He sits up suddenly, breathing hard, heart racing, before a quick survey around the room confirms that he is still in a deeply unremarkable hotel room in Regina, Saskatchewan with his equally unremarkable left winger Dmitri Vasiliev snoring a few feet away.

Ilya slumps back in the bed, letting out a long, slow breath. He has a raging migraine, a very distinct sense of déjà vu, and an inverted imprint of the Nike logo on his cheek. Feeling the faint pattern on his face, he huffs, pushing the aggrieving hoodie he’d used last night to prop his head up onto the carpeted floor off the bed.

His nightmares before had been… vivid. Though, if he was being reasonable with his subconscious, not entirely nightmarish. Certainly some things he could’ve done without. His many NHL-earned injuries had been conjured in his mind in harrowingly accurate detail: the MCL sprain and shoulder separation and battered ribs and ankle fractures — his body was alight with the ghostly sensation of injuries-yet-to-come. The strangely specific quality of the decline of his father’s health was a particularly disturbing fabrication of his imagination. Not to mention, why in God’s name would dream-Ilya have signed with Ottawa at the peak of his imaginary career? He shudders at the prospect.

His stomach lurches suddenly, like the floor has dropped out from under him. He presses his palm flat against the mattress just to feel something solid. The flash-bang plane-crash ending to his dream-turned-nightmare suddenly flashes in his mind’s eye —

But. He’d had the good sense to dream about being the best hockey player in the world. He’d earned accolades he’d spent his entire life hungering for. And he’d been madly, deeply, irrevocably in love with Shane Hollander.

No, that’s not right. His cheeks tinge at the thought as it forms in his mind. It was obviously lust in the driver’s seat last night, not love. He could make peace with that; that meeting Hollander in the back alley behind the rink yesterday with his stupid handshakes and his even stupider freckles had clearly fucked with his subconscious. It’s not unreasonable that using the two second interaction as mental fodder to jerk off to in the shower had led to him dreaming about having nine years’ worth of secret hookups followed by three years of a secret relationship, all of which came to a crashing halt when an imaginary plane took an imaginary nosedive into the imaginary world his addled brain had come up with.

He reaches blindly over to the nightstand to twist the alarm clock to face him. 5:24 am. Christ. He needed to get some sleep before the double practice coach had in store for them today. He twists onto his side, turning his back to the clock and to Vasiliev, willing himself to go back to sleep. No more nightmares. No more plane crashes. But, he supplies thoughtfully, if his subconscious thought a fair trade would be for him to dream about having incredible fucking sex with a beautiful boy, well, he certainly wouldn’t complain about it.

The tournament proceeds for the week that follows as expected. Russia wins, of course. He resolves to pay as little attention to Hollander as possible, though he finds the mantra don’t think about Hollander pretty much guarantees the exact opposite occurs. Still, he can’t help the little ‘See you at the draft,’ dig he gives the opposing centre in the handshake line at the end of the game, can’t help hunting for that darkened, wide-eyed look he gets from Hollander, close-but-not-quite to the looks he’d gotten from him in Ilya’s dream.

***

That sense of déjà vu persists. On the flight home, he rolls his eyes when Beletski shows him the miniature bottle of whiskey he’d gotten someone to buy for him in the duty-free shop in the Regina airport, making a point of convincing Lezhnev to switch seats with him early in the flight, just before Beletski’s motion sickness causes him to throw up the little alcohol he’d managed to discreetly consume. Fucking rookie, he thinks from three rows back.

Back in Moscow, he watches his father intently for signs of mental decline, finding nothing but the usual disdain Grigori Rosanov typically held for his youngest son. Alexei, the not-so-doting brother, came by for weekly dinners, joining his father in their regular accounting of Ilya’s failures — his decision to declare for the draft and abandon Russia and what would’ve surely been a long, illustrious career in the newly-formed KHL for the American abomination that was the NHL was the recurring agenda item, but they never struggled to find something else worth their scrutiny: the length of his hair, the cut of his clothes, his heavily accented English (as of if either of them could do any better). Still, each of these remarks slide off like sweat from his brow, stinging a little, but easy enough to wipe away. Ilya notes how the first time Grigori calls Polina ‘Irina,’ the week before they fly out to to Los Angeles, Alexei and Polina carefully pretend like the misstep never even happened.

He’s drafted first, because of course he is. He endures his father’s slights, because of course he does. And later that evening, he finds himself drawn to the hotel’s gym at 10:30 in the evening, not to work off the adrenaline of being the first overall draft pick for the NHL, but because he is certain, lying alone on his bed staring the speckled white of the hotel ceiling, that Shane Hollander is there.

He bites back the grin at the sight of Hollander when he tabs open the gym door with his key card, and gets on the stationary bike next to him. There’s nowhere to go, but it’s a race all the same, and he feels a thrill he hasn’t felt for six months, chasing Hollander while being next to him all the while.

When they finally collapse against the mirrors (Ilya mentally adds another win to his tally; Hollander definitely slowed down first), he tracks Hollander’s eyes carefully — they fall on Ilya’s lips, on the rise and fall of his chest, track down his body to the bulge of his dick against his shorts. When Ilya reaches across the expanse between them to offer him water, he leans into the jolt of Hollander’s hand brushing against his. It’s exactly like he dreamt it, and also nothing like a dream at all.

Ilya knows — he knows — in that moment, where this is going. It takes every ounce of willpower not to rush it. He tells himself resolutely that it’s because he can read attraction, not because it’s a script he’s played out before. He imagines crowding into Hollander’s space then and there, pressing him up against the mirrors, kissing the sweat off his jaw, licking into his mouth. But men like Hollander scare easily, he tells himself. There’s no need to rush. “We’ll be seeing each other a lot,” he says that night, knowing he's right, knowing they will. Ilya can play the long game. He has a feeling it would be worth the wait.

***

Ilya had never been a patient man, and Hollander’s cheeky, “See you in October,” felt more like a challenge than a promise. So when the opportunity presents itself (or, when Ilya manufactures the opportunity in question) to jointly film the CCM endorsement, it’s just another way to get the win over Hollander.

The face-off shot is the director’s idea, and, in Ilya's view, a boring one. He says as much to Hollander while they set the lighting — “If they wanted to see us face-off they should just come to home opener, yes? Feels like a waste of my acting potential.” Hollander, professional as ever, is easy to bait into playing along. “Yeah right, Rozanov, seems like getting you to follow simple directions will be a hard enough act for you as it is." 

The banter might’ve set the stage for the rival energy CCM was looking for: the two of them squaring off at centre ice, sticks down, staring each other down for the camera. It should be easy. Ilya’s been staring Hollander down since he was seventeen years old. But the lighting rig overhead flickers at exactly the wrong moment, and Hollander flinches and Ilya — watching him flinch — makes the mistake of smiling (“you look like you need to sneeze — tissue?”) and once he’s smiling, he can’t stop, and then Hollander is laughing, and his whole face contorts and he tries to stifle his laugh behind a gloved hand, and… that’s it. That’s the shot. Except it’s completely unusable, and they have to do the whole thing over again.

Ilya puts a little bit more of an edge into his individual skate after that, even managing a couple impressive trick shots where he bounces the puck off his stick, and one where he goes for a Michigan against the stand-in goalie, because he can. He doesn’t have to look up into the stands to know Hollander’s watching.

In the showers, he puts on a bit of a show. How can he not? With Hollander’s eyes on him, obviously turned on himself, Ilya’s hand trails down his stomach; he wraps it around his dick and strokes it, his eyes staying on Hollander’s. In the back of his mind, he wonders what it would be like for Hollander to put on a show for him, and his mind unhelpfully supplies an image of Hollander, spread out over a bed, touching himself for Ilya’s own pleasure…

Hollander’s, “Not here,” snaps him out of his reverie. But it’s not unexpected. When he asks for Hollander’s room number, he thinks fourteen ten before he hears it. He goes still when Hollander says it — questioning for a moment, which came first. When the clock strikes nine that night, he makes his way to the elevator, and when it pauses part-way up, he’s carefully rearranged his face into something somewhat more respectable to greet his future fuck-buddy’s mother with, before the doors slide open to reveal Yuna Hollander standing on the other side, and shut before he can embarrass himself any further. 

“This is such a bad idea,” Hollander says moments later when Ilya slides into his room, but Ilya's never been deterred by a bad idea in his life. He gives in to every compulsion he’s had for the last eighteen months and holds Hollander’s jaw in his hand, angling his lips against Ilya’s. He watches Hollander take Ilya’s thumb into his mouth, and Hollander swirls his tongue around it, and Ilya doesn’t have to wonder what that mouth will feel like on his dick because he knows, he knows Hollander will fall to his knees and suck him off like he was fucking born to do just that and absolutely nothing else.

As much as his memory’s convinced him he’s lived this life before, he still has the stamina of a nineteen year old at the end of the day, and has to pull Hollander off his cock before he embarrassingly brings this interaction to an early close. When Hollander adorably asks if that was bad, Ilya is quick to reassure him, kissing the uncertainty off his face; intimately familiar with Hollander’s internal drive towards perfection and his near-crippling fear of failure, though with absolutely no sense as to how he knows any of that at all. “I want more,” Ilya says as he kicks his shoes and lies back on Hollander’s bed, and finds that, yes, he does want more, the unbearable hunger in the pit of his stomach is endless with its want. The lines of Hollander’s muscles, the swell of his ass, the splatter of Hollander’s freckles as his nose presses against the crease of Ilya’s groin, the velvet of Hollander’s dick against Ilya’s tongue, the stuttered sound of his name from Hollander’s mouth — he is gluttonous in his want for this impossibly beautiful, ridiculously sweet man who was so eager to take him he couldn't be bothered to take off his socks. 

In the aftermath, as he gathers his clothes, the feeling in the pit of his stomach sours. This is right, he thinks, but it’s also wrong. There’s something missing, a nagging feeling at the back of his mind that fills him with unease. He says goodnight and closes the door behind him, confident that he’s forgotten something that he can’t name.

***

It goes like this:

They meet each time Montreal and Boston face each other. They fuck. They part ways. Rinse, repeat. The dream he’d had all those years ago fades into a distant memory, one hardly worth comparing his real, actual life to. The longer the stretches go between seeing Hollander, the more Ilya convinces himself that the fairy tale his seventeen year old brain had conjured was just that: a fairy tale.

His father’s dementia progresses; worse than he could’ve imagined. He clicks through random webpages about the effects of dementia, guiltily wishing that the version that befell his father could be the version where Grigori forgets his son exists entirely; instead, Ilya seems cursed with the version where Grigori’s memories of his son are the memories of all the endless ways Ilya’s failed him — better at being a hockey player than at being a breadwinning son, but somehow a generational disappointment at both. He’s grateful, at least, that his father seems to remember enough to know that he shouldn’t hit a man who can, will, and has hit back. Ilya clings to small mercies.

His vices are his vices. Beautiful cars and beautiful women and cigarettes and really good vodka. The sting of turning Hollander away in Sochi is eased by the salve of hoisting the Stanley Cup months later. He loves Boston — loves their loudness and their gregariousness and their no-nonsense expectations that their sports franchises will be the best, each year, every year, no exceptions. He cheers on the Patriots, who win more than he does, and the Celtics, who win less, and feels like he’s earned the respect of a city who’s embraced him. He delights in each time Svetlana graces him with her presence. She is the last vestige of his childhood worth preserving — the one person who makes him feel simultaneously seen and not scrutinized, and he thanks her for it by keeping her at a comfortable distance, debating the handling of the Porsche versus the BMW while he fucks her against the glass windows of his Boston apartment.

He’s lonely.

The feeling swells into him every now again; a tide melting into the shoreline. It sneaks up on him at post-game nightclubs, at airport security lines, in the locker room showers after games (whether it’s a win or loss makes no difference, turns out). He throws himself into the business of the game because he’s excellent at it, because what else is the almost-leading scorer of the NHL (you win this time Hollander) meant to do, but the distinct aftertaste of incompleteness lingers. The vices do their job at making him forget he ever felt lonely to begin with, but the tide comes back into view each time he sees Hollander, most of all when the door closes behind him after their semi-regular meetups. It’s just sex, he tells himself, tells Hollander, tells Svetlana, tells Marleau, tells anyone who sees the name Jane pop up on his phone screen, but he’s stopped sounding persuasive, especially to his own ears. Each time they meet, he tries to find some semblance of the recognition in Hollander he feels in himself, and each time he only finds Hollander’s earnest eyes staring back at him, blissed out on Ilya’s cock, even through his continued insistence that Ilya is in fact an asshole.

It’s a relief, he tries to convince himself, that Shane (no, Hollander — Hollander) has found some pretty blonde from Hollywood to shack up with. No, Sveta, he hadn’t seen Rose Landry’s fucking Vogue 73 questions video, thank you very much. He had better things to do, obviously, like scroll through TMZ’s Rose Landry and Shane Hollander compilation slideshow like a man possessed and think bitterly about how ill-fitting the Voyageur’s jersey looked on her. He has to believe his memory-dream of this is wrong; he has to believe that Shane’s walking up to him at the All-Star Game in Florida to announce his engagement to beautiful, perfect, stunning Rose Landry. To cling to even the faintest stray thought that Ilya still has a chance — well, he’s wary of keeping his hopes up. The higher the climb, the longer the fall, or so the saying goes.

He’s so caught up in the inevitability of being wrong that he hardly has time to process — let alone appreciate — being right. Shane (yes, Shane — Shane) does want him, does like him (a little too much! — he said so himself). Ilya doesn’t have to believe he’s worth the affection if Shane Hollander has decided he is, even if the prospect of being cared for terrifies him.

His father used to say, “If you’re scared of wolves, don’t go into the forest.” Grigori Rozanov had been dead for four months by the time Ilya understood that that advice had never been meant for him — that it was the kind of wisdom a father gives a son he believes capable of being brave. He’d stood at his father's graveside in Moscow and felt nothing he could name. It was the same nothing he'd felt standing at his mother's graveside at the age of twelve; he had been trying to outrun that nothing ever since. 

So, yes, he is scared of being outed losing his career rejection wolves, but when Hollander crumples on the ice after Marleau’s hit, he decides there are things he’s more scared of, after all. So weeks later, when Scott Hunter faces those wolves in the aftermath of his Stanley Cup win and kisses the man he loves on National Fucking Television, Ilya thinks he’ll be damned if a pre-fucking-historic fossil will show more courage than him.

He tells Shane between kisses, I love you, I love you, I love you, in the summer light of the cottage. Ilya has dreamed of what comes next — the fight, the spiral, the plane dropping out of the sky — and chooses not to follow the thought. He stays in the light instead.

***

The plan is a good one. It has Yuna Hollander’s stamp of approval, and David Hollander’s careful nod of approval, and Shane Hollander’s desperate need for it to be approved, and Ilya learns pretty early on that there isn’t anything Shane needs that Ilya isn’t willing to give, so yes, he approves as well.

Yes, it’s Ottawa, and there’s a version of Ilya from the not-so-distant past that would have sooner flung himself off a building (the joke is, perhaps, in poor taste) than play for the Centaurs, but it can always be worse. At least Shane’s family isn’t from Winnipeg, or, God forbid, Buffalo. They lose. The feeling of losing is sort of endless. His hockey life starts to mirror the rest of his life — the monotony of nothing really seeming to matter, in between glimpses of everything deeply, deeply mattering.

It’s not long after the move that he starts ignoring Svetlana’s calls. He's not doing it on purpose, at first, but eventually, finding it easier to stay stuck in that vicious cycle of simultaneously craving closeness while pulling away. It leaves a sour feeling in his gut, the acidity of guilt eating him from the inside out. She suspects, probably, why he’s here, who he’s here for, and he tells himself that hiding away from her is the functional necessity of keeping his relationship with Shane a secret. Her luxury car dealership sponsors the Irina Foundation camps, and he tells himself that’s enough, to keep the spark of their friendship alive. He'll have time eventually to course correct, to invite her into his life. When Shane is ready. (When will he be ready?)

Sex is still fantastic. Better than, in fact. That insatiable feeling he would get each time he got his hands on Shane never abated when they became exclusive, but being with him was richer, deeper, more intoxicating, somehow, with the knowledge that only he got to have Shane like this, open and wanting. The scrunch from the way his eyes would shut tight when the sensation of his orgasm became too overwhelming, the way his thighs would tremble under Ilya’s hands when Shane was riding him, the way his cheeks would flush when Ilya would murmur deliciously filthy praise into his ear. The limit did not exist when it came to the want he felt for Shane. Somedays it made Ilya feral with it; on those days when he’d run his hands over the sculpted muscles of his boyfriend's shoulders and chest, Ilya would give into the compulsion and bite into the meat of Shane’s pecs, just to prove to himself he was allowed to.

Even though his team is shit, he’s still the best hockey player in the NHL, so he makes All-Star rosters (on the first pass, thank you very much, though he has no doubt he’d get in on the fan vote if push came to shove). But the accolades don’t hold the same shine they used to. He has no qualms about skipping the All-star game in 2019 to attend Duncan Harvey’s funeral after his suicide. He tells himself it's professional solidarity; it's the right thing to do; someone should be there from the league who isn't obligated to be. He’s not surprised to find Ryan Price there the way he’s not surprised when Yuna’s burns the lasagna the next weekend during a Hollander family dinner because she’s caught up on the phone negotiating a contract with BioSteel.

There’s a photograph of Harvey on the service program, laughing at something off-camera, stick in hand; he looks… fine. Happy, even. Ilya studies it for longer than he means to, because he knows that face; has worn that face. He didn’t know Harvey, but he feels like he knows him differently than most here would; knows in his bones that he has the blueprints to make the same bitter choices — that most days, it’s the shock of picturing Shane at his funeral that pulls him off the ledge.

You don’t like me, he once insisted to Shane. I’m not— He’d never finished that sentence all those years ago, but he wonders if Shane could guess how it ended. He tries to be a good Captain even though he’s certain Boodram would make a better one. If the NHL weren’t so worried about letting goalies leaving the crease Hayes would’ve made a decent number two option. Ilya wears the C because he’s supposed to, because he’s on one of the NHL’s largest contracts, because he has to make this work, because this is the plan goddamnit, but he knows he’s not — fast enough smart enough hardworking enough kind enough strong enough good enough enough enough enough enough—

He goes to therapy.

Being able to speak in the same language he thinks in quiets the cacophony in his mind. He stubbornly thinks that just showing up to his sessions at all should be sufficient, that quieting the needling voice of doubt in his mind is as good a goal as any, but each time he settles into the grey couch of Dr. Galina’s windowless room, he contemplates whether therapy is in fact the scam his father had always claimed it was. Ilya certainly didn’t seem to be getting any better; he leaves sessions feeling flayed open, agitated, as lonely as he did walking into them, except now, he had all of the language and insight to understand how deeply fucked he was.

He gives everything he has to hockey and to Shane. He has always been good at giving, so good that his giving runs nearly on autopilot, and so the habit holds even when he’s certain he has nothing left to give. No words of wisdom for the young rook on his right wing, no son-in-law-appropriate reassurances for Yuna and David, no easy gazes and gentle touches for the man he loves more than life itself. He’s empty, but still, the giving machine keeps running, and still he scrapes at the edges of his body and doles out whatever’s left.

He knows what's coming, like he’s learned to know an Ottawa snowfall is coming by bone-chilling bite of the cold. The tether on his limbs pulls him to the inevitable future; the invite from Bood’s party, the rejection from Shane to attend with him and be open with his teammates about their relationship, the voice in his head — louder and louder these days — convincing him that if push came to shove Shane wouldn’t choose Ilya over hockey because Ilya wasn’t worth choosing.

The fight is hot and ugly and unleashes something painfully familiar in him. He has always worried, in his darkest moments, that he is too much like his mother — her volatility, her ocean-deep sadness, her capacity to disappear. But in the heat of the argument, when he realizes he’s pressed Shane’s back against the wall, for one terrifying moment, he wonders if he is his father’s son after all.

He tells Shane to leave, and he does. Ilya turns off his phone, and curses his fucking heart for being so fucking breakable.

After the session with Galina that followed, and the brief reprieve of his conversation with Shane where they tried to smooth things over, Ilya leaves his house for a long walk, and eventually settles on a park bench along the Rideau Canal. He pulls the hood of his sweater over his head, cinching it tight, hoping that the combination of a nondescript sweater and a puffy winter jacket will guarantee him some anonymity. He sits there for a long time, letting the slow exhale of his breath fog in front of him, a reminder that he is, in fact, still breathing.

***

Ilya boards the plane still coming off the high of the Centaurs’ win against Carolina, and thinks, for the first time in years, about the dream he’d once had in Regina, Saskatchewan of falling in love with Shane Hollander. He doesn’t remember the details — it’d been over ten years ago, after all — but it had mostly been, he thinks, a good dream.

He clings to that thought when the plane’s engine bursts into flame. 

The plane drops. Ilya’s teeth clatter like he’s been shocked. It takes him four separate tries to unlock his phone and navigate to Shane’s instagram. He forces himself to focus — just for a moment — on what it is he needs to say. He wills Shane to not be playing right now. He begs time to bend — just a little, just enough — so he can tell him: that the freckle behind his left ear is Ilya’s favourite place on earth, that Ilya has never once deserved him, that he is sorry, that he is grateful, that he loves him, that he loves him, that he loves him.

He thinks: maybe I’ll see my mother again.

The plane jolts. He spares a glance outside the window, and sees the ground flying towards them at an impossible speed. Ilya grips tight on the cross, thinks of Shane, and prays.

***

Ilya Rozanov wakes up.

He sits up suddenly, gasping for breath. The dimmed light from the street lamps outside filter through the cracked open curtains of the shared hotel room in Regina, Saskatchewan.

His face is wet with tears. His throat is hoarse from screaming.

He reaches out for to the alarm clock, ignores a still-snoring Vasiliev, and sees the time — 5:24 AM — flashing red.

It was a dream. But also, it was real. It was so, vividly, inexplicably, impossibly real.

Ilya gulps in the dark. “Fuck.”

Chapter End Notes

how we doing gang? drop a comment if you're so inclined :)

thank you for reading !

Songs from the Playlist

Wake Up by Arcade Fire: Now that I’m older / my heart’s colder / and I can see that it’s a lie

Smile Like You Mean It by The Killer: Dreams aren’t what they used to be / Some things slide by so carelessly

Cough Syrup by Young the Giant: A dark world aches for a splash of the sun

Chapter 2: I know this one

Chapter Notes

sometimes the brain cooperates and we write a chapter a week sooner than planned and do not question how this came to be. this is one of those times.

again

The idea strikes him somewhere over the Atlantic, gold medal around his neck, Beletski vomiting Canadian whiskey and airplane steamed vegetables into the paper bag three rows ahead of him.

Ilya flexes his fingers around the arms of the narrow airplane chair. Curiously, he’s not afraid of flying. There’s a kind of freeing liberation about it, knowing that there’s absolutely nothing in this world that can kill him before the flight from Raleigh to Tampa will.

The solution, then, is simple: he won’t be on it.

He has about a decade to work out the particulars, but the satisfaction of having arrived at such a neat conclusion to breakaway from whatever science fiction peculiarity had befallen him helps settle him for the flight. Now that the shock of what's been happening has worn off, he is fairly accepting of his circumstances. He wonders, idly, if anyone else might be caught in this temporal dance he’s found himself in, but has the sense, as he often does, that in this maelstrom, he is quite alone.

He glances to his left. Morozov, the broad-shouldered, ginger-haired defensemen whose persistent checks on Hollander hadn’t been enough to keep Morozov from getting turnstiled by him in the third period, is passed out, head slumped over into the aisle. Ilya had remembered, during the period break, that Hollander would get the breakaway goal. He’d been on the bench the last two times it had happened, and was waiting for it this time around; the make-it-look-easy split of the Russian defence, the toe drag that had sent Morozov spinning. Thinking about it now, he wonders why he hadn’t warned Morozov — he might’ve spared him the humiliation, but no, some truths were inevitable, and Shane Hollander being dazzling on the ice seemed like one of the load-bearing beams of the universe that he didn’t dare fuck with.

Plus, they’d won the game, so really, what did it matter.

The cross is warm on his neck, the sky pitch black outside, save for the occasional grey cloud passing through the airplane’s wing. A dark shadow over a dark silhouette. He strains his eyes, trying to differentiate between the foreground and the background. This is the third time he’s taken this exact flight. He wonders, is there even anything new to see?

It’s the last conscious thought he has before he sleeps.

At the All-Star Weekend of his rookie season, Ilya is practically vibrating on the flight to Nashville. It had been eight months since he’d last had Hollander’s mouth on his cock, and he can hardly believe he’d ever been so patient the last two times around. Of course, it’s not as though he’s been lacking where sex is concerned — between nightclub hookups, models looking for a night with the All-Star rookie, and Svetlana, he certainly had no logical reason to be quite so… wanting. And yet, laying eyes on Hollander, suited up for the joint press conference the league had them parading for, the alternatives pale in comparison.

The more time passes, the easier it is to forget the little intricacies of the life before the life before this one. His throat still gets caught on the nineteen-part question the reporter poses to him, and he flounders, forgets, for a moment, that Shane Hollander will come to the rescue.

Watching Hollander rattle off his press-polite fucking response, he wonders, does Shane somehow already know that Ilya’s managing to get by on his relatively poor grasp of English by saying as little as possible? That he feels trapped in his own mind — not just because of the language barrier, but because he has the memory of another version of himself with a perfectly acceptable grasp of the English language? That, just like Shane, Ilya too, has his own stakes for getting it wrong? Maybe, he thinks as Shane knocks the toe of his shoe against Ilya's, Shane somehow does have the knowledge of a hundred lifetimes — knows how much Ilya craves kindness.

Or maybe, he’s just that fucking perfect.

I love you, Ilya thinks helplessly, far too early. But he doesn’t take it back.

There’s a part of him that wonders if any part of this will play out differently. But Shane (Hollander — Hollander, he sternly reminds himself) still knocks on his door that night, frantic energy, mouth open, hands tangled in his hair, and Ilya feels like he has to work overtime to settle him. It’s not serious, it can’t be, not yet, but it’s still good — too good to rush.

“Breathe, Hollander,” Ilya whispers into his mouth, as he grabs the underside of Hollander’s thighs and lifts him, carefully making his way to the bed before laying the man out underneath him. “You will enjoy it more.” It immediately sounds too earnest, so he follows it up with a smirk, glancing down at Shane’s erection, already stiff. Ilya reaches down, rubbing his thumb over Shane’s slit. “Or — you enjoy too much already?”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, and Ilya bites back a smile. Predictable. He kisses his way up Hollander’s chest. He’d wondered before, if anyone got to see Hollander like this, and hoped that the way his dark lashes fanned over the faint freckles dusting his cheekbones was a sight that was just for him. Now, he knew, definitively, that this was his, and the thought nearly made him throw his plans aside in favour of fucking Hollander’s perfect mouth right fucking now. He grabs for the handful of Shane’s tit that he can hold in his hand, presses the hard line of his body against Shane’s, and smiles against his neck.

His mouth trails back to Shane’s chest, passing over his nipple and sucking once, hard. The moan he elicits from Shane makes him want to go back and do it again. The hand at Shane’s dick trails down, cupping Shane’s balls, before tracing lightly against his rim.

“Is okay if you haven’t,” Ilya says, glancing up at Shane, who’s gone very still, but who, Ilya suspects, remains very interested.

“I have!” Hollander snaps back — ever the contrarian.

Ilya’s eyebrows raise — genuine surprise, while something uglier bubbles up inside him — jealousy? “You have?”

Shane’s cheeks immediately redden. The confidence seeps out as quickly as it had arrived. “I mean, you know, I have— a thing? I mean—”

Ilya smiles. He’s in love with a man who can’t say the word dildo. “It’s purple, isn’t it?”

Shane pushes at Ilya’s head. “Suck my dick,” he says, too helplessly for it to be the admonishment he intends it to be.

Ilya returns an easy smile — but Shane's laugh is half a beat late, his eyes narrowing just slightly, and for a moment Ilya feels a lump form in his throat for reasons he can't quite place. He brushes the thought away, and obliges; it was hardly a fair guess anyway, what with his insider knowledge. He swallows Hollander down in one motion, keeping his eyes on Shane as he sucked him, resisting the urge to close his eyes so he can watch Shane’s face screw up in pleasure when Ilya takes him to the back of his throat.

Ilya slides off him with a pop, allows him to be pulled back up for a kiss that’s all fervour, all zeal. “I want to fuck you,” he says simply, pressing his cock against Hollander’s. “Not tonight,” he gets out quickly, bypassing Shane’s look of protest. “But next time.”

“Next time?” Hollander asks, like there’s a chance Ilya will change his mind, like Ilya won’t die twice over to make sure it comes to pass. He holds Shane’s face in both his hands, and kisses him hard.

Sometimes Ilya feels like he’s outside of himself, thumbing past old haunts like his life’s a flip book animation. He tries, on more than one occasion, to strike up conversations with Svetlana, with Marleau, about the nature of death and reincarnation in a way that he can barely pass off as “just a Russian thing” to Marly and barely pass off as “fatalist but in a fun way” to Sveta. “I certainly hope you’re not planning on dying anytime soon,” she scolds the fourth time he tries, and he settles into the knowledge whatever game the universe is playing with him is one player only.

His changes are few and far between. It’s a good life, his life, he reminds himself often, as the memory of the dream fades further and further into the recesses of his mind. He gets to play hockey for a living, the number one pick on the number one team. He has his friends, and his cars, and his city, and occasionally, Shane Hollander. As time passes, he has less of his friends, and less of his cars, but under the summer light of that fucking cottage it’s impossible not to promise your boyfriend ridiculous things, like, sure, you’ll move to Ottawa to be closer to him, so the city changes too. To have Shane a little more than occasionally feels like a fair trade.

He contemplates skipping therapy this time around, but Shane still makes a surprise appearance on Halloween in 2020, and still leaves barely six hours after he’d arrived, which all still ends with Ilya crying in the lonely solitude of his Ottawa home. He figures, whatever he’d learned in therapy the first two times clearly hadn’t stuck, so he tries again. It’s never not painful, reliving the moments of his childhood — the good, the bad, the ugly. Out of some strange concern that Galina will somehow realize she’s heard these stories before, he tries to pick different moments, and marvels and how easy it is to do just that — a story here for how his father hurt him, and a story there for how his brother lashed out, and another one for how his mother tried to stop the entire house of cards they’d built for themselves from falling down around them until she stopped trying altogether.

The closer the New Year looms over them, the more desperate Ilya feels he becomes. Every moment with Shane feels monumental; he searches within himself each time, desperately, for the light-hearted, wry, horny, sardonic man he suspects Shane has fallen in love with, but all he finds is someone hollowed out and haunted instead. Shane must think he’s crazy — or at least, crazier than usual. Ilya had learned the hard way that Shane needed to hear things said exactly as he meant them, but how could he be plain about what he wanted from Shane when he hardly knew himself?

The Boxing Day Fight comes and goes. He tries hard not to bring up Bood’s party, with the weary certainty of having lived through this argument before and knowing exactly where it leads. He watches himself do it anyway. It bubbles out of him, and by the time he says the words, he doesn’t even want to, doesn’t even believe them like he once did, but they’re out there, already doing their damage. “You wouldn’t even choose me, would you,” Ilya accuses, like it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, like either of them have a choice to begin with. It’s not fair — it has never been fair — that they have to hide when everyone around them gets to be with the people they love. And Shane’s insistence that theirs is a necessary secret is fucking maddening — doesn’t he realize how precious and finite their lives are?

Still, something unclenches in his heart when Shane apologizes the next day. He says he loves him. Ilya says it back, and then again in Russian, and when Shane repeats it, Ilya doesn’t laugh at his accent. These are twists in the long road, he reminds himself. They’ll have more time, this time around. Ilya has a plan.

The week before the Carolina game, he begs and pleads with the Centaurs’ Operations Director to have the team take a bus from Raleigh to Tampa. “For bonding reasons,” he insists. “We are still a young team, Wiebe is a young coach. We need to… what is this word—” he interlocks the fingers of his hands.

“Gel?” Lynn McKinney provides uncertainly.

“Yes,” Ilya nods stoically. “Gel.”

McKinney laughs, and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes get a little more pronounced. “They all warned me you were a character, Rozanov,” she says, not unkindly. “But I’m afraid we can’t in good conscience put a bunch of high performing athletes on a ten-hour bus on a back-to-back.”

“But—”

“Did Harris put you up to this? He’s always mining for ‘BTS’ shots,” she exaggerates the finger quotes around the initials. She pats his shoulder. “Your lower back will thank me, I promise you that.”

He tries a few more times as the week progresses, in between home game losses — starts sending McKinney alternative flight itineraries to get them off the flight in question, but she doesn’t budge. The deadline looming, he finds himself seriously considering buying and donating a plane to the team himself, scrolling past endless tabs of private jet specs like he has any fucking idea what he’s looking for.

The day before they’re scheduled to leave, Wiebe calls him into his office. “McKinney’s going to block your number if you keep harassing her,” he says, eyeing Ilya carefully. “Something you need to share?”

He squirms under Wiebe’s gaze. Ilya under no uncertain terms will be on that flight. But can he in good conscience let his teammates take the fall for him? They have families. Haas is just a kid. Bood’s about to be a father…

“I have been dealing with a… personal matter,” he says finally on an exhale, letting the air in his lungs out like a balloon. “I will apologize to Lynn.”

Wiebe’s already shaking his head. “The thing about being a professional hockey player is that your skills as a centre are probably not even close to being the most interesting or important thing about you.”

Ilya blinks. Across three lifetimes, he’s never heard anyone say that to him before. He’s not even sure he believes it.

“Take the time you need to deal with your business,” Wiebe says firmly. “We’ll be here when you’re ready.”

He’s a scratch for the Carolina game due to personal reasons. They lose the game without him.

He ignores Shane’s and Yuna’s texts that night. It had been a surprise to them too; Ilya doesn’t miss games — certainly not unless he’s suffering from a debilitating injury. He provides quick reassurances — he’s fine, something came up, he’ll explain later — all the right platitudes, and focuses instead on pacing in his kitchen, staving off a panic attack, constantly refreshing the flight alerts and the Centaurs group chat and the fucking news for updates, the dread building, building, until the, “We’ve touched ground, Cap!” text from Haasy shocks him to tears.

They’re okay. They’re okay.

It doesn’t matter how, he decides, before he can spiral further. He hadn’t just condemned a bunch of people he loved and cared about to die. He had done enough, this time, to change things. It’s a peculiar sensation, not knowing what comes next. He’d almost forgotten what that felt like.

Ilya texts Wiebe and tells him he’s a go for Tampa.

As he settles in his first class seat, he tries to remember the last time he’d flown commercial. It must’ve been while he was still in Boston — the last time he had anywhere worth flying to that wasn’t driving distance. He’d made a point of telling Shane, in the heat of their argument, how much he resented having to rework his whole life around Shane’s world, but the truth was that he loved that world — wanted so desperately to be a part of it, to have everything he cared about and everyone he loved within arm’s reach at all times.

Once they’re up in the air, he orders a green juice from the flight attendant because he think it’ll make Shane laugh, alongside a bottle of water and a vodka. He frames his shot for the message, discreetly pushing the vodka so it’s just barely in the photo. You’re a bad influence, he types out, chuckling as he sends it to the ether.

And then the plane jolts.

“We ask everyone to please, stay calm — fasten your seatbelts, stow away your tray—” a loud bang echoes through the cabin. He hears people screaming — a baby behind him starts crying.

Out of his periphery, he can see, the wing is on fire.

The horrible clarity of Ilya’s miscalculation washes over him.

No, he thinks furiously, no no no no no—

He enters his passcode incorrectly too many times, and his phone locks for a minute. Does he even have a minute to spare? He swallows the lump in his throat, tunes out the screams of terror, stills his too-fast-beating heart and watches the seconds tick by.

There’s no certainty he’ll wake up — he knows this. It might’ve been a fluke, the last time around. It might even be a relief, to not have to carry the weight of living.

But if this is his last chance, he needs Shane to know he loves him.

The minute ticks by. He unlocks his phone. Clicks into ShaneHollanderHockeyPlayer's profile. Types: You are the best part of me.

Ilya doesn’t know what else to say. The noise filters in, the cacophony of screams, the stain of the green juice spilling into the aisle, the loud crack overhead of something fracturing in the plane’s body.

It’s so much worse this way, he thinks in his final moments. He’s surrounded by strangers, and still completely, utterly, alone.

***

and again

It’s 5:24 in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Ilya Rozanov is alive. 

He takes methodical stock of his body like he would after a hard check. Fingers, toes, knees, hips, lungs, neck, shoulders. The migraine. The damp of old tears on his face. Vasiliev, snoring. All of it, again.

Someone somewhere is fucking screwing him. Or, maybe, screwing up. He believes in God the way every Orthodox Christian Russian believes in God, but he figured that that would translate into a 60-40 shot at having his soul saved or eternally damned. He hadn’t realized there was a third option: being stuck in an infinite loop— a cosmically-sized administrative nightmare.

For the record, he’d like it noted — by whichever asshole he has to thank for this celestial mishap — that the solution he’d arrived at was completely logical. The plane goes down. He is not on the plane. Simple. This was the kind of creative problem-solving Ottawa had paid over a hundred million dollars for.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, blinks his eyes open, and thinks, Fine, universe, we’ll try again. If the plane wasn’t the problem…

New hypothesis: it’s Ottawa.

It’s a curiosity, holding multiple realities in your brain. Ilya would have to remember to ask Wyatt what comic books were worth reading on the subject.

He understands, practically, as he puts on his gear and his Bears jersey, as he juggles his father’s pharmacy bottles, as he hooks up with Hollander in his secret sex condo, as he drunkenly waves down a taxi to cart him and Svetlana home after a night out in Moscow, that he’s done all this before. But there’s a novelty to all of it that suggests that, for a part of him, this is the first time.

Most days, he is Ilya Rozanov, the cocky son-of-a-bitch that wins the Bears their first Cup in nearly two decades — he fights and fucks and smokes and drinks and lives the life he’s been gifted like it’s his only one.

But some days, the nagging weight of what-will-come-to-pass presses into his mind — nothing useful, of course. No lotto numbers or stock market crashes or reminders that the burger place on the corner of Hemenway and Westland will (not might, motherfucker, will) give him food poisoning. But he remembers St-Simon's snort-laugh at videos of cats flying away from cucumbers seconds before it happens. He remembers Alexei’s call frequency correlates uncannily with the amount he’s about to ask for — two calls for under ten thousand, three calls for more, six calls for “Papa is dead.”

He remembers that in 2016, he will walk in on Bears defensemen Jason Feller crowding a woman who clearly did not reciprocate his interest near the nightclub washrooms, and uses that knowledge to be there to interrupt whatever fuckery Feller had been trying for, and to subsequently punch him hard enough in the face in the back alley behind the club that the man had to miss the next three games because of an orbital bone fracture.

So, he amends, some useful things, then.

Ilya doesn't remember everything in perfect detail from past lives, but he always remembers the cottage. Not that he was ever brave enough to ask for it; to take anything less than nine years of yearning after Hollander before it materializes, but God, does he ever remember the cottage. The giant stone-front and the exposed beams and the floor-to-ceiling windows and how the whole place is covered in light. He’d died each time before, thinking of the cottage as being a little bit his, what with all the time he spent there. Now, he feels the hammering of his too-excited heart beat through his chest as Shane pulled into the driveway for what was meant to be his first time there.

“Make yourself at home,” Shane says, standing far enough behind Ilya as he walks in through the threshold to be his shadow, and Ilya turns, and in four quick strides, kisses him. The moan he draws out from Shane is music to his ears, and he’s quick to pick Shane up, ignores the ache of his bruised ribs, and carry him to the bedroom. Tossing him onto the bed and crawling over top of him, it occurs to Ilya that Shane's trust is so complete it hadn't even crossed his mind to question how Ilya knew where the bedroom was. The thought sits strangely in Ilya's chest — a splinter he can feel but can't find.

He eats Shane out instead of dwelling further, letting out a satisfied sound when Shane opens up enough for him to slip his tongue inside. He flips him onto his back and sucks his cock, delighted to find him loose enough that he can start opening him up with two fingers. He lets the pleasure wash over him as Shane twists his hands in Ilya’s hair, cries out, “Oh, god, Ilya,” and fuck if Ilya isn’t possessed by the sound of Shane crying out his name. The sex is filthy, desperate, tender, theirs. He’s loves that he's always been able to give Shane this — Ilya knows this, deep down, that for all of the ways he’s failed him, he’d always had a special knack for quieting the noise in Shane’s head.

That night — the first night, Ilya props his head up on his hand, watching Shane in the afterglow of having come three times within the span of a few hours, takes a deep breath and says, “I love you.”

Shane's his jaw goes slack. Ilya knows this isn’t how it usually goes. It takes a few days of the safety that the cottage provides for them to drum up the courage to say how they feel. But Ilya needs Shane to know now, how deeply gone he is for him. He smiles softly when after a long moment that would’ve panicked the Ilyas of the past, Shane says, “Fuck — I. I love you Ilya.” 

When Shane says it back, his voice cracks on Ilya's name, his face is full of the terror and wonder that comes with saying 'I love you' for the first time. Ilya realizes, with a pang, that he might never have that feeling again — the freefall of not knowing whether the other person will catch you. Shane is risking something real, while Ilya... Ilya's replaying a scene he's already watched. 

In the end, all that matter is that Shane knows he loves him. Ilya has this knowledge a reason. And Shane was brave enough to say it back. 

It's good that one of them could find it in them to be brave. Because — Ilya knows — there’s nothing brave about what comes next.

He doesn’t get awoken in the middle of the night when the topic of Ottawa comes up — he hadn’t brought up the possibility of a green card marriage to Svetlana this time, so there was no midnight panic forcing Shane to make a spreadsheet of all of the teams in Canada in need of a centre and their salary cap space.

It’s over dinner, instead. Shane makes a favourite recipe of his, a favourite of his mother's, inherited from her mother — a curry of some type with okra and shiitake mushrooms. Shane eats it standing, leaning against the counter, while Ilya sits on one of the high stools, watching him carefully.

“This is good,” Ilya says, scraping his spoon on the curve of the bowl. “Is Japanese, yes? Canadian food is, well, boring. Too much salt. Not enough,” he waves his hand, “you know. Everything else.”

“What, like, spice?” Shane says with a laugh. “I mean, there isn’t really a ‘Canadian’ cuisine. Steak, I guess, is an Albertan thing. Montreal has poutine,” he laughs at Ilya’s face. “C’mon, you haven’t had poutine?”

“No, what is this noise you are making, fucking poutine?”

Shane laughs, and Ilya grins, pleased with himself.

“Ottawa — where I grew up. It’s very multicultural. I used to get, you know, shawarma or Caribbean food with my teammates after tournaments.” Shane trails off. “They even have, like, Eastern European grocery stores, you know, like if you wanted specific ingredients or…” he trails off.

“Are we going shopping, Hollander?” Ilya teases. “Very domestic. Will they have smetana?”

Shane shakes his head, still smiling, but with an expression on his face that is faintly familiar to Ilya — like he’s steeling himself. “I was just thinking,” he says. “You’re a free agent next season.”

Ilya regards him carefully. Maybe Shane had made that spreadsheet after all. “Yes,” Ilya says.

“Well,” he watches Shane take a slow breath, in and out. “Ottawa needs a centre. And they could definitely afford you—”

It’s a curious turn of events. Shane had never brought up his free agency unprompted. But then again, Ilya had never been so upfront with his feelings towards Shane. Bravery, it seems, was making both of them stupid.

“I think… I need to stay. In Boston,” he says, and watches Shane’s face fall.

“Oh,” Shane says softly, looking down. Ilya was never supposed to be responsible for that look. And yet. “Right, I shouldn’t have even brought it up.”

“I started permanent residency process there already,” Ilya continues, ignoring the guilt gnawing through his ribcage — not a lie, but not the whole truth. “Sooner I get passport, then, is better. For us.”

Shane slowly looks back up. “For us?”

Ilya is a fucking coward.

“Just a few more years,” he says, nodding. “Ottawa is terrible. They will still need a centre after I have the passport. Then, we go to your grocery store. Get sauerkraut.”

He thinks the joke does it job to take away the sting, but he still sees it — three lifetimes of carefully regarding the many expressions of Shane Hollander had prepared him for all the ways the man hid his hurt. The counter between them feels like a canyon.

Christ, he needs a cigarette.

“I have another idea,” Shane says, the tone almost shy. “Another reason we could have to… to see each other more.”

Ilya listens to him explain his idea for the charity, and his suggestion that they name it after his mother. Rather than saying anything, he puts the bowl down, crowds into Shane’s space, kisses him fiercely. Shane opens his mouth almost instinctively, scrambling to move his bowl out of the way, before pushing Ilya at the shoulders, breathless.

“We’re going to have to get Canadian and U.S. Charitable registration numbers though,” Shane says, eyes glimmering. “Do you know anything about cross-border tax filings?”

“Hollander,” Ilya says fondly. “Shut up and kiss me back.”

Shane does.

Boston management is thrilled to keep him, of course. He renews his Patriots season tickets, even though he usually only manages to go to one game a year, but is happy to gift the rest to Svetlana, or to the Hollanders when they’re in town to “watch their son face his rival” (a stretch of an excuse to see Ilya that he does not take for granted), or to Carmichael’s wife, who is a proper American football fan and always texts him blurry videos of good tackles as a thank you.

He wins a second cup on his re-signing year, and it feels like absolution. The feeling of endless loss after loss from his Centaur days fades to a distant memory. He does find himself thinking about his teammates, about Dykstra’s music and Barrett’s Funko Pop and Boodram’s barbecues. He realizes, with a twinge of grief, that he’ll never actually be able to ask Wyatt about comic books.

Ilya loves Boston. He reminds himself often. He loves its fury and its complete lack of charm. Each time he thinks it, he wonders if he’s thinking something true, or just trying to convince himself it is.

His teammates are surprised, first, then confused, second, at his and Hollander’s joint charitable adventure. They spin a narrative (with Yuna’s help) about how they’d developed a respect for each other after the 2017 All-Star Game, and, through talking, had discovered their mutual interest in mental health and suicide prevention. “Fucking Hollander?” Marleau asks the day after the press conference airs. “Really?” But when Ilya asks a select few to coach the Boston summer camps, the tension simmers into acceptance.

His teammates and Shane form an uneasy alliance over the course of the 2019 camps that Ilya’s bravado and self-assured comments barely hold together. He watches Shane bite back retorts from the few comments his teammates will sling his way when they think Ilya isn’t listening — backhanded remarks about Shane’s ‘good-boy’ persona and Montreal’s early exit from the most recent playoffs. Still, Shane endures, makes it work, chirps back, for Ilya.

“Is just how they show affection,” Ilya says, skating up to Shane as Hammersmith skates away, chortling to himself about a new ‘Hollandaise’ nickname for Shane he’d apparently conjured up during one of the breaks (“Cause you’re plain, like the sauce, get it Hollander?”). “Like kittens, you know? They show affection by—”

“Being complete dicks?” Shane mutters out of the side of his mouth as a line of kids skate past - one of them dragging three other ones on the end of his stick, all of them laughing maniacally all the while.

“Play fighting,” Ilya corrects, nudging his shoulder.

Shane shakes his head. “If you say so.”

“I do,” Ilya straightens up. “Go. Make friends.”

“Make me,” Shane says, rolling his eyes.

Ilya starts skating backwards, back to his side of the ice. “Maybe tonight,” he says with a smirk, taking a second to appreciate the blush that creeps down Shane’s neck before skating off.

When his back is turned to Shane, Ilya lets his face fall. Boston’s antics had been starting to wear, even on him. Truthfully, his team hadn’t held the same shine for him as it once did under the glamour of endless VIP booths and club nights. And though he held the respect of the locker room, since his press conference and the story he’d shared about his mother, he could see how some of them refused to look him in the eye, how some of them snapped their eyes at him when Connors offhandedly told Zadonsky, “Kill yourself,” after Zadonsky had filled his shower slippers with shaving cream.

But he loves Boston. He does.

Really.

His love for Svetlana persists easy as ever, at least. In the long, long months between moments with Shane, he feels grateful to have her — to watch games with, to go out for drinks with. He and Shane had agreed that she should know about their relationship, so Ilya had someone he could confide in, though Shane had been mostly hesitant until a bunch of tabloid photos of Ilya and Svetlana at some fancy restaurant get published, with headlines speculating about an imminent proposal. (“Tell her,” Shane had said, crowding into Ilya the moment he had stepped into his hotel room. “I need her to know you’re mine.”)

Ilya takes advantage of this fourth chance at life to pay closer attention to Svetlana this time around. He notices her loneliness keenly, in ways he hadn’t before; the careful ways she holds him at a distance. He’d never noticed before, needing that distance between them himself. Still, even at arm’s length, she's reliably too fucking perceptive, clueing in on Ilya's unbearable sadness that seems to come and go in waves, never more pronounced than the nights after Hollander’s sporadic away-game visits.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” she asks once, passing a bottle of vodka back and forth between them. “This secret, this distance, it’s killing you.”

“I’m not dead yet,” he says drily. He's smoking between sips, careful not to blow the smoke in her direction. It's a good reason not to have to look her in the eye. 

“If I would’ve told a sixteen year old Ilya that he would fall in love with the best scorer in the NHL—”

“Fuck you, second best—”

“And that Hollander would love him back, sixteen year old Ilya would’ve laughed in my face,” she presses on as though she hadn’t heard him. “Because it is an impossible dream. But it’s not a dream! It’s your life. You could have everything you want.”

Ilya is shaking his head. “What about you? You’re just like me,” he accuses, pouring them both another glass. “Half vodka, half sadness,”

“All Russian,” she sighs, reaching out to tuck a curl behind Ilya’s ear. “It’s the thing that’s hardest to learn, leaving home — how to let yourself be happy.”

There’s no Boodram, so there’s no Halloween party, so reasonably, Ilya thinks, there should be no fight.

As is the case with most things, he couldn’t be more wrong.

“I miss you,” Shane says over FaceTime. The yellow light of the hotel lamp glares horribly through the screen — Montreal had just lost on the road to New York. Ilya had watched the game with Svetlana earlier that evening, yelling at the TV while Shane’s team somehow leveraged all of their collective efforts to lose them a 3-1 lead in the final four minutes of the game, in spite of Shane’s best efforts.

“I know, sweetheart,” Ilya sighs, passing his hand over his face. “We’re facing each other soon - three more weeks. And Boston has a two-day break, after. We can drive to Ottawa—”

“We’re so close now,” Shane cuts in, almost petulantly, then makes a face. “Sorry, I know, I sound like a fucking kid. It’s just — a four hour drive. That’s hardly anything.”

“The I-90, hardly anything?” Ilya jokes, but it sounds hollow to his ears. “Is like tempting fate, that kind of talk.”

“Shut up, I’m being serious,” Shane says, and Ilya hears a rustle on the other side. “You know what, fuck it, I’ll rent a car.”

“What?” Ilya says, a shocking laugh escaping his throat. Shane disappears off screen, and the phone falls back on the bed, leaving behind only the hotel ceiling in view.

“I don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier, to be honest, but I’ll just pack and get a cab to the airport, and their car rental office will be open, and I’ll just—”

“Hollander, hold on. You’re going to drive to Boston? Now?”

“I want to see you,” Shane's bodiless voice responds, like it's that simple. “It’s been weeks.”

“But, your team,” Ilya protests. “You fly out tomorrow, no?”

“I’ll meet them in Philadelphia tomorrow night. I’ll just, get Louise to change my flight—”

“Shane, Shane, stop. Be serious, please. Your team will have questions. I have practice in the morning. What will we say?”

With a huff, Shane pops into the frame, and he picks the phone back up. “What’s with you?”

“What’s with me?” Ilya asks in disbelief. “I am not the one making impulsive decisions right now.” He scoffs at Shane’s look. “I know, I am as surprised as you are.”

“Do you not want to see me?”

Ilya freezes like he’s been slapped. “You know that’s not it.”

“Then what is it?”

I can’t bear the thought of you leaving the next day, he thinks bitterly. I don’t know what I’ll do the moment you close the door. “You can’t just leave your team,” he says slowly. “I can’t just miss practice. That’s not how this works.” 

Shane scoffs. “Right, yeah,” he says, shaking his head. “Ilya, c’mon. Practice? Like you’ve never missed a practice.”

“I am captain,” Ilya snaps, unnecessarily defensive. “I have obligations. I owe it to the team.”

“I’m a fucking captain too,” Shane snaps back, his voice raising. “I know what it takes. I'm asking you to choose me. What about what we owe each other?”

Ilya falls silent. He knows how rare it is for Shane to offer something like this — spontaneous, impulsive, unscripted, a little desperate. And all Ilya can do is find reasons to refuse it. 

A lifetime ago, he’d stood across from Shane, furious at the insinuation that Ilya hadn’t, time and time again, chosen Shane over hockey, over everything.

But here? In this lifetime? Shane wasn’t wrong.

“You’re right,” Shane says after a long silence. “It was a stupid idea.”

“Shane—”

“I’ll text you,” he says, and doesn’t spare a glance before the call cuts.

Two nights later, Boston’s plane goes down en route to Columbus.

When Ilya hears the familiar bang, the screams from his teammates, the clatter from the engine, it’s almost a relief. He gets into his phone the first try, this time, already knows what this Shane needs to hear.

You were the only right choice I ever made, he types. He wipes the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

He closes his eyes, and waits to wake up.

***

and again

It’s 5:24 in the morning. Life goes on.

He feels half awake, most days, going through the motions of eating, sleeping, smoking, fucking, playing hockey, grieving his mother, resenting his brother, hating his father, and yearning after Shane Hollander.

Ilya spends a few years considering how to navigate his fraught relationship with Shane. He makes his decision after the infamous Tuna Melt disaster of 2016, after Hollander walks away from him, wearing Ilya's shirt, because Ilya called him Shane. His time with Shane isn’t a guarantee. So he won’t waste this life without him.

Planes, however. Planes, he could do without.

His car obsession comes in handy. He tells reporters he wants to drive down every highway in America, and that’s his built in reason for wanting to drive between cities instead of fly with the team. Boston’s front office seems mostly bemused instead of outright annoyed by his antics, but he still wins them games, and a cup, and makes them a contender every year, so sure, if he wants to drive his sport car from Nashville to St. Louis, who are they to stop him? There is a kind of glee driving down too-wide, too-flat American roads, going just far enough past the speed limit to keep it interesting. He takes to revelling in the quiet solitude of highway driving, where the headlights from oncoming traffic are the only proof other people exist. When Marleau asks, once, what his favourite moment on the drive was from Los Angeles to Phoenix, and Ilya tells him about the rest stop at 2 AM that was so quiet he swears he heard an owl. 

Marleau, naturally, doesn't see the appeal. 

Shane takes issue with the sports cars. “If you die getting flattened on the highway, I’ll kill you,” he says.

Ilya thinks of hours of empty highways, of scanning through radio stations and finding nothing, of dark shadows over darker silhouettes. 

He says, “Lots of things could kill me,” and leaves it at that. By this point, he feels like an authority on the subject.

He keeps up the car obsession when he comes to Ottawa. The team is even more willing to look past his peculiarities, largely, he suspects, because they can hardly believe he’s choosing to play for the Centaurs to begin with. But he takes the wiggle room for what it’s worth, and for Shane’s benefit exclusively, invests in a Jeep for winter driving.

It’s more of the same, beyond that. The same hockey. The same adoration. The same heartache.

“Would you choose me?” Shane demands on Boxing Day, and Ilya thinks about dying four times over, choosing Shane each and every time, because loving him was the easiest thing Ilya had ever done, except when it was the hardest.

“I already chose you, Hollander,” he says. Again, and again, and again, and again.

Wiebe puts up a fight, when Ilya says he wants to drive from Raleigh to Tampa. “Rozanov…” he says, in that same voice Ilya’s grown used to after only a few short months, the one he uses when he doesn’t like what Ilya’s saying, but is going to let him get away with it anyway.

“I do this all the time, Coach,” Ilya insists. “America’s Highway Hockey Hero, you know?”

“Yeah, I bet Sports Illustrated was real proud of that one,” Wiebe says tiredly.

He lets him go, as expected. Ilya’s become very good at being let go of.

One hand on the wheel of a Cadillac Escalade (a Hollander-approved rental), the highway unspooling ahead of him, Ilya thinks, as he often does on these drives, about Shane.

He glances at the clock — he’ll have finished his game, right about now. Will probably text soon, congratulating Ilya on his win over Carolina. He’s good like that, checking in. Even in the fragile aftermath of their argument, Shane has always been good.

Right on time, his phone vibrates. He smiles, takes his eyes off the road for a fraction of a second to dig his phone out from the console.

Ilya glances back up at the road, finding nothing but the headlights of a semi coming towards him.

He has time only for one thought before impact:

Okay.

***

and again 

He keeps his eyes closed for a full minute longer, stays corpse-still on the hotel bed, his tears pooling in the skin of his neck, under his jaw. He keeps his eyes furiously shut tight, refusing to open them until he’s certain the clock’s ticked to 5:25.

Chapter End Notes

not even all the buddy-cop Marly / Rozy fanfiction in the world can make me love Boston, sadly, so the team catches some strays here. I am regrettably too into hockey not to make reference, in the small, relevant ways that I can, of how deeply fucked hockey culture is, in a way that I feel is very true to Rachel Reid's whole thing. But of course, this is very much about Ilya's interiority, and his world, and he's simply not equipped to pay close enough attention to what's actually happening around him - not yet, anyway!

anyway!! thank you for reading, commenting, kudosing, or lurking! would love to know how this is being received if you're feeling inclined to share! just remember it's gonna get worse before it gets better, but it does get better, (in about 8 chapters, give or take heh heh heh).

Songs from the Playlist

Teach Me About Dying by Holy Holy: Teach me about dying / so I can learn how to live

Soul Meets Body by Death Cab for Cutie: I do believe it’s true / that there are roads left in both of our shoes

Run Till You Fall by The Gertrudes: Just set fire to it all / till your lovers are free

Chapter 3: as performed by

Chapter Notes

Click to expand for this chapter's content warning

Ilya's use of his foreknowledge becomes increasingly discomforting to a (unintentionally) manipulative extent here. He's navigating his relationship (and intimacy in general) with a significant and deliberate informational advantage over Shane, and the text doesn't shy away from how that reads. More on this at the end.

I'm uncertain how to tag for this, but just be warned for general power dynamics. If there are tags that would help you navigate this text with more ease, please don't ever hesitate to let me know.

Most days Ilya would prefer not to die.

He’s smoking in the parking lot of Regina’s Co-Operators Centre, leaning against the concrete wall where the cold has seeped through his jacket and settled uncomfortably into his spine. Inside, the rink’s technician is still flooding the ice after Sweden’s practice, with Team Russia slated to follow. The sun sets really fucking early here, so it’s already dark enough that the parking lot lamps have flickered on, casting everything in that trademark flat, orange-tinged glow Ilya has come to associate with this God-forsaken city. 

There’s always a rawness to the first few days in a new loop. The memories are freshest — layered on top of each other, translucent, like sheets of ice freezing and refreezing — uneven and cloudy in some places, too clear in others. He’s taken to smoking (more than usual, that is) as a way to ground himself in the new-old version of himself, this body he’s been returned to. It’s a good way to remind his lungs that they are, in fact, seventeen years old with a nicotine problem and not nearly-thirty, crushed and burning.

Mentally, he takes stock of his last few attempts. The plane could be from flying Vancouver or Pittsburgh. He could be driving a hundred miles an hour or twenty. The team bus might be moving, or might be at a standstill on a traffic light when it’s caught up in a fatal T-bone collision. Missing the game just means it’s coming on the next one.

One fateful iteration, he’d torn his ACL on purpose (and if that wasn’t a bitch of a choice), thinking that if he missed the season entirely, death wouldn’t find him.

He was wrong, of course. He’d slipped getting out of the bathtub. The back of his skull hit the porcelain lip of the tub, and that was that: the great Ilya Rozanov, naked, wet, and very much dead on a bathroom floor. That time, he’d woken up and laughed at the absurdity of it all, rousing a swearing Beletski in the process.

His hand’s shaking slightly, trying and failing a few times to light his second cigarette. His thumb slips on the lighter until he finally ignites a flame, cupping his hand around it to protect it from the sudden gust that peels through the parking lot. Ilya gets the cigarette lit, inhales, holds it, and watches the smoke curl out of him and disappear.

The only thing he hadn’t tried was abandoning hockey in its entirety, but he dismisses the idea. Hockey is the only thing Ilya knows how to do; the one thing that punches his ticket out of Moscow. He briefly pictures himself doing — what, selling insurance? Becoming police, like his father and brother? Shane’s joked enough about his failed modelling career…

Anyway. Hockey stays.

So. If not the plane, and not the car, and not the bus, and not the city, and not the fucking bathtub…

“Would you choose me?” The question bubbles up to the surface every time. He’s heard himself say it to Shane. He’s heard Shane say it him. He knows the cadence of every version of the fight, knows how Shane’s breathing changes right before the worst of it, knows the exact moment his own voice becomes cold and unfamiliar. Ilya’s watched himself and Shane lob that grenade back and forth to each other dozens of times.

It’s not just a matter of ‘avoiding the fight.’ He’s lived it enough times to know the fight isn’t the point, understands that that moment is the culmination of the thousands other moments before the one that matters. Each time they reach that point, whatever that point is (the party, the distance, the secret), Ilya resigns himself to the inevitability of what comes next. Shane, for all the love he has for Ilya, will not choose him over everything Shane’s life was built to achieve and protect.

Ilya takes a drag, and thinks about what Shane sees when he looks at him. The drinking, the recklessness, the carelessness. The man who chirps always and apologizes never, whose ideal post-game meal is a McCrispy and a 10 piece of nuggets (while in Boston) or a Skor McFlurry and fries (while in Ottawa). He treats his body like it’s a rental that he doesn’t give a fuck about getting the damage deposit back for. Truthfully, if Shane needed a reason not to choose him, Ilya always made sure there were plenty to pick from.

He lets out a small huff, exhaling smoke and cold air out in one intermingled breath. It's a childish thought. Not to mention, if Shane could change anything about him, he’d start with the cigs.

He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and holds it between two fingers. The end glows, steady and small.

Could he do it? Drink less, listen more? Read something other than hockey stats and car magazines? Stop picking fights with reporters on Twitter. Stop insulting Scott Hunter on a weekly basis. Drink Shane’s disgusting protein smoothies. Try the almost certainly useless meditation podcast…

Could he hunt down the thousands of other moments before the moment, and control for them, one-by-one? Could he arrive at that moment and confidently say he was a person Shane would have no qualms about choosing?

The wind picks up again. Ilya looks at the cigarette for a long moment. It’s such a small thing — paper and tobacco (and lung cancer, his mind helpfully supplies in Shane’s knowing tone). He thinks of all the versions of himself who held this same cigarette in this same parking lot and didn’t think twice about it.

Ilya sighs, and takes one last drag, slow and deliberate.

Then he drops it, and crushes it under his heel.

It couldn’t be any worse than dying.

***

Ilya wins Rookie of the Year.

There’s been a lot of unintended side effects this time around, not the least of which is that Ilya Rozanov is really fucking good at hockey.

His numbers this year are, simply put, insane. 51 goals, 63 assists. Second overall for any Rookie in the NHL’s history; Ilya broke a record that had last been set in the 80s when hockey was basically the wild west and nobody believed in giving goalies pads.

He hadn’t expected to win. The thought wasn’t to be mistaken for humility, mind. Sure, Shane’s numbers hadn’t been as strong, but he’d managed to drag the Voyageurs to the second round of the playoffs for the first time in eight years, whereas Boston had been just barely edged out of the Wildcard spot. Still, the Calder was a points game at the end of the day, and Ilya always played to win.

Besides, if there was a way to Shane Hollander’s heart, it was through hockey.

His dress shirt is a little too stiff — he’s hit every now and again with the smell of starch — and it’s all he can smell when he walks up to the stage to give his speech. It’s stilted, but he leverages his still-tentative grasp on the English language to convey the sort of boyish charm he suspects the audience is looking for. He thanks the city, the fans, his teammates, his family, and the cannoli place down the street from the arena. (“They tell me they are number one fan of mine, and, uh… yes. Is same for me too. These are lucky cannolis.”) He tries and fails to find Hollander in the crowd.

It’s hard to get away, after that. Everyone wants a photo with the record-breaking rookie, and the endless flashes leave spots in his vision that he struggles to blink away.

“We doing shots, rook?” Scott Hunter asks, appearing from the crowd putting an arm around Ilya and leading him to the bar. Ilya sighs — he had just extricated himself from a conversation with David Moreno — one of the Boston owners, who’d been eager to claim Ilya’s victory as a personal one. But sure, he thinks. He can trade one annoyance for another.

He puts on his best grin-and-bear-it face, and bites back the chirp about Hunter being so far over the legal drinking age he’s actually come full circle. “Maybe just one — have an early flight tomorrow,” he says, looking around as Jake Pierce, the first line centre for Columbus - has taken to the task of wrangling all the rookies for a celebratory drink.

“We’re missing Hollander!” Pierce calls out at the same time that Ilya thinks it. “You know where your boy is, Roz?”

Ilya keeps his face composed, and shakes his head. “We are not… er… close like this.” It’s still early years — still a pretence to keep up, after all. “I will go look.”

“One for the road first, Rozy!” Carter Vaughn, Hunter’s right winger, says, handing Ilya a shot glass. A handful of nearby players gather round. Alcohol spills over the centred fists. “Wait, wait, Petrov just taught me this,” Vaughn says, clearing his throat. “Za zdorov’ye!”

The pronunciation’s so bad that it takes a second to realize what Vaughn’s saying, but then the crowd’s cheering, and they’re all throwing it back, and Ilya is joining. It’s tequila, and it’s terrible, and Ilya viciously hopes Vaughn trips and sprains an ankle on his way to his hotel room, but it’s done, and Ilya nods his thanks, once again twisting out of endless platitudes to try and get away.

He would kill for a fucking cigarette.

He finds a stairwell to get a birds eye view of the room, and takes the opportunity to pop a nicotine lozenge in his mouth. It's a rare thing, these days, to need even that; he’d spent the last couple years trying and failing to find suitable replacements (gum, patches, toothpicks), and usually he's okay white-knuckling through the headache until the craving passed. But sometimes, when the stakes felt a little too precarious, he needed a fix. And so: lozenges.

The mint does a better job than the cherry flavour at masking the peppery taste of nicotine, but not by much. It’s always an exercise in restraint to avoid just chewing it and letting it dissolve, but he’s had enough practice by now to let it run its course. He scans the room for Hollander, and comes up empty, grimacing at the tingling sensation that hits the back of his throat. He turns on his heel, heading to the elevator that’ll lead him to the rooftop.

Usually, he’s the one that retreats at this event. The weight of having to go back to Moscow, the pressures of his song-and-dance with Shane, the sting of losing Rookie of the Year — it all swirls for Ilya in a way that has typically sat uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach, each and every time. The version of himself that’s been through all this before can never seem to reassure the version of himself that’s experiencing all of this for the first time that it’s all happening exactly the way it’s supposed to.

This time, though, he’s doing his damnedest not to run. Hollander, perhaps, hadn’t gotten the memo. 

The cool air hits him when he opens the door, and it’s not a surprise to see Shane standing there.

Shane whips around at the sound of the door opening, shoulders hunching up to his ears like he’s been caught doing something far more nefarious than looking out over the Vegas strip. When he sees it’s Ilya, he doesn’t look any more reassured.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says. “You’re… congratulations.”

Ilya takes a moment before responding, his eyes settling on Shane carefully. The pause has been necessary to his whole ‘think-before-you-speak’ routine. They’ve hooked up three times already — like in previous cycles — at the CCM shoot, their first match-up, and the All Star game. They’ve exchanged a few texts, though Ilya’s been less forward in his texts overall, and he’s observed that when he doesn’t initiate, Shane never does. Still, he’s done a decent enough job to fight his instincts and let Shane approach him, for once.

New situations, like this one, always put him in a sense of unease. There’s a way to win this particular scenario, he’s sure of it. The win conditions, however, aren’t immediately apparent.

“Ah, sorry, did not mean to interrupt,” he says, taking a step forward. “You are good?” Only the slightest raise at the end of the sentence marks it as a question.

“Yeah, yeah, just — wanted some fresh air.” Shane nods his head at the skyline and street below. “Enjoying the view.”

“Is a nice view,” Ilya says slowly, coming up to stand next to him just as slowly, like a sudden movement would scare him away. He feels Shane’s eyes on him, but resolves to keep his eyes forward.

“Do you have, um, your family here with you?” Shane asks finally.

“No,” Ilya says, shaking his head. “They are back in Russia. I go back and see them soon.”

“It’s too bad, they didn’t get to watch your speech,” Shane replies.

Ilya turns at this point, searching Shane’s face for the emotion beneath the words, and struggling to find it. He knows Shane must be disappointed — angry, even — at losing Rookie of the Year. Hollander never accepted anything less than the best from himself, and his competitiveness was a double-edged sword. But apart from the faintest trace of envy, he doesn’t sense any malice in Shane’s tone.

“My father hates America,” he says, finally. “He would not have enjoyed it here anyway.”

“Oh,” Shane says by way of response, before falling quiet.

Ilya runs through his rolodex of possible options: crack a joke about the award, make a genuine observation about how close of a race it had been, offer condolences about the loss — he's still not sure what exactly this situation calls for. He can feel Shane vibrating in his skin.

“Your parents are here then?” Ilya asks.

Shane nods tightly, and Ilya just barely catches the hitch of his breath at the question. Ah, Ilya thinks. Bingo.

“They are enjoying the party?”

“Um, probably. They might’ve gone to bed by now.”

“They must be very proud,” Ilya says, carefully filtering any hint of sarcasm out of his voice.

“Yeah, maybe, I mean, I didn’t win, so.” Shane shrugs.

“Hollander, be serious,” Ilya says. “You are best scorer in the league. Is a big deal, this.”

Shane blinks at the unexpected direction of the conversation. He shuffles uncomfortably. “I mean, you’re solid too. You have more assists—”

“We are not talking about how amazing I am right now, this is old news,” he says easily, flashing a hint of that trademark smirk. “We are talking about you and your snap shot — is very good.”

Red floods into Shane’s cheeks, visible even in the dark. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Your backhand, not so much, but—“

“Hey!” Shane retorts, and Ilya chortles. “Asshole,” he mutters, but Ilya can see the tension already seeping out of Shane’s shoulders.

Ilya lets the echo of laughter linger between them for a moment. “They are proud, your parents. The Shane Hollander is their son. Would be stupid to not be proud.”

Shane catches Ilya’s eyes, giving Ilya the softest look he’s earned from him yet, but then he shakes his head, turning away. “You don’t have to be up here making me feel better about myself,” he says, apologetic. “You should be celebrating.”

“I am where I want to be,” Ilya says simply. “You have problem with this?” He raises an eyebrow in Shane’s direction.

“What? No,” Shane protests.

“Is okay, I can leave — you will give me enough time to take the elevator, or do you need me to take the long way down?” he teases, nodding to the other side of the balcony.

And then Shane’s lips are on him.

A surprised noise gets swallowed up in Shane’s kiss. It’s messy, imperfect. Ilya’s hands instinctively go to Shane’s waist to steady him. He feels one of Shane’s hands press against the lapel of his jacket, then curl around it, bunching the fabric. Ilya’s mouth opens easily underneath Shane’s; Shane’s mouth opens a little too wide, like he’s trying to swallow Ilya whole. Ilya would let him.

He slides his hands up to Shane’s chest, and carefully pushes him back. No sudden movements. “Hollander,” he says. He allows a second kiss and Shane leans in again, then says again, more urgently: “Hollander, stop. You do not want this.”

Shane’s lips are red and spit-slick. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “How do you know what I want?” he says breathlessly.

Ilya’s eyes darken. It’s a loaded question, to be sure. His are hands still on Shane’s waist; he slides them up to his biceps, and yanks him away from the balcony edge, pressing him into the wall. He leans in close.

“So you want me to kiss you here, where anyone can walk in and see you?” he whispers. His heart’s racing, but he works to keep his voice even. “You want everyone to see what you do to me, is that it?”

Shane arms flex underneath Ilya’s grip. His chest rising and falling. He swallows once, licks his lips. “You’re right, that was— I shouldn’t have.” His eyes flicker to the door, like he’s suddenly remembered it’s there.

Ilya releases his grip, taking a second to smooth out the wrinkles in Shane’s jacket. He gives him a once-over. “There.” He flashes him a smile. “Is perfect.”

Shane nods, running his hands over the fabric of his own jacket himself, following Ilya’s path. He then hesitantly reaches out, and catching Ilya’s small nod of permission, Shane returns the favour, pressing an open palm against Ilya’s chest and smoothing out the places where the fabric has twisted, before pulling his hand back quickly, like he’s burned it.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

Ilya shakes his head. “Is a compliment, I think. You cannot help it — why, is it my good looks? Or my new Calder trophy?” He waggles his eyebrows.

“Oh, fuck off,” Shane says, but there’s no edge to it. Ilya laughs louder.

“You should go back to the party,” Ilya says, regretfully. “They are looking for you. Give you many condolence drinks.”

Shane rolls his eyes, then nods, heading to the door. He pauses at the handle, then looks back. “Do you want to… I mean, are you staying…”

Ilya smiles ruefully, putting his hands in his pockets. “1502,” he says. He bends a knee, leaning back and pressing his foot against the wall behind. “See you there?”

Shane nods, tightly, then disappears behind the door.

As soon as the door slams shut, Ilya lets a full-body sigh. Hands still in his pockets, he extends out his fingers and then clenches his fist. He replays the interaction in his head like it’s game film, then shakes his head from the reverie. There’d be time for that later.

He waits a full ten minutes before following Shane downstairs, plays the part of the just-humble-enough Rookie of the Year winner. And hours after that, when he hears the knock on his hotel room door, he pulls Shane inside, and carefully, always carefully, takes him apart.

***

Boston wins the Cup a year sooner than usual, and then they run it back again after Sochi.

There’s a proof-of-concept here that Ilya can’t help but feel slightly annoyed at, hearing the ghostly nag of Shane’s ‘I told you so’ in the back of his head, as he diligently schedules his workouts, counts his macros, eats fewer cannolis.

He earns the C in his second season — business-as-usual — and so with the responsibility of captaincy, he understands, comes particular obligations that he tries to fit into this new version of his life. He has to hold the locker room so he’s not out of place with his pre-game fucking fuck San Francisco! speech — it’s what the team needs to hear. He needs to keep the team’s edge, so he chirps, a little, but spends less time in the penalty box. He has to celebrate Marly’s fifth hat trick, and St-Simon’s bachelor party, and Carmichael’s wife’s pregnancy announcement, so he makes his appearance at the nightclubs, sticks to the two-drink limit he’s imposed on himself, and picks up a woman every now and again to keep up appearances.

From his hookups, he gets the usual compliments without basking in them — that he’s beautiful, sexy, ripped, snatched. He can see the difference in himself, the definition in his shoulders and back, the thick cords of muscle in his triceps and quads, but when he catches his reflection, he finds he has no feeling about it whatsoever.

Svetlana notices too. “Young Ilyusha was never so disciplined,” she calls out as Ilya rolls out of bed at five in the morning to start his cardio. “Never so boring, either!” To be called boring, well, it’s a special kind of irony.

He’s been careful with Svetlana, this time around, the one doorway into an old world that he’s worked hard to shut out. She jokes that being a big NHL star has gone to his head, and attributes most of his newly acquired oddities to that fact. He wants her in his life — and since this will be his last pass through time (he’s confident it will), he’s careful not to push her too far away. Each time they meet, he asks about her business, her father, her health, her travels. Did she win the e-mail battle with that asshole from finance? Will she ever go back to that kickboxing class with the hot instructor who looks like Usher? He offers to buy her clothes, and jewelry, and plane tickets back home so she can check on her younger cousins.

“I can afford my own plane tickets,” she rolls her eyes, leaning over his island counter, swirling the glass of wine in her hand. “You’re always like this.”

“Like what? Generous? Attentive?”

“Obsessive,” she shoots back. “Sometimes talking to you, it’s like… like you’re going through a list.”

He reels back. “List, what list?”

She holds her hand up in innocence.  “It’s just how you come across these days. Like you’re worried you’re forgetting something. Like you’re trying catch me off-guard for an odd-man rush.” Her eyes glimmer at the hockey analogy, proud with herself for putting it in terms he'd understand.

Ilya frowns. “You’re imagining things,” he says. “Says more about you if you think it’s so strange for me to give a fuck about what’s happening in your life.”

“There’s no need to be so defensive,” she says calmly, taking a sip and setting the glass down. “I love you, you know? If you want to buy me the new silk jacket from Margiela’s Artisanal collection I’m not going to say no, obviously. I’m just saying, I’ve known you for a long time. I know when you’re holding back.”

He says nothing at that. He’s drinking a carbonated water himself — something bubbly and flavourless.

“It’s fine, I shouldn’t have said anything,” she says easily, waving a hand past the discomfort. “We’re doing a GQ shoot at work next week, you know. Think you’ll want to come by and pose for a camera? I’ll let you drive the new Audi.”

Ilya lets her change the subject. He can’t place the sin, but it feels like absolution.

He pays closer attention to his conversations with Shane, after that, worried that somehow Svetlana’s picked up on a flaw in the design he hadn’t accounted for. Did Shane find him to be— what had she called it, obsessive? He didn’t think so. If anything, Shane was the obsessive one; he always had been: turning all the locks on the door (any door), from top to bottom, each time he closes it, folding his clothes before sex, patting his chest pocket, jacket pockets, pants pockets (always in that order) each time he left the room.

In fact, he’s pretty sure Shane’s quite taken with him, this time around. He still calls Ilya an asshole with an astonishing frequency, but he’s initiated their hookups more and more as the years have gone by, which has to count for something. Ilya still takes pleasure in the glazed-over look Shane gets in his eyes when he opens him up and fucks him; he recognizes it for the release it seems to bring him. And Ilya’s careful — so careful — not to rush things, not to push past the limits he anticipates Shane would have — not to call him by his first name.

So it’s a surprise when he comes over in 2016, Ilya makes him a lentil bowl with tempeh (a joyless meal, as far as Ilya’s concerned, but it seems to make Shane happy, so it’s a win), calls him Hollander and nothing else, and Shane leaves anyway.

He's bitter, in the aftermath. “I didn't do anything wrong,” he says to the quiet dark of his empty house. Shane had been the one to ask to come over, this time. Ilya hadn’t even asked him to stay the night, like he normally would. He’d taken the call from his father — tried to get Alexei to give the man his fucking meds (useless, as always). He’d come back and they’d watched Edmonton trounce Phoenix. He’d delighted when Shane had jumped him on the couch, held him in his lap and let Shane’s praise wash over him — “I can’t take how fucking hot you are, Jesus Christ.” And then —

Well, there had been a moment. In the aftermath of their orgasm, Shane breathing heavily in Ilya’s lap, his hand covered in Ilya’s and Shane’s come, when Shane had, far too sweetly, kissed Ilya’s forehead.

Shane must’ve felt it. Ilya had tensed, completely frozen beneath him, just for a fraction of a second. It was hardly his fault — what the fuck was he supposed to do with a kiss like that?

Shane’s hurried, “I should go,” had followed soon after. Ilya hadn’t even tried to stop him.

Fuck.

He walks over to the kitchen, opens his freezer, and pulls out a bottle of vodka. He always keeps one — for special occasions, because Sveta would think he’d been body snatched if he didn’t. But he rarely indulges. Sometimes though…

He pours himself a glass. He takes a sip, relishing the burn down his throat, and sets the glass down on the counter. His hand is trembling.

“Fuck!” he shouts, and with a sudden motion, he pushes the glass off the counter.

It shatters beautifully.

Ilya breathes heavily for a moment. Tries box-breathing — like that stupid meditation podcast had taught him. In for four, hold for four…

He thinks, what a waste of good vodka.

The exhale is shaky coming out. He goes to get a broom.

It all works out, in the end, as these things tend to. Shane gets with Landry, then breaks up with her. Finds him at the All-Star Game. Ilya’s father dies. He buys a new drinking glass.

***

Hollander’s still better at face-offs.

It makes Ilya smile slightly more than it irritates him. Here was Ilya, playing the best fucking hockey of his many lives, and there was Hollander, still somehow keeping up. Two cups a piece, and a Hart Memorial, Conn Smythe, and Art Ross to each of them.

And yet. Shane wins more face-offs. He wins this one to, sending it back to the defence. Ilya puts pressure on the forecheck, which forces them to send it to Pike on the wing. Pike flicks it back to Shane. Marly lays him out.

He doesn’t get up.

Ilya can’t count the number of times he’s tried to have this go differently; it unnerves him to no end, seeing Hollander motionless on the ice. He stays composed this time, even though his heart is hammering through his chest, the sweat on the back of his neck going cold as he watches them carry Shane out on a stretcher. Everything else has gone according to plan, he reminds himself as Shane disappears down the tunnel. They were back on track after Ilya’s stumble in October. There’s no reason that this also won’t go the way it’s always gone.

He can’t afford to lose him. Not when he’s come so far.

The next morning in his hospital room, Shane asks him to come to the cottage. Ilya doesn’t risk waiting around for Scott Hunter’s Gay Debut. He says yes.

Weeks later, at the cottage, under the flicker of firelight, Shane’s head in Ilya’s lap, Shane turns to look up at him, and tells him he loves him. It’s the first time Shane’s said it first.

It’s working, Ilya thinks to himself, and he says it back, because of course he does, because of course, he does love him. He does. And yet.

The strange satisfaction of having Shane say it first suddenly sours in his stomach. Where does the gratification at his plan end and the endless love he has for this man begin?

Shane loves him. Loves Ilya’s attentiveness, loves his patience, loves that he keeps his books in alphabetical order by the author’s last name, loves that he uses the same supplements Shane uses, loves that he prefers to stay in instead of go out to the club, loves that he doesn’t take a joke too far, loves that he’s disciplined and focused and professional, loves that he has absolutely everything under control.

This was always the plan, Ilya reminds himself sternly. But in the cover of darkness, with the loon’s call echoing over the water, he finds himself reaching for Shane — his Shane — the Shane that saw him broken and fractured and imperfect and loved him anyway.

Enough. He’s here now. He brushes his thumb over Shane’s cheek. Shane’s soft smile under the glow of firelight is worth being perfect for. 

Ottawa is still Ottawa, with its too-cold winters and its bottom-of-the-standings NHL team. But Ilya’s a new man, a better centre, and worth every bit of that hundred million dollar salary.

His reputation precedes him in Ottawa, much like it always had, but to an opposite effect. They start turning their record around halfway through his first season, after they sign Wyatt. He hatches a plan with Bood, heavily implies that the optional skates are very much non-optional, and they start to win a little bit more than they lose. In the 2020 postseason, they earn a wildcard spot, largely on Ilya’s back, thank you very much, but get swept in the first round. Then Haasy joins, then Barrett, and it’s all up from there.

They don’t start the charity, this time — no time, with Ilya’s off-season schedule and his focus on his team. But it’s fine — their free time over the summer break is spent at the cottage, and his interactions with Hayden Pike are minimal, so, generally, things are good — better, even.

He puts his foreknowledge to good use. He pulls Barrett aside before the first game against Pittsburgh, tells him that the team stands by him, tells him that Dallas Kent is a fucking prick who deserves to go to hell, tells him the team needs him. Troy nods, and tries, and still plays like trash, but the trying is what matters. 

Ilya doesn’t cry at Halloween as Shane drives off into the sunrise to make his morning practice in Montreal. He doesn’t cry at all, in fact, even though he remains diligently well hydrated. It’s a relief, that he can stand by the old adage this time around — Russians don’t cry (or blush or giggle or emote in anyway that wouldn’t be appropriate in a hand-to-hand combat with a bear). He doesn’t bother with therapy; he won't risk it throwing him off his careful balancing act. And if the occasional pang of sadness strikes him from time-to-time — well, it’s a small price to pay. The team doesn’t seem to notice. They never did before, when Ilya was at his lowest. They certainly wouldn’t now.

The Hollanders, on the other hand, are uncannily observant, so he tries to bring a particular steadiness to his visits. He watches Shane’s games curled comfortably in their living room sofa, drinking green tea and helping fold laundry.

“You’ve done a great job with them, son,” David says in that easy way of his, like calling Ilya son with all that paternal affection isn’t the thing Ilya’s always craved. During the Voyageurs-Admirals period break, they’d thrown up the Atlantic Division rankings, where Ottawa currently sat in third. They cut to Centaurs highlights from their win the night before.

“A team effort,” Ilya responds easily. “Brandon’s built a good system — we generate more turnovers now with the 2-1-2.”

“I’ve noticed that!” Yuna calls out through the open door from the office down the hall. She’s using the period break to go through emails. “Defence’s more involved in the rush.”

David rolls his eyes. “I’m surrounded by nerds,” he says. “Offensive systems aside — you turned that team around. Brought them a mature, stable leadership presence. Gave us a playoff contender to root for, for once.”

Ilya smiles into his mug. “I’m just trying to sabotage the Voyageurs by taking away their number one fan.”

“Good luck with that,” Yuna calls out, and David laughs, shaking his head.

The second period starts, and David and Ilya wince simultaneously as Shane takes a hard crosscheck and draws the penalty. Yuna comes rushing out at the sound, gently smacking David’s shoulder at not calling her for the puck drop.

Moments later, Shane scores on the power play.

Ilya watches his parents whoop and holler, like Shane can hear them all the way in Quebec, and thinks, not for the first time, about how grateful he is that his boyfriend is so deeply loved. 

“You’re liking Ottawa, then?” David asks as the play settles.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “No buyer's remorse.” He’d learned that phrase recently, finding the irony of a millionaire's regret laughable. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches David and Yuna exchange an almost imperceptible glance, but pretends he doesn’t. The camera zooms in on Shane’s face as the Voyageurs pile on him in celebration.

“I know it’s hard, during the season, with your schedules,” Yuna says, nodding at the screen.

Ilya shrugs. “Was much more difficult in Boston — at least here I’m close. Can drive to meet him on off days. Get to spend time here. It is much better. The team is better. Kinder…” he trails off, watching Shane skate to the bench, still flushed with pride at the goal.

“But you miss him,” Yuna says softly.

“Of course,” Ilya says. “But no use in missing what you can’t have.”

The look Yuna and David exchange is longer this time. He pauses, looking between them, replaying the words in his head. Too much, he realizes. Too honest.

“He needs to win you at least — what, two more cups, yes Yuna?” Ilya rushes to correct. “You need him in Montreal.”

She smiles, breaking the look with David. “Giving up your cup run already, Ilya?” she jokes.

Ilya shakes his head. “Not a chance,” and turns his and the Hollanders’ attention back to the screen, back to Shane, away from him.

“Can I ask you something?” Shane asks one night. They’re lying together in his Montreal apartment. Snow is falling past the streetlight and disappearing into the dark.

“Yes, moya lyubov, of course,” he says. Shane’s resting his head on Ilya’s chest, and Ilya’s gently combing his hand through Shane’s hair. He loves that Shane’s let it grow out. He follows his hand with his lips, kissing him on the crown of his head.

Shane is tracing his fingers down the centre of Ilya’s chest. “Why do you wear this?” he asks, reaching up to touch the chain of his cross. “You’ve never struck me as particularly religious.”

Ilya looks down pressing his chin to his chest. His brow furrows at the question. Surely, he’s told him the story, he thinks. It’s not like Shane to forget…

And then, he realizes. He never had.

It would’ve come up first at the 2017 All-Star Game. But no — this time, he’d mentioned his mother had died years before that, though he'd never shared how she’d died… There hadn’t been a right time, he reminds himself. It was too early, when they were just hooking up. And too late, when they’d gotten together. He’d convinced himself it would make Shane look at him differently, if he knew she’d died by suicide. Shane would inevitably wonder, as Ilya often did, if Ilya had that same capability himself.

“It was my mother’s,” he says finally. Shane’s breath catches, and he looks up to meet Ilya’s eyes.

“It’s beautiful,” Shane says, and then he leans down and kisses the spot on his chest next to where the cross is laying, right over his heart.

Ilya’s hold around Shane tightens, and says very little for the rest of the night. He focuses on slowly carding his fingers through Shane’s hair until he’s certain Shane's fallen asleep.

***

Ilya is so thoroughly convinced that he’s pulled it off that he forgets to be worried about Bood’s Boxing Day party. “I have to make an appearance,” he tells Shane — hoping that Shane will wait for him to get back before driving to Montreal, but not expecting him too. He spends the entire party distracted, checking his phone for some message from Shane telling him what he’d decided, and leaves twenty minutes earlier than he intended to in his eagerness to come home.

When Shane greets him with a fierce kiss the moment he closes his front door, the relief is so profound that it almost shatters him. He hasn’t even taken off his shoes and jacket, just melts back into the door and takes Shane with him. 

“Eager, are we?” Ilya says against Shane’s teeth, toeing his boots off with little grace, throwing his toque - still damp from the snow — somewhere in the foyer.

“You have no idea,” Shane says, pushing Ilya’s jacket off his shoulders, and in a rare feat of haste, doesn’t bother to pick it up out of the slush Ilya’s tracked in. He pulls Ilya by the hem of his shirt, their lips never parting, and Ilya quickly gets the memo and picks Shane up, hitching him over his waist, indulging in the sensation that overtakes him when Shane's legs wrap around him as he walks them up the stairs towards the bedroom.

They make a few pit stops on the way up. Ilya presses Shane against the wall, grinds his hardening cock into him, mutters evenly in Russian all the things he plans to do to him. Shane urges Ilya to put him down on the landing to work the buttons of Ilya’s jeans, pulling them down and falling to his knees to mouth at Ilya’s cock through the fabric of his briefs.

Ilya hauls him up by his armpits, pulling Shane’s shirt off him in the process, and by the time they’ve finally made it to the bedroom, they’ve left a trail of their clothes behind.

“You came home early,” Shane says happily, sliding his boxers off — the last piece of clothing between them. His cock is hard and already leaking.

“Would’ve come home sooner if I’d known this was what was waiting for me,” Ilya says, pulling Shane back to him, already moving to push him down onto the bed.

Shane braces himself for a moment, keeping a hold on Ilya’s forearms. “Wait — can we, try something?”

Ilya breathes out slowly. This impossibly beautiful man. “Anything, sweetheart. I’ll give you anything.”

Shane nods, like he’s steeling himself, and then spins them around so Ilya’s back is to the bed, and pushes him down. He falls into the mattress, holding his hands out to catch himself on the bounce.

He lets out a low laugh. “Are you going to ride me, Hollander?”

By way of response, Shane crawls over him, kissing a line starting at his lips, down the centre of his chest, and finally, wrapping his lips around Ilya’s cock.

He was so fucking stunning. Ilya could never get tired of the way he looked sucking him off, the way he’d glance up at him through the flutter of his lashes. He reaches his hand down, breathing out Shane’s name, working his fingers into Shane’s hair.

Shane pulls off, catching Ilya’s hand before it finds its destination. He interlocks his fingers with Ilya’s, and presses his hand firmly down into the mattress. He’s breathing heavily.

“I want you to be good for me,” Shane says firmly. “Will you do that for me?”

Ilya stutters at this. Their dynamic during sex had been pretty fixed — the predictability of it was a comfort. He took charge because that’s what Shane liked, what Shane needed — it’s what quieted the buzzing in his head. He always assumed Shane liked when Ilya was in control — because it meant Shane didn’t have to be.

Shane watches his eyes — his fingers loosen a little bit in their interlocking grip, but he doesn’t let go. “Ilya?” he asks hesitantly.

It can’t be that difficult, Ilya thinks reasonably, tightening the squeeze of Shane’s hand. Just let him be in charge for a little bit.

“Sure,” he says, forcing a smile. “I can be good.”

Shane grins, then returns to the task at hand. He keeps Ilya’s hand in his, swallowing him down, his tongue running along the underside of his shaft. Ilya thumps his head back into the mattress, bites back a noise. His free hand reaches for Shane instinctively, but he pulls back, grabbing the fabric beneath him instead.

Shane pulls off of him, replacing his mouth with his free hand. He kisses the inside of his thigh, then around to the top of his leg, to the spot under his hip, in a way that can only be described as reverent. He gently loosens his hand from Ilya’s, pulling it away entirely. Ilya’s hand closes on air.

“You’re so stunning,” Shane breathes out, palming Ilya’s chest, swinging a leg over him to straddle him. He bends down to kiss his sternum. “So fucking beautiful.”

Ilya keeps himself as composed as he can, breathes slowly through his nose. He feels the drag of the hard line of Shane’s arousal against his. “Not as stunning as you.”

“We’re not talking about how amazing I am right now,” he shoots back with a smug grin, and it’s such a jolt, to be brought back to that moment, all those years ago, on the rooftop after their rookie year. How little Shane had known of Ilya back then.

How little he knows of him now.

“We’re talking about you,” Shane continues, coming down to kiss his neck, smiling into his skin. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

Ilya’s body is a line pulled taut. “Good,” he says. Inexplicably, the box breathing floats into his mind. “I feel good.”

“Just good?” Shane teases, pulling back. “C’mon, I want to hear you. You can let go.”

If only it were that easy. Ilya’s being pulled so tightly in different directions that he’ll snap.

Shane pulls back, hands splayed flat over Ilya’s chest. His thumb brushes over the cross.

Ilya flinches.

“What’s wrong?” Shane says, and Ilya doesn’t even know where to begin with that question, because it’s all wrong, it’s all wrong—

“Nothing,” he says, but he can hear his voice, the register is off, dissonant. He tries again. “Nothing, it is nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Shane says, frowning fully now. He gets up off of Ilya, but doesn’t pull away, coming to lie down next to him. “Talk to me.”

Ilya forces out a dry laugh. “Shane, please, you’re overreacting. Come, I’ll be good, just—”

“Hey, stop that,” Shane says, cupping Ilya’s cheek, and the panic rattles in Ilya’s bones. “Don’t just… humour me. Was it something I did?”

Ilya has heard Shane describe, in this lifetime and in others, his general aversion to physical touch when he was feeling particularly overwhelmed — how light touches felt like something crawling on his skin, how an unexpected gesture felt like sandpaper. He’d taken the insight to heart — always telegraphing his reach, always checking in, pleased when he found that, with very few exceptions, Shane tended to move towards him, never away.

His understanding of this aversion had been theoretical, until now.

He pulls away from Shane, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed to sit up. This… this has never happened before. Ilya’s breath catches, trying to find his way out of this maze, hunting for an explanation for what’s happening to him right now that won’t lead Shane to the inevitable conclusion that he is fundamentally broken.

“This is not how we do this,” he says, finally, trying to arrive at some semblance of equanimity. “Is cute, yes, but not for me, I think.”

“Bullshit,” Shane says, and there’s a ferocity in his voice that Ilya’s never heard before either. “You’re shutting me out.”

Ilya shuts his eyes tight, then opens them wide. Thinks before he speaks. He stands up, turning to face him. “Shane,” he says, reaching for him.

“No, don’t ‘Shane,’ me,” he says, sitting up to stand on the other side of the bed. “You never let me in.”

Ilya lets out a short disbelieving laugh. “I never let you in?” he asks, looking around, finding nobody but the two of them, naked on either side of the bed, voices raising. “Who is more in than you?”

“Stop it, stop making me think I’m fucking crazy. You’re never relax, never let me take care of you, never—” Shane stops short. “Am I not good enough for you?”

Ilya feels the wound deep in his bleeding fucking heart. “How can you say that?” he asks. “How can you even.. even think that?”

“What else am I supposed to think?” Shane snaps. “Sometimes being with you— I feel like, you’re so afraid of letting me see anything that doesn’t fit exactly the way you need it to. It’s like — don’t you think I get that?”

His voice breaks, and Ilya realizes, with horror, that Shane is crying.

“I just want you to let me in,” Shane says. “Let me see you — all of you.”

“You have all of me!” Ilya insists, desperate, furious, terrified. “You have everything I have to give!”

“I don’t believe you, Ilya,” Shane says. “I think if you had to choose between keeping everything sealed in your perfect fucking box, or letting me see you be vulnerable for even a second—”

“No,” Ilya says frantically, hearing the words before they come. “Please, Shane, don’t—” 

“—you wouldn’t choose me.”

Ilya closes his eyes.

The grenade lands.

***

On the plane from Raleigh to Tampa, Ilya is quiet.

It’s not out of place for this new Ilya. ‘Focused,’ they call him. ‘The man with the plan.’ He calmly boards after their win against Carolina, knowing, with absolute certainty, that the plane will go down.

He always sends his last message, when he can. Sudden death collisions aside, the plane crash usually gives him a few minutes to say his goodbyes. This endless cycle isn’t a guarantee — one of these days, death will stick. And if that’s true, he can’t bear the thought of leaving Shane behind without the knowledge of how completely he has Ilya’s heart.

This time, when the plane drops, when the seatbelt light goes on, when the masks drop from the overhead, Ilya doesn’t reach for his phone.

The loops are a condemnation. He’s running the same play, over and over again, because there’s something he’s not getting right.

He’s a smart player. Coachable. And so, by process of elimination, he knows there’s still one thing left to try.

I have to do it without him.

Most days, Ilya would prefer not to die.

This is not one of those days.

Chapter End Notes

woof! okay, we're going from bad to worse folks. TRUST THE PROCESS. Or rage in the comments. Either are acceptable options.

meanwhile, contemplating adding a tag to warn people that there's clearly way too much fucking hockey in this gay hockey fanfic. let a gal know if it's warranted.

thanks for your comments and kindness so far! Hope to have our next one out soon!

Author's ramblings on time travel, mental illness, and Ilya, whom she loves dearly (really)

This will be, I'm certain, the most difficult chapter to both read and write. I wanted to say a bit more about the ethics of what's happening, because I think it's the one most likely to make people feel uneasy about Ilya, and I want to provide some (potentially soft spoilery) context for those looking for reassurance at the end of a heavy chapter.

Ilya in this loop is, by very arbitrary external measures, a "better person." He's healthier, more disciplined, more attentive, a better captain, a better partner on paper. He's also at his most manipulative, not because he's cruel, but because he's desperate, and because the only tool he has for managing his terror of being unlovable is control. He controls what Shane sees of him. He controls the pace, the dynamic, the narrative. He uses what he knows about Shane to curate an experience of intimacy that feels real to Shane but is highly managed.

This is my way of writing about how depression lies to you about what safety looks like when you live in a constant state of hyper-vigilance. For this version of Ilya, safety looks like never being caught off guard, never being seen at his worst, never giving someone a reason to leave. Of course, by protecting himself from being fully known and potentially rejected, he's also pushing away the thing that would actually save him. He's built a version of himself that's easier to love and harder to reach, and he can't tell the difference between being loved and being approved of.

I'm interested in exploring the ethical weight of foreknowledge in a time travel narratives, which is something I think most uses of these tropes skip past. Knowing what someone will say, what they need to hear, what will make them fall in love with you — that's not romantic. Or at least, it's not only romantic. It's also an asymmetry of power, and I'm trying to take that aspect seriously while also getting us to the happily ever after we (and they!) deserve!

TL;DR If this chapter made you uncomfortable with Ilya, that's by design. He's uncomfortable too! He's just not there yet.

Songs from the Playlist

When I Grow Up by NF: I just like to overthink / Mockin’ me, you pay the fee / No return and no receipts

Time to Pretend by MGMT: Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? / Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

mad girl's love song by Under The Rug: how could you truly know me?

Chasing Pavements by Adele: I build myself up / And fly around circles waiting as my heart drops

Chapter 4: the fist I willed into a flower

Chapter Notes

Tags have been updated! Specific, potentially spoilery, content warning below

Chapter-specific content warning

Use of misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic slurs, references to sexual assault, and non-consensual outing. Also just a general trigger warning for Dallas Kent - absolutely fuck that guy.

It’s 5:24 AM.

***

Russia wins the World Juniors.

In the handshake line, Shane tries to meet Ilya’s eyes.

Ilya looks away.

***

In Moscow, his father says, “You won, but that Canadian boy still outplayed you.”

Ilya doesn’t disagree. He says nothing at the hard slap of his father’s hand on the back of his head.

“Respond when I speak to you.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“They will compare you to that boy for the rest of your career,” Grigori says. “You cannot lose to him.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Pfft,” Grigori says, turning his head away in disgust. “Useless boy. You don’t have what it takes.”

Ilya nods. “Yes, Papa.” He means it this time.

***

At 10:30 PM in Los Angeles, the night Ilya is drafted as the first overall pick, Ilya walks past the hotel gym because he fucking hates himself.

He presses his back against the door and listens for the faint sound of the stationary bike, whirring away.

***

He watches the CCM spot from his new Boston rental.

The TV’s the first thing he’s hooked up, just to have noise in the background to fill the silence. He’s flicking through channels, images blurring past, and then, doubles-back to an overhead shot of Shane lacing up his skates. His voice echoes through the speakers.

“…there’s nothing I love more than…”

A hotel room at a perfect 18.5°C.

Yuna’s beef & potato stew.

Stick tape that comes off the roll cleanly.

Exactly one square of Ilya’s Hershey’s Cookies & Cream chocolate bars.

Being held down when he’s overstimulated.

Summers at the cottage.

Ilya’s joggers that sit low on his hips.

Glasses that don’t dig into the bridge of his nose.

Tenderness.

“…playing hockey.”

He shuts the tv off.

***

“We’re gonna do great things together Roz,” Marleau says on the evening of their home opener. 

Ilya’s smile is tight at the eyes.

If the pre-season was any indicator, he’s good at hockey. Good enough to be the first overall draft pick.

Good. Not great.

“Maybe,” he says.

***

His first regular season face-off against Shane.

No chirps. No, 'will you disappoint them?' No smirks across centre ice.

Ilya can count the number of words they’ve exchanged since Shane first introduced himself two years ago on one hand.

He tells himself he’s trying to read an opponent, and not trying to catch the way Shane’s freckles reflect through his visor.

Shane wins the face-off, splits the defence, and scores.

Some things never change.

***

“Wanna take me home?” the woman he’s dancing with asks. 

The bass shakes the floor of the club. The lights pulse, tinged blue and red. Bodies are pressed against each other. Her hands are around his neck.

His vision blurs, pulling his lips away from her neck to try and get a look at her. Dark hair, dark eyes.

How much has he had to drink?

He can’t read the expression on her face, but the grip on his shoulders change.

“C’mon, sweets,” she says, sliding her hand under his armpit to hold him up as he stumbles forward. “Let’s go find your friends. They’ll get you home.”

***

“Papa keeps calling, asking when I’ll be home for supper.” Ilya says over the phone, pinching his brow. “Did you take him to the doctor yet?”

“Don’t worry about Papa. He’s an idiot. Win a fucking hockey game for once,” Alexei snaps back. “Isn’t that supposed to be what you’re good for?”

***

“Roz, you gotta keep it together. We got a game tomorrow man,” Marleau says. The floor is tacky near the bar from where Ilya’s drink has spilled.

Ilya laughs. “Don’t worry about me, Marly. Is the Russian way.”

“Drinking yourself into an early grave?” Marleau yells over the music.

“Living like you’ll die tomorrow!” Ilya says as he lets himself get pulled by a stranger onto the dance floor.

***

“Get up,” Svetlana says.

Rarely does Ilya hear Russian these days. Let alone first thing in the morning.

Sunlight floods the bedroom as the curtains are yanked open.

“Go away,” Ilya groans, turning his face into the pillow.

“You haven’t answered my texts.”

“Christ,” Ilya mutters. Svetlana slides open one of the windows; cool spring air wafts through the room. His mouth is dry, sweat has dried uncomfortable on his back overnight, and his head is pounding with a hangover.

“You got fined six times in the last two months for missing practice.”

“How do you know that? You sound like my fucking agent. It’s fine.”

“You smell like bad vodka.”

“I’m trying to be responsible,” he says, not moving his face from the pillow. “The top shelf shit is expensive.”

“Get the fuck up, Ilya.”

Ilya makes a noise of frustration that doesn’t help his hangover, and rolls himself out of bed.

By the time he’s showered, changed, stripped the bed, emptied the garbage cans, and packed for his afternoon practice (all under protest), Svetlana has, mercifully, made up some toast and eggs and a coffee. She sets them down in front of him with a painkiller and a gatorade she’d dug out of the back of his fridge.

He drinks the gatorade and takes a bite of the toast. The painkiller goes untouched.

“Are you done being a fucking prick?”

“After two more bites, I’ll consider it,” he says through a mouthful. He regards her for a moment — wearing a flowing blue and gold blouse, hair styled back — she’s dressed for work, he realizes. And yet, not at work. Here, instead. He doesn’t remark on it.

“When are you going to tell me what’s going on with you?” she asks tiredly. “Is it Grigori?”

Ilya frowns. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

Svetlana lets out a short breath through puffed cheeks. “It’s like pulling teeth, with you.”

“No one asked you to come,” he says, trying to wipe the tired from his eyes. “If it’s so difficult to be around me—”

“Oh, grow up, Ilya,” she snaps. “I’m not going to leave you to blow up your life. Who do you take me for?”

With a heavy sigh, Ilya pushes the half-eaten plate aside, and presses his face into the cool of the counter.

He listens for the tread of her steps as she walks over, dragging a stool out and sitting next to him. A moment later, her hand, gentler than her voice, combs through the curl of his hair at the back of his neck.

He mumbles something into the counter.

“What was that?” she asks, her voice softer now, but damn her, he can hear the smirk in her voice.

“I said, you’re right,” he says, turning his face to look at her, his cheek smooshed on the countertop. “Happy now?”

“Extremely,” she says drily. She pulls her hand away.

He forces himself to sit up. They say nothing as he finishes the eggs, drinks the coffee, leaves the empty dishes behind.

“I’ll clean it up,” he says. The dishes, he means. Everything else.

“You better,” she says. “You’re the star centre of the Boston Bears. First overall draft pick. Living it up in America.” Her eyes are steady, never leaving his. “You only have this one life. Don’t waste it.”

***

In the Boston International Airport, waiting to board his flight to Moscow, Ilya watches Shane’s acceptance speech for Rookie of the Year, chewing on the end of his hoodie string. He affords himself a small smile as he watches Shane smooth out the folds of his pre-written speech, imagines that Shane has to remind himself to hit that right tone of humility even though he was probably certain he would win.

It’s not like Ilya had put up the numbers to be a contender this year, anyway.

He watches Shane’s careful expression break into a smile as the crowd applauds, and with a sigh, Ilya closes the video and pockets the phone. Svetlana’s admonishment rings true, even if it is a bitter pill to swallow. There’s no use yearning after the life he doesn’t have — for Sveta’s sake, at the very least.

Summers in Moscow are never a reprieve, but he makes the most of it; he runs every morning, just to have a reason to leave the apartment as soon as he wakes up. He gets his agent to set up visits at some of the hockey camps running over the summer to keep busy during the long stretches of enduring his father’s long-suffering remarks. He takes his father to dinners with members of state and listens to Grigori apologize to every person of import for the embarrassment that is his son.

His performance at the Sochi Olympics doesn't help matters, and Ilya breathes through his nose in the aftermath of Russia's early tournament exit, bracing himself for the abuse that’s sure to follow. He doesn’t correct his father each time he calls for Irina instead of Polina; some battles, he’s learning, simply aren’t worth fighting.

Svetlana sneaks them away during the Minister’s party to link up with Sasha, the coach’s son he’d hooked up with years before, and he tries to reach for the same flirtatious danger they’d had as children.

It takes a line of drone at a night club that smells like vanilla, bleach, and fried wires to loosen him up. “They call it a designer drug in Paris,” Sasha says with a smirk, shaking the packet between his fingers. The three of them stumble back to Sasha’s hotel room, lights too bright and giggles too loud, and when the door closes behind them, they reach for each other.

Sasha pulls Ilya into a kiss first. When he bends down, sliding his lips across Ilya’s jaw, down to his neck, Ilya lets his head fall back into Svetlana’s shoulder. He turns his head to chase her lips.

They stumble onto the bed. Svetlana sits on Sasha’s face while Ilya fucks him. The drugs help with muting out the wrongness of it — Sasha’s lips are little too big, his hands too loose. He’s beautiful though, and he imagines the three of them are beautiful together, like glossy pictures in a magazine.

Later, when Sasha and Svetlana have fallen asleep, Ilya lies awake, their limbs tangled together, ignoring the hollowness in the pit of his stomach. Instead, he tries to remind himself how good sex with beautiful people can feel even when nothing else does.

There’s a reason, Ilya reminds himself, that giving up on hockey was never a question. He commits to it as best he can, even squeaks out a Finals appearance for the Bears in 2014, though they don’t win the cup.

The Bears don’t have long playoff runs, so Ilya’s in Moscow earlier, and for longer. It never feels like home — but neither does Boston, to be honest, and at least this way, he gets to see his niece grow up, dote on her with clothes she grows out of every few months. The summer she turns five, he turns up to his brother’s home with a gold necklace and the nicest pair of skates he could find. He doesn’t miss Alexei's flinch when she runs for him.

“I’ll take my niece for the day, yes?” he says, kneeling down to bop her on the nose. 

“Of course. She talks of nothing else but her Uncle,” Alexei says, but it’s offered without warmth. Ilya’s eyes flicker to meet Alexei’s, before he kisses his niece on the forehead.

“Go show your mother your necklace, Evelina,” he says, keeping the smile until she runs off, before rounding on Alexei. “What is it?” he says, the smile dropping the instant she’s turned the corner.

“I said nothing.”

“Your eyes said plenty. Problem with the gift?”

“Give her whatever you want,” Alexei says, tiredly. “You show up for two months a year, buy everyone’s favour, and then leave. What do I care.”

Ilya reminds himself, breathing deeply through his nose, that it would be rude to hit his brother in his own home. “You call me asking for money every week, and then I give it to you, and now you don’t want it. Make up your fucking mind.”

“You know what I hear from Papa, every damn day,” Alexei says, moving to gather his daughter’s belongings scattered around the foyer to pack them for her outing. “Where is Ilya, where is my son, where did he go, who the fuck are you,” he says, punctuating each question with a yank of the bag’s zipper before he shoves the princess-themed backpack in Ilya’s hands. “I'm the one here taking care of him, and still all he ever asks for is you. Excuse me if I’m pissed off having to hear it from my daughter too.”

“LET’S GO!” Evelina shouts, thundering down the stairs and launching herself at Ilya before he can respond.

“Yes,” Ilya says, catching her and hoisting her on his hip, backpack in hand. He keeps his eyes on Alexei, and is the first to turn away. “Let’s.”

He retreats slowly, after that. The gifts to his niece never stop — there’s always money to spend, after all. But Alexei's message is clear: Ilya's money is welcome. He is not.

He takes to traveling instead, using Moscow as a home base for his summer adventures. BASE jumping in Switzerland, canyoning in Croatia. He and Svetlana rent a Lambo and drive down Norways’ Atlantic road, and at the peak of the bridge over the water he relishes the feeling of it being the two of them, the ocean, and absolutely no one else.

He likes seeing new things, meeting new people, doing adrenaline-seeking things just because he has the money to spend and the necessarily fearless nature that comes with playing a professional full contact sport. The anonymity of travel holds a certain appeal. When he travels, he has sex with beautiful strangers who he never has to see again. He hardly remembers their faces, but grounds himself in the feeling of it, the sweat and the moans and the texture of skin on skin.

Eventually, he stops reaching for comparisons, stops looking for dark hair and dark eyes and freckles and furrowed brows. The lives he once lived recede into memory. Sometimes, he wonders if they ever even happened at all.

Early playoff exits aside, he’s still good at hockey. Good enough to get sporadic invitations to the All-Star Game every now and then, but isn’t too disappointed on the years he’s edged out by players that obviously care more and work harder. He tags along with the Bears’ golf resort vacation during one All Star break, and finds he’s not opposed to a game with a different pace. He disagrees that a slap shot is anything like a golf swing, he’s not the worst of the bunch — good enough that he can still mock Connors through tears of laughter when he sends his ball into the pond for the third time “He cannot find the net when the team pulls their goalie — you expect him to find this tiny little hole on the other side of the field?”

But the start of his 2016 season is more than a good year. It’s a great year. He’s finding the back of the net more and more — he and Marly are clicking on their line like they haven’t before, and he finds himself thinking that the Bears have a real shot at a cup.

It’s not exactly a surprise, then, that he gets the invitation to the 2017 All Star Game. Svetlana calls him excitedly when she hears the news to congratulate him.

“What a year for you to win it!” she says excitedly over the phone.

“I know, we’re hot this year,” Ilya says proudly. “I mean, I’m hot every year, but the team.”

“Get off your own cock for a second,” she says. “I meant the format. East versus West. You’ll finally get to play with Hollander!”

Ilya’s stomach drops.

“He’s a beautiful man — you know Cosmopolitan voted him the number one hottest man in the NHL last year?” she says. “Oh, you have to let him centre you — it would be amazing to see him play with a wing that can actually keep up with him…”

Svetlana keeps talking, but Ilya has stopped hearing her. He allows himself to think concretely, for the first time in years, about Shane Hollander.

***

Ilya waited until the last possible second to join the East team meet up in the hotel bar.

He’s waffled back and forth on possible entrance and exit strategies, but decides ultimately that he doesn't want to be caught off guard. He can arrive last, read the room, and extricate himself cleanly if the situation called for it. He opts for a floral patterned button down shirt and bright orange shorts, wanting to keep in theme for a Florida All-Star event, trying to make the best of what would otherwise be a panic-attack-inducing situation.

The doors to the patio of the resort’s bar are wide open on the other side of the room, and he can see the sun setting over the water. Team East is sprinkled about the room - New Jersey’s defensemen Brophy chatting with Burke and Casey — both locals from Tampa — in one corner, Columbus’ Jake Pierce trying to convince New York’s Carter Vaughn to do a handstand in another.

And there in the middle, holding court with the rest, is Shane Hollander. He's dressed in all white — a white lace shirt with a see-through pattern, half tucked into white linen pants. A pair of sunglasses rests on his head. He’s holding a beer.

He looks relaxed, confident. Ilya can see a small bead of sweat along the side of his face, slowly drawing a line down his neck. He’s simultaneously completely self-conscious about his choice of outfit, and completely overcome with the inexplicable urge to walk over to him and lick the line of sweat off Hollander's jaw.

His eyes meet Ilya’s at the bar’s entrance, and Shane waves him over. All thoughts of entrance and exit strategies immediately fly from his brain. Ilya walks towards him.

“Captain,” Ilya says easily, because of course, the fans had voted Hollander captain this year — coming off the Voyageurs’ recent back-to-back cup win last season, he was every bit the on-ice marvel the world thought him to be.

“Rozanov,” Shane says. He points at his beer in question, and Ilya nods. Shane waves the bartender over to grab another, and reaches across to hand it to Ilya. Ilya, for his part, decidedly does not look at the hollow of his throat, keeps his eyes on the bottle, doesn’t let them trail to his forearms, the bits of skin visible through the shirt pattern—

Christ, he needed to get ahold of himself. “Thought you’d run a tight ship — you let us drink on the job?” Ilya says, trying far too desperately to reach for casual.

“Holly’s taking his foot off the gas now that he’s got two cups to his name,” Cade Carlisle, the winger from Detroit, says with a laugh. “We’re all wondering what he’s like when he’s relaxed.”

The teammates around them laugh, and Shane joins them, though Ilya doesn’t miss that it comes out a half-second later than the rest. “All Star’s supposed to be fun. Figured we could afford a drink or two.”

“Yeah, you’re a real wild one Hollander.” Dallas Kent, the Toronto Centre, shoots out from the other side of the bar. Ilya watches Shane’s composure just barely fracture, but it smooths over too quickly for anyone else to take notice. “Not that I don’t love hanging out with you faggots, but are we going to hit up a club and find some ass tonight, or—”

“Fucking keep it in your pants, Kent, Jesus,” Logan Owens, the goalie from Brooklyn, says. “You can’t go twenty four hours without getting your dick wet?”

Ilya’s eyes never leave Shane — he sees Shane's cheeks flush, the grip around his drink tighten, as the conversation spirals. It’d been so long since Ilya had heard the slur used so casually; it hits him more viscerally then he expects. He quickly scans the space around them, scrambling for an intervention.

“I see they have this game — corn hole?” he says, gesturing to the boards and hacky sacks set up just past the patio where it opens onto the beach. “You fuckers all need to warm up if we’re going to beat the West."

Vaughn, who’s finally successfully landed his handstand, comes to his feet. “There, see, fucking told you I could do it," he says distractedly to Pierce before rounding on Ilya — "Yes, fucking cornhole — thank you Roz! Been trying to get a game started all night.”

The interjection works as intended as the team filters out onto the beach. Shane meets Ilya’s eyes as people file past, and silently mouths, thank you.

He doesn’t leave early, like he’d planned to. He convinces the team to play corn hole in teams of Forwards vs. Defensemen, unknowingly drafting a ringer in Shane (“I’ve played before with my parents,” he admits abashedly to Ilya after sinking three in a row). From there, Brophy urges for a rematch race to the buoy line floating in the ocean, which about half the team are drunk enough to agree to, though Shane, Ilya, and a handful of others recuse themselves as referees while the rest of the team strips their shirts and goes peeling off into the water.

“Coach says I might get to centre you, if you’re willing,” Shane says, leaning against the patio railing. He’d switched to ginger-ale after his first drink. Ilya had switched to a cocktail — too sweet, perhaps, but relishing the citrus and sugar that coats his tongue.

“You won’t centre me?” Ilya asks, and resists the urge to giveaway the fact that he’s joking for a beat longer, finally unable to keep from laughing at the look on Shane’s face. “Is okay Captain, I let you have this one.”

Shane shakes his head. “I’m not so easy to rile up, you know.”

“I believe it.” Ilya says, holding up his hands in surrender. “You are — what is this phrase. Stone cold.”

Shane laughs. “Yeah, ice cold.”

An easy silence falls between them. They watch Brophy stumble out of the water, fists held up in victory, chasing the players who had declined to go in the water and shaking his hair out on them.

“Should be interesting,” Ilya says finally. “Playing on the same team.”

“Yeah,” Shane nods. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like.”

“Have you?” Ilya asks, surprised.

“For a long time,” Shane admits. “Since you beat me at the World Juniors.”

Ilya smiles despite himself. They’d been so young. “You have beat me a few times yourself since then. I think we are even.”

“Maybe a little more than even,” Shane says, nudging Ilya’s shoulder with his own. Ilya’s arm prickles with the warmth of it. “It’s funny, you remember what the press was like back when we were rookies? Trying to drum up this whole rivalry between us. I feel like — like what did we know, back then, right? We were just… kids. Kids who wanted to play hockey.”

“Yes,” Ilya says. “And now, look,” he gestures to the open beach. “We have everything we wanted.” 

Shane is quiet for what feels like far too long before he finally says, "Sure. I guess we do." He looks at Ilya. 

Ilya wants to kiss him.

“Anyway,” Shane says, gesturing to his scattered teammates. “I should make sure everyone’s looked after.” He steps away from the railing.

“Right,” Ilya says, and watches Shane go.

It’s the best weekend of Ilya’s life so far.

The morning before the skills competition, the players spend time around the pool — especially the northerners who take particular pleasure in being on a sunny beach in January. Ilya makes the most of it himself, not missing the Boston winter in the slightest. He drums up a bit of a following in the pool — an army of the players’ kids who have challenged him to a swimming race, which he has inconveniently ‘lost’ every time, to much laughter from the children. He delights in feeling Shane’s eyes on him the whole time.

Later, Ilya wins the hardest shot contest, and blows a kiss to the commentators who seconds ago had called the slap shot a ‘dying art.’ Shane comes in second for the passing challenge. Shane return to the bench, grumbling about the angle of one of the pylons — he’d gone for the smaller three point targets every time, missing enough to edge him behind.

“Whoa, whoa, Hollander, you blame the pylons? Such sportsmanship,” Ilya smirks.

“Fuck off,” Shane says. “I’d like to see you do better.”

“I did do better,” Ilya says. “I won my competition. I’m not losing to some centre from Edmonton.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Next time, we should sign up for the same contest. Then we’ll really see who’s better.”

Ilya laughs. “I thought you were happy for there to be no rivalry."

Shane shrugs, but he’s smiling now. “Maybe a little rivalry would be alright. Don’t you think?”

And then there was playing with him.

It's like they're tethered by an invisible string. Ilya is pulled to Shane the entire time they're on the ice. On Hollander’s right wing, wherever Ilya looks, there Hollander is. He assists Shane twice, and Shane returns the favour twice over — on his last assist, dishing the sexiest no-look Ilya’s ever seen that he almost forgot to finish the damn play.

“This is crazy,” Shane says breathlessly, laughing as he skates over to bump his helmet to Ilya. “Right?”

Ilya laughs right back, the crowd cheering, the goal bell blaring. Shane’s upper lip is glistening.

“Crazy,” he agrees, knocking into Shane, and then skating past him to line back up at centre ice. He spins on his skates to look back at Shane, and winks. “Let’s do it again.”

At the East Wins afterparty, the team parties on the beach. Some of the hotel staff are teaching the players basic salsa steps. The great corn hole rematch is held. When the West players show up, some of the East players dare them to form a human pyramid as penance for their loss, which, unbelievably, enough of the players are either sober enough or drunk enough to attempt.

Shane is never that far from Ilya, as the night wears on. He refills Ilya’s drinks, he drags him into the corn hole game, he adjudicates the human pyramid with Ilya as his number two judge. Ilya wonders if Shane realizes he’s doing it — orbiting him, like Ilya’s a centrifugal force. Or maybe, they’re orbiting each other. Lifetimes of gravity, pulling them in.

In the lobby of the hotel room the next morning, Shane finds Ilya waiting for his cab to the airport, and settles in on the couch next to him, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like it costs him nothing to be close to him.

“Hey, so I wanted to ask,” he says, avoiding his eye. Ilya watches him dart his tongue out over his lip. 

“Yes?” Ilya prompts.

“I’m starting this charity,” he rushes out. “I still have to work out the details, but I wanted to get some of the guys in on it to run hockey camps over the summer, and then donate the proceeds to like, youth organizations.” He’s not looking at Ilya as he says any of this. “And I was wondering if you wanted to do it.”

Ilya tries to process what he’s hearing. “Do what?”

“Coach the camps,” Shane says. “They’d be in Montreal, and in Ottawa - my hometown,” he explains, as if Ilya doesn’t know. “You could stay with me, or you know, if enough people are flying in, I might rent a house for the guest coaches, you know, just to save on costs since you’d be doing me a favour.” Shane looks down, suddenly not knowing what to do with his hands, and settles on interlocking his fingers together and resting them on his lap. “I just— you’re really good with kids. And a great skater. It was really great, playing with you—”

“I shouldn’t,” Ilya says, before he can think twice.

Shane stops short. “Oh.”

“I mean, I cannot.” The words spill out before he can catch them. “I go back to Russia in the summer.”

Ilya watches Shane’s face fall. The tentative image that has been forming in Ilya’s mind all weekend — a future where he and Shane can still co-exist, maybe as friends — shatters in an instant. It had seemed so possible, in the dark on the beach with the sound of the ocean around them. But looking at it now, in the morning light, Ilya couldn’t ignore how close it was to destroying him already.

“Right, of course. I shouldn’t have assumed.” Shane inhales and exhales once, then looks up, finally meeting Ilya’s eyes. “Maybe next year?”

Ilya’s instincts beg him to take it back. To reassure. To comfort. This life was supposed to be Ilya’s pain alone. In a lifetime where he’s committed to living without Shane, how did Ilya manage to hurt him all the same?

“Maybe,” Ilya says. “Maybe.”

Two weeks later, Ilya’s father dies. He flies to Moscow and packs up everything that remains of his father. At the funeral, he avoids his niece’s eyes.

Alexei and him have a blow out argument at the reception. Ilya asks for a number — the number that it would take for him to never have to hear from his brother again. Alexei gives it.

He goes to his mother’s gravesite. He leaves her flowers.

On the evening before his return home, hours before the trade deadline, Ilya gets a middle-of-the-night wakeup call from his agent.

“I’m sorry, Rozanov. I tried, I promise.”

“What is it?”

“You’ve been traded, kid. To Toronto.”

***

He thumbs through the articles analyzing the trade while waiting to go through customs at the Toronto Airport. Ilya Rozanov for Wyatt Hayes and a conditional second round 2017 draft pick. Apparently, he’d been a “depreciating asset,” about to head into the last year of his contract. Rozanov had been an above-average player at best, but hardly worth the starting line money Boston was paying him. Rather than hang onto him and risk losing him for nothing, they’d traded him for a solid goalkeeper that would help push the Bears through the playoffs.

Ironically, his outstanding performance this year had worked against him — it was seen as an anomaly by head office rather than an indicator of his potential. And the Bears had capitalized on getting more than they believed Ilya would’ve been worth otherwise.

There was some commentary about the unfortunate timing of the trade, on the heels of his father’s passing. But hockey was a business at the end of the day, as avid fans on reddit threads were quick to remind those who passionately decried the Bears for their heartless decision.

ESPN gave the trade a grade of A minus.

Svetlana had cussed out a storm over text when she’d heard the news. She’d flown back to Boston after Grigori’s funeral the day before Ilya had gotten the call, and threatened to go knocking on the Bears’ management door herself. Ilya tried to offer for logic and reason, reminding her that Boston owed nothing to him, and he owed nothing back.

And if privately, he’d tried not to reel at the shock of losing everything he’d known in Moscow and Boston all within a matter of weeks, well, that was his business.

The Toronto Guardians had set him up with an apartment building close to the arena, with a south facing view overlooking the lake. Toronto, Ilya had decided, was an unusual place. He’d had fun in the past when Boston had played here — big city night life always had its own appeal. And yes, there had always been an intensity to the city that was similar in some ways to Boston’s energy. But he couldn’t help but feel that coated over the place was a veneer of Canadian civility that made him second guess every interaction. He watches for any sign of recognition in supermarkets and drug stores, and finds the occasional wide-eyed glimpse, followed by a hurried “have a nice day,” that didn't quite meet the eyes. Toronto, he’s reminded has over four times the number people as Boston — an easy place as any to disappear.

He tries to keep an open mind. Wyatt had been on this team for years, he reminds himself, reaching for threads of knowledge that would bring him some measure of comfort. Barrett was here now — he liked Barrett, considered him a friend, in other lifetimes. Surely Toronto couldn’t be all bad.

It was worse.

The team, for starters, was terrible. No organization, dispassionate coaching, and a lifeless bench. It was all of the pressure that came for playing for a city like Boston, but with none of the optimism. Toronto had either missed out entirely from the playoffs, or, arguably worse, made first round exits consistently, every year for the past eight years. Every now and then, they would try to course correct with band-aid solution trades. Today, Ilya was that band-aid. But not even Ilya at his peak could save the crash-and-burn trajectory of this team, let alone as the second line centre.

The on-ice product was — to put it mildly — a problem. Off the ice, though? A fucking disaster

He’d heard the horror stories of Dallas Kent, of course. There were dozens of Kents just like him around the league. The small taste he’d had at the All-Star game had been more than enough to paint a picture. Not to mention, there was the small voice in the back of his mind that remained ever present, reminding him of truths about Kent he had no way of knowing or acting on.

He tries to fight that knowledge, his first few interactions. Ilya himself is proof, after all, that not all lives follow prescribed paths — different changes lead to different outcomes. And Kent isn’t unique, Ilya reminds himself; he's played with men like him before, watched coaches turn a blind eye as long as the points kept coming, watched front offices shrug off complaints because the name on the jersey sold tickets. The league didn’t create Dallas Kent. It just made sure nothing ever stopped him.

Still, knowing the reality was different from witnessing it first hand every fucking day.

“This bitch I saw last night was crazy,” Kent says before a morning skate. “Danny, you should message her. She seemed like she’d go for any guy with a working dick — oh, never mind Danny, guess that rules you out.”

“This city’s fucking gone to shit, boys,” Kent says in the locker room before puck drop. “I’m trying to get these new speakers installed last night, and I’m asking the installer about the specs, and I can’t understand a fucking thing he’s saying,” Kent shakes his head. “Like fuck, they’ll just bring anyone into this country nowadays.”

“Roz, you’ll like it in Toronto — good party scene,” Kent says at drinks after Ilya’s first week. “Just try to get out for the last week of June. City gets overrun with queers.”

Ilya is a coward, and said nothing. Just two months, he thinks. He’s already told his agent to get him out of here as soon as the season is over. Surely somebody, somewhere, would be willing to make a trade for him for next season. He'd go anywhere that wasn’t fucking here.

He’s slumped on his couch, home after this sixth game with Toronto (just eight more to go, he reminds himself bitterly), scanning on his phone through highlights of other games that had been happening that day: Shane Hollander had been carried off the ice on a stretcher in his game against Boston.

Ilya sits up too fast, blood rushing to his head, as he googles ‘shane hollander injury’ for a status update. Eventually he finds a link to an article, confirming that Hollander had been transferred to hospital, was presumed stable, and would likely be out with a concussion for the remainder of the season.

Ilya tries to settle his heart. There hasn't been a version of this life where Shane doesn't get injured with a season-ending concussion. Ilya had always assumed it was the product of their rivalry — that the intensity of their games created greater risks. Truthfully, he’d forgotten that something like this could even happen, assuming that if he was no longer there, then Shane wouldn’t get hurt.

He scrolls back to the highlights, and watches the hit, feeling nauseous at the sight of Shane, motionless on the ice. Instinctively, he goes to his contacts, scrolling for Shane’s number under the name Jane, knowing it’s not there.

Road trips are hell.

At least with home games, he can escape to his apartment, call Svetlana, bitch in the privacy of his own home about the situation he’d been saddled with. But with away games, there was no escape.

“Careful boys, don’t bend over too long here,” Kent says with a smirk during a warm-up skate, ahead of their game against the Admirals. Ilya tracks Kent’s gaze across the ice to Scott Hunter, who’s currently talking to his goalie.

Barrett snorts. Ilya’s eyes narrow. He tries to recall hearing anything about Scott Hunter’s sexuality before he’d come out, and comes up empty. A lucky guess on Kent’s part perhaps. Then again, Ilya reasons, if you accuse everyone you play against of being gay, you’re bound to be right eventually. Something about broken clocks, or however the saying goes. 

“He’s fucking soft,” Barrett says. “Should be an easy win.”

It isn’t. Ilya isn’t sure what it is Kent says to Hunter at the face-off, but it makes him skate with renewed vigour. New York wins in a shootout.

Kent’s not terrible in the aftermath of the loss, Ilya thinks, desperate to grasp onto even one redeeming quality. He apologizes for not converting on the power play, reassures the rookie on the team that the takeaway Vaughn had gotten on him wasn’t the end of the world — that they would’ve lost regardless, and he didn’t need to blame himself. If everything Dallas Kent said and did could start and stop with hockey, he could downgrade him mentally from monstrous prick to mildly annoying. But there was no separating the man from the man; and much of his vulgarity seemed hard coded in his DNA.

Ilya declines to go out with the team, brushes off the shocked protests that he's turning down the opportunity to party in New York. He nurses a drink at the hotel bar instead, until he’s too tired to keep his eyes open. There were two more games left in this road trip — Pittsburgh, then Washington. Just five more games left in the season. The countdown had done a decent job at keeping him sane.

He heads to the elevator, and presses the button to call it down. 

He hears it before he sees it — Kent’s grating laugh and drunken stumble through the hotel lobby. His arm’s around a woman, curly red hair, wearing a leather jacket and jeans, leaning her full weight against him. She looks like she’s struggling to keep her eyes open.

Kent nods at Ilya, winking as he walks on the elevator.

Ilya follows.

“What floor?” Ilya asks.

“Nine,” Kent says easily.

The elevator is walled with mirrors, he leans against one, seeing endless versions of this scene — Ilya and Kent and some woman too drunk to keep her eyes open — staring back at him.

“She is okay?” Ilya says, no longer able to help himself.

“It’s fine,” Kent says. “I got a consent video.”

Ilya blinks. “Sorry?”

“Don’t worry about it, man,” Kent says as the elevator opens. “She’s cool. Have it on video saying she’s fine with it,” he continues, seemingly comfortable enough to talk about the woman in third person while she stands right in front of them.

“Fine with what?” Ilya asks harshly. He’d heard that some athletes would film videos like these to ‘cover their bases,’ but the thought of someone like Kent needing his bases to be covered has his blood running cold.

Kent rolls his eyes, pulling the woman along with him. “Have a good night Rozanov,” he says.

Ilya waits a second too long, processing what he’s seeing, before he curses at himself in Russian, sticking a hand out to keep the elevator from closing.

Kent looks over his shoulder. “Need something?”

Ilya ignores him, crossing down the hallway and tapping the woman’s shoulder. “What is your name?”

Kent’s eyes flash darkly. “What’s your problem, Rozanov?”

Again, Ilya ignores him. The woman’s eyes flutter open. She smiles between the two of them. “Hey,” she murmurs.

Ilya frowns. “Your name, please?”

“Dude, if I was fucking interested in sharing, I’d say so. You’re acting fucking weird right now,” he says, pulling the woman along with him again.

“No,” Ilya says, holding a hand out and placing it firmly on the woman’s shoulder. “Look at her — she can barely stand. She’s going home.”

“The fuck?” Kent rounds on him. “Get in your fucking lane, Rozanov. I mean it.”

“Go the fuck to sleep, Dallas,” Ilya responds, summoning every ounce of rage he could muster. “Unless you think we have a problem here, then please, let us settle it.”

Ilya watches Kent look him up and down, sizing him up. Kent wasn’t a small man by any means, and in a fair fight, Ilya figures it could go either way. But Kent was drunk, and Ilya was not, and if Ilya was backed into a corner, he had no intention of fighting fair.

Fortunately, Kent is not so drunk that he's abandoned his self preservation instincts. He releases his grip on the woman’s shoulder.

Ilya lets out of breath. He forces his hand to stop fucking shaking as he reaches for the woman and ushers her back the way they came.

The door to Kent’s room slams shut. The woman flinches in Ilya’s arms.

“What’s going on?” she mumbles into Ilya’s shoulder.

“Nothing,” he says, stepping into the elevator. “Let’s get you home.”

Ilya sits her down in the lobby while he rummages through her purse, eventually finding her phone, and asking her which of her friends they should call for her to pick her up. It takes a few tries to get the name from her, but eventually, about an hour later, Malia turns up in an Uber to pickup the woman — Renee, he learns her name is, and Ilya finally heads to bed.

The next morning, the story goes that Ilya’s a cockblock, jealous of Kent’s pull, and unable to get a woman to fuck him on his own terms. Ilya lets them jeer and laugh and draw their own conclusions. Lines have been drawn within the team, and most are content to leave Ilya alone. So, in the airport waiting for their flight to Pittsburgh, he’s surprised to find Barrett decides to sit next to him. 

“He’s a decent captain, you know,” Barrett says finally, looking back over his shoulder at Kent, who is recounting last night’s events for the third time now to a captive audience. “We could be a great team, you know, with him and you — that centre depth—”

“Why do you like him?” Ilya interrupts. Barrett was better than this. Ilya was better than this. “You are okay with these things he says?”

Barrett stumbles. “It’s just locker room talk…”

“This makes it okay? If one locker room jumps off a cliff, all locker rooms should do this?”

“I’m… pretty sure that’s not how the saying goes.”

“He is vile. The things he says, they are vile.”

“Hey — he’s a good friend. He’s been a good friend to me. Helped me find a place in this league. He looks out for his boys.” 

Ilya scoffs. “Have some pride, Barrett,” he says, even though Ilya has none. "Choose better friends.”

Barrett says nothing, and after a beat, takes the response as his cue to leave.

The loss of the last game of the season is a relief. They secure their position just out of playoff berth, and Ilya’s itching to get out of the stadium and put this city behind him. He spends a little extra time in the showers, scrubbing out the grime of the game and the team and the city — a clean slate.

He’s got a towel around his waist, using another one to wring out the ends of his hair as he walks back into the locker room. He’s surprised to find most of the team is still there, huddled around a phone that Kent is holding. Most of them are wide-eyed, some are laughing.

Barrett, he notes, is standing off to the side by his locker, his back to the group, decidedly not engaging.

“What is this, goodbye committee?” Ilya says, opening his locker. “You need a picture of this Kent, before we go?” he says, gesturing to the length of him. “You can just ask, no need to be strange about it.”

Kent shakes his head, taps something on the phone, and holds it out. “Nah, Rozanov. No picture — well, not of you, anyway.”

Ilya’s brow furrows.

Sinclair, another player, gestures for Ilya to take it. “You wouldn’t believe it if we told you.”

“Yeah, Roz, you gotta see it.”

Ilya looks at the phone, then back at Kent. He feels Barrett tense up behind him.

“No, thank you.” Ilya says, sickly sweet. “Maybe next year.”

Kent shrugs. Ilya wants to slap the fucking smirk off his face. “Suit yourself,” bringing the phone back. Ilya turns back to his locker as Kent taps something on the screen, restarting whatever video was playing.

He hears the sounds of the video — the slap of skin, the sound of the moan, distinctly sexual. A familiar tenor. Fucking animals, Ilya thinks, hurriedly sliding his sweats on so he can get away from this locker room.

“I fucking knew it,” Kent is saying. “You fuckers didn’t see at the All Star game, but I’ve been telling you. I don’t know how many times I offered to take Hollander to find some pussy — no wonder he said no, when he’s getting dicked down like a—”

Static fills Ilya’s ears. He looks up, and finds Kent’s eyes on him.

Ilya strides over to the group in two long strides, yanking the phone out of Kent’s hand.

“Yeah, like that,” a bodiless voice says. The video’s zoomed in — someone, on their knees, choking on someone else’s dick. The person on their knees pulls back after a particularly forceful thrust, and splutters off screen. “Sorry, sorry, fuck, your mouth is so good. Fuck, you were made to suck cock.”

The face comes back into view. It takes up most of the screen.

Shane Hollander, on his knees, staring back at him.

The phone clatters to the floor from Ilya’s hands. “The fuck is this?” he says. He can’t keep his voice calm, even as the locker room laughs around him.

Kent bends down to retrieve his phone, inspecting it for scratches. “Quite a fucking sight, eh?” Kent says. “He tea bags him next, if you can believe it. It’s like I was saying—”

And then Ilya’s fist connects with Kent’s mouth.

***

Ilya drives.

He drives and drives and drives.

His bruised knuckles grip the steering wheel.

Rain falls in sheets, hammering against the windshield. The wipers can’t move quickly enough to keep the glass clear.

His phone is buzzing in the passenger seat. Seven missed calls from his agent, two from the Guardians general manager. There’d be consequences for knocking out the teeth of his team’s captain. 

He reaches a stretch of highway with no streetlights.

Ilya presses the pedal flat, revs the engine against the weight of rain, and drives like he can outpace the dark.

***

By the time the pavement gives way to gravel and dirt road, Ilya realizes he has no idea what he’s going to say.

It’s still dark by the time he puts the car in park. He’d left just before midnight, had stopped exactly once to fill gas with the efficiency of an F1 pit stop, and shaved thirty minutes off the estimated arrival time. He glances at the clock on the dashboard — 5:24am.

He spares no thought to the serendipity of it all.

Ilya takes a few minutes to steel himself. This is so fucking stupid, he thinks, stepping out the car. He feels strangely naked. He should be carrying something, have literally anything to offer. He pats his shirt — a light long sleeve, and the back pocket of his jeans, finding only a packet of cigarettes.

Fuck.

He walks up to the door — a screen door and an inner solid door. After a moment’s hesitation, he opens the screen door, propping it open with his foot, and knocks.

It’s too early. Who the fuck would be awake this time of day?

Why am I here?

He knocks again.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches his reflection in the large windows to the left of the door. He looks haggard, hair askew, eyes gaunt and sleepless. He quickly runs his hand through his hair, trying and failing to set the curls hanging around his face.

First light starts to peak through the trees.

One more time, he thinks. He glances back to where his car is parked next to the Jeep that had already been out front, and knocks again.

He holds his breath. He waits.

Nothing.

He lets the screen door swing shut, and stares at his face in the reflection of the glass.

I shouldn’t have come, he thinks, turning his back on the door. It makes no sense for me to be here.

The door hinge creaks. Ilya inhales sharply, turning on his heel.

Dark hair, dark eyes, freckles. He hadn’t slept either, Ilya thinks. His eyes are red, and a little puffy. His face is tear streaked. But he’s here, staring at Ilya through the mesh of the screen door.

“Rozanov?” Shane asks. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Chapter End Notes

I have lived in Toronto. I love Toronto. I also hate Toronto. Toronto understands and accepts this.

Also, Shane's CCM commercial draws heavy inspiration from Sidney Crosby's CCM spot

Thank you all so much for your lovely comments, your kudos and readership! Sorry to end on a cliff hanger - I really want to give the next part room to breathe, so I hope it'll be worth the wait! If you're interested in more of my ramblings, particularly as they relate to hockey culture and Ilya's place within it, feel free to expand below.

The Author Hates to Love Hockey

Consent videos, sadly, are absolutely a thing, and very indicative of the complete lack of understanding we have of consent as a society. Racism and misogyny in sports is a reality that I thought it was important for Ilya to confront, especially given how linked those attitudes are to his and Shane's decisions to hide their relationship in canon.

A fully unintended side effect of the loop structure in this story is that it sort of perfectly encapsulates the reality of having multiple chances to do the right thing, and still not doing it. Ilya is not a hero in this chapter. He intervenes with Renee in the elevator, which does matter, and he punches Kent which is satisfying and necessary. But he also sits in silence through weeks of toxic "locker room talk" without saying anything. He knows more than anyone in that room about who Kent is and what he's capable of, and feels like there's nothing he can do with that knowledge. Knowing what will happen (or, if we're looking at this fic through the lens of metaphor, the assumption that you know what will happen) has a paralytic effect on Ilya because he can see the full scope of the harm Kent is capable of and still can't figure out how to stop it without exposing or harming himself.

If there is a thesis here, it's that people will stay silent if they feel cost of speaking up is greater than the cost of staying quiet. Ilya is staying silent on a LOT of things for exactly that reason, until Shane's outing tips the scale.

I promise this is still very much a love story about Ilya and Shane and finding your way back to the people who love you. Do forgive me for my meta-commentary on the nature of sport and what it reveals about our society!! And if you're after some non-toxic hockey vibes, watch the PWHL!!

Songs from the Playlist

Agnes by Glass Animals: I’m lost but I don’t know why / You’re gone but you’re on my mind

Let Me Down Easy by Gang of Youths: So leave me and tell me what I already know / That I trialled and I failed and it's good to let it go

Every Other Freckle by alt-J: You’re the first and last of your kind / (Pull me like an animal out of a hole)

Chapter 5: the dream is long

Chapter Notes

featuring ilya "I'm coming to the cottage" rozanov

Ilya’s lives have always been a careful exercise in denying himself what he truly wanted.

It was a game he and Alexei had played, when they were little — a game born out of necessity. So much of what they had wanted as children — second helpings, sweets, impractical toys or extra time at the playground — were things they knew their father would punish them for wanting. So the longer they could go without it, the less likely they were to earn his ire.

Their mother would inject moments of rebellion when she could. He’s struck by the distinct memory of being five years old at the rink for practice, and his mother picking him up, Alexei in tow, with a grin she could barely fight back into a more appropriately stoic expression. She had waited until he’d swapped out his skates for boots, and then, when they were far enough away from the rink, pulled out a Snickers bar like it was a magic trick.

They split it into three pieces, and ate it slowly. She wiped down his face before he was allowed into the house, checked his teeth for chocolate stains. Ilya understood: this was a luxury he could never, ever ask for, no matter how badly he wanted it.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Shane stands on the other side of the screen door, wearing a rumpled looking pair of blue pyjama pants and a loose shirt that doesn’t match, completely baffled at the sight of Ilya Rozanov on his doorstep.

Ilya takes quick mental stock of the situation. He’s driven for hours, shown up to Shane’s cottage uninvited — a cottage that he should have no way of knowing how to find — after punching Dallas Kent in the mouth (and again, in the jaw on his way to the floor), after Shane had been outed, all because…

Because what? What the fuck was he doing here?

“Did I get doxxed?” Shane asks suddenly, without waiting for an answer, his eyes going wide with panic. “Oh my god — is my address also just fucking out there—”

“No. No, Hollander. No one has your address,” Ilya rushes out to prevent the spiral. “I, er. I asked… Wilson.”

Shane shakes his head in confusion. “Wilson? Arthur Wilson?”

Had Ilya always been such a terrible liar? “He was traded to Boston from Voyageurs last year.”

Shane blinks. The screen door is still closed. “Yeah, I know. Why the fuck are you asking Wilson where my cottage is?”

He hadn’t asked Wilson, of course. He hadn’t spoken to Wilson since the trade — had barely spoken to him before the trade, to be honest, but seemed like a nice enough guy. It’s not like Ilya could say he’d called up Hayden fucking Pike. “I just—” he stammers. How many lifetimes would it take for him to find the right words? “I saw the video.”

Shane scoffs. “Who hasn’t.”

“And I wanted to help.”

“So you asked Wilson?” Shane asks, moving on rapidly from confusion to skepticism. “How does Wilson even know where to find this place?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Ilya exclaims, throwing his hands in the air. “He gave me general area and I drove around — I saw pictures in your stupid documentary—”

Shane reels back at the sudden outburst. “Okay, geez — wait. You saw that?”

“And it’s not like is that hard to find, I mean this place is huge, you can probably see floor to ceiling windows from outer space—”

“Okay, okay, I got it,” Shane cuts in. Ilya stops, watches Shane swallow the lump in his throat. “So you called Wilson.”

“To help,” Ilya repeats.

“To help.” Shane’s eyes narrow. “Rozanov, no offence — I don’t know what this is. If you’re trying to be a — an ally, or whatever. I don’t even know you.”

“You know me,” Ilya refutes, helplessly. He feels himself grasping for straws. “You asked me to coach your camps.”

“Yeah, and you said no.”

“What happened to you wasn’t right,” Ilya says. “It wasn’t right. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, or — or whatever. You should be able to,” he exhales sharply through his nose. “You should be able to sleep with whoever you want to sleep with and not worry about someone posting a stupid video without your say so.”

He sees Shane’s lip wobble at he speaks. Watches him angrily press his tears back in with the heel of his hand. “I don’t think you should be here—” he starts saying, and Ilya plays the only card he has left.

“I’m bisexual.”

Shane’s eyes go wide. “What?”

“I like both. Men and women,” he says. “So it matters, to me. How this goes for you.” Later, he would marvel at how true that had felt to say — they had always had their fears, their worst-case-scenarios, about what it would be like to be out. To be outed so viciously, and to be the first one… not even Scott Hunter had had his moment on ice yet. “I want to help.” 

“Yeah, you said that.” Shane looks like he’s struggling to meet Ilya’s eyes, but also, like he can’t look away. “I just. This is all a little fresh. My parents aren’t even in the country right now. I’ve got like a hundred emails — the league, my coach—” Ilya can see him fighting the urge to panic, can see the incoming wave of Shane Hollander’s worst nightmare crashing down around him. “I’m just… not sure there’s anything you can do to help me right now."

It probably wasn’t meant to be taken as a challenge. Ilya couldn’t help but take it as one anyway.

“I’ll think of something,” he says waving a hand out nonchalantly. “You have a pool?”

“Yes…” Shane says slowly.

“Good. I will clean the pool. You need to eat, yes?”

“Rozanov,” Shane says exasperatedly.

“I will make food. Laundry to do? I can press buttons on your machine. Someone to write emails for you, maybe?”

“I’m not sure I want you as my personal secretary,” Shane says, but all Ilya hears is not a no.

“Would be easy. How’s this? Dear so-and-so, go fuck yourself, Shane Hollander.”

“You can’t tell the league office to go fuck themselves.”

“I will add a ‘Sincerely’ at the end: Go fuck yourself. Sincerely, Shane Hollander.”

“Okay, I get the gist.”

“If you want me to leave, I will go,” Ilya says seriously. “You never have to see me or speak to me or— or think about me, even. It will be like I was never here.” He pushes past the heartbreak. The sunrise is in full swing now — streaks of purple and blue and orange starting to bloom above the tree line. Shane has to step to the side to avoid squinting, to stay in the shadow. “But I came because I wanted to help. If you will let me.”

It’s probably seconds of silence that follow Ilya’s speech. It could’ve been hours. He reminds himself to breathe.

The sun comes up higher. This time, Shane stays in the light.

After a beat, Shane creaks open the screen door, peering his head out of the threshold, past Ilya at the Porsche he’d driven in, parked next to his Jeep. He looks back at Ilya. “Didn’t you have a game last night?”

Ilya’s fist clenches involuntarily. “Yes.”

“It’s six in the morning.” Shane says in disbelief. “You drove all night?”

The corner of Ilya’s lip twitches up. “I really wanted to clean your pool.”

Shane shakes his head, then turns around, back through the door. Before it can swing shut, he extends out a hand, keeping the door open behind him.

“You can come in for a bit,” he says without looking back. “Rest up before you head back.”

Ilya resolutely does not pump his fist in victory. He follows Shane inside before either of them can change their mind.

***

Shane sets Ilya up on the sectional sofa in the living room, tells him to help himself to whatever’s in the fridge, and then goes up the stairs to his room and closes the door.

Ilya blows out a lip trill as soon as the door closes, and takes in the empty room. He could see the lake stretch, glimmering under the still rising sun. He sees an arm sling hanging over the stair railing leading to the second floor, and remembers, suddenly, that Shane is still injured, has probably just gotten out of his sling less than a week ago, only for this video to be released to the world.

Ilya hasn’t yet allowed himself to feel the full weight of the rage he knows he is destined to feel at whoever had released that video, too caught up in his rage at Dallas Kent and Toronto and his own spiral of self-loathing. After all, if Ilya hadn’t been so committed to avoiding Shane, Shane wouldn’t have been hooking up with other guys. If Shane hadn’t been hooking up with other guys, that video would’ve never been made. If that video hadn’t been made, it wouldn’t be plastered all over the internet for everyone to see —

It's a straight line, then, from Ilya choices to Shane’s agony.

He shakes the thought from his head. He’s here to be useful.

There aren’t any dishes in the sink, he clocks. No clothes scattered about the cottage. Everything is neat, orderly. Even the stupidly Canadian plaid blanket on the couch was folded and tucked away. Shane had probably been here since his injury, or maybe, had come here when his parents had flown off to wherever they were now. Somewhere with a beach, he suspects. Yuna always loved a beach in April.

He goes outside. Even the fucking pool looks clean.

“Do you ever relax, Hollander,” Ilya mutters to himself in Russian, returning back inside the cottage and storming to the fridge door. Inside, there’s a half-used container of miso paste, a jar of pickles, a row of condiments, and three cans of Canada Dry ginger-ale.

Finally, he thinks victoriously, grabbing his car keys from where he’d thrown them on the couch, and storming back outside. Something useful.

He gets lost a few times, driving through backroads and small towns consisting of nothing but gas stations, churches, and liquor stores, but eventually stumbles on a marché in the middle-of-nowhere, Quebec with the essentials: eggs, vegetables, some halfway-decent protein options, pasta, a box of frozen waffles because why the hell not. At the checkout line, he throws in a Snickers bar for good measure.

After he’s stashed everything in the back seat, he settles back behind the wheel in the grocery store parking lot, but doesn’t turn on the car. He eyes his phone like a ticking bomb, still laying untouched in the passenger side.

Don’t be a coward, he thinks, as he reaches to unlock it.

The screen floods with notifications. Three texts from his agent, the last one reading: “and if you wanted to blow up your entire career in one night a little heads up would’ve been nice.” He swipes away the preview. A voicemail from the Toronto GM; he listens to the first ten seconds, hears the words “misconduct,” “formal investigation,” and “mandatory meeting,” and deletes it. Eight texts from Svetlana, most of which were various exclamation marks and emojis, but somewhere in the throng, “poor Hollander, he doesn’t deserve this.”

He swallows, going to his inbox. Dozens of unread emails. He opens the one that matters: an email from the league, to all active players, stating they are aware of “a video circulating of one of our players,” that an investigation was underway, and that no players or team representatives were to make any comments regarding “the video” in any way shape or form. No mention of Shane’s name, no mention of what was done to him. Just that phrase, “the video,” like if they said enough times it would lose its meaning.

He swipes out of his inbox, and before he can stop himself, types the words ‘Shane Hollander,’ in the search engine.

He doesn’t watch the video again. He doesn’t hate himself that much. But he finds about a hundred different articles providing a comprehensive breakdown of what it entailed: Shane Hollander, very clearly, having oral sex with a man. He digs further, and learns that the video had first been posted by TMZ, and according to the article, had been verified by a “trusted source, on the condition of anonymity.”

The irony of who was being afforded anonymity in this situation would be laughable, if it weren’t completely infuriating.

The online commentary is largely one of shock. There’s some vocal support for Shane as the first publicly out (and outed) gay man in the NHL — but it arrives in the same breath as the voyeurism, the hot takes, the people who make a point to post that they don’t have a problem with him being gay, but that they take issue with the “vulgarity” of the video. Some even speculate if Hollander had leaked it himself.

Ilya feels the bile rise in his throat. Whatever this video was… however it had came to be, a violation had happened here. What was done couldn’t be undone.

He types a quick message to team, to his agent, to Svetlana — Ilya Rozanov is out of office. Please try again later.

Returning to the cottage, he’s determined to take out all the groceries in one trip. It’s a struggle to open the screen door with his foot, but he manages all the same, eventually wandering in, setting the bags on the counter, and sets to the task of feeding both Hollander and himself. He’s still packing away items when Shane stumbles down.

His eyes looks redder than they did before, like he was recently crying. Ilya doesn’t reach for him, even though he’s standing barely six feet away. He’s not Ilya’s to reach for.

“I thought you’d left,” Shane says quietly. “Heard the car.”

“Maybe that was your stomach, you heard,” Ilya says, keeping his focus on the ongoing game of Tetris he’s playing in the fridge. “When was the last time you ate?”

Shane shrugs. “Yesterday at some point,” he says. He doesn’t sit, watching curiously as Ilya rummages through his kitchen.

Chicken soup. He’d landed on the idea sorting through the too-cramped grocery store aisles. It's basic, comforting, and weather-appropriate for an unseasonably cold April. And not the pre-boxed shit either — Shane would hate that.

“Did you get some rest?” Ilya asks as he opens the wrong drawer for the third time, expecting to find cooking utensils and instead finding dishcloths. He curses in annoyance in Russian.

“Under the microwave,” Shane says, by way of response, and Ilya nods, remembering suddenly that in past lives the layout of the kitchen had changed entirely after that first summer when Shane had gotten that new smart oven installed. He opens the drawer, grabs the wooden spatula, and gets to the task of cooking.

Ilya says nothing. He’s not going to push Shane to talk. It’s not his job to build a bridge through the silence. He’s going to keep the place clean, make some chicken soup, sleep on the couch, and probably head out in the morning, largely because he isn’t certain he has the consciousness left for a return drive tonight. He watches the chopped carrots, celery, and onions, and chicken breast glisten and sizzle at the bottom of the pan, eventually emptying the container of broth over them and causing the place to steam.

“It smells good,” Shane says finally. Ilya wonders how long he’s searching for the right words to say.

“You should sit,” he replies. “You look tired.”

“Gee, thanks,” Shane says, making a face, but goes to sit at the table in the adjacent dining area all the same.

Ilya can still see him out the corner of his eye, keeping his focus on the pot. “Is fine, I also look like shit.”

“You said I looked tired, not that I looked like shit.”

Ilya shrugs. “Well…”

“Sorry if I haven’t been getting a full night’s rest,” Shane says hotly. Ilya sees him turning his body away the kitchen to face the windows. “Have had some things on my mind.”

“Right,” Ilya softens. Jokes would only take him so far. “I know.”

Silence. Ilya hears Shane tapping his fingers on the table. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

Ilya shakes his head, happy his back is to Shane so he doesn't have to worry too much about keeping his face neutral. “It’s not my business,” he says.

Shane lets out a disbelieving scoff.

Ilya frowns, turning to him. “Did you agree to have that video be posted?”

Shane’s brows furrow. Ilya heart skips a beat at its painstakingly familiarity. “No. Of course not.”

“Then it’s not my business. It’s not anyone’s business.” Ilya can’t filter the venom out of his voice. “I won’t ask, because you owe me nothing. But if you want to talk, I will listen. I won’t judge. There’s nothing to judge, because you did nothing wrong.”

Shane isn’t looking at him. His avoidance of eye-contact had always been a sign, for Ilya, in the past, that he was overwhelmed, stressed, in need of grounding. His hand twitches, picturing in his mind’s eye reaching out to hold Shane’s jaw, forcing him to meet his eyes, forcing him to believe what Ilya’s saying.

A loud ring interrupts the silence. Shane and Ilya both flinch, then Shane digs in his pocket for his phone. “Sorry — my mom,” he says, as he steps outside to take the call, out of earshot.

Ilya turns his attention back to the soup. Shane wanders occasionally into his periphery, pacing outside. He tries hard not to eavesdrop, but can’t help but think that even muffled through the glass windows that separate them, Shane's tone still sounds even — reassuring. He takes a sip of the soup to taste the seasoning, largely to distract himself, impatiently blowing on it to cool it down, and curses when he still burns his tongue.

By the time Shane returns inside, Ilya’s set a bowl aside for him. Shane closes the door behind him, regarding the single bowl on the table, and then looks at Ilya. “Aren’t you going to…?” he trails off, gesturing to the table.

Ilya hesitates. “I thought I should give you some space.”

Shane looks gaunt, bone-tired. “Just eat, Rozanov,” he says, dragging the chair out to settle in. He doesn’t ask again, but, to Ilya’s satisfaction, takes a few bites.

He’s here to do what Shane wants him to do, Ilya reasons, pouring himself a bowl. And if Shane wants Ilya to sit down and eat some fucking soup with him…

Yes, there was no denying: Ilya sounds pathetic, even in his own mind. 

It’s peaceable silence, broken up occasionally by the clatter of spoons against the edges of the ceramic bowls. When Shane’s bowl is empty, Ilya gets up without being asked, and pours him another. He accepts it without word, but Ilya can’t ignore the silent tears that have begun streaming down his cheeks.

Shane is not Ilya’s to reach for. Not Ilya’s to comfort, or to hold, or to touch, or reassure. And yet—

“Hey,” he says softly, extending a hand out to gently touch his arm.

Shane lets the spoon clatter in the bowl, and Ilya pulls his hand back. Shane brings up the collar of his shirt to rub his eyes. “Fuck,” he says. “I can’t stop.”

“Of course not,” Ilya says, reasonably. “It would be strange if you weren’t crying, after everything.”

Shane shakes his head. “You don’t understand,” he says, looking down at the table. “I wasn’t out to my parents.”

Ilya doesn’t react. He keeps his breath even. His hand is still outstretched on the table, inches away from Shane’s arm.

“I hate that they found out this way. While in— in fucking Mexico,” he let out a short, humourless laugh. “I’m not just… I’m not just fucking sad. I’m angry. I had a whole plan, to tell them this summer.”

“But they are — were they okay?” Ilya asks, suddenly horrified at the prospect of Yuna and David being anything other than accepting and gracious and good hearted and everything he’d ever known them to be.

Shane nods, and the cold grip on Ilya’s heart loosens ever so slightly. “They’re great,” he says. Still looking down at the table. A tear is stuck in one of his eyelashes. “They’re mad, obviously, they want to sue Noah, that’s the guy—”

“Right,” Ilya says quickly, not needing further elaboration, though internally roaring with satisfaction that his fury now has a name it can be pointed at.

“—and TMZ, not like people haven’t tried to sue TMZ before, but…” he trails off. “They said they, you know, love me, and…” he squeezes his eyes tight, and the tears start to spill with earnest.

Ilya is human. Imperfect and selfish and, ultimately, unable to deny himself the thing he truly wants. He slides the chair close enough to reach him, and wraps an arm around Shane.

And maybe Shane is just as human, and just as imperfect, and just as wanting. Maybe even he can’t deny himself the comfort he needs right now. Or maybe it’s a matter of right place, wrong time. The reason, Ilya thinks, doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Shane is leaning in, turning his face into Ilya’s chest, allowing himself to be held.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” Shane says into Ilya’s shirt.

“I know, sweetheart,” Ilya says in Russian, because he can’t lie to Shane, not now. All he can do is try to keep the full force of his affection hidden in plain sight. “I’m so sorry.”

He holds Shane tight, wraps him in both of his arms. Lets one hand come up to the back of his head. They sit like that for a while, and when the full wave of grief has washed over him, Shane stays in Ilya’s arms, boneless, matching breaths. The exhale comes after the inhale.

Ilya doesn’t know how much time passes. Only that the sun has gotten low in the sky again. But he knows how this goes — knows that he has to be the one to let go. So he does. He pulls Shane up to standing — walks him to his bedroom — brings him a damp cloth and a large glass of water. And Shane, who remains silent through it all, says nothing until Ilya flicks off the lights.

“Thank you,” Shane murmurs into the dark.

Ilya nods, though he knows Shane can’t see it, and closes the door behind him.

He goes downstairs. He puts away the dishes. He packs away the leftovers. He doesn’t check his phone. He runs his tongue over the back of his teeth, still feeling the sting of the burn.

He sleeps on the couch.

***

It’s not the sun streaming into the windows that wakes him up, but the shadow Shane casts to block it out that rouses him. He rubs his neck, stiff from the angle he’s slept on it, squinting as Shane blots out the sun.

“I have guest rooms, you know,” Shane says helpfully.

Ilya nods, “Thank you, good idea,” he grumbles, grasping for English while half-awake. He blinks a few times to shake the fog of sleep out.

“There’s coffee,” Shane continues. “Or tea, if you’re — is that a European thing, or just a British thing?”

“Coffee,” Ilya says. He sits up, kicking the blanket off him. He’s suddenly self-conscious at the fact that he’s wearing the same clothes he’d driven up in. Shane looks a little more put together — wearing a hoodie and track pants, a slight upgrade from the pyjamas he’d worn the whole day prior.

Shane nods, then walks out of view to the kitchen to make good on the promise.

Ilya surreptitiously sniffs the collar of his shirt. Could be worse, he thinks, but the sleep sweat and the stale air of being in a car for six hours weren’t exactly setting him up for success. He gets up and stretches, looks around the room, and takes in the expanse of the water.

“I was thinking,” Shane says over the sound of the coffee grinder. “I need some fresh air I think. A walk.”

“A walk,” Ilya repeats.

“There’s some good trails nearby. It won't be too warm - it's been a cold spring.” he says. “I can loan you a jacket. Is that, um, okay?”

Ilya should go home. He has at least seventeen calls he has to respond to, and thirty more to ignore. Svetlana must be driving herself crazy waiting for a response from him. And, most importantly, he is not supposed to be here.

Ultimately, none of this outweighs the persuasive powers of Shane Hollander.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “Let’s walk.”

There’s no gradual space between the lake and the trees. The forest simply takes over where the lake’s shoreline ends. They walk in silence, interrupted only by the crunch of gravel or the squelch of mud beneath their shoes. Above them, Ilya tracks the fragmented picture of a flock of small birds — sparrows, maybe? — fluttering through the air, like a shawl twisting in the wind.

“I was really fucking stupid,” Shane says after they’ve been walking for about thirty minutes. The sweat is prickling on the back of Ilya’s neck after a stretch of incline that takes them to a ridge overlooking the water.

“You weren’t,” Ilya says automatically.

Shane shakes his head. “Just, let me get this out,” he says. “I let him make that video.”

The path’s incline gives him the excuse he needs to pause and catch in his breath, and think about what he wants to say. “Okay,” he says. “That still doesn’t mean he had any right to share it.”

“I know,” Shane says, resigned. “But I knew the risks. I just… it was like, we'd been dating for a while. Six months. I guess I thought…” he trails off, looking out at the water. “I don’t know what I thought.”

“That he wasn’t a fucking asshole?” Ilya says sardonically. “How dare you assume good in people.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Shane says. “I think it was more that — he was into me, or at least, I thought he was. I don’t know. I was into him. He was out, and I wasn’t, and I thought… I can’t give this guy anything. Like what do I have to offer, you know?”

Ilya’s eyebrows go up. “This is not a serious question.”

Shane’s cheeks go red. “Okay, so I’m like, a hockey player.”

“The hockey player, Jesus Christ Hollander,” Ilya says, continuing to walk because he can’t stand still listening to this nonsense. “The best hockey player in the league. Who the fuck is — what is this name? Noah?” he spits out. “Who is he?”

“He works for a business lobby group,” Shane says, following Ilya, knowing full well that wasn’t the question.

“Woop-de-fucking-do,” Ilya is seething. “You’re a millionaire. You’re the best at the thing you do, and will be the best probably for another decade. You are so fucking attractive even fucking Cosmopolitan puts you on their cover.”

“That’s not the point,” Shane insists. “He had to… to keep this secret. I couldn’t, you know. Take him out. Go on a date. Meet his friends.” He shrugs. “I thought, I don’t know, the video. It was like, this…” Shane blushes, but presses on, “like, kind of hot thing, you know. Something I could do for him.”

Ilya falls silent at that. Is Shane confiding in him as a… what? A fellow queer person? A fellow hockey player? What are they, to each other? He turns back to look at him, trying to read the expression on Shane’s face and failing. And while no part of him wants to think about Shane and… Noah, his mind supplants unhelpfully… is that what Shane needs from him, right now?

“I didn’t watch… whole video.” Ilya says slowly. “But, it is not… strange. To want to give a partner something like this.”

Shane nods, seemingly gratified at the reassurance. “I felt so embarrassed about it the next morning, I asked him to delete it. We got into a huge fight, I wasn't very nice, and — I mean, I made him delete it in front of me. But I guess, you know, the damage was done. Phones, you know, I guess deleting something isn’t deleting something.”

If Ilya ever meets this man, there isn't a single doubt in his mind he would kill him.

“Hollander,” he says, repeating his words from the night before, “it wasn’t your fault.”

“I know,” Shane responds.

“It wasn't.” Ilya insists, stopping again. The trees extend high above them, birch and cedar, their overlapping branches creating kaleidoscope shadows across Shane’s face. “You wanted sex, and to feel good, and to be... connected. To this person. And you were punished for wanting these very normal things because this man’s only chance at relevance is that once he got to be with you.”

Shane nods. “Okay.”

Ilya looks him in the eye. “Okay?”

Another nod. A heavy swallow. Ilya watches Shane’s throat bob up and down. “Okay,” he says.

Ilya shakes his head, then continues down the path. “I need to borrow some clothes after this,” he says, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Fucking cold spring my ass.”

They make it back to the cottage with mud up to their ankles and the beginnings of a sunburn on the back of Ilya’s neck. They shower, and Shane lends him a change of clothes — a soft, grey crewneck and a pair of sweats that sits a half-inch too short at the ankle. He catches his reflection in the bathroom mirror, looking like an overgrown teenager raiding his boyfriend’s closet, and has to turn away before the thought burrows too deep.

The fire pit is set up behind the cottage, and while it's typically a luxury reserved for a warmer Canadian night, Ilya knows firsthand the comfort that comes with staring into the fire. After dinner, he stubbornly goes outside, crouching in front of the fire pit with a confidence that lasts as long as it takes for his third attempt at lighting the kindling to sputter out.

“You have to build it from the bottom,” Shane offers unhelpfully from his cushioned seat behind him, not even pretending to hide his amusement.

“I know how fire works, Hollander.”

“You clearly don’t.”

“So much of these little things — sticks and this, paper, paper is wet, is the problem.”

“They’re not wet, they’re from the recycling bin,” Shane says, getting up. “Move.”

Ilya surrenders the lighter with as much dignity as he can muster (which is to say, none to speak of), and watches Shane rebuild the fire from scratch, balling up the newspaper loosely, stacking the kindling, leaving gaps for air. He lights it on the first try. The flame catches, holds, and starts to climb.

“I could’ve done that,” Ilya says, settling into the two-seater.

“Sure,” Shane says, smiling, sitting back down next to him. The firelight catches the edge of his jaw. He looks more settled than he has since Ilya has arrived — the lines around his eyes and tension in his jaw disappearing with the thin streams of smoke into the night.

They sit with the fire for a while, staring at it; a favourite Hollander pastime. They exchange pleasantries — Shane shares that he's convinced his parents to finish their trip before returning home. Ilya shares that he's going to try to make French toast tomorrow morning with a stale loaf he found in Shane’s bread bin. Frivolous exchanges of nothing pass to nothing until they both fall quiet, and let the sounds of the fire popping and snapping fill the night.

“I’m sorry about the trade,” Shane says, out of nowhere.

Ilya glances over at him, taken aback. “What?”

“Boston, trading you to Toronto.” Shane is staring at the fire. “You would’ve won them the cup, this year, the way you were playing. I know you would’ve.”

Ilya wishes Shane would look at him. “You watched my games?” 

“I watch all the games,” Shane says quickly. “Don’t you?”

Ilya shrugs, smirking a little. He leans back in the seat, watching the fire flicker in Shane’s eyes. “If I can be bothered, you know, if nothing more interesting is on TV…”

“Shove off,” Shane says, with a familiar eye-roll that Ilya is always proud to elicit from him. “I’m just saying. It was a bad trade.”

“Was it?” Ilya asks, amused. “Hayes and a second round pick. He is a good goalie.”

“Not a great one, though. Not yet,” Shane shoots back. “And a conditional pick. They gave you up for pennies. They didn’t know your worth.”

Ilya tries to process this. Shane Hollander, who has spent the last forty-eight hours navigating the worst crisis of his life, is sitting by a fire analyzing Ilya’s trade value. “How are you thinking about hockey right now?” Ilya asks, half-laughing.

Shane keeps his gaze on the white of the fire. “It’s easy,” he says. “Hockey’s always been… easy. It’s everything else…” He trails off.

Ilya understands. Across lifetimes, he’s always understood: hockey is the scaffolding Shane built his entire world on — the thing that holds him up when everything else falls away. In hindsight, it had been a stupid question. Of course he’s thinking about hockey. It’s the only structure in Shane’s world still standing.

“Well,” Ilya says, shifting a little in his seat. His knee knocks into Shane’s. “I appreciate the sympathy, but it’s fine. Toronto is… a learning experience.”

“You could be so much better though,” Shane says. There’s a sharpness to his voice, direct in the way he always has been about hockey and almost nothing else. “You have so much talent — for years I’ve just… I don’t know. You could be one of the best players in the league. But it’s like you don’t care enough to try.”

The words land with more precision than Shane could possibly know. “Maybe I'm getting bored, is all. I need better competition,” Ilya says lightly.

Shane scoffs. “You have me.”

Ilya cocks an eyebrow at this. “Do I?”

The fire crackles between them. A log shifts, sending a scatter of sparks up toward the darkening sky. Shane is watching him with an expression Ilya can’t quite read — somewhere between challenge and curiosity and—

“You know what your problem is?” Shane says.

“Please, enlighten me.”

“You’re infuriating.” Shane says. Ilya isn’t totally sure how he’s earned that moniker in this lifetime, but perhaps Shane eventually learning to find him infuriating was as reliable as the sun eventually setting. “Sometimes you say shit, and I don’t know if I want to… to push you off the dock, or—”

He stops. The fire pops.

“Or what?” Ilya asks, daring him to continue.

Shane looks at him. The firelight moves across his face.

And then, Shane is kissing him.

It’s different from anything Ilya ever had with Shane; tentative in a way that none of their previous lives’ kisses ever were. Shane’s hands find the sides of Ilya’s neck, his fingers cold from the evening air, and Ilya feels the slight tremble in them. Shane is kissing him like he’s not sure he’s allowed to, like he might pull back any second —

Ilya surges forward. He presses closer, his hands hovering until they land at Shane’s waist, find the slip of skin underneath his sweater. Shane’s tongue swipes across Ilya’s bottom lip, finding Ilya's tongue against his open mouth, and his hands tug on the ends of Ilya's hair at the nape of his neck, and Ilya moans, an embarrassing noise that echoes out into the night.

The noise startles them both. Shane breaks the kiss, his forehead resting against Ilya’s, his breath unsteady.

“I’ve wanted to do that,” Shane says quietly, “since the All-Star game.”

Ilya closes his eyes. He's warm all over — the heat of the fire on his face, Shane’s breath warm on his mouth.

“Me too,” Ilya says. It’s not a lie, exactly. Just not the whole truth. 

They fiddle with the fire, trying to quench it with dirt while Ilya kisses along Shane’s neck, before Shane gets up in a huff, grabs a nearby bucket, fills it with water from the lake, and drowns the embers. Ilya laughs at his impatience, and beckons Shane back towards him.

Their kiss turns desperate in a way that is achingly familiar — Shane gathers Ilya in his arms and, his lips never leaving Ilya’s, pulling them back into the cottage. As soon as they’re inside, Shane slams Ilya against the window with enough force to punch all of the air out of his lungs. He cradles Ilya’s face in his hands, his kiss is demanding, insistent, tongue and teeth and wet and warm and everything Ilya has tried to stop wanting, for years. Shane’s head tilts against Ilya’s, and he’s forced to close his eyes from the sheer force of it, but when he deigns to open them, he’s overwhelmed by the sight of dark hair, dark eyes, freckles.

“Can I,” Ilya says between kisses. Shane moves his mouth along the edge of Ilya’s jaw, to his ear. “Wait, Hollander—”

Shane pulls back instantly. “Is this okay?”

“So okay,” Ilya says earnestly. “Don’t fucking stop, and also — can I take you to bed?”

Shane looks at him with complete seriousness. “You can take me wherever you want, Rozanov.”

Ilya visibly gulps, makes another embarrassing noise as Shane finds a sensitive spot behind Ilya’s ear. He wraps a hand around the underside of Ilya’s thigh, bringing it up over Shane’s hip, and shamelessly grinds into him.

“You look, uh, really good,” Shane says, his breath hot in Ilya’s ear. “Wearing my clothes.”

Ilya is overtaken by an impulse to kiss Shane’s cheek, so he does. “So should I keep them on, or…?”

Shane huffs. “Absolutely not.”

Ilya slides his hands under Shane’s sweater, stripping it off in one smooth motion. He’s caught up running his hands on Shane’s chest, same-but-different — same skin, different scars — before Shane interrupts to tug at the hem of Ilya’s sweater, and Ilya obliges, pulling on the back of the neckline over his head and letting it fall to the floor.

Shane takes a step back, watching Ilya propped up against the window, the shape of his erection clear in his sweatpants. His chest is rising and falling. “I think I might need to take you to bed,” Shane says. “I… I genuinely am having trouble thinking straight.”

“Nothing straight about this,” Ilya says cheekily, and takes two steps to close the distance between them, bringing his leg up over Shane’s again, grinding onto Shane’s thigh.

An involuntary growl leaves Shane’s lips. He grabs Ilya’s thighs in a tight, large grip, and lifts him up off the ground.

It’s disorienting, Ilya thinks, being carried like this. He takes the opportunity from the high ground to hold Shane’s jaw in his hands, to angle his face against Ilya’s, to coax his mouth open and let Ilya in. Ilya bumps against the stairwell banister, and then the side table in the hallway, and then the door, before the laughter peels out of him and he has to fall to his feet before Shane drops him completely.

“Will you fuck me?” Shane asks, once they’re finally in the bedroom, and Ilya wonders what he did to deserve this, in this or in any lifetime. Ilya is helpless to do anything but agree. Shane gets a towel to lay over the bed, pulls out lube and a condom from the drawer at the bedside, and sits on the bed, back up against the headboard, knees propped up and open and he reaches down to prep himself.

Ilya is stripped bare. His hand is stroking the full length of his cock. He can see Shane’s cock bobbing towards him, already slick at the tip. “Can I?” he asks, gesturing to where Shane has stuffed two fingers now into his hole.

Shane’s eyes are screwed up in focus. “Be my guest,” he says, pulling his fingers out. Ilya comes onto the bed between Shane’s knees, reaching out to press against his rim with the pad of a finger, still fluttering.

“Don’t be a tease,” Shane whines and Ilya grins at the familiarity of it, gently pressing a finger in.

“More,” Shane begs, “C’mon, I can take more.”

“What if I want to take my time with you?” Ilya retorts.

“Should’ve thought of that before you — oh fuck,” Shane arches off the bed as Ilya slips in a second finger, curling it to find the spot he was searching for. One of his hands grips the ends of his hair.

“You were saying?”

“Fuck me,” Shane says defiantly. “Or do I need to find someone who will?”

A flare of possessiveness rushes through Ilya that he has no right to feel. “Tomorrow, I’m going to eat you out, and you’re going to come with my tongue in you and nothing else,” he promises. “But tonight, since you ask so nicely…” He pulls out his fingers and presses a kiss to the inside of Shane’s thigh.

He props himself up over Shane, and slides the condom on. He thinks about turning Shane around on his hands and knees. But he wants to see him. Wants to keep those dark eyes in view. His thumb brushes over Shane’s cheekbone, where his freckles bloom from his skin. Shane keeps his knees bent, arches up towards Ilya, and they both groan as Ilya presses in.

It’s agonizing — the tight heat of him. Every muscle in Ilya’s body is trembling with the urge to press in, to go. Instead, he bends down, brushing his lips against the shell of Shane’s ear, marvelling at the flexibility of him. “Is this good?”

“You’re good, Ilya,” Shane breathes, and Ilya feels tears prickling at his eyes. “You’re so good.”

Ilya’s hand finds Shane’s in the dark. Shane’s eyes have that glassy look — familiar and not familiar all at once — and Ilya wonders if Shane even realizes what he’s said. Ilya squeezes his hand, pressing it down over Shane’s head, and begins fucking him in earnest, murmuring in Russian, how beautiful he is, how much he wants him, how perfect he is for him — every stray thought pouring out of him like a flood.

“Please,” Shane says, and Ilya releases his hand, immediately understanding, as he reaches to wrap a hand around Shane’s cock. “Please,” Shane repeats, and Ilya’s body understands what his mind does not, bending down to kiss him. Shane’s fingers grip the sheets, his body arching up.

“Please,” Ilya whispers against Shane’s lips, and Shane comes, streaks across Ilya’s hand, across both their stomachs and chests. The heat of him, the arch of him, the surrender of Shane beneath him, and Ilya’s coming too, the inevitable release.

They don’t leave the bedroom until hunger forces the issue the next morning, and even then, Ilya makes the heralded french toast with Shane pressed against his back, arms wrapped against his waist, chin hooked over his shoulder, doing his best to make it very challenging for Ilya to handle the spatula.

The day passes in a haze. Ilya makes good on his promise — takes his time, maps the geography of Shane’s body with his mouth, discovers that Shane is ticklish in the dip of his hip, that he swears with the faintest French accent when he’s close, that his whole body goes rigid before he comes and then releases all at once. Shane takes Ilya a part with an attention that Ilya had never known before — like in this lifetime he’d learned that asking what someone wanted was itself a kind of want.

There are moments that catch Ilya off guard. His hand finds the spot at the base of Shane’s spine that makes him arch, and he doesn’t quite remember how he knew that spot was there. Shane rolls them over and pins Ilya’s wrists over his head, and the sound Ilya makes surprises them both. They laugh — at the headboard hitting the wall, and Ilya’s struggle to open the lube one-handed, at Shane’s completely serious mid-sex observation that Ilya’s defensive positioning in the neutral zone could use the same patience he’s showing right now.

“Did you just give me hockey tip while I’m inside you?” Ilya asks in disbelief, lying on his side. He props himself up to peer over Shane’s shoulder, never relenting the continuous drive of his cock into him.

“Multitasking,” Shane says through panted breaths, and twists his head to kiss Ilya’s shoulder.

In between, they work out in Shane's gym downstairs, though, it's mostly Ilya working out while Shane, still on concussion protocol, watches, which is its own kind of fun. They clean out the boathouse because Shane insists it needs to be done before summer. They sit on the dock in borrowed clothes and watch the water. They talk about falling in love with hockey — about growing up in Ottawa, in Moscow. Ilya tells him about his mother — not the full story, but just enough for Shane to understand why the cross hangs where it does.

That night, they’re lying in the dark, legs tangled, Shane’s head on Ilya’s chest. The window is open. The sound of the lake fills the room — water against the dock, a low wind through the trees, something alive and unknowable moving through the brush.

“I wish we could always have this,” Shane says, so quietly that Ilya almost mistakes it for breathing.

Ilya’s fingers curl in Shane’s hair. He stares at the ceiling, at the shadows cast by the moonlight streaming through the branches outside.

He says nothing. Wishing they could, he understands, means knowing they can’t.

Shane’s breathing deepens and evens out. Ilya stays awake a while longer, holding what he has, for exactly as long as he’s allowed to have it.

***

The next morning, Ilya wakes up to find Shane already awake, elbow propped up, resting his head, staring at him. He ducks his head shyly into Ilya’s shoulder when he realizes that Ilya was awake, and Ilya, refusing to let Shane hide his face, uses both his hands to pull Shane’s face away, creating enough space he could close with open-mouthed kiss.

Ilya revels in how quickly he gets Shane to come not long after, moaning and riding Ilya's cock with Ilya's hand around his dick. 

“I have to ask you something,” Shane says, chest still rising and falling in the early morning as he rolls off.

“Ask away,” Ilya says turning to look at Shane with a grin, running his hand up and down the expanse of Shane’s chest. 

Shane seems to be desperately looking for something else to rest his gaze on other than Ilya. “Just… don’t get offended, okay? I just need to ask.”

“Spit it out, Hollander,” Ilya says, reaching for Shane’s cheek — because he can do that now — to gently turn him to face him.

“It’s just…” Shane lets out a breath. “You didn’t come here for this, did you?”

Ilya twists his head in confusion. “For this?”

“I mean, you’re bisexual,” Shane says, and even with his face in Ilya’s hands, he’s doing a pretty good job of looking past Ilya instead of at him. “I’m gay. Did you just… come here to hook up? After you saw the video, I mean?”

Ilya looks horrified. His hand pulls back. “Of course not,” he says, then, because now he has to ask: “Is that what you thought? Did I… pressure you, or—”

“No,” Shane says, shaking his head. “No, Rozanov, I promise.” He turns back on his side, reaching for Ilya’s retreating hand, and brings it back to his cheek. “To be honest…I still don’t really get why you came. I’m so glad you did,” he adds quickly. “I just… I don’t think it feels quite real. You being here.”

Ilya blinks, tries to slow his rabbit heart, thumping away. “Is just me,” he says. He slides his hand along the length of Shane’s neck, down his shoulder and arm, eventually finding his hand and bringing it to Ilya’s cheek, then sliding it over his nose and mouth. “See, very real,” he says, muffled under Shane’s hand.

Shane gently pushes Ilya’s face aside, rolling onto his back to stare at the ceiling. “Exactly. It is just you. That’s the problem,” he says. His cheeks tinge red. “Do you know I had a huge fucking crush on you?”

Ilya grins. “Really?” he asks.

Shane nods, but at least now he’s smiling too. “I spent a week at World Junior’s pumping myself up to introduce myself to you,” he said, and then he turned to look at Ilya, the reminiscing tone turning playfully accusatory. “And then you blew me off!”

“I did not!” Ilya protested. “You said I’m an awesome player to watch, and I agreed!” 

“I don’t think that’s what I said,” Shane laughs.

“It is,” Ilya’s nodding, turning now and swinging a leg over Shane to straddle him. Shane wriggles a little bit underneath him, but ultimately succumbs, looking up at Ilya. “I have superior memory. If you had said, ‘I’m Shane Hollander and I want to blow you right fucking now,’ I would have remembered that.”

Shane shakes his head. “You’re unbelievable.”

Ilya settles his weight comfortably on Shane. Contrary to Shane’s disputes, Ilya did remember the first time Shane had introduced himself — vividly, even though it was a memory he’s only lived once. It’s the last memory he has from before the loops — proof that Shane finds Ilya, in every lifetime.

“So, if you didn’t come to hook up,” Shane says, surrendering underneath Ilya’s weight. “Why did you come?”

Ilya considers the question as he bends down, framing Shane’s head with his arms, close enough that their noses brush, close enough for Ilya to count each one of Shane’s freckles.

“I thought you could use a friend,” he says, and then, after a moment, adds, “I needed one too.”

Shane blinks up at Ilya. He’s gone so still beneath him — the only movement is his breath, his chest rising, pressing into Ilya’s, and then falling again. “We’re not friends, though,” Shane says.

Ilya smiles, a bittersweet thing. He brushes his nose against Shane’s, and presses his lips to his with the lightest brush of a kiss. Shane’s eyes flutter closed.

And then Ilya sits up, and clears his throat, extending a hand out to the man beneath him.

Shane’s eyes open, and he looks at Ilya’s hand in confusion. “What are you…”

“Shane Hollander? Ilya Rozanov,” Ilya says, fighting back a cackle as Shane reluctantly grabs his hand. In his best Shane Hollander impression, Ilya adds, “You’re an awesome player to watch.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, laughing. “I didn’t sound like that!”

Ilya holds tight to Shane’s hand, refusing to let it go. “The truth hurts, Hollander.” 

Shane starts to move with earnest beneath Ilya, eventually getting enough leverage to flip them around. “I’ll show you awesome player,” Shane grumbles, dragging his mouth down the length of Ilya’s body. And Ilya is overcome with the deep freedom of surrender — overcome with the recognition that he has no control over Shane's heart, can't protect him from whatever he feels for Ilya even if he tried. He lets himself be moved.

Reality comes knocking not too long after.

Ilya turns his phone on that afternoon to learn that he’s facing a two game suspension that won’t come into effect until the start of the next season. He has three more voicemails from his agent, each one shorter and more resigned than the last. He fires off a text to prove signs of life, promises to meet the requirements of a formal apology to the team and anger management training and whatever the hell they want. Kent apparently needed emergency dental surgery, so it seemed like a fair trade.

He hasn’t shared the details of the punching-Kent incident with Shane, and doesn’t intend to. As far as he’s concerned, that’s his mess to clean up, or let lie. He's seen Shane's gaze settle on the fading bruise on his fists, but Shane hasn't probed, and Ilya hasn't offered. 

He responds to Svetlana’s threats to send “a mob, any mob, you can pick the mob” after his days of silence with reassurances that he is fine, safe, and will be back in Boston soon. He doesn’t tell her where he is; whatever this time with Shane was, it doesn't feel like his to share. 

Shane spends most of the afternoon on the phone. Ilya can hear the low murmur of his voice through the closed door of the guest bedroom on the first floor — his agent, then his parents, then his agent again. Ilya busies himself with wiping down counters, sweeping the floor, changing the sheets. The cottage doesn’t need cleaning, but he cleans it anyway.

When Shane comes downstairs, Ilya swallows at the expression on his face. He nods for the two of them to wander outside, and drags the plaid blanket from the sectional with him, ignoring Shane’s insistence that it’s not an “outdoor blanket,” before finding them a comfortable spot on the dock to watch the sunset.

He waits for Shane, because that’s all he’s ever known how to do.

“Montreal’s looking to trade me,” Shane says, finally. “I have a no-trade clause, but… I’m thinking I might need to.”

Ilya nods. His fingers curl around the blanket that’s wrapped around both of them. “Where?”

“Western conference, is what they’re saying,” Shane says. “They can’t give me to a conference rival.”

Ilya purses his lips. Western Conference — so Vancouver, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, maybe. Somewhere thousands of miles from here, from Toronto, from anywhere Ilya might feasibly find himself.

“Good teams out west,” Ilya says, because he has to say something. “Could be worse.”

“Could be Boston,” Shane offers, and Ilya huffs out a laugh that doesn’t quite reach his chest.

“You could do a lot worse than Boston,” Ilya says. “You’d make a good Bear, I think.” He presses in a little closer to Shane as a rush of the breeze sweeps over the lake.

Shane’s parents are flying back tomorrow night, he shares. Shane would leave in the morning, drive to Ottawa to meet them when they land. Ilya is glad Shane will have his family. He needs them now more than ever. He doesn’t do the math out loud, though they both know what it means. Tonight is their last night — whatever this is, it can’t carry on in the morning.

Ilya sits. He doesn’t know what else to do, but when a long-necked bird that Ilya’s never seen before flies across the water, he asks Shane, who doesn’t know himself, so they download a bird app on Ilya’s phone, and take blurry photos of winged silhouettes to try and put a name to the things they don’t have a name for. They don’t talk about hockey, or tomorrow, or the Western Conference rankings. Their elbows bump against each other underneath the blanket, and neither of them move away.

Later, on the couch, Shane falls asleep against Ilya’s shoulder during the second period of a playoff game neither of them cares about. Ilya watches the pale blue light from the television flicker across Shane’s face, admires the shadows cast from the ridge of his brow and the curve of his nose, and commits the sight to memory — not with any plan, or purpose, or intention to catalogue for a future loop, but the way anyone would, watching someone they care about sleep, knowing it’s almost over.

He waits until Shane’s breathing has gone deep and even. Then he carefully shifts his phone out, lowers the brightness all the way, and texts his agent to book his flight to Boston.

Ilya sets the phone face-down to snuff out the light, and sits in the dark, listening to the faint sound of Shane, breathing in his arms.

Ilya wonders if he’s imagining the reluctance from Shane to pack their cars the next day, thinks perhaps he’s projecting. But morning light turns to high noon, and with Shane’s parents landing in a few hours time, Ilya knows it’s time.

He stands on the gravel road, watching as Shane locks up the cottage, and walks the perimeter to make sure the doors are closed, the shed sealed, the dock well maintained. Ilya busies himself with scanning through playlists, each one failing to deliver the emotional resonance Ilya needs — too happy, or too sad, or too nonchalant, or too French (he’s getting a lot of algorithm recommendations being in Quebec). What he really wants is something that captures the sound of the cottage — the wind and the lake and the critters and the birds and Shane Hollander’s steady footsteps in springtime.

“Thank you,” Shane says, standing a few feet away from Ilya, just out of arm's reach. “I’m… really grateful you came here.”

“Me too,” Ilya says, leaning against the car. His hands are in his pockets. The distance between them, after all the days they’d spent together, feels insurmountable.

“You don’t… I don’t want you to worry about me," Shane says. “I’ll be okay.”

“I know you will,” Ilya replies. He means it. There was never any doubt that Shane would be alright. Ilya knows that now — as much as he could lie to himself and say he was here for Shane, deep down, he knows the truth — this was for Ilya — asking for the thing he was never supposed to ask for.

“It’s funny,” Shane says. “Makes you think… another life? Other circumstances… maybe we could’ve been something.”

Ilya can’t find his voice, so he doesn’t try to. He just nods again.

Shane squints against the light, then with a sigh, rummages through his pockets to pull out his sunglasses. He slides them on his face. “But maybe we can still be friends? I’d…” Shane hesitates. “I’d really like to be your friend.”

Ilya blinks, forcing himself to maintain just a few more minutes of composure. “Whatever you want,” he says, then, struck with a sudden thought, opens the car and digs through the console, before emerging out with a half-melted Snicker’s chocolate bar.

Shane tilts his head. “What’s that?”

“For the road,” Ilya says. “In case you get hungry.”

“I’m not me, when I’m hungry?” Shane says with a glimmer in his eye, the commercial slogan rolling off his tongue.

“You’re always you, Shane Hollander,” Ilya says, climbing into the front seat, and affording once last look back at everything he’s leaving behind. “No doubt about that.”

***

Ilya boards his flight from Toronto to Boston with a carry-on bag and a very distinct sense that he is about to die.

He settles into his seat. It’s economy, because apparently punching your team captain in the mouth has consequences for the sort of luxuries your agent is willing to give you, though at least he’d sprung for a window seat. The tarmac blurs past.

He is not afraid. He hasn’t been afraid of flying in a long time, and what little fear remained has always been reserved for specific flights, on specific dates, in a specific direction. That fear has no place here, on a Toronto to Boston flight, in the middle of April, three and a half years ahead of schedule.

Which is how he knows: this is it.

It’s happening now because there’s nothing left that’s supposed to happen next. In every life before this one, Ilya had been on a path — chasing Shane, losing Shane, rearranging his entire existence around the axis of Shane Hollander. There had always been the next thing — the secret, the cottage, Ottawa, the fight, the plane from Raleigh to Tampa.

This life, though, was defined by denying himself the thing he wanted most, and he’s dying only after giving in to it. The universe would have something to say about him showing up at Shane’s door with nothing but a half-empty pack of cigarettes and his own desperation. He drew from credit he didn’t have. In exchange, he got five days of holding Shane, cooking for him, sleeping next to him, learning the version of Shane Hollander that existed without Ilya for all these years and finding him to be, of course, just as worth loving.

He’s made peace with how it ends. There won’t be a wakeup call in Regina, Saskatchewan this time around.

The captain announces they’ve reached cruising altitude. Ilya pulls out his phone, connects to the WiFi, and waits.

On cue, a loud bang reverberates through the cabin. A plane wing is on fire.

Here we go.

The usual panic erupts. People twisting in their seats. Flight attendants scurrying down the aisles. By his count, he has about eight minutes; he’s become something of an expert, by this point, of parsing out the seconds and minutes and hours and days — of letting time pass through him like water through an open hand, but always knowing exactly how much of it he has left.

He still has WiFi. He’d spent the slow trajectory upward, past the clouds into open sky, thinking about the calculus of his last words, triaging who needs to hear what, and settles on three people; three messages.

To Troy Barrett, he writes: You can make a different choice today than the one you made yesterday. Be brave.

He doesn’t know if Barrett will understand — bravery probably isn’t something you can ask of a person you barely know over text. But he thinks of Troy’s face at the airport after he’d approached Ilya, of how he’d held himself apart from Kent and the rest of the group when they’d been watching the video. The Troy he knows is in there, he suspects, waiting for someone to coax him out.

To Svetlana: You are a light. Nothing can dim you. Keep shining, my love.

She’ll be furious with him, for dying. She would kill him herself if not for the fact that he’ll already be dead. But she’ll also know he means what he says, because she’s always been able to discern his lies from his truths. 

Masks drop from the overhead compartment. The panicked screams are starting now. He needs to focus. The plane lurches.

To Shane —

Ilya hesitates. His thumb hovers over the keyboard.

What they had was theirs: a few days of peace. Of waking up surrounded by the smell of cedar and coffee, of watching Shane’s face soften when Ilya walked through the door, of falling asleep to the sound of crickets and loons and the lake lapping at the dock. Five days that didn’t belong to any loop or any plan or any version of Ilya trying to guarantee an outcome. They just. Were.

It would be selfish, wouldn’t it, haunting Shane with last words when it was already understood they couldn’t be together. Shane has enough ghosts to contend with. He’ll be busy trying to rebuild his life from the wreckage that someone else’s cruelty left behind. The last thing he needs is Ilya’s goodbye lodged in his phone like shrapnel.

But Ilya is selfish — he always has been. He’s imperfect, grasping, incapable of a leaving a room without making sure everyone in it knows he’d been there. In the face of death, his flaws didn't retreat: they sharpened. Why else would he have come back, pressing into Shane’s life like an old bruise he would never let heal, over, and over, and over, again, and again, and again— 

He thinks of Shane’s hand on his chest in the dark. The sound of Shane’s laugh when Ilya couldn't light a fire the third night in a row. The weight of Shane’s head on Ilya’s shoulder during the hockey game neither of them watched. The morning Shane woke up before him, and Ilya opened his eyes to find Shane studying his face with an expression Ilya didn’t dare ask about.

I don’t need another life, he types. I’m grateful for what we had in this one.

Send.

There. Three chapters of his life that needed closing, closed.

Ilya closes his eyes. The plane shudders, and it feels, for a moment, like it’s rocking Ilya to sleep. There’s a part of him — the tired, peaceful, finished part — that would be okay with drifting off and not waking up.

And then he looks down.

ShaneHollanderHockeyPlayer is typing…

The three dots bubble at the bottom of the screen. They pulse, once, twice, and then disappear.

Then they come back.

Ilya sits up.

In every other life, Shane had been playing a game, or had been asleep, or was flying himself, or out of service, and always, Ilya’s message would sit unread until it was too late. But not today. Today, Shane was at home. Awake. He’d gotten the message, and he was writing back, and Ilya —

Ilya doesn’t want to die.

The realization hits him like a punch to the gut. Not yet. Not now. If he dies in the next sixty seconds, he’ll never know what Shane said. He will never know if Shane typed I’m grateful too or what the fuck does that mean or come back or nothing at all. The not-knowing is unbearable in a way that dying has never been.

He grips his phone tight with one hand, the cross around his neck with the other. The metal is warm from his skin. His mother’s cross. Maybe the last thing she’d touched before she—

Please, he thinks. Please. I want to live. I want to live.

The plane drops.

If Ilya had come home an hour sooner that day, if he’d opened the door to his mother’s room, if she’d known he had words for her, if he’d had the chance to say: stay, please, I need you, don’t go — would she have stayed to hear them?

“It’s not that simple, Ilyushenka,” a voice says. A voice he hasn’t heard in many, many lifetimes.

It’s the last thing he hears before impact.

Chapter End Notes

y'all this chapter was my roman empire. also not me saying '1 update a week' and then being incapable of doing anything other than writing this story out of my subconscious!!

in other news, this edit ruined my life, and is VERY this universe coded, so here you go I hope you hate it (love it) like I do.

The Author's Thoughts on Trauma as a Vehicle for Character Growth

I guess we're gonna just keep doing these until I run out of things to say, but thank you all for reading and engaging with my many musings!!

I wanted to be careful with how Shane's outing is handled. That kind of outing is traumatic, and I'm so happy that Rachel Reid's universe doesn't resort to that for them. I... love pain and suffering, so I did not have these reservations. Besides, this is very much a story about worst-case-scenarios, and this was one that felt too rich not to explore.

I didn't want the chapter to use Shane's trauma as a vehicle for Ilya's growth, which is tricky to do given how much we live in Ilya's world in this fic. But I really tried not to have Shane be simply "a lesson" for Ilya to learn. He's a person navigating possibly the worst trauma of his life, and the fact that Ilya happens to be there doesn't make it about Ilya. Shane's grief, his anger, his embarrassment, his devastation about his family and friends finding out — those belong to Shane. Ilya's role is to be present for them, not to fix them.

That said — Ilya definitely does grow here! It's just sort of happening accidentally. He didn't come to learn something. He came because his body took him to the cottage before his brain could catch up. And the result is that he's kind of the most honest he's ever been — he can't light a fire, he opens the wrong drawers, he doesn't know what Shane likes in bed, but the not knowing is a source of joy and discovery and is where connection actually happens for them. The performance falls away because the man drove the 401 with the clothes on his back and nothing else, and simply has nothing left to perform with. Lots of folks have commented on the differences between "Better Person" Ilya and this Ilya (maybe affectionately called "Crash and Burn" Ilya?), and I think one of the main distinguishing factors is that it's ultimately about control - how you show up when you have it and when you don't, and how you surrender it and to whom. Being intentional with those choices is how we become better people, Ilya included :)

While I'm on the subject of characters who deserve more than being vehicles for Ilya's growth, I do feel the need to just name the reality of the dynamic with Svetlana, which is to say: I'm very aware that this story has a brown woman showing up primarily to take care of a white man, to call him on his shit, to drag him out of bed and make him eat breakfast, and to be the emotional anchor he doesn't deserve. That's a trope canon draws from, and it's not a great one, and the fact that I love Svetlana doesn't exempt me from playing into it. I tried to be thoughtful about it. Svetlana, in every version of Ilya's life, has her own life. She does dispense a lot of wisdom (because... girl. someone needs to), but there's a difference between dispensing wisdom for Ilya's benefit and being a woman who left her own country, built her own life, and has her own shit that informs her perspective. I hope I've landed on the right side of that line more often than not.

All of which is to say: in a story told entirely from Ilya's perspective, every character is filtered through what they mean to him. Svetlana, Shane, even Alexei — none of them are exceptions. That's a limitation of the POV, and the best I can do is make sure that every time these characters are on the page, they feel like people whose lives continue when Ilya isn't looking. I hope that comes through.

Until next time!

Songs from the Playlist

Madness by Muse: Is it just madness keeping us afloat ?

Cardiac Arrest by Bad Suns: Same old story since day one / But I’ve got no place to run

Lost It To Trying by Son Lux: Give in and get out / We rise in the dying

Chapter 6: but still, I choose it

Chapter Notes

and for the lady, perhaps a surrealist exploration of the afterlife?

“Ilya Rozanov?”

Ilya blinks at the sight of Shane, approaching him wearing his stupid green beanie and sporting his even stupider smile on his face; a boyish grin that reminds Ilya of the first time he laid eyes on him. He resents that it makes Ilya want to smile back. He’d missed him. How long has it been since he’s seen him?

Miss me already? Ilya thinks, because teasing Hollander for his softness is always preferable to confronting his own. Instead he says nothing. Why is he saying nothing?

“Shane Hollander,” Shane says by way of introduction. “I wanted to introduce myself.”

Ilya wants to laugh. Like Ilya doesn’t know who Shane Hollander is. He knew who Shane Hollander was back in Moscow — the young up-and-coming phenom that was destined to challenge Ilya for first place in the 2009 NHL draft. He knew who Shane Hollander was in Regina, Saskatchewan, facing off against him for the first time. He knew who Shane Hollander was at home games and away games. In hotel rooms and at poolsides and in the locker room. Under the dimmed lights of his bedroom, at the dinner table with his parents, playing cards on the porch of his cottage, on the trail running alongside him, through phone calls and video calls and on the ice — always, on the ice. Under the precious gold of sunlight and the hazy glow of a full moon and in the crushing black vacuum of the universe, he knew who Shane Hollander was.

He should be laughing. He feels the laugh, even, in his mind. But instead, he says nothing, and takes a drag from a cigarette he doesn’t even really want to be smoking.

“I’m not sure you’re supposed to smoke here,” Shane says.

I do a lot of things I’m not supposed to do, he thinks. I’m not supposed to want you, or need you, or love you. I’m not supposed to admit how impossible it feels to face this world without you. I’m not supposed to feel anything at all — I don’t even know how to name the feelings inside my body when they happen. If it’s not the heat of wanting you, and the numbness of nothing at all, what am I supposed to call it? What do I call it when you look at me like you want to devour me? What’s the name for the feeling I get when you drag your hand from my neck down to my chest, when you press your fingertips into the edges of where my heart's supposed to be, like you haven't fucking torn it out of me already?

Instead, he says: “Okay.”

He’s trapped inside his own mind, watching Shane watching him. He is both the man who loves Shane Hollander and the boy who can’t admit it yet. He’s disconnected from the rest of his body, feels himself scrambling to find the control over his mouth, his lips, his tongue — all he has is the smoke in his lungs and the way Shane’s freckles look with the cold flush of red beneath them.

“Anyways I should go,” Shane eventually says, and they exchange last words, they talk about seeing each other in the finals, and Ilya doesn’t move. He’s letting Shane walk away. Why the fuck is he letting Shane walk away?

Please, come back he thinks, no, pleads. Begs. Fog is creeping into the edges of his vision. He feels himself growing unsteady.

The fog overtakes him.

Please. 

Let me try again.

***

“Solnyshko.” The voice seeps through the pebbled shore of Ilya’s mind — water filling the spaces between stones, and then receding back to the ocean it came from. “Wake up, my little sun.”

Ilya blinks his eyes open to a sting of cold. Wind whips at his face, and he buries his nose into the soft scarf wrapped around his neck. His eyes blink, too much light all at once frying his retinas. The edges of his surroundings come into view — bare, skeletal trees and mounds of snow. He takes a step forward, and stumbles, finding ice beneath his feet.

“Careful, darling,” a voice calls out, echoing across the ice. He hears the scrape of blades across the uneven surface. “I taught you better than that — eyes forward!”

Ilya’s eyes flash out, spinning at centre ice on his skates (because indeed, he is wearing them) as a figure zips past — her red scarf and blonde hair leaving a trail behind her.

Her laugh echoes over the frozen pond. “Am I faster than you now? I don’t think so. Come, move! It’s not fun if you let me win.”

Ilya watches, motionless, as the woman skates a full circle around him before finally stopping, just out of arm’s reach. His eyes finally settles on her — the square shape of her face, the soft set of her eyes, the narrow bridge of her nose.

“Mama?” Ilya asks, breathless, like he's the one skating laps.

She nods, pleased with herself. “Who else would it be?” She looks around the rink. “Isn’t it just like you remember it?”

Remember…? Ilya’s mind latches on the word, and then quite suddenly, he is a little boy at a pond near his grandfather’s cabin, pushing off the edge of his blade with ferocity, chasing after his mother’s red scarf, fingers outstretched, and—

He blinks up at his mother’s face from the ground, now flat on the ice.

She makes an apologetic grimace. “Sorry! I forget I have to be careful — memory is strange, here. Come,” she says, reaching a hand down to pull her son up.

He grips her hand, dazed, and pulls himself up to sit upright. Irina crouches down in front of him, reaching out to brush some of the ice shavings from the shoulders of his jacket.

“Are you… real?” he asks slowly. “Am I really here?”

“What a thing to ask your mother after so many years,” she says impatiently. She stands back up on her skates, beckoning him up with both hands. “On your feet!” He swallows past the disorientation, shifting onto his knees and slowly coming to stand on unsteady skates. “Better,” she says, then goes back to the task of brushing snow from his jacket, coming behind him. She makes a tutting sound as she moves her gloved hand over the expanse of his back. “You should’ve worn your gloves.”

He looks down to his bare hands, red from the cold, slightly damp from the ice. “How could I have known to—”

“But at least you brought a good jacket.” She comes back to stand in front of him. “There. Try to not to fall again.”

Ilya makes a face, caught between confusion and astonishment, between laughter and tears. He wants to reach out, to touch her, but finds he can’t — won’t. He’s gripped by the possibility that his fingers will pass through her, watching her like one might watch a soap bubble — like even a stray breath would cause the moment to pop. “How is this possible?”

Irina shrugs. “I do not know, and do not care to.” She drops her voice to a stage whisper, leaning in conspiratorially. “Much of this place makes little sense.” She straightens suddenly, like she’s worried the sentiment will offend someone listening nearby. “So we skate! And we accept we are lost. And maybe we find our way back.” She pushes back, starting a lazy backwards glide, crossing both her arms behind her back.

“But… wait!” Ilya calls off, skating after her. “What is happening to me?”

“You tell me, synok.”

“I keep — I don’t know. Starting over! I die and wake up, and die and wake up, and—”

“—and what?” Irina calls out, now on the opposite side of the ice. “Would you rather die and not wake up?”

Ilya shreds the ice on hard stop, near the perimeter of the rink. He tracks her with his eyes. “Are you… are you doing this? Is this you, somehow?”

Irina laughs, continuing her path, a lazy serpentine from edge to edge. “When has anyone been able to make you do anything you don’t want to do?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, suddenly defensive and hating himself for it. He’d spent so many lifetimes thinking about what it would be like to meet his mother again, and yet here and now, with the impossible opportunity before him, he can only find petulance and anger. “Are you saying I’m doing this to myself?”

“I do not know,” she repeats again, eyes cast down as she focuses on the path of her blades.

Ilya makes a frustrated noise. “What do you know, then?” he calls out, impatiently. “What do you mean, we are lost? Stop… stop skating away from me!”

Irina stops mid motion, and looks at her son from the middle of the pond. “Ilya, tell me. Where do you want to be right now?”

Ilya opens his mouth to answer the question, then abruptly closes it. Where does he want to be?

Irina looks at him, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised. “We can only go where you want to go. If you do not know what you want…” she trails off, giving him a pointed look, right on the edge of pitying. “So do you understand, then, why we are lost?”

Ilya makes a pfft sound through his teeth. “I know what I want,” he says, saying the first thing to mind, knowing even as he says it that it’s to prove her wrong. “I want to go home.”

Irina sighs as the fog closes in. “My love. You need to be careful for what you wish for, here.”

The fog takes him where he asks to go.

He’s in a hallway of his Moscow childhood home. He’s fourteen years old. He can tell by the height of his eye line — the top of the doorframe leading to the living room is still above him. The light in the hallway is the pale yellow of late afternoon, the air tastes heavy as it hits the back of his throat — the staleness a home where no one opens the windows. There are no pictures on the walls, no marks to denote the passage of time — those had been painted over in the last year. There is some stately decor sprinkled about the room, Grigori’s medal  — For Distinction in the Protection of Public Order — his finest possession, hung over the mantle piece. Save for that one signifier that this was a home that belonged to someone who had something worth remembering — the apartment could’ve belonged to a stranger, for all that remained of the Rozanov family on its walls.

Grigori calls his name, and Ilya drags his heels into the room. The bruising on his back and sides from where the belt had landed with the full force of Grigori’s swing would be hard to differentiate from the bruises he’d earned in practice earlier that morning — good. They were all injuries earned on his way out.

“You decided to pay some respect to your father, did you?” Grigori says after Ilya emerges into the living room. He is sitting in his chair, in the centre of the living room, facing the television playing a Russian Superleague broadcast, the tinny sound of the commentator’s voice rattling through the speakers. Ilya can see the back of his head, his thinning hair, his fingers gripped around the armrest. “You come when I answer. Lazy, this son of mine.” He scoffs, then nods to the television. “Watch.”

Ilya watches one of the players — Andrei Markov from Dynamo Moscow make a hard shoulder check into the opposing player, jamming their stick in for a puck takeaway, and swings it around the perimeter of the board.

“You see, Markov comes back to play for Russia only because his precious National Hockey League won’t pay.” The NHL Lockout had been a source of massive frustration to Ilya and his teammates following the league — an entire season without the best hockey in the world being played, though he would never say as much to his father. “But at least he has the good sense to come home. The NHL is all flash. No substance.” He scoffs. “You are perfect for them then, I suppose.”

Ilya doesn’t say, that’s why I’m going. He doesn’t say, the NHL is the one place you can’t follow me. He focuses all his energy on keeping still, stands ramrod straight even though he’s not entirely certain his father can see him out of his periphery. He has learned his lesson of obedience once today already and doesn’t intend to learn it again. 

His father says nothing for the remainder of the game, and an hour later, as the game finally comes to a close, he clicks the television shut, stands, and doesn’t react to the sight of Ilya still standing there. He walks past him to his bedroom, and closes the door.

Ilya stands there, in the dark, waiting to be dismissed. He’s there another hour, until he hears the steady breathing of his father, fast asleep.

The scene fractures, cracks, and Ilya falls through—

—another room, the same apartment. The doorframe is slightly closer to the top of his head — his fifteen year old growth spurt. He’s holding a letter, signed and sealed from the Russian Ice Hockey Federation — the World Juniors selection camp. He’s clutching it in his hand — the seal popped open — as he walks into the kitchen.

Alexei is standing at the fridge. He’s bigger than Ilya now — broader in the shoulders, thicker in the arms. He’d stopped growing upward at seventeen and started growing outward, how men in their family did, settling into a heaviness that looked like their father’s and moved like their father’s and hit like their father’s.

“What is this you’re holding, little brother?” Alexei says, zeroing in on the letter.

Ilya freezes, instinctively holding the letter closer to him. “None of your business,” he says warily.

Alexei reaches for it, and Ilya takes a step back. Alexei’s eyes flash with a dangerous edge.

“Don’t do that,” Alexei says, his voice low.

“Do what?” Ilya manages, his heart thumping through his rib cage.

“That face,” Alexei says. “Don’t make that fucking face at me.” Ilya tries to see outside of himself — his face is his — the same square jaw and high cheekbones and the cupid’s bow of his lip that has earned him every name Alexei has deigned to call him.

“It’s my face,” Ilya says, defiant, knowing full well it's not his face Alexei sees. “What are you going to do about it?”

He watches, with satisfaction, Alexei clench a fist, like getting a rise out of his brother is the victory he wanted all along, albeit short lived. If Alexei hits him, it won’t be anywhere anyone can see, and that is its own reward. Scouts were coming to all of Ilya’s games these days. Gigori wouldn’t allow Alexei to compromise Ilya’s one shot at bringing some semblance of honour to their family.

Alexei takes three long strides, and full body shoves into Ilya has he storms past him and out of the kitchen.

Ilya is braced for long after Alexei leaves, holding his breath. He has to win. He has to win, and he has to leave, and he has to never, ever come back to this place, where his face is a wound that won't heal, where the ghost of his mother lives in his cheekbones and his laugh and his eyes. He clutches the letter, wrinkles the paper in his clenched fist, and counts down the days before he can finally leave home behind.

The fog lifts. He’s on the ice. Flat on his back.

“You fell again,” Irina says.

Ilya lifts his head off the ice to glance at his mother. She’s sitting on the bank of the pond on a mound of snow, skates still on, legs stretched out in front of her. She’s not moving to help him up, this time around, but keeps her grey eyes on him, watching him carefully with a look he can’t quite place — not quite pity, not quite sadness.

The cold of the ice is seeping through his clothes. He goes through the unsteady motions of pushing himself onto his feet, and slide to slump next to her, from ice to snow, trading one cold for another.

“Why did you show me that?” he asks, but there’s no weight behind the accusation — only a tinge of despair.

“I told you, Ilya, we only go where you want to go.” She shrugs her shoulders. “You wished for home, so home is where you went.” 

Ilya slumps a little further into the snow mound, suddenly exhausted. “I’ve had many homes,” he insists. “Boston was home. I had my team, and my city. People who respected me. Sveta was there.”

Irina hums in agreement, then presses her lips together, tilting her head in consideration. “But — you leave Boston. Yes?”

“So?”

“No so, I’m just asking — if Boston’s so good to you, why do you leave it?”

“Ottawa then,” Ilya says, trying again, instead of answering the question. “Ottawa was good. I had good neighbours. Good coach. The team was, well, good people. The hockey was… fine.” He makes a face. “I was building a life. And Shane’s parents, they treated me like—” he stops himself, suddenly self-conscious at comparing Shane’s parents to his own with his mother present.

“The Hollanders are very kind,” Irina says gently, laying a hand on Ilya’s knee. “You like Ottawa?”

“I could have liked it,” he insists. “I just… I needed another chance. I needed to not be so fucking sad all the time.” He sighs, slumping his chin to his chest. “I liked it when Shane was there."

“Ah,” Irina says delicately, pushing herself off the snow mound and landing on the ice with a clink. “So Shane makes Ottawa feel like home.”

“That’s not the point.” Ilya says, but he has the sneaking suspicion that it is.

“But instead of going there,” she says, ignoring his protest, continuing to wonder out loud, “you went to Moscow.”

“I was just— you’re here, and you’re being annoying,” he says, flustered. Irina gives a mock gasp at the accusation, her gloved hand on her chest, affronted. He ignores her antics. “And I wanted to go home. I wanted us to go home.”

Irina draws her feet wide on the ice, then brings her heels together, watching him, and saying nothing. She nods at him to continue.

“So I went home,” Ilya says. “And you…” The cold is seeping into his bones. “You weren’t there.”

She draws her lips in; makes an apologetic face. “I wasn’t,” she agrees.

“And every home since was just… the closest I could get to what it felt like when you were you there.”

Irina asks the question Ilya knows is coming. “Because without me there, it felt…?”

Ilya looks Irina straight in the eye. “Lonely.”

“Of course,” she says. “And the person you’ve always felt less lonely with—”

“Was Shane,” Ilya finishes. He meets her eyes for a moment longer, before forcing himself to turn away, looking out on the snow-covered trees far off in the horizon — the edge of the forest near his grandfather’s cabin.

Irina watches as tears from in the corners of Ilya’s eyes. He blinks, and feels them cling to his lashes. “Why won’t you hug me, synok?” Irina asks.

The petulance bubbles up in Ilya once again. He pushes himself to stand. “Because you won’t be there to hug tomorrow, mama,” he says tiredly, like he’s accepted his fate as truth. “I’ve had to learn to live without you.”

Irina nods in understanding. “I see.” She skates backwards a bit, giving him a wide berth. “You do not want to lose what you have.”

He nods. She, of all people, should understand.

“So of course, you don’t let yourself have it all! That will solve everything,” she says with a snap of her fingers, her voice brightening considerably.

It takes him a second to realize: “You’re making fun of me,” he says, deadpan.

She winks, nodding to the ice before them. “Shall we keep skating?”

Ilya looks around at the small rink. “It’s not that big of a pond.”

Irina blows a raspberry, already pushing off into a glide. “Nothing wrong with going somewhere you’ve already been,” she says in a sing-song voice. “As long as you bring a little fresh perspective!”

He sighs, pushing into a half-hearted glide himself, falling into pace behind her. He tries to match her movement, line his blade with the line of hers, catches glimpses of his reflection in the ice below.

“So,” Irina says, calling over her shoulder. “Are you going to tell me about him?”

Ilya bristles in the way only a son can when being interrogated about his love life by his mother. “No.”

“Ilya!” she says, drawing out all the syllables of his name. “You won’t tell your own mother about this boy who makes you feel like home?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he insists. “He’s just — he’s Hollander. He’s the second best hockey player in the world, and he’s—” he catches himself before the words leave his mouth, and deflates. “Boring,” he finally says, settling on the familiar word. 

“Boring,” Irina repeats, slowing down to skate alongside him. “You’ve lived dozens of lives for a boring man.”

“You don’t know him,” Ilya mutters.

“I know he makes you blush,” she says, and when Ilya shoots her a look, she raises both hands in surrender, wobbling slightly on her skates. “I’m just observing!”

“Observe quieter.”

Irina laughs — he loves that sound. Even now, in this liminal place, he can’t remember the last time he heard it, and wonders if that is even how it sounded before — did she always smile like that, seconds before the laugh came out? Did her voice always have that musical lilt to it? The back of her gloved hand finds the back of his bare one. Even the momentary contact is impossibly warm for this frozen place.

“You've loved this boy,” she prompts, gently. "For how long?"

Ilya looks down at the ice beneath his skates. The ice has gone clear — impossibly, perfectly clear — and beneath it, he can see a shape forming. A room. Fluorescent lights. And a sound from below — the steady whir of a stationary bike. 

“A long time,” he says.

The ice gives way, and he falls in.

He’s sitting, but still, he feels like he’s still falling, sitting across from Shane Hollander, slumped against the hotel gym mirrors in Los Angeles on draft day. Shane’s hair is damp on his forehead, sweat dripping down his neck into the collar of his shirt, and he’s smiling — even though he’s come second in the draft, even though Ilya is sitting across from him, teasing him for coming in second like he’s being paid to do it.

He’s falling into his want. To want and to not have, it wrings him out. In the moment between desire and pleasure, he is weightless, free. Then gravity takes over, and the weight of not touching him, not crowding into him, not pressing him against the glass, not saying I love you, it pulls him down, further, and further, and the scene dissolves—

— and Ilya is on the phone, pacing in his Boston apartment, talking his bewildered agent into selling CCM on a joint endorsement. “Trust me,” he says in Russian. “It’s better for the brand — the fans want to see us together.” He doesn’t say: I’ve been replaying the last time I saw him for the last six months and I’m losing my fucking mind. He says: “The rivalry sells. Get me in.” He glances at his reflection in the window overlooking the downtown skyline, and sees, in the glass, a light so bright he has to put his hand up to protect his eyes—

— and he’s on the ice. The lights overhead are flickering. The face-off shot. Ilya is laughing. Hollander’s laughing. The director calls cut, and neither of them hear it because laughter is all they hear and the space between has shrunk to nothing, and—

—and they’re in a hotel room, and Shane is frantic against him, rushes in with a door closing at his heel, and Ilya’s hands shoot out to Shane’s sides to steady him, all open mouth and tangled hands, and Ilya tries to slow them down, says “too much, too good,” and feels Shane’s whole body settle at the sound of his voice. And the trust in it, the way Shane goes pliant under his hands, like Ilya’s voice is the thing that finally quiets the noise in his head, undoes something in Ilya that he will spend years trying to put back together—

—Awards night. Shane across the room, beautiful in a suit that doesn’t fit him quite right, laughing politely at something someone is saying. Ilya watches from the bar, nursing a drink he doesn’t want, thinks: I would burn this whole building down for five minutes alone with you —

—Shane’s hand on the back of Ilya’s neck. A possessive, easy touch. Shane’s thumb tracing absent circles into Ilya’s skin—

—He’s methodical, precise in everything he does. Lacing his skates and taking long drives and chopping vegetables and organizing his medicine cabinet and fluffing his pillows and making the bed every morning and unmaking him every night

—Shane’s laugh. Shane’s focus. The crease between his brows when he’s reading. How he says Ilya’s name when he’s annoyed (two syllables, clipped). How he says Ilya’s name when they’re in bed (three syllables, drawn out). The sound he makes when Ilya's hand holds his jaw steady. The tilt of his head when he’s listening carefully —

And then—-

Shane is straddling his lap. Ilya has just said his name at the height of pleasure because it’s Shane who gives it to him: “Shane.” Shane’s mouth is open against Ilya’s forehead, breathing him in. And when he pulls back to look at Ilya, Ilya watches his face morph into fear — like Shane’s realized they’re standing on the edge of something they can’t come back from.

“I should go,” Shane says. And Ilya, sitting helplessly on the couch, watches him leave.

He’s falling again. Sinking. It’s dark, lightless, the rush of wind in his ears, the whistle of the ground coming closer and closer—

Shane is leaving. On too-early mornings to make it back to Montreal in time for practice. On late nights before the team realizes either of them have gone missing. The end of summers when they pack up the cottage and try not to drown in the ocean of silence for the long drive back to the city, another year of restraint and lies and secrets. “You wouldn’t choose me,” Shane says. And Ilya, who has chased this man across lifetimes, who has died with his name on his lips, who has rebuilt life after life again and again around Shane Hollander, feels the warmth in his chest collapse inward, like a star going dark —

He doesn’t even try to stand, this time.

Ilya lies there, staring up at the sky that isn’t a sky, on ice that isn’t ice, snow blending into horizon, whiteness, vast and indifferent, stretching out around him like a held breath.

Irina peers over him, her face upside-down from where he’s lying.

“What a sweet young man,” she says.

Ilya drags a hand down his face. “He’s the worst.”

Irina hums at that, crouching down next to him, balancing on her skates. Seeming to have accepted the inevitability of falling, she pushes him up to sitting without comment, returns to the easy task of brushing the ice and snow from his back.

“He’s never ready,” he says. “I give—gave him, everything. Every version of myself I could think of, and still couldn’t…” he swallows the lump in his throat, and turns away from her. “He wants — wanted me. I know he wanted me. But he wants hockey more, and his privacy more, and his parents’ approval more, and his routine more, his carefully, perfectly fucking controlled life, and then he would—” he makes a motion with his hand, a door swinging shut. “Leave.”

“And you would let him.”

Ilya scoffs. “Like I had a choice.”

Irina sighs with a shake of her head, before eventually lowering herself to sit cross legged on the ice next to him. “So he leaves, and you let him—” Ilya makes a noise that she ignores, “or you leave, and he lets you—” another noise, though not one of disagreement. “And then what?” she asks. “You try again?”

“Again and again and again,” Ilya says shifting his own legs under him to mirror his mother’s posture, though he finds himself strangely too embarrassed to look her in the eye. “I try being patient. I try being better. I try being perfect. I try not being there at all!” He laughs, the sound hollow. “He always leaves, or I always die — usually both.”

“So, you’ve decided…?”

“That it hurts too much,” Ilya says flatly. “To be with him. It hurts too much to want someone who can’t—” He stops. Starts again. “Who won’t—”

“Who won’t what, Ilya?”

“Choose me!” The words crack out of him, echoing across the frozen pond, startling them both. He’s breathing hard. “He won’t choose me. Over fucking hockey. Over his fucking comfort. And I can’t keep showing up to be the thing he doesn’t fucking pick.”

Irina frowns. At the language, perhaps, or the sentiment, or both, or neither. The wind moves across the ice, carrying snow in low, skittering lines between them.

“So,” she says. “No more trying.” It’s not a question.

“I’m tired of being left,” Ilya says, sullenly. “I’d rather stay dead.”

“Ilya,” Irina says gently, reaching out to touch him.

“No!” Ilya snaps. His breath comes out in sharp white clouds. “You of— of all people—” He knows there are tears spilling over now. They come on suddenly, accompanied by a sharp pang in the back of his throat. “You left me.”

Irina doesn’t flinch. She holds his gaze.

“You left me,” he says again, and the anger that has been rising through his chest starts spilling out. “I came home, and you were—” his voice fractures, he feels the ice beneath him shift, feels the memory trying to pull him under again—

—he keeps his eyes shut tight. He knows where he is. He knows what he’d see if his eyes opened, he sees it well enough with his eyes closed, his mother, lifeless, his hand at her shoulders, shaking her, begging her to wake up—

He waits a full breath, until he is absolutely certain the fog of the memory has passed, before opening his eyes. He is here, on the ice, sitting next to his mother, the man who has lived a hundred lifetimes, but still, he is the boy who found her. “You broke me, mama,” he says. “I had nothing without you. I am nothing without you.”

Irina closes her eyes. When she opens them, they’re bright, and she blinks twice, quickly. Ilya recognizes himself in her efforts to keep herself together.

“Ilya,” she says. “I need you to hear me.”

The wind has stopped. The pond is perfectly still. He waits.

“I was in unbearable pain,” she says. “For a very long time. It was a pain I didn’t have words for, and wouldn’t have known where to bring them if I did.” She reaches out gently to cup his cheek. “I love you — I loved you and your brother with everything I had. But that pain—” her breath hitches. “That pain was louder than my love.”

“But, you could’ve,” he hiccups over his tears. “You could’ve asked for help.” He hates how young he sounds.

“Yes,” Irina agrees. “I should have. I didn’t know how.” She brushes a single tear aside with her gloved thumb, lets the other ones spill over her hand. “I died because I was sick— it was a pain I didn’t know how to cure. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“I could’ve—”

“No.” Her voice is firm now, and for the first time, he is undeniably certain that it’s his mother speaking to him: a voice that leaves no room for negotiation. “You were twelve. You were a child. You could not have saved me, Ilya.” She pulls her hand back. “I wish my pain hadn’t become yours. That is the one thing I would undo, if I could. Some things —  my death. It is a fixed point. Unchangeable. But how you've carried it, how you’ve turned it into a reason to deny yourself everything good—” her voice catches. “I would take that away in a heartbeat, if I could.”

Ilya is crying now. Not the restrained, angry tears from before, but full, chest-heaving, breathless crying; he cries from deep in his chest, from below his ribs, from the place where he’s been storing a boy’s grief for decades.

Irina waits. She finds his hand, and holds it in hers, and waits, the way everyone who has ever loved Ilya has learned to wait.

He takes a deep inhale, and lets out a shuddering exhale. “I’m scared,” he admits in the quiet of this frozen place. Ilya takes another deep breath, wiping the tears from his face with his fingers before the track stains can freeze on his cheeks.

Irina gets up, reaching down for her son, and pulls him to his feet. “You know what they say,” she says, dropping his hand once she’s certain he’s steady. “If you’re scared of wolves…”

Ilya lets out a huff of a breath. “Don’t go into the forest, I know. Papa said it all the time.”

“But do you know what it means?” Irina asks, starting her slow glide across the pond.

“That I’m a coward, I expect,” Ilya retorts. “Papa made that clear often enough.”

She tuts, shaking her head. “No, my love. Fear is not cowardice. It does not mean: never have fear. It does not mean, don’t go into the forest. It means…” she lets the uneven slant of the ice carry her to the perimeter of the rink, trying to find the words. “It means—- there will always be wolves in the forest. But the forest is always worth entering.”

Ilya hesitates, uncertain. “But, I thought…”

Irina gives a soft smile. “Your whole life is the forest, solynshko. All the joy, and pain, and hope, and despair, and love, my sweet boy. So much love. Will you let the wolves turn you away?”

The ice beneath him cracks. He watches the fissure form at the edge of his blade, a hairline fracture that darts through the ice like a mad, elaborate spiderweb. His eyes flash up, and meet his mother’s, who smiles.

Down at his feet, water starts to pool at his skates. A trickle, bleeding from gaps in the ice, then a stream, and then quite suddenly, without warning, he’s caught in a tidal wave.

The memories come fast as he spins in the current.

His mother, catching him in her arms, spinning him around the small space of their living room, windows thrown wide open. He’s giggling, and she’s laughing, and her laughter — it’s sounds just like he remembers it did — he can’t believe he’d almost forgotten—

—Svetlana, dragging him by the sleeve through a Moscow club, shouting over the music that he needed to dance with her right now because, “It’s our song Ilya!” And Ilya, unable to resist her, yells back, “We don’t have a fucking song!” but he dances with her anyway — he still doesn’t know what the song was called—

—Marleau, screaming in his face after Ilya’s first hat trick, beer pouring over both of them. St-Simon’s wedding, where Ilya stole the bouquet from Cadyn’s girlfriend and Carmichael laughed so hard he fell out of his chair. The Bears winning the Cup — the weight of it in his arms when he carries it overhead, the ice and confetti and deafening roar of a city that had claimed him as its own—

—Wiebe, unnervingly positive, always with a kind word and a clap on the shoulder, even when Ottawa was deep into a losing streak. Boodram, showing Ilya the ultrasound photo of his kid, unable to stop himself from looking at it again himself like he’s seeing it for the first time. Hayes, sprawled across a locker room bench before a game, insisting that Ilya was “basically Colossus,” and Luca instantly agreeing, though neither he nor Ilya nor anyone in the locker room other than an affronted Wyatt Hayes had any idea who Colossus was—

—David, always with a gentle hand Ilya has never flinched from. Yuna, letting herself in to Ilya’s home when Ilya was too sick to come watch the playoffs. He wakes up to the sight of her arranging his medications on the nightstand in the order of when he should take them, a glass of water set next to a bottle of Pedialyte—

And Shane.

Shane on the ice, breathless and grinning. Shane at the cottage, barefoot and open. Shane, wearing the magician's cape and top hat Pike's children had donned on him. Shane in the morning, in the dark, under the stars and planets and wind and rain and out under the light of an open plain and deep within the dark of a forest that has no name—

The ice is gone. The pond is gone.

Ilya is standing at the edge of a forest.

The trees are tall. Their branches hang bare, snow dusting their limbs. The path ahead is narrow and unlit, disappearing into shadow. Somewhere deeper, he can hear the rustle of wind moving through the canopy, or maybe it’s not wind. Maybe it’s something else; maybe he’s hearing tread of something moving — it’s a familiar sound. Whatever’s in there, he suspects, has always been there.

He can see Irina standing beside him out of the corner of his eye. She’s dressed for the journey — boots, a warmer jacket, the same red scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. She looks smaller, here, at the edge of the trees, than she did on the ice. Less like the figure he’d been arguing with, larger than death. More human. More like the woman he remembers.

Ilya looks down at his hands — notes the gloves he’s now wearing.

“No one can make you do anything you don’t want to do,” she reminds him again. “You can turn around, if you want. You can close your eyes, and let it be finished.” She tilts her head at him. “Are you done, synok?”

He looks at the forest. The path is still dark. The wolves, he imagines, are still there. But the trees are beautiful, even stripped bare, skeletal and exposed as they are. 

“I'm afraid,” Ilya says, instead. An answer to a different question.

Irina nods. “I know."

He takes a breath, holds it for a second, and lets it out in a slow wisp, watching the fog of his breath disappear above him. Ilya turns, finally, to look at his mother, the way he's been avoiding doing since he arrived to this place. He traces his hand around her face. Takes in the shape of her eyes. His eyes, he thinks. Everyone always said so.

“Will you come with me?” he asks, pulling his hand away. 

Irina presses a palm flat against his chest, over the cross that still hangs there. 

“I am always with you.” 

Ilya nods, and turns to the forest. He can’t see Irina out of his periphery. But he feels her. She’s there as he takes a step. Then another. The snow crunches beneath his boots. The branches close overhead. The path is narrow, and dark, and his.

***

It’s 5:24 AM in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Ilya Rozanov opens his eyes. 

Chapter End Notes

we tried some weird shit here! we believe in the power of metaphor! sometimes a memory is a trapdoor and sometimes it's ice breaking and sometimes it's a tidal wave and sometimes it's the thing you need to fall in to find your way out.

thank you all for reading and for your willingness to follow me into whatever this was! I feel very very seen by your comments! They are so encouraging - y'all are nice! Please throw all your feelings at me, whatever they may be.

next up, we're back in the land of the living! see you very soon.

Songs from the Playlist

Meet you at the Graveyard by Cleffy: You were undecided / between life and past tense

Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Mama, what have you done? / I trace your steps / In the darkness of one

The Scythe by Last Dinner Party: Don’t cry, we’re bound together / each life runs its course / I’ll see you in the next one

In the Woods Somewhere by Hozier: What caused the wound? / How large the teeth? / I saw new eyes were watching me

Chapter 7: in spite of knowing

Chapter Notes

heads up: this is a long one! like, get a snack. carb up. eat four plates of pasta. we write at dawn and we read also at dawn.

A therapy scene included herein, and therefore I am including a PSA that I always appreciate as a reader: one singular session of therapy will not heal this man! that said, the therapy required to do the very real work of addressing and healing from one's trauma could be a 100K saga of its own, so instead, we have one session that I've tried to depict as responsibly as I can within the confines of this fiction.

see y'all in the end notes!

5:24 AM.

Ilya Rozanov opens his eyes.

For a long time afterwards, he doesn’t move. He feels the lumpy weight of the mattress beneath him, twitches at the itch on his cheek from the Nike logo from his sweater that had been balled up into a makeshift pillow from the night before, hears the faint hum of the hotel’s heater under the window. Vasiliev is snoring. The alarm clock’s red digits glow in the dark. Everything is exactly where it’s always been.

5:25 AM.

He lifts his hand in front of his face, examining his palm under the faint light of the moon through the threadbare curtains, then turns over his hand and flexes his fingers. He’s seventeen years old. No bruised knuckles, no scars from fights he hasn’t had yet. He has the cross around his neck and his breath in the dark.

5:26 AM.

He tries hard to hold onto the memory of the rink — already fading to that ephemeral space where dreams go the moment you wake. Tries to remember the sound of her voice, the smell of the ice, the lines around the corners of her mouth. The harder he tries to hold it, the more the details slip away.

5:27 AM.

There’s nowhere to be for hours. For the first time in a long while, he doesn’t feel the urgency to move or to plan or to calculate his next steps. Vasiliev shifts in the bed next to his, muttering something in his sleep as he rolls over. Ilya watches the slow rise and fall of his teammate’s back, and feels, absurdly, a rush of tenderness for this otherwise unremarkable boy who has slept three feet away from him at the beginning of every life Ilya has ever lived.

5:28 AM.

The dream is clenched in his fist, so he focuses on loosening his grip on it, slowly, one finger at a time. Whatever Irina gave him, it’s in his bones now.

What he needs to do now is focus on what’s real. The crick in his neck from his poor sleep posture. The faint vibration of a car passing at street level outside. What’s real is that he has a double practice in a few hours and a World Juniors team to lead to a championship.

So, Ilya turns his face into his Nike hoodie and goes back to sleep.

Hours later, in the lobby, the team gathers for the paltry continental breakfast before the morning skate — eggs, toast, fruit, coffee that tastes like it was brewed last week. Ilya skips the eggs but takes a piece of toast and slathers it with butter, holding it between his teeth as he fills his coffee and sits at a table near the window, watching the grey Saskatchewan sunrise creep across the parking lot. He can still see the white crescent moon high in the prairie sky.

“You good?” Daniil Gorbunov, a second line winger, drops into the chair across from him, halfway through a banana. “You look weird.”

“Just thinking,” Ilya says with a shrug, then grins. “It’s this thing you do when you concentrate really hard on using your brain — I know it must be strange for you to see it in action.”

“Oh fuck off—”

“And your brain, it’s like this thing rattling around in your skull — yours is smaller than most, so you might not have noticed it was there.”

“Okay, you don’t look weird, Christ, forget I said anything.” Daniil said, finishing his banana and tossing the peel on the table. “Ready for the tournament?”

“We shall see,” Ilya says, taking a sip of his terrible coffee. “One day at a time.

Of course, Russia, predictably, does win the World Juniors. In the line-up, Ilya shakes Shane Hollander’s hand. Says: “See you at the draft.” And counts down the days.

In Moscow, he tries and fails to find his mother’s memory, and barely finds his father’s.

Grigori would be astounded to learn, he suspects, how often Ilya tried to be a good son. He tries again in this life: trains harder, comes home earlier, keeps his hair shorter, stops himself from snapping when his father corrects his posture at dinner, nods when Grigori tells him the NHL will chew him up and spit him out. He cannot seem to find the formula — somehow both too lazy and too restless, too soft-spoken and too loud, not aggressive enough on the ice and too aggressive off it. His father’s approval is a locked door, and Ilya keeps arriving with his hands full of all the wrong keys.

He tries to remember what love is supposed to look like from this man, scouring his memory for evidence that it was ever there, and what he finds is this:

Ilya remembers them dancing, once.

It was New Year’s Eve, probably, or some other festivity worth celebrating, though he was small enough that the memory sits at knee height, the hem of his mother’s dress brushing against him as she moved. Someone had put on a record — an uncle perhaps, or one of his cousins — an orchestral tune that Ilya can’t name. His father — caught up in the frivolity of the holiday and the faint buzz of champagne, perhaps — had taken his mother’s hand and pulled her close.

Grigori had never been a gentle man. His hands were made for gripping, correcting, striking. But in this single, stubborn memory that had survived countless loops and endless hurt at the hands of his father, Grigori’s hands rest on the small of Irina’s back, gentle as ever. She leans into him. Her eyes are closed. Her forehead is pressed into the curve of his neck, and Grigori bends his head towards hers, and they sway.

Ilya had asked his mother about it once, he recalls, years later. Not about the dancing, specifically, but about the two of them; how could she love a man who was so hard on her? How could she lean into hands that she knew could hurt?

“Love and hurt go hand-in-hand,” she’d said. “It is human, for the people who love us to sometimes hurt us.”

So Ilya tries. He takes his mother’s words holds them up against his father like a light, searching for the human beneath the hardness. Grigori is cruel, but perhaps cruelty is what fear looks like in a man who lost the one person he ever loved. Grigori is dismissive, but perhaps dismissal is how he protects himself from hoping that his sons will stay. Grigori calls Polina by Irina’s name, and maybe that’s not just his mind erasing his second wife, but also the only way he knows how to say he misses the first one.

He carries this with him to Los Angeles, where Grigori sits stiffly in the audience as Ilya’s name is called first. Back on the way to the hotel, after wining and dining with Boston’s executives, he says: “You didn’t embarrass us.” From his father, it’s practically a standing ovation.

Ilya is openly flirting with Shane Hollander in the hotel gym on draft night, with far less subtlety than he has usually required of himself. But he can’t seem to find it in him to care. The impatience he feels at seeing him alone on the stationary bike harkens back to eagerness he’d first felt meeting him, however-many-loops-ago, like all the time he spent since the World Juniors was just time between the last and next moment he’d get to see Shane again.

“You know Boston?” Ilya asks, slumped against the hotel mirrors, legs outstretched in front of him. If he just extended his toes out a little further, he would bump up against the sole of Shane’s shoe. He resists the urge. “Is a good city?”

“I’ve never been,” Shane says, still catching his breath. “But I hear people like it there.”

“Ah, too bad,” Ilya says, squirting water in his mouth from his water bottle. “Thought you could show me the city, when Montreal comes to lose against us.”

“Fat chance,” Shane says automatically. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure the team has people for that sort of thing — showing rookies around and stuff.” he adds.

“Wouldn’t be the same,” Ilya says, settling eagerly into the banter like an old shirt, made soft by overuse. “Who would show me all places I am not allowed to smoke better than you?”

Shane rolls his eyes. “You wouldn’t want me being your tour guide. I doubt we have a lot of overlapping interests.”

“Yes, my interests get me picked first in the draft, and yours get you picked second.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Shane mutters, scratching the back of his neck where the sweat has pooled uncomfortably.

“Clearly I am more interested in backhand than you are. Yours is — how they say this? Very weak.”

“Okay first of all, you fucking know how to say ‘very weak,’ and second of all, I do not have a weak backhand,” Shane retorts hotly.

Ilya chortles. He loves this game. “We are not so different, is what I'm saying.”

“I meant,” Shane says through his teeth, “interests aside from hockey.”

“What, you do not go out? Drink? Meet people?”

“I only just turned eighteen last month.”

“Ah, yes,” Ilya says, sarcastically. “Me too — would never drink under age. This is, um, no responsible.”

“Irresponsible,” Shane corrects automatically. “And it’s not just that. I’m too busy with hockey to go out.”

“Of course,” Ilya says.

“And I have a girlfriend.”

“Is okay to be boring, Hollander,” Ilya says, fully ignoring the flare of annoyance he feels at the mention of Shane’s supposed girlfriend. “So you have no life. Is okay. You get more exciting life, maybe they pick you first in the draft next year.”

“You’re seriously such an asshole,” Shane says again, and Ilya believes him both more and less each time he says it. “Just… find someone else to show you where to pick up women in Boston or whatever, is all I’m saying.”

“Or men.”

Shane freezes. His eyes snap up to Ilya’s. “What did you just say?”

What had he just said?

He’d just said it, like it was instinct, like the thought of not saying was never an option to begin with. “I like both,” Ilya says slowly, finding his way through the words. “Boys, girls.” His heart starts hammering, and his eyes flicker to the door to the gym, suddenly remembering that his father is somewhere in this hotel, along with every team’s executive and the entire 2009 rookie class. Still, he can’t imagine lying to Shane about this right now — not even by omission. “Is this problem for you?”

“No,” Shane says quickly. “Not for me.” Ilya tracks his eyes, also looking around the room, like he’s forgotten they’re the only two here. “Is that… I mean. Are you… what about the league?” Shane says, finally settling on a question that Ilya isn’t even certain is the question he intended to ask.

“Is not their business.” Ilya shrugs, squirts a little more water into his mouth. “Is secret. I am not stupid. Hockey I know is no good for people like that.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, the frown deepening for a moment. He shakes it off after a moment, before Ilya can give in to the urge to reach out and smooth the wrinkles of his face himself. “I won’t say anything,” he says. 

I know, Ilya thinks hopelessly, fondly. He thinks he knew, even the first time, that Shane Hollander, with his simple kindness and his earnest eyes, was someone worth trusting. “Thank you,” he says instead, watching Shane’s chest rise and fall. He extends out his water bottle as an offering.

Shane hesitates for a moment, before shuffling forward, extending his hand out, and grabbing it. Ilya watches the bob of Shane’s throat, gesturing for him to take another sip. A drop of water splatters on the corner of Shane’s mouth, and Ilya imagines himself drinking it off of him.

Shane eventually hands the bottle back. “Thanks,” he says, and Ilya ignores the feeling of the brief brush of their fingers. “And I promise — I really won’t say anything. Your secret is… safe with me, I mean.”

“I believe you,” Ilya says. “Maybe as thank you, I show you Boston myself?”

“What would I want to see in Boston?” Shane asks, bracing himself for the joke Ilya suspects he knows is coming.

Ilya winks. “Will show you best place to get drunk when you lose.”

Shane does not dignify the chirp with a response other than to shake his head. With a heavy sigh, he forces himself to get up to his feet, and offering a hand. Ilya looks up at the hand for a moment, then takes it, giving Shane all his weight as he's pulled to his feet.

“Guess I’ll see you at the World Juniors?” Shane says, heading to the door.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “Try not to make it so easy for us, next time.”

“We’re gonna win,” Shane says, and though Ilya knows it’s impossible, it’s said with such confidence it’s like Shane also knows what’s coming next.

“We will see,” Ilya says, and Shane gives him a curious look, before slipping out of the gym.

Of course, Canada, does win the World Juniors six months later. In the line-up, Shane shakes Ilya’s hand. Says: “Told you so,” with a proud grin, just an edge more arrogant than Ilya’s ever known Shane to be at this age. Maybe neither of them is quite what the other expects them to be, this time around. Ilya waits until they’ve passed each other in the line up to allow himself a small knowing smile.

He’s giddy at the CCM shoot— had been giddy on the whole flight from Boston, in fact. He’d spent the entire flight fidgeting with the in-flight magazine, tearing small pieces off the corners of the pages until the flight attendant had asked him, politely, to stop destroying airline property.

He can’t help but be excited. Something has shifted between them since the draft, and Ilya can’t help but wonder at what else would be different this time around, with this tentative bridge that had been built between them, simultaneously more unsteady and more robust than any previous connection between them had ever been.

The shoot goes well — Shane’s the one to crack first, this time around, when Ilya stops for the face-off shot with a snow plow stop just to be a shit, and Shane snorts at how stupid it looks, and the dam of laughter breaks between them like it always has. They shower, and Ilya catches Shane’s not-so-subtle glances in his direction, the rivulets of water streaming down the plane of his chest and legs, but Ilya mostly shows restraint, other than the wink he throws in Shane's direction that causes Shane to quickly turn his back.

He’s thinking about what to say as he enters the locker room, towel around his waist, when he sees Shane stand immediately as he enters.

“Hey,” Shane says. He’s already dressed, loose track pants and a light long sleeve. It’s rumpled in places, and the dampness from the shower soaks through the shirt along his torso, like he’s hurriedly put it on before Ilya could walk in.

Ilya blinks at the sudden greeting, looking over his shoulder behind him, then back at Shane. “Is the President coming?”

Shane’s brow furrows, “Prime Minister, Canada doesn’t—” he shakes his head, clearly disoriented. “What?”

“You stand at attention, I think celebrity or royalty is entering room, but is just me.”

“You’re so… stupid,” Shane finishes, lamely. Ilya watches, curiously, as he crosses his arms, then uncrosses them, puts in his hands in the pockets of his track pants, then takes them out. “I wanted to say,” Shane says, like he’s rehearsed this in his head for the last twenty minutes and cannot be deterred from saying it: “I don’t have a girlfriend anymore.”

Ilya waits — certain there must be more, but isn’t. Shane just stands, his hands limp at his sides, waiting for Ilya to respond. “Must be… sad for you,” he says slowly, feeling him out.

“Not really,” Shane says, his cheeks flushing red.

“Ah,” Ilya says; and smiles with the smallest upturn of his mouth. “Should we discuss how not sad you are in your room later tonight?”

Shane lets out a short breath — halfway between a laugh and an exhale — like he can’t believe what Ilya’s saying, but also can’t pretend it isn’t exactly what he was hoping for. “You’re — you’re unbelievable.”

“Room number, Hollander.”

“Fourteen ten,” Shane says, too quickly for someone pretending to be nonchalant.

Ilya preens a little as he tracks Shane’s eyes following down the line of muscle of his abdominal muscles, cutting through his hips, before they snap back up to meet his eyes. “And if I come to fourteen ten tonight, around nine o’clock?”

Shane’s lips stay parted. “I might open,” he says.

He smiles before the words fully form in his mind. “I might knock.”

It’s clear Shane’s nervous when Ilya arrives. The bed is too tidy, the furniture slightly shifted. He takes a step back as Ilya enters the room. Ilya closes the door behind him, leans against it, and waits.

“I… don’t really know what we’re doing,” Shane says, keeping the space between them. Ilya can see his chest rising and falling, and wonders how much of that is driven by panic.

“We don’t have to do anything,” Ilya says, and he means it. He stays at the door — the distance between them is Shane’s to close. “Should we talk about your no-girlfriend?”

“Ex-girlfriend,” Shane corrects, then flickers his eyes at Ilya’s, seeming to realize a second too late that Ilya is joking. “And no.”

“Hmm… is big problem, then.” Ilya shrugs. “We have so little in common, according to you. Nothing else to talk about, I guess.”

Shane stares at him for a long moment, then crosses the room in three strides, grabs the front of Ilya’s jacket, and kisses him.

Ilya moans into Shane’s mouth. It’s undignified and helpless and inevitable. For all the hundreds of thousands of other times they’ve kissed, this is still the first one. Shane’s mouth is urgent and searching, his hands sliding underneath the collar of his jacket to slide it off of him, and Ilya pulls his hands away from where they’ve gripped onto Shane’s waist to let the jacket slide off. He spins Shane into the wall, brings a hand up to Shane’s jaw, coaxing Shane’s mouth open, and tries, gently, to slow the kiss down, letting his tongue trace along Shane’s lower lip until the feels the tension in Shane’s shoulders start to unspool.

“We have time,” Ilya murmurs against his mouth.

“We really don’t,” Shane says, and there’s a desperate edge to his voice, like Shane knows something Ilya doesn’t but should — that this is temporary, that the clock is ticking on whatever permission they are giving themselves right now.

Shane falls to his knees, pulling Ilya’s boxers and jeans down just enough to pull his cock out, and Ilya’s hand shoots out to the wall to immediately steady himself. “Fuck, Hollander,” he grits out, and it’s sloppy, and imperfect, and so Shane he has to quickly pull away before he shoots his load far too soon.

They make it to the bed. Ilya peels Shane’s shirt off of him, pressing his mouth to Shane’s collarbone, the dip of his sternum, the ridge of his hip. Shane is responsive, arching into each touch, his breath hitching when Ilya wraps a hand around him, and follows soon after with his mouth. The sound he makes as his head falls back into the bed — open, helpless, wanton — is the sound Ilya has been waiting lifetimes to hear for the first time and also again.

Afterward, they lie next to each other, close but not touching, staring up at the ceiling. Toronto’s skyline blinks through the gap in the curtains, artificial stars against the glass.

“Can I have your number?” Ilya asks.

The shift is immediate. He feels Shane stiffen beside him. It’s not a full-body flinch, or anything quite so dramatic, but the tension that had slowly bled from his muscles suddenly returns, like a door snapping shut.

“Why?” Shane asks.

“Because,” Ilya says, turning his head to the side, trying to catch Shane’s eye. “We could… you know. Do this again.”

Shane sits up. He’s not looking at Ilya. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Ilya props himself up on an elbow. “Why not?” he asks, hearing and hating the childishness of his voice.

“Because we’re not— this isn’t—” Shane exhales through his nose. “I’m not like you, Rozanov.”

Ten minutes ago, Shane had his mouth on Ilya’s dick. And now: I’m not like you.

“What do you mean,” Ilya asks, keeping his voice even, “not like me?”

“I’m just— we’re just. Blowing off steam. I’m not into— I don’t have a—” He starts and stops and Ilya imagines the hundreds of different ways each of those sentences could end. He watches Shane slide off the bed, reaching for his shirt, perfectly folded on the dresser, already retreating into the armour of his clothes. “This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Wow,” Ilya says, disbelief colouring his voice in a way that sounds ugly to his ears. The tenderness he’d felt, the ember he’d seen himself coaxing to a flame in his mind’s eye, goes out in a puff of smoke. “You are a really bad liar.”

“This can’t be anything,” Shane insists. “We’re… we’re rivals. Montreal, Boston. Nobody’s out in the league — no one can know we ever did this—”

“Is just a plan to fuck, Hollander,” Ilya says, as each excuse curdles in his stomach. He rolls off the bed. “No one is telling you to suck my dick on centre ice.”

“You said you’re— you like both. And I’m just saying it’s not like that, for me. This was just—”

“Look you lie to me is fine,” Ilya says, reaching for his own shirt now, and pulls it on. “But maybe you stop lying to yourself.”

The colour drains from Shane’s face, then rushes back. Ilya watches from the corner of his eye as his mouth opens, then closes. For a moment, he thinks he’s going to say something — but the moment passes.

Ilya could say something. He could soften the blow, could take it back, could tell Shane it’s fine, that he’s right, it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t need his number, he was just fucking with him, they’re just blowing off steam. He’s done it before, in other lives. He knows exactly how to make this comfortable again.

“I should go,” Ilya says instead. He walks over the entrance, picks his jacket off the floor, and closes the door behind him.

He makes it to the elevator before the sting of it catches up to him, prickling at the corners of his eyes. He presses the button, watching the numbers climb, and forces his face into picture perfect stillness until he’s inside the elevator and the doors slide closed.

Later that year, at the All-Star game, Ilya still gives Shane his room number, because he is as undignified and helpless and inevitable as ever, and Shane still knocks. Shane tries to apologize about how they’d last parted ways, and Ilya brushes it aside — gives them both the comfort and ease they crave. “Is like you said - this doesn’t mean anything. Just blowing off steam.” And after they kiss too quiet through too thin walls, wanting too much from each other to ever give it a real name, they exchange phone numbers with the names Jane and Lily instead.

Ilya is not the same boy he once was, in this lifetime. But neither, he is forced to accept, is Shane.

He stands on the rooftop balcony in Vegas, after Shane’s just won Rookie of the Year, and regards the Las Vegas strip below with a curious indifference. He’s smoking, because that’s his right as a young first-overall draft pick who came in second in the scoring race, who couldn’t break his team’s playoff drought, who’s pretty sure the last kind thing his father will ever say to him has already been said: You didn’t embarrass us.

His knowledge of what’s coming feels further away than ever, this lifetime. He wants too much and expects too little and can’t seem to bridge the widening gap between the two. He knows what it would take to be the kind of hockey player that wins MVP, just like he knows what it would take to be the kind of person Shane falls for without reservation, just like he knows what it take to not be exposed to the possibility of being abandoned by Shane at all. The price, he knows first-hand, is too high. And so he finds himself here now, paying an entirely different price instead, with no real knowledge of what he’s paying for.

Another drag from his cigarette. Maybe he'd played his hand too soon. He didn’t hold back with Shane like he was supposed to, revealing too much of himself too quickly. The first year of their hookups had always been a bit of a dance. And Ilya had never learned how to just lean in and sway.

The balcony door opens, like it’s supposed to. Ilya feels Shane’s eyes on him, hears, “I don’t know if it’s worth jumping over,” and closes his eyes, flicking the ash off his cigarette off the edge of the balcony, watching the flakes float in the breeze.

“Big night for you,” Ilya says after a long pause, glancing at Shane, hunched over the railing in his perfectly fitted tux. “Congratulations.”

“It could’ve gone to either one of us,” Shane says, trying to soften the edge of annoyance in his voice.

“It went to you,” Ilya says dismissively, between drags. He knows everything about his delivery, from the inflection of his voice to the nonchalance of his tone to the lack of eye contact are exactly the ingredients that will lead this conversation to its powder keg explosion, just like it has dozens of times before.

He tunes back in to Hollander mid-outburst.

“—I win one, stupid fucking thing you couldn’t even show your face down there—”

Ilya pinches the bridge of his nose as the words land. Resists the urge to snap, to wave Shane off, to shout Not everything is about you Hollander! into the void of the night. He exhales slowly, realizing that Shane is watching him curiously, waiting for an answer. He knows what Shane’s wanted in the past from him here — to be seen, to be celebrated, to be validated.

So why is Ilya so shocked to finally realize that he perhaps wants the same thing?

“I go home in three days,” Ilya says finally.

“Okay,” Shane says, disarmed. “Must be nice.”

Lean in, he thinks, and tries again. “It’s not,” he says. “Russia. Is hard.” He tries to find his way through the landmine of this conversation. “Is home. I miss home, sometimes. But…” He swallows. “My father. He is…”

He catches Shane in the corner of his eye, processing this truth. Shane, who has never known parents who didn’t love and support him. Shane, who craves, rather than resents, that feeling of home and the privacy and solitude it brings.

Ilya blows out a puff of air from his lips. “English. I do not have good words for this.”

“So you’re up here because… you don’t want to go home?” Shane tries.

“No,” Ilya says, shaking his head. “Is not that I don’t want to go home. Is that home is not… is not always good. For me.”

“So don’t go?” Shane tries again, and Ilya makes a frustrated sound. “What? If you don’t like going home—”

Ilya swears in Russian. “You don’t understand,” he says.

“So explain it to me!”

“I'm fucking trying!” Ilya snaps. “Fuck!” He’s near the end of the cigarette, and the bitter, metallic taste of it coats his tongue.

“If I need a break from my parents, I just, tell them,” Shane insists. “They give me space.”

“Not all parents are like yours, Hollander,” Ilya says tiredly. “I have… expectations. I have to take care of things.”

“What things?” Shane asks again, and Ilya hears it this time — the question is so genuine, the ignorance so heartbreaking, the silence between them as vast as the space between Shane’s reality and Ilya’s. He could reach out to Shane — touch him, kiss him, if he wanted to. He’s done it before. But he can’t imagine himself jumping the distance between them and landing safely on the other side.

Ilya shakes his head. “Nevermind. Was stupid, trying to explain.”

They fall quiet. The dance falters. And here is Ilya, in spite of knowing, hurtling towards uncertainty of it all.

“Okay… I’m gonna—” Shane starts, and then shakes his head in turn, before turning to leave. He stops at the base of the stairs leading up to the balcony, and extends out his hand for a final farewell. “See you next season.”

Ilya turns to look over his shoulder. Hollander had always loved his handshakes.

He pushes himself off the balcony railing, meets Hollander’s hand with his, and shakes it once, before letting go. And when their hands fall at their sides, they wait a breath, eyeing the canyon between them, neither of them daring to make the leap.

He leaves. The balcony door closes, Ilya slumps against the railing, and thinks: Shane always, always leaves.

His phone buzzes in his pocket while he’s in the line to board, direct from Boston to Moscow. He fishes it out of his pocket, and nearly drops it when he sees that it’s Jane.

You’re right. The message preview reads. He unlocks his phone with unsteady fingers, letting the boarding line peel away ahead of him while he stays, frozen in place, reading the messages as they come in.

You’re right.

I don’t understand. I can’t imagine home not being nice. I can’t imagine being so far away from the place I grew up. Having to translate everything I feel in a language I’m still learning. I don’t get it.

But I want to.

Ilya blinks through tears building at the base of his vision. Another buzz, as the next message comes in.

I don’t know what we are. I want you to be able to tell me stuff like this. I want to understand.

And then, another one.

Is this weird?

Is talking about stuff like this crazier than hooking up?

Yes, Ilya types back. But let’s try.

He leans, he sways. He hits send.

***

Through the years, Boston remains good to him, offering both its loudness and its loyalty in equal measure. He’s loved by Boston, so Ilya throws himself into hockey, and loves it right back. His numbers are great as they’ve ever been — not the record breaking lunacy they’d been in the lifetime he’d been at his supposed peak, but good enough for the front page of the Boston Globe on occasion, good enough for LeClaire to nod with a coach’s approval as he barrels to the bench after each shift.

He tries to be present — rallies the team after losses and celebrates their wins. He learns St-Simon is afraid of his fiancée’s cat, so prints of hundreds of photos of it — an orange Persian with a squishy face — and plasters it all over his locker. His first year as captain, he takes the rookies out to a high-speed car autocross, and though none of them are brave enough to get behind the wheel, they sit in the passenger seat with semi-professional drivers who all take a turn racing (and, in most cases, delightfully beating) Ilya instead. He and Cliff dominate the club scene — the sight of either one of them gets them waved to the front of most lines at the club, and it’s fun, it’s always fun, to drink and fuck and dance and disappear into the night.

“I love you, I love you,” he says to each player as they skate in to the tunnel after each game, win or lose. His special flavour of gregariousness earns him his stripes here, and while it never fills the all consuming pit ever present at the pit of his stomach, it changes the shape of it somehow — like it’s not a void he’s endlessly falling into, and instead just a space he’s learning to sit on the edge of.

Boston plays Chicago only a couple times a year, but in his third season, he finally drops gloves with Duncan Harvey — a fight that’s been building since the first period, when Harry’s elbow caught Ilya’s chin on a cross-check. Harvey wins, decisively, and Ilya skates to the penalty box with a split lip and a bruise blooming on his cheekbone.

When they’re near each other on the ice at the next stoppage, he catches Harvey’s eye. “You owe me a drink for this,” Ilya calls out, gesturing to his swollen lip. “My face is worth more than your salary.”

Harvey snorts. “Whatever Rozanov.”

“Two drinks now — second for boring comeback. Hey — I’m not joking you know!” he calls out as Harvey skates away to take his position for the face-off.

He wasn’t joking, in fact, and because Ilya isn’t the sort of person most people say no to, they do get drinks after the game — Ilya, Harvey, and a handful of the guys from both teams — at a bar near the hotel Chicago’s staying in. Harvey doesn’t say much, but laughs and nods and falls quiet at all the right times. They talk about hockey, mostly, the travel, the grind, the best arenas, the worst fans. Ilya promises that Boston will beat Colorado on their next road game for Chicago if Chicago will do its job and beat New York. And when they’ve had too much to drink, Marleau leads them to a late night fast food joint with terrible burgers but decent fries, inexplicably playing Nirvana on repeat. Ilya manages to convince the group, in their drunken state, to join a group chat he titles ‘Smells Like Team Spirit,’ a joke which never fails to make St-Simon laugh every time one of them sporadically drops a meme every few weeks.

And if, privately, Ilya stows away Harvey’s number for safe keeping, occasionally texts him random chirps or commentary on his highlights? Well, that’s his business.

Svetlana is a constant. She shows up at his apartment unannounced, often, as is her right. They have sex, sometimes, or go out to fancy restaurants, or watch Carmelita - her current favourite of the Russian soaps she’s downloaded onto her computer. They talk about hockey, and Russia, and occasionally, their families, though always with the careful wariness of walking through landmine infested grounds. They had always maintained unspoken agreement that fine was a place they both lived, and neither of them bothers to look too closely at the foundation.

Alexei calls him often now, though the calls are shorter, which he is mostly grateful for. Requests for money are more perfunctory — a number, a reason that’s barely a reason, a slur or two, and click. His father sometimes calls, confusing him with Alexei, and when Ilya carefully corrects him, says, “Papa, it’s Ilya,” Grigori blusters, snaps, “I know who you are, useless boy,” before he trails off, once again, berating Ilya for a game he’d lost months ago.

And through it all, Shane Hollander.

They meet when Boston and Montreal face each other, sometimes in Ilya’s rooftop penthouse, sometimes in hotel rooms, and then, eventually, in Shane’s condo — purchased exclusively for the purpose of keeping this thing between them secret and safe, though Hollander would of course never admit that. They chirp on the ice, awards and records passing between them like playing cards changing hands, and Ilya still claims to be the best hockey player in the world, though privately knows it won’t be long before Shane’s monastic, borderline-insane commitment outpaces his own raw talent. And between visits, they text — usually filthy, flirty messages largely inspired by Ilya’s creative grasp of the English language, but occasionally, it’s something else.

Lily: Your team keep tagging you in this post from Voyageurs: [link]

Jane: It’s a post for Asian Heritage Month.

Lily: Why your teammates are using this emoji 🥢

Jane: They’re chopsticks. I’m half Japanese. I guess they think they’re being funny.

Lily: Do you find it funny?

Jane: Not really.

Lily: Me neither.

Sometimes, Shane is the one reaching, asking about Ilya’s family or how things are going back home. Ilya tries to explain his father in fragments. He is sick. In the head. Dementia. He forgets things, and then forgets that he forgets.

Shane’s responses always come quickly. That sounds really hard. I’m sorry. Some nights, Ilya clings to those messages like a lifeline, his finger hovering over the call button, though he never presses it, and tries to be content with being seen by Shane in this small way instead.

Still, Shane seeks to comfort where he can, so when he’s at a loss for what else to say, he tries to lighten the subject — defaulting to hockey, typically, but lately he’s branched out asking Ilya questions about Cyrillic. He claims that he got a Russian cookbook and was trying a new recipe to fit into his diet.  

Jane: What is мУка? I’m supposed to add it little by little.

Ilya stares at the message for seconds before he starts laughing so hard he has to put the phone down.

Lily: You’re supposed to add suffering little by little? Very Russian.

Jane: Fuck. I meant мукА.

Lily: That’s flour.

Jane: That’s one letter different.

Lily: Same letters, different accent. Is tough language. Might be too hard for you.

Jane: I can figure it out.

Ilya smiles; Shane’s never been able to back down from a challenge. Sure enough, an hour later, he sends back a photo of the most badly misshapen syrniki Ilya’s ever seen. He saves the photo in a private album anyway.

Sometimes, he dreams about the pond.

It’s always the same pond, but the details shift. Sometimes he dreams about it under the bright light of a clear day. Sometimes, it’s under a dark, starless night. It’s usually empty — just the ice and the trees and the wind, and occasionally, there are figures skating in the distance — always staying just too far away to identify — just shapes and movement and the echo of the faint scrape of blades.

One night, he sees Svetlana.

She’s standing at the edge of the ice wearing a beautiful white coat, the tight curls of her hair falling in front of her face. She looks at him, her head tilted, like she’s trying to figure out what he’s doing there. The sight of her sends ice through his veins. The pond is for the afterlife, isn’t it? It’s where he found his mother — found himself, between death and life. And if Svetlana is here —

He wakes with a start at 3 AM, grabs his phone still gasping, and calls her.

She picks up on the second call, after four rings.

“Someone better be dying,” Svetlana says, her voice thick with sleep.

“Are you okay?” Ilya asks, already feeling the bone-deep relief at the sound of her voice.

“Am I— Ilya, it’s three in the fucking morning.”

“Just… tell me you’re okay.”

Her breath goes quiet. He hears the rustle of sheets on the other line. “I’m okay, you lunatic. What’s going on?”

He slumps back into his pillow. “Bad dream,” he says, closing his eyes, letting her irritation wash over him. “Go back to sleep.”

She swears and hangs up.

He still sees her at the pond in his dreams, on occasion. Not just her — Marleau, is there sometimes. Scott Hunter, inexplicably. Duncan Harvey. Sometimes his mother, though she never says anything — none of them do. They skate, never staying still long enough to tell Ilya why they’re here. He never sees Shane, and for reasons he can’t explain, it’s a relief he clings to.

Sex, at least, still brings him the peace of mind it always has. So he picks up women at nightclubs and hotel bars, because that’s what the world expects Ilya Rozanov to do. He’s good to them — generous, attentive, present in the way sex has always allowed him to be — and when they leave, he showers and checks his phone for a message from Jane.

It used to feel routine. Lately, it’s felt like a detour — a lie he’s trying to convince his mind of with his body. Some mornings, the shower doesn’t feel long enough to wash the lie off.

Russia loses to Latvia in Sochi in 2014, and Ilya, captain of the team that has just delivered the most humiliating loss in Russian hockey in recent memory — on home ice, no less — finds the emptiest section in the arena and watches figure skating.

He likes to watch the pairs skate, watching from the top of the bleachers as a Russian duo takes to the ice. The woman is angular and precise, her partner broad-shouldered and steady, and together they move across the ice in tandem. All sports on ice, he believes, require a certain level of trust, though that trust manifests in figure skating in a way hockey doesn’t ask for — it’s a willingness to be thrown and caught, a belief that the hands reaching for you will be there.

He’s sitting up in the nosebleeds, hoping to disappear long enough for the worst of his father’s fury to expend itself on someone else. Alexei, or Polina, maybe, or a Minister’s aide who has the misfortune of being nearest when Grigori needs somewhere to put his ancestral shame. He’s hidden in this arena before in previous loops, but has selectively chosen today a different time, a different spot, to ensure he could be well and truly alone.

“Hey.”

Ilya closes his eyes. Of course. Of course Shane Hollander finds him, again, in the most remote corner of the Olympic complex. The man has a fucking homing signal.

“Not a good time, Hollander,” he says without looking at him.

Shane hesitates, but doesn’t leave, taking up post against the nearby pillar. “Are you okay?”

“No.” A stupid fucking question, and Ilya has a good mind to tell him so before he catches himself and bites it back. The loss is sitting in his stomach like a stone, and his father’s voice is rattling in his skull — useless, weak, embarrassment, shameful —

The crowd below them applauds as one of the skaters on the ice lands a massive jump. Ilya sees, out of his periphery, the moment they’re suspended in the air.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Shane asks.

“Not here,” Ilya says, his jaw set. He can see Shane in the corner of his eye, wearing his stupid Team Canada fleece, too open and too concerned and so painfully earnest that Ilya wants to kiss him and scream at him in equal measure. “This is not a safe place for us to talk.”

He can feel Shane processing this, the frown, the quick recalculation. “Because of your dad?”

“Because of everything,” Ilya glances around — the section is entirely empty, but the paranoia of being in Russia, in public, makes every shadow feel like a threat. “If someone sees us talking—”

“We’re both NHL players,” Shane insists. “We’re just talking,” and the simplicity of it drives Ilya fucking insane—

“I will text you,” Ilya says. “Please, just, go.”

Shane looks at him for a long moment — searching for the lie, perhaps, and not finding one, because in that moment, there isn’t one to find. “Okay,” Shane says finally, pushing off the pillar. He hesitates, like he wants to reach out — a hand on the shoulder, maybe, a casual touch that would be barely acceptable anywhere but here, but he doesn’t. He disappears down the steps and through the concourse exit.

Ilya watches the rest of the pairs competition. The Russian duo places fourth. He doesn’t text Shane.

He means to — drafts messages in his head while standing at Grigori’s elbow at the Minister’s reception, where his father introduces him to deputy after deputy as, “my son, the Olympic failure.” He composes an apology in the shower, explanations staring at the ceiling above his bed, promises while walking through Moscow aimlessly — having nowhere to go and too many places to avoid.

But each time he opens the conversation with Jane, the cursor blinks at him expectantly, and he can’t find the words — not in English, not in Russian, not in any language he knows. So the silence stretches. Days become weeks become months. Shane’s messages arrive — hey, you okay? and just checking in and then nothing, and Ilya reads each one and doesn’t respond, hating himself for his cowardice.

He tells himself distance is necessary; Shane deserves better than half of him, and half is all he has right now; he’s parsed out pieces of himself to his father’s care and his national failures and Boston’s cup run. It’s the longest they’ve gone since they started this affair without speaking, and Ilya fills the months with hockey and the team and Svetlana and late-night drives down the highway with the windows down and the radio off, letting the cold air numb his face until he can’t feel it anymore.

He thinks about what it means to be afraid; occasionally he’ll hear if you’re scared of wolves drift into his mind — sometimes in his mother’s voice, sometimes in his father’s. Ilya has shown Shane fragments of himself across this lifetime — his bisexuality, his father’s illness, his loneliness — and Shane has been kind; Shane is always kind. But kindness and understanding are not the same thing, and Shane’s kindness keeps running up against the limits of his own experience. Shane has never been hit by his father. Shane has never been afraid to exist in his own country and also terrified to lose it. Shane has never felt the crushing weight of loneliness while being surrounded by people who claim to love you.

How do you explain a wound to someone who’s barely had a fucking scratch?

He doesn’t figure it out. The silence hardens, until Boston wins the Cup, and suddenly Ilya has a reason to be in the same room as Shane Hollander that doesn’t require explanation.

Awards night in Vegas. Ilya hasn’t spoken to Shane in nearly six months. They exchange terse words backstage, co-present the sportsmanship award because someone in the league office thought it’d be funny to have two rivals who supposedly despised each other make nice for the fans, and as they’re walking off the stage, Ilya slips a spare hotel key into Shane’s suit jacket pocket. “We’ll talk,” Ilya promises, just before the part ways, and adds, with a wink, “right after I win MVP.”

He wins. He revels in the thrill of it — winning the cup, being recognized as the best player in the NHL. He remembers, distantly, doing this before, but the vindication of it all has a particular novelty to it. And at the end of the day, it was this body — not any other one — that took those hits and scored those goals and held that cup in his hands.

He poses for a million photos and shakes a million more hands and finally extricates himself to the hotel’s penthouse. He throws the suit jacket on one of the nearby chairs, unbuttons the length of his shirt, fills a chilled glass with vodka, and waits.

When he hears the whirr of the door unlocking, Ilya freezes by the window, watching the knob turn, the door swing open, to reveal Shane, still mostly put together, save for the unbuttoned sleeves and the suit jacket in hand. The door clicks closed behind him.

“Congratulations,” Shane says — the delivery was is mostly flat, but Ilya catches the faintest tremor in his voice.

Ilya nods his thanks. “I owe you an apology.” Shane blinks at the unexpected turn, but Ilya presses on. “I didn’t text you. I should have—”

“I didn’t think we were talking about that,” Shane says hurriedly. “We don’t have to.”

Ilya takes a couple steps towards him, finding a table to set the glass down. “Is that what you want?”

Shane swallows, then nods.

Okay, Ilya thinks. He can give him this. “Fine.” He says, nodding at Shane. “Take off your clothes.”

Shane follows instructions beautifully. Ilya watches, heat in his eyes as he strips, folds his clothes carefully, sets them on the armrest of the bed. He straightens, standing in his boxers, his eyes darting to the window.

Ilya is nothing if not attentive. He drags a chair to the bedroom, beckons for Shane to follow. “Give me a show, Hollander,” he says, settling into the chair, and Shane does, because maybe Shane is trying to give Ilya something just as desperately. Ilya watches as Shane lies in the bed, runs his hands down the length of his body.

He crawls over to the edge of the bed when Ilya stands up to shrug his shirt off his shoulders, to mouth at Ilya’s cock through the fabric of his pants. Ilya pulls away, settles into the chair, and is overwhelmed to find Shane getting up to follow, straddling Ilya’s lap, his back to Ilya's chest. Ilya’s hands settle on Shane’s thighs, gripping hard enough to bruise. Shane rolls his hips, grinds his ass down into Ilya’s hardened cock, and they fuck there, in the chair, and then again, on the bed. Ilya presses a hand onto the middle of Shane’s back, face down in the mattress, and he drives into him from behind.

It takes everything in him to hold off until Shane comes, fucking himself back on Ilya’s dick. It’s so unbelievably hot, so unbearably impersonal, and exactly what both of them say they want, and when Ilya comes, he has to brace himself against the mattress, to avoid slumping his entire weight on Shane’s body collapsing beneath him.

Ilya uses the last of his energy to stand up, dispose of the condom, and find a damp cloth to wipe them both down. He takes the opportunity while he’s standing to retrieve and top-up his glass from the living room.

“I only have one glass, second one was too far away,” Ilya says, returning to the bedroom. “We’ll have to share.”

He stands at the entryway to the bedroom, regarding Shane for a moment. The red rim of his eyes. The eerie quality of his stillness. He hasn’t looked up at the sound of Ilya’s voice.

“Everything okay?” Ilya asks slowly.

“Why didn’t you kiss me?”

Ilya keeps his hand clenched on the glass of vodka. But it’s a near thing. “What?”

Shane’s turns to meet Ilya’s gaze directly. He’s still naked, legs tangled in the sheets. “I get that this means nothing to you, but it was a fucking dick move, just not answering me.”

Ilya frowns. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about that.”

Shane mirrors the frown in turn. “Well I changed my mind. It’s fucking bullshit. I haven’t heard from you in six months, and then you give me your room key and expect me to come running, and I guess I do because I’m a fucking idiot—”

“Hollander,” Ilya says, “slow down—”

“Do you even want to keep doing this? If you’re over me, or—”

“I tried to apologize! You said you didn’t want—”

“Forget what I said,” Shane snaps, and Ilya can see the quickening of his breath, his chest rising and falling, like he’s struggling to catch the air on an inhale — like it’s stuck in his throat on the exhale.  “Do you have any idea what it’s like, just waiting for you to say something for months — fucking anything, and then I come here and you won’t even kiss me—”

Ilya scoffs, makes a tutting sound as he sets the glass down with a slam on the nightstand, crowding into Shane’s space and kissing him.

Shane makes a noise of protest against his lips, so immediately Ilya pulls away, only for Shane to grab Ilya on both sides of his face and pull him back in. He feels Shane’s mouth open against his, and Ilya tugs on Shane’s top lip gently with his teeth, then he pulls away again, exhaling a breath into him.

Shane chases after Ilya’s lips with his own, but Ilya keeps the space between them, pressing a kiss to Shane’s forehead instead, then his temple, then his cheekbone, then the corner of his jaw. Shane’s hands fall to Ilya’s chest. Ilya trails his lips down to Shane’s neck until he feels Shane’s breath go steady and even.

“Listen to me, Hollander,” he says, pulling away carefully, cradling the back of Shane’s head. “I said nothing after Sochi because of me — not because of you.”

Shane scoffs. “It’s not me, it’s you, right?” He shakes his head. “Oldest line in the book, Rozanov.” He tries to look away, but Ilya tightens his grip on the hair at the back of Shane’s head, shifting his weight so he’s solidly hovering over him, settling his knee between Shane’s legs.

“I am serious,” he says. “Russia is… not good for me. I am with people everyday who… take everything from me.” His grip on Shane’s hair loosens, and he brings the back of his fingers to brush at the freckles splattered across Shane’s cheek, watches Shane’s eyes flutter at the contact. “When I have nothing left, I can’t be…” he gestures between them. “This. Whatever this is. I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

Shane is quiet for a moment. His hand slides up Ilya’s chest, fingers brushing over the chain of his necklace, before falling down at his side. “Because of your father?”

Ilya sighs. He shifts slightly, settling an elbow next to Shane’s head, carefully pressing down with the full weight of his body, trusting Shane to carry it beneath him. “Him, yes. My brother. Their friends. It takes all my… energy. No… I don’t know the word. The thing that makes me feel like a person.”

“Like, your spirit?” Shane offers quietly.

Ilya nods slowly; it's as good a word as any. He presses another soft kiss against Shane’s lips for good measure. “I am sorry.”

Shane inhales a shaky breath, then lets it out in a slow, steady stream. “You could have told me what was going on.”

Ilya hides his face in Shane’s neck, and kisses him there. Shane lets out a soft, almost imperceptible sigh. “Is not so easy to explain.”

Shane’s jaw works. Ilya can see him turning the words over, testing them against his own knowledge of hardship, and coming up short. “Okay,” he says.

The simplicity of it catches Ilya off guard. He’d been bracing for follow-up questions and well-meaning suggestions. He’s not sure he knows what to do with unconditional acceptance.

“Okay,” Ilya echoes. His lips slide back up to Shane’s, and kisses him softly, before slumping to Shane’s side.

Shane turns his head to Ilya. “I know this is supposed to be casual. I know we said it doesn’t mean anything. But… if you’re going to ghost me for six months and then invite me to your penthouse, the least you could do is kiss me.”

Ilya huffs out a small laugh. “The least I can do?”

“It’s just, basic manners.”

Ilya’s lip twitches. “Yes, of course.”

“Common courtesy,” Shane says, completely serious.

“Was me making you come twice common courtesy? Once in a chair, by the way.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t kiss me in the chair either!”

Ilya laughs. He presses his face into Shane’s neck and lets it run through him, and feels Shane’s chest shake with his own laughter underneath.

“I will kiss you first, next time,” Ilya says after he’s settled, pressing his lips to Shane’s collarbone, tasting the salt and musk of dried sweat.

“You better,” Shane says, turning into him. He tucks his head under Ilya’s chin, wraps an arm around him, and Ilya slides an arm underneath his body to pull him closer. It should be awkward — it's not what either of these bodies have done before this lifetime, but they figure it out. Their legs tangle and untangle and retangle until they click, and they’re still.

Ilya listens to Shane’s breathing, certain that the sound of his heart pumping must be vibrating through his whole chest, but Shane rests easily, seemingly unbothered.

“This is new,” Shane says into Ilya’s skin.

“Yes.”

“Is it weird?”

Ilya considers the question. It is weird, this glimpse into what their relationship could be, if they permitted themselves to hold on to each other.  “Little bit.”

“But it’s okay?”

He pulls Shane in tighter and presses a kiss to the top of his head. “It’s okay.”

Shane will get up and shower soon. He’ll go back to his own hotel room. And Ilya will fall asleep, alone. But for now, Ilya feels Shane’s grip around his torso, and holds on.

There is such a thing as holding on too tightly. Ilya, of all people, should know better.

They have sex — frequently, enthusiastically, in ways that are getting harder and harder to categorize as “blowing off steam.” Shane still folds his clothes before they fuck, unless Ilya can convince him to occasionally skip that step — completely endearing himself to Ilya either way. 

They orbit each other in games, at All-Star matches, on the opposite sides of a face-off, and Ilya feels the wolfish grin take over each time he catches Shane’s eye. Hotel rooms and game-day texts and one vicious 7-game post-season match-up during which they resolutely do not meet up and do not fuck much to Ilya’s disappointment, though it pays off for Shane in the end, Ilya thinks, watching him hoist the cup over his head on his television, and then again, the following year.

Sometimes, they text — about things that matter, like Shane’s feelings of not having control over the toxic bullshit spewed in his locker room, or Ilya’s mounting impatience and intermingled guilt towards his brother — and things that don’t, like Shane’s very earnest and somewhat distressed line of questioning about what counts as a sandwich, and Ilya’s photo of an disgruntled, beady-eyed pigeon, sent to Shane with the caption: this is you when you lose a face-off.

And yet. He calls Shane “Hollander,” like the distance of a surname will maintain the fence he’s built around him. He reaches for Shane in the dark, in the aftermath of sex, then pulls his hand away, yearning for that same moment they had at awards night where Ilya had held him, but being too afraid to ask for it. He dreams about the pond, and while he’s largely relieved not to have found Shane in his dreams, sometimes he wakes up, inexplicably furious at the dream version of Shane for not finding him there.

Ilya asks himself, on occasion, what he’s waiting for, while he finds and picks up another woman at another bar in another city, or when Svetlana shows up unannounced with the clear intention to blow off some steam of her own. He knows what he wants, of course. He’s so in love with Shane that it’s a physical ache — a compression in his chest that makes it hard to breathe. He convinces himself each time that he’s giving Shane the space to come to his own conclusions, to want it himself. Still, sometimes he imagines himself saying it — I want to be with you — and imagines Shane’s rejection, his horror, his confusion. He circles the forest of his want, trying and failing to be even a little less scared of the wolves within.

Ilya makes him a tuna melt and calls him “Shane,” — helplessly, foolishly, inevitably — and Shane leaves. Shane always, always leaves.

He lies awake in his empty house, and thinks about his parents dancing.

Ilya had taken the lesson at face value, filing it alongside all of the other things his mother had taught him about endurance and survival — how to be the kind of person that leans, and sways, and makes themselves a little bit easier to love. The people who love us sometimes hurt us, she’d said. He’d thought she was teaching him about his father. But his father’s hurt was in his presence. His mother’s hurt was in the leaving.

Shane is nothing like his father. Shane was open, and kind, and gentle, and thoughtful, and earnest. There is a version of Shane, in every universe, that loves him.

But Shane also says, “I'm not like you,” minutes after coming apart in Ilya’s hands. Shane whispers, “I wish we could always have this,” in the safety of the cottage, then packs his car the next morning. Shane lets himself be loved, but secretly, in the dark, where Ilya’s love can’t be known or seen or recognized. Shane watches Ilya sacrifice everything he’s ever known for him, and still has the fucking audacity to ask, “Would you choose me?”

Ilya wonders now if this is what Irina had meant: love and hurt, hand-in-hand. Not that love requires enduring cruelty, but that loving someone completely means accepting that they will sometimes be the one that hurts you.

He wonders too, if his mother knew that she was preparing him for the absence she’d eventually leave behind. Whether the hurt she was warning him about was the hurt that comes from being loved by someone who cannot stay.

Ilya decides, he should probably get some professional help.

***

His only experience with therapy, in past loops, had been with Dr. Galina, who was based in Ottawa, and to his knowledge, didn’t offer services over Skype. And though his stomach churns at the thought of having to go through the upheaval of therapy with someone new, he tries to find reassurance in the fact that in Boston, there are several Russian-speaking therapists to choose from. Dr. Katya Novikov’s online profile seems welcoming enough, and her photo — an older woman with short grey-blonde hair and blue eyes — reminds him of no one at all, which is its own blessing.

Dr. Novikov’s office has the same grey couch he imagines every therapy office across North America must have. He notes the glass of water and box of tissues placed on the side table, and tries to gauge whether or not he’s supposed to sit on the side of the couch closest to the table, or further away, like perhaps it’s some sort of test. He opts for the middle, and as soon as he settles in, immediately regrets it.

“So, Ilya,” Dr. Novikov says, in Russian, settling into the chair across from the couch. She has a notebook, but it stays closed, and she hasn’t picked up her pen. “I know we spoke on the phone. But forgive me if I ask you to share, again, what brings you in today.” She smiles softly.

He’s rehearsed this, which already feels like a bad sign. “I think I’m depressed,” he says.

“So you said,” Dr. Novikov says. “You think, or you know?”

“I know,” he corrects. “I’ve known for a long time.”

She nods. “But this is your first-time seeking therapy.”

He doesn’t want to lie, so he avoids answering the question, and instead, says, “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

“What does depression feel like, for you?” she asks.

Ilya blinks at the question. “I… don’t know how to answer that.”

She nods. The notebook stays mercifully closed. “That’s okay. Do you find it easy, or difficult, would you say, to talk about your emotions?”

“I just… I know I have them,” Ilya says. “I feel, hot or cold. Or empty, sometimes. But I don’t know if these are emotions or just—” he waves a hand, then sighs. “Difficult, I guess. It’s difficult.”

“That’s okay. It can feel abstract, talking about emotions. Let me try and ask a better question.” She’s quiet for a moment. “What was the last feeling you felt very strongly that you could name?”

“Anger,” Ilya says quickly.

“Okay,” she nods encouragingly. “Excellent. That’s good. What caused you to feel anger?”

“My brother called asking for more money—” Ilya says distractedly, then asks, slowly. “I didn’t think… anger is not a good emotion, I thought.”

“I’d like us to try not to label emotions as good or bad,” Dr. Novikov says. “Emotions are essential. They give us information about our minds and bodies, and help keep us safe.” She settles more in her chair, and sets the notebook aside. Ilya wonders why she even brought it to begin with. “For instance— you play a professional sport. Have you ever played angry, before?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, and he can’t help but smile.

Dr. Novikov mirrors the smile in turn. “A good game, was it?”

“Some of my best games,” he admits. “But playing with anger is different than being angry with my brother or my—” he stumbles, at the thought of Shane.

Dr. Novikov says nothing, just sits, waiting for him to find his words.

“There is someone I am… seeing? Casually? We don’t have a word really, for what we are.”

“That is perfectly alright. There are more types of relationships then there are words to define them,” she says. “But you feel strongly, towards this person.”

“They — he—” Ilya watches carefully for a reaction, and when he sees none, carries on. “He is wonderful. But also, infuriating.”

“Hence the anger.”

Ilya nods. “But when I get angry with him, I feel guilty for being angry, and then I get angry at myself.”

Dr. Novikov considers this for a moment. “Did you talk much about emotions, growing up?”

Ilya laughs. “You’re Russian, aren’t you?”

“It’s true — our culture can have a bit of a stigma around this topic.” She smiles, but doesn’t laugh. “So I take it the answer is no.”

“My father warned me not to cry at my mother’s funeral,” Ilya says, still in the aftermath of his disbelieving laughter. “So, no. No feelings talk.”

“That sounds very painful. How old were you?”

“Twelve,” Ilya says.

The silence that follows is louder than his laughter.

“I am so sorry you experienced that — that is a traumatic thing to go through, especially as a child. Expressing our grief is an important part of healing,” she says gently.

Ilya nods tightly, shifting towards the arm of the couch, to reach for the tissue box.

“I’d like to offer something, Ilya. Tell me if this resonates with you,” Dr. Novikov says. “Sometimes, when a person grows up in a household where they weren’t supported to talk about their feelings or process their emotions, anger becomes the emotion they most readily jump to.” She waits, and Ilya realizes she seems to be waiting for a reaction, so he nods, because it’s the only gesture that comes to mind. She continues. “Anger is highly accessible — it often surfaces when we are experiencing other feelings, such as sadness, or anxiousness.”

Ilya’s breath hitches, and Dr. Novikov pauses. When he says nothing, she continues. “Now, that’s not to say that anger isn’t constructive — anger tells us when a personal boundary has been crossed, it can warn us when a situation feels unsafe for us. It can even focus us, or motivate us, in high stakes situations. What is important is that you develop the tools to access and understand other feelings you might also be having, so they can also be expressed, and you can have all your emotional needs met, not just the emotional needs that stem from your anger.”

Ilya considers this. “So when I get angry at… my brother. Or at—” he catches himself again. “At the person I’m seeing. You’re saying the anger might be… covering something else.”

“It’s possible,” Dr. Novikov says. “When this person you’re seeing upsets you — is there another feeling, underneath the anger?”

The answer comes to his mind immediately. “Fear.”

Dr. Novikov nods. “Fear of what?”

“That he’ll leave.” The words tumble out before he can polish them up. “Every time it feels like we’re getting… close. Like, emotionally close, I guess. He pulls away. I know he’s going to. I can feel it coming. So when he does, I get angry. Or I pull away first, so at least I’m the one choosing it.”

“That’s a significant insight,” Dr. Novikov says. “This fear of being left. Have you ever experienced that feeling before?”

Ilya looks at the tissue box again. He’s already holding one, crumpled in his fist. “My mother,” he says. “When she died.”

He’s told this story before — to Dr. Galina, to Shane, many times, in many lifetimes. It should be easier by now. It isn’t.

Dr. Novikov listens, and Ilya recounts the stories of his father, and mother, and their dynamic, and how he and his brother would often get caught up in it all, and how she’d died, and how he’d found her, and how quickly his father had rushed to erase any trace of her from their lives. As he talks, he’s grateful that she doesn’t rush to fill the space between them with condolences.

“I don’t—” he swallows hard, trying to put a bow on the tale, after he’s talked for so long he’s gone hoarse. He reaches for the water and sips it, setting it back down. “I’ve dealt with it. I understand, she was sick. I’m not angry at her, or anything.”

“You’ve dealt with it intellectually,” Dr. Novikov says. “You understand, rationally, that your mother had an illness. But have you allowed yourself to feel the hurt of it?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well,” she says, “understanding might say: ‘my mother was in pain and couldn’t find help, and died by suicide as a result of an illness.’ But the hurt might say: ‘my mother left me, and I was twelve, and I needed her, and she wasn’t there.’ Both can be true. But it sounds like you are more comfortable with the first one.”

Ilya’s jaw clenches. “Because the second one sounds like I’m blaming her.”

“Does it?” Dr. Novikov asks, genuinely. “Or does it sound like a child who lost his mother and was never given permission or space to grieve that loss?”

It feels like a trick question, so he doesn’t answer. Instead, he reaches for another tissue.

“Let me ask you something,” she continues. “This person — the one you’re seeing. Is it possible that when you experience this feeling of him leaving, the pain you feel isn’t just the pain of this relationship, but an older pain this relationship is activating?”

“You mean, like a trigger,” Ilya says flatly. He’s heard the word before, though usually as an accusation of softness, levied in locker rooms at those deemed to be ‘too sensitive.’

“I mean that sometimes we carry wounds from childhood that shape the way we experience relationships as adults. As child, you lost a parent suddenly by suicide. The world taught you, at twelve, that the person you loved most could be there one moment and gone the next, without warning or explanation. You’ve had to adapt to that reality — because it is your reality. Your nervous system has learned to protect you from loss.”

“I don’t feel very protected.” Ilya scoffs.

“We only have to use what feels useful to you, in this space,” she says. “But just try for me now, before we dismiss the idea outright: when you think about this person, or any relationships you might have, can you think of ways you’ve adapted, to try and keep yourself safe from the possibility of loss?”

Ilya is quiet for what feels like a very long time. He can hear traffic outside, the muffled sound of pedestrians on the sidewalk below, the tick of a clock he hasn’t noticed hanging above Dr. Novikov’s head until now.

“I… keep people at a distance. Even him. Especially him.” Dr. Novikov nods, a sign for him to continue. “I joke a lot, when I get uncomfortable. I drink too much, sometimes. I have a lot of casual sex, not just with him. But, in general. It’s just… easier.”

“These are very common protective strategies,” she says. “It sounds like your strategy has been to to avoid being abandoned by never fully letting anyone in. Is that right?”

“But it’s not working,” Ilya insists. “It still hurts.”

“What worked for you as a child, or even as a young adult, may not be working for you now, in this stage of your life — especially if you’ve met someone whom you want to form a lasting relationship with,” she says. “But you found your way here. You recognized that a part of you needed attention, and walked through that door. That tells us you already have the capacity to sit with your feelings — whether they be depression, anger, fear — and try something new in the face of them.”

Ilya looks at her — this woman he doesn’t know, who has just, in the span of an hour, described his pain to him more clearly than he he has ever been able to describe it to himself. He’s struck by the sudden memory of Shane’s Cyrillic mishap — мУка, suffering — and imagines facing it, little by little.

“Should we try to book another appointment, before you leave today?” she asks. 

He doesn’t trust his voice, so he just nods instead.

The All-Star game falls in January, and Ilya is looking forward to it for reasons that have nothing to do with hockey.

It is, largely, everything he expects it to be. Shane still finds him in the hotel beachfront bar, still tells him that he and Rose Landry are “not compatible,” still looking gorgeous and only in small part due to the stylist he’s apparently hired to dress him in clothes that fit. They still move with a wary understanding of each other — at the poolside and during the skills competition and on the ice — like they’re both holding out for something they’re terrified to hope for.

Ilya still finds him on the beach. Shane still asks for his room number.

Shane still says he’s gay, and still apologizes for leaving, and still holds Ilya through his tears.

There’s no promise of what comes after. It all feels fragile and impossible. But at the end of it all, Shane says, “Goodnight, Ilya.” He closes the door behind him, and for the first time, in a long while, it doesn’t feel like leaving.

Ilya’s father dies.

Grigori's death sneaks up on him. He comes into the locker room after an impressive showing against Montreal, and sees the six missed calls on his phone from Alexei, panicking for a full second before remembering that this was a pain he’d been preparing his many lives for.

He tries to do, in the immediate aftermath, what Dr. Novikov has suggested. Allow himself the feeling. He closes his eyes and tries to feel something more complicated than anger, and eventually settles, shamefully, on relief — the relief that he can finally, in this lifetime, stop spending his life trying to be loved by this man.

It’s a disaster, in Moscow. He thinks about his brother’s anger — the fear it probably masks in turn — but can’t find it in him to move past his own hurt. He spends hours packing up the apartment, largely by himself — Alexei had cared for Grigori’s life, after all, and now Ilya, the prodigal son, would be here to care for his death. When the mounting tension between his brother and cousins and uncles finally explodes over the memorial dinner service, and he and Alexei nearly come to blows while Svetlana tries to intervene for Ilya’s sake, Ilya’s buzzing in his skin, unable to settle. Late in the night, not giving any thought to timezones or availability or convenience, he calls Shane.

“How are you holding up?” Shane asks. Ilya’s bundled against the cold, wandering through Moscow, and finds a familiar pedestrian tunnel to shield himself from the streets and snow and wind.

“I’m…” he catches the lie before he utters it. Okay, fine, not bad — lies of convenience designed to end this line of questioning and make space for a safer one. “I want to come home,” he settles for instead.

“To Boston?” Shane asks. And though the Ilya of this lifetime has never been, he pictures the cottage.

“To… somewhere that isn’t here,” Ilya says honestly. “I don’t think I can come back here.”

“Is it upsetting, having to deal with your father’s affairs?”

“It’s… yes? I don’t know. Is hard to explain in English,” he says. He feels his nose run — because of the cold, or the tears threatening to spill over, or both, he’s not certain which. He rubs his nose on the back of his hand.

Shane is quiet for a moment, and in a split second, Ilya tries to reach for a memory that isn’t his — of how this conversation is meant to go — before he finally hears Shane’s voice on the other side.

“You could… try… in Russian?” he asks, and it’s a full ten seconds of silence later that Ilya finally processes that Shane is speaking in Russian.

Ilya’s hand tightens around the phone. “You—” he starts. “How are you—”

“I wanted to understand you,” Shane says, carefully, deliberately. “So I’m learning.”

The Russian is imperfect. The accent is slightly off, the vowels a little too round, but it’s unmistakable and technically correct. The meaning is clear.

“Say something else,” Ilya whispers.

He hears a sharp inhale, and a steady exhale on the other side of the call, before Shane’s voice echoes through the phone’s tinny speakers. “You are not alone, Ilya,” he says in Russian, slowly. “I am with you.” A pause, a deep breath, and then: “I love you.”

Ilya realizes his face is wet only when a sudden rush of wind brings a sting of cold to his face. He’s not sure when he started crying — probably from Shane’s first syllable. “I love you,” he says, the words tumbling out in Russian — maybe too fast for Shane to understand, but he can’t stop the rush of them, so he lets the full weight of them fall. “So much. Sometimes I think loving you is the only thing getting me through one day to the next. I know this is supposed to be nothing, this thing between us, but I also know that I love you even if I don’t know what to do about it.”

He thinks he can hear Shane’s smile on the other side of the phone. Maybe he’s imagining it. It seems so impossible to feel happiness here, now, but he feels it all the same. “This is not nothing. You are not nothing,” Shane says, in his careful, accented Russian. “Do you hear me?”

Ilya presses his free hand over his eyes. His father is dead and his mother is gone and his brother can barely look at him. Truth be told, Moscow stopped feeling like home long before Shane Hollander shook his hand in a parking lot in Regina, Saskatchewan, but that moment gave him another home to hope for: a sun piercing through an overcast sky. 

And Shane Hollander — beautiful, infuriating, methodical Shane Hollander — has been learning Ilya’s language, because Ilya once told him he didn’t have the English words for the things that mattered most, so Shane decided in his own way, to shine a light in the dark and find him there.

“I hear you,” Ilya says, in Russian, and then again in English, and then again, and again, and again. “I hear you.”

Chapter End Notes

so- that was a lot of chapter!

obviously, we are covering a lot of the same beats as canon, so it's possible you may have been reading many of these scenes thinking "I know how this goes." that is somewhat intentional, but intentional does not automatically mean interesting. For me, Ilya has to go through these moments, including moments that we as readers/ writer know very well, but he has to go through them differently because he's different! (also, in other news, water is wet?). TL;DR the same things happen, and also, nothing is the same at all.

if the chapter worked the way I hoped, the familiarity of the beats is part of the experience. if it felt repetitive or slow, I'd genuinely love to know - I am most uncertain about this chapter structurally (and probably have sat with it too long which is only making me MORE uncertain) but your feedback is always appreciated.

LASTLY - y'all. your comments. they are beautiful and so kind! I don't take a single one of them for granted. thank you for reading and caring about this story the way you have <3

I suspect it'll be a much shorter wait to the next one, but I always reserve the right to change my mind, so... instead of making any promises I can't keep, I'll just say: see you all soon!!

Songs from the Playlist

Old Note by Lisa O'Neill: I can’t come to quantify the feeling / I was walking home half in the dreaming

Help I'm Alive by Metric: Hard to be soft, tough to be tender

River by Dylan and the Moon: He tried hard to help me / You know, he put me at ease

Chapter 8: I am afraid. still,

Chapter Notes

Chapter-specific content warning

Minor-character death by suicide. More in the endnotes.

“Come on, really?” Ilya pleads through panted breaths.

“Who’ve you got fighting for you these days Rozanov?” Duncan Harvey asks, all business as he drops his gloves on the ice to a raucous cheer from the Chicago crowd.

“No need for anyone to fight my battles. I make love, not war,” Ilya retorts, shaking his gloves off in turn and letting his now-broken stick clatter to the ice.

“So what was that cross-check on Clarke, then?” Harvey asks, eyeing the broken stick on the ice.

“What? Clarke?” Ilya asked, feigning confusion as he glanced over at Chicago’s star centre, currently getting looked over by the medical staff on the bench after taking a particularly hard hit, courtesy of Ilya, before turning back to Harvey. “Well, okay, he is very cross-check-able, was hard to resist.”

Harvey ignores the banter and brings his fists up. “Let’s just get it over with.”

Ilya sighs, resigned, and does the same. “Can you try and avoid my face this time at least? Have a hot date tomorrow night.”

Harvey shakes his head; Ilya thinks he sees a quirk of a smile before the six foot seven behemoth grabs the front of Ilya’s jersey and swings.

“Fucking bastard,” Ilya mutters, wincing as he comes out of the showers from the sting of the water on the cut over his eye. He touches it gently with the pad of his middle finger, looking at Marleau, standing at the lockers. “How does it look?”

“Like you got punched in the face,” Marleau says helpfully, chuckling to himself and shaking his head. “Never know when to back down, do ya Roz?”

“Eh, back down? Is this some new hockey move you’ve been practicing? No one wonder you’re not scoring goals these days.” Ilya looks around for a mirror, finding a small magnet mirror on the front of Hammersmith’s locker, and pushing him aside, ignoring Hammersmith’s protest, to get a closer look at the cut. It’s not bleeding anymore, but it’s ugly, bright red, and impossible to hide, just above his eyebrow. He can see a bruise starting to form around it as well.

He swears loudly.

“He’s worried about his Montreal girl, I bet,” St-Simon says, nudging Marleau with his elbow.

Ilya blusters. “I’m worried about press crying because they’ll have to take pictures of you fuckers for the next week instead of me.” He steps way from the mirror to return to his locker.

Marleau laughs. “Don’t worry brother, I’m sure you can get creative when you see her tomorrow. She doesn’t have to look at your face.”

“Shut up Marly.” Ilya's cheeks are reddening, so he uses the excuse of drying his hair to cover his face with a towel to get his composure. “Just because no person on this planet wants to look at you while they’re coming doesn’t mean is true for the rest of us.”

“Ah, see, he gets mean when you bring her up,” St-Simon teases. “What’s her name again?”

“Jane,” Marleau drawls, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, fuck, I remember Rozy’s Montreal chick!” Connors exclaims. He lets out a low whistle. “Damn, she still on your roster? Feel like I first heard of her five years ago.”

“Six, at least. Remember when we got snowed out of that one Montreal game? Kid was fucking miserable,” Marleau says to a collection of laughs.

“Fuck all you fuckers,” Ilya says, trying hard to keep his composure. He knows it’s in good fun — he’s always said Boston’s brand of friendship was a little prickly to say the least. These days, he was much better at dishing it than he was a taking it. “No one has anything nice to say about the Captain that won you the game?”

“Don’t worry Roz, it’ll be fine,” Marleau says good-naturedly, coming to ruffle Ilya’s hair, much to his annoyance. He half-heartedly bats Cliff’s hand away, immediately fixing his hair when Marleau’s hand retreats. “She’s put up with you for this long. We’ll slap some polysporin on it, call it a day.”

“I’ll slap something on someone alright,” Ilya mutters in Russian, to a collective laugh from the locker room.

“He’s cursing us in Russian again,” Connors says from behind him.

“Marly, you broke the captain, turned his English mode off.”

“Hit his reset button!”

Ilya has to press his lips together to keep from smiling too hard, still playing the part of a disgruntled captain.

He was really going to miss this team.

He carries the thought with him as they eventually break out of the arena. He waits until he’s out of the eye-line of his teammates, allowing them to move past him towards the bus that’ll take them to the hotel, before he pulls out his phone, scrolling past the texts congratulating him on the win from Svetlana, from Yuna, and from ‘Jane,’ to a different thread entirely, sent earlier that day, with an address to a Chicago pub.

He texts Duncan Harvey: see you soon, and smiles at the almost immediately returned thumbs-up emoji. Verbose as ever.

The bar in question — Richard’s — is a small dive bar that only takes cash, and, miraculously, allows smoking indoors. Ilya pushes a cloud of smoke away from his face as he walks in, spotting Harvey hunched in the back at a stool at the bar that barely fits him.

Ilya settles next to him, looking at an older woman at the other end of the bar, smoking openly. Ilya looks back at Harvey, a shocked look of delight on his face. “This isn’t a joke? You can really smoke here?”

Harvey gestures to the several other patrons, openly smoking, and to the back of the bar, where packs of cigarettes are available for sale. “Thought you might like it,” he shrugs.

Ilya shakes out a cigarette from his pack, holding it between his lips as he fishes out his lighter from his pocket. “You are a beautiful man, Harvey,” Ilya says. He lights it, and takes a revelatory inhale. Just as he goes to put the pack away, he hesitates, offering one to Harvey, who waves him off.

“I’ll stick to beer,” he says.

“Why not both?” Ilya raises his eyebrow, looking around to wave the bartender down, ordering a second of whatever Harvey’s drinking. He settles into his stool, taking a sip from the bottle that’s handed to him. “You’re buying, yes?”

“Why am I always buying, with you? You make a lot more money than me.”

“Lose a fight for once and then I buy. Besides, I don’t carry cash.”

Harvey seems to consider this, then sighs, accepting his fate, before pulling out his wallet, and throwing cash on the bar top.

The conversation flows from there. It’s halted - as it has always tended to be between them, over the years, and Ilya does most of the heavy lifting when they run out of things to talk about, jumping from hockey to golf to music to cars to travel before eventually circling back to hockey. Harvey lets Ilya drive, content to be part of this forced friendship Ilya’s spent years cultivating.

“So,” Ilya says, pursing his lips to take a swig from the bottle. “What do you have planned for this summer?”

“Um, probably head back to my folks. They’re near Guelph, if you know where that is?” Harvey says, brushing the sandy blonde hair from his forehead. Ilya doesn’t have a fucking clue where Guelph is, but does remark on it. It’s rare for Harvey to have so much to say. “Help my granddad out with the farm. How about you? Hanging around Boston?”

Ilya makes a face, tilting his head back and forth as he chews over his next words, then sets the bottle down, turning fully to Harvey. “No, not Boston.”

Harvey blinks, not sure what to make of the sudden eye contact. “Oh. Are you, traveling?”

Ilya shrugs, considering. “Sort of.”

Harvey waits a moment longer, then nods, accepting this, reaching for his drink again.

The man’s shocking lack of curiosity is entirely perplexing to Ilya. Still, he presses on. “Harvey, come on, you have to ask one more time!”

“Er…” Harvey retracts his hand, wipes the damp condensation from the bottle on the fabric of his pants. “Right, okay…” he tries again. “What do you mean, sort of?”

Ilya leans in, whispering conspiratorially. “Thinking I might leave the Bears.”

Harvey’s eyes widen, pulling back, and says, very much not at a whisper. “Whoa, dude. You serious?”

Ilya waves his hand nonchalantly. “Yes, it is time. New challenge. New opportunity.”

Harvey lets out a low whistle. “Wow. Are you… not happy in Boston?”

His brow furrows. “Boston is the best.” He pictures the locker room, remembers holding the cup surrounded by his team, the way the fans cheer when he skates out onto the ice. “But… think I could be happier somewhere else.”

“Wow,” Harvey says again. Ilya preens a little having brought the man of so little words to such a loss of words. “Guess you’re not one to settle.”

Ilya shakes his head proudly, thinking of Shane. “Nope,” he says with a pop of his lips.

“Well, they’ll miss you in Boston. Think you’ll stay out of the Western Conference? It’s a pain in the ass facing you twice a year already.” Harvey shifts on the stool, grimacing slightly.

Ilya frowns. “You are hurt?”

Harvey waves Ilya off, which does nothing to lessen his concern. “Just my back. Shoulder. Whatever.” He huffs the loose hair off his forehead again. “Team doctor’s got it covered.”

Over the nearly eight years that Ilya’s played in the NHL, he’s faced Harvey on the ice probably no more than ten or so times. He was terrifying to play against, and couldn’t lie about how grateful he’d been in 2014 when he’d had Ryan Price to take some of Harvey’s hits for him. Truthfully, he’s shocked to have even played him tonight; these days Harvey was listed out, or optimistically, ‘day-to-day,’ more often than not, usually with some nonspecific injury listed like ‘upper body’ or ‘lower body’ or once, comically, ‘upper and lower body.’

“Are you… happy in Chicago?” Ilya asks hesitantly, flipping the question back on him. 

He watches Harvey’s eyes furrow at the question. “Yeah, I mean. It’s a good team. Why wouldn’t I be? Clarke seems happy to have me around,” he says, in reference to the centre he was typically sent out to protect.

“I just mean…” Ilya struggles to find his way through. “You’re a good hockey player. Had a good season last year. Scored… what, twenty-three goals?”

“Twenty-four,” Harvey mutters. “You don’t have to make fun of me. I know I’m not putting numbers like… like you or, or Hollander or anything.” Ilya’s heart flutters, the way it always done when Shane’s name comes up in a conversation unprompted. “Just got lucky.”

“Am not making fun,” Ilya insists. “Just saying, maybe you find a team that needs someone to score them goals, and not just to knock handsome Russians around.”

Duncan considers this for a moment, then shakes his head. “I think they’re gonna offer me an multi-year deal next season.” He’s wistful when he says it - Chicago had been dragging him a long on single year contracts for some time. Ilya can’t tell if he’s trying to convince himself it’s true, or trying to convince himself to be happy about it. “Longer term money. Hard to come by.”

Ilya doesn’t say: usually this time next year, you’re dead.

He claps a hand on Duncan’s back, before fishing out his wallet, and pulling out a couple hundred dollar bills and tossing them on the table to round out the tip.

Duncan looks at the cash, then accusingly at Ilya.

Ilya’s eyes are glimmering. “Guess I had some cash after all.”

***

The free agency signing announcement with Ottawa goes out in July on a Monday, and by Tuesday, Ilya is the most hated man in Boston. He tries and fails to ignore the the news alerts that overload his phone, with headlines such as Where did it all go wrong for Ilya Rozanov and the Boston Bears? or Ilya Rozanov: Hero or villain? or ROZANOV DUMPS BOSTON: BREAKUP OF THE DECADE. Marly, still devastated himself by the news himself, but clearly trying to process his grief through humour, sends him a screenshot of a Reddit thread titled ”Rozanov Jersey Burning Party — Public Garden, Saturday 6PM, BYOB.”

He gets booed in the checkout line of the grocery store. A man in a Bears jersey gives him the finger as he’s leaving the bank. People start tagging him online with videos of parents telling their children that Rozanov is leaving Boston, only for the children to start crying in earnest. While he’s at the post office setting up his mail forwarding, he comes back to a note slipped under his windshield wiper that reads: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO RETIRE HERE. The note is helpfully signed: — FUCK YOU.

He sends a photo of the note to Shane, who responds: that’s kind of sweet actually, which Ilya thinks is probably a joke, but also, given that Shane’s favourite term of endearment is to call Ilya an asshole, he wouldn’t put it past him to have meant it sincerely.

He’s moving in two weeks, and does his best to cling to his past life’s recollections of what it was like to stay in Boston as a way to remind his brain and body that leaving Boston is the right thing to do. Still, the week-long retrospective that hits the sports media news cycle does nothing to alleviate his anxiety. Svetlana, perhaps thinking she’s being helpful, sends him a surprisingly tender write-up from the Boston Globe titled The Bear Who Couldn’t Stay, along with clips of a TSN segment asking former teammates to share favourite Rozanov stories, cut to highlights of the Bears’ 2014 cup run. In the segment, Connors actually tears up on camera.

“Wow, they love you,” Svetlana says when Ilya holds his phone out wordlessly to show her clips of the jersey-burning party.

“That’s quite an interpretation,” Ilya says drily.

“You have to be loved here to be hated this badly,” she shoots back, scrolling past some of the videos, bemused. “Do you know the city gave them a permit for this?”

Ilya just shakes his head. Svetlana had come over to pack, which meant that she was currently sitting on the couch eating his potato chips while critiquing his packing skills. Unlike the Bears’ management team and his former teammates and his new agent Farah Jalali (also, conveniently, Shane’s agent) — who all largely believed Ilya was moving to Ottawa for…the money, supposedly? — Svetlana knew Ilya’s true motivations. She has curiously remained largely silent on the move thus far, other than to just barely raise her eyebrows when he first mentioned that he was moving to Ottawa to be closer to his boyfriend Shane Hollander. I had been, truthfully, a disappointing reception. For the last couple weeks, he periodically brings up Shane just to make sure she’d heard him the first time. “Do you want any of the living room furniture? Shane Hollander is helping me furnish the new place in Ottawa,” or, “What do you think of this paint colour? Shane Hollander said it would be calming.”

He’s halfway telling her about how Shane Hollander had found a Russian version of Words with Friends to practice his Cyrillic before Svetlana finally interrupts.

“Ilya,” she says, not looking up from her phone. “I heard you the first time. You are moving to Ottawa for your boyfriend, Shane Hollander. It’s weird you keep using his full name.”

“Oh,” Ilya says. He’s currently wrapping his print of Muhammad Ali’s Sting Like a Bee piece in endless layers of bubble wrap. “Just thought a gossip like you would have more questions,” he recovers neatly.

“You’ve been looking at your messages from Jane with cartoon heart eyes for nearly the last decade,” she says, crunching on a chip. “You didn’t think I’d notice that every time your phone buzzed you’d get that stupid look on your face? Every time you came back from Montreal you’d go on pretending like you hadn’t just had the best night of your life.” He leans in to have a chip deposited in his mouth, and she reaches over and flicks his ear instead.

“Ow!”

“I knew there was someone, of course, I just didn’t know who it was. And then you told me, and it made so much sense I was annoyed I hadn’t figured it out.”

Ilya stands up and props the print alongside the rest of his wrapped art near the wall, along with the few boxes of possessions he planned to take with him. “You must have opinions, then. Tell me — go on.”

“He is gorgeous.” Svetlana says simply. “Best hockey player in the league—”

“Second best, fuck you.”

“You must love him, obviously,” she continues as though she hasn’t heard him. “Love him enough to sign with the Centaurs — stupid name, stupider logo, you’ll never catch me in a jersey,” she says plaintively.

“Not even when we win the Cup?”

She snorts. “Sure, you get Ottawa a cup and I’ll wear their jersey.” She swings her legs up onto the couch, sliding down to rest her head on the arm.

Ilya comes to stand in the living room, surveying the state of the various half-filled boxes, before turning to catch Svetlana’s gaze. “You’re not upset I kept it from you?”

“Of course I am,” she says. “But I’m mostly relieved.”

“Relieved?” he asks, confused.

“That you finally trusted me enough to say it.”

Ilya idly scratches at the back of his neck, feeling the faint red flush at his cheeks. “Of course I trust you. It wasn’t that I didn’t. I just…” he trails off. “I needed to make sure it was real.”

She gives him a fond look, then reaches into the bag and throws a chip at his forehead.

He brushes the crumbs from his face. “You’re being very violent with your affections today.”

“Boston’s rubbing off on me,” she says with a smirk. “Love for us is a dangerous game.”

The house is quieter after Svetlana eventually leaves, and Ilya stands in the room, taking stock. The walls are bare, the closets empty, the kitchen is stripped to its essentials (one cup, one plate, one fork). There’s a warm, hazy nostalgia about the space that makes now that makes him want to sink into whatever soft things he hasn't packed away and reminisce.

He would miss this city, for all the usual reasons, of course, but mostly, because it was simple here. His memories of past lives in Boston had grown fainter with each passing year — blurred at the edges, like photographs left too long in the sun. But his memories of this life, this single, stubborn, painful, beautiful life — had only sharpened. The exact audacious shade of blue of the sky the first time he’d landed here. The sound of Marleau’s voice cracking during his Cup parade speech. The low thunder of the arena when they call his name and he skates out from the tunnel. These memories felt more substantial than any future he might hope for — they had the solidity of things that had actually happened, to this body, in this city, in this life. And the terrifying gamble of Ottawa was that he was trading the certainty of what he had for the possibility of what he wanted, with no guarantee that it would work out in his favour.

Even this home had its fair share of memories; the house itself was unremarkable in his mind’s eye, as impressed as Shane had been with the architecture when he’d first seen it, but he can’t help looking at the kitchen island and imagining Svetlana leaning against it; peering into the backyard and imagining it chock full of the Bears and their WAGs for his annual pre-season barbecue; even his own bedroom gave reason to remember Shane, splayed out there, the picture of wanton desire, though Shane had probably only actually spent a handful of nights here.

He would even miss Dr. Novikov’s office, with its grey couch and grey-white walls and poorly insulated street noise, the clock ticking overhead that he’d finally stopped watching. He thinks about the stupidity of waxing poetic to the tissue box as he steps in for his last appointment before the move, his throat thick with emotion from the beginning, even as he rationally reminded himself that this was not a goodbye, that they’d agreed they would try to continue virtually for his first year in Ottawa.

“I do want to say, with the time we have left,” Dr. Novikov says, as the session comes to a close, “that this is our last session before you move, Ilya.”

“Don’t remind me.” He picks at a thread on the cushion — a habit she’s never commented on, though the cushion is visibly worse for it.

“How are you feeling about it?”

“Terrified,” Ilya says honestly, and then adds, “but don’t write that down, it makes me sound pathetic.”

She traitorously writes it down anyway. She does write things down now, occasionally, and Ilya no longer watches her pen with quite as much suspicion. She looks up, and her pen stills on the paper. “What specifically are you afraid of?”

“That it won’t work.”

“More specific.”

Ilya sighs, frustrated, and externalizes every stray thought that’s been floating in his mind for the last year. “What if I move my whole life to be closer to him and it’s still not enough? What if he’s still too far away for us to see each other regularly? What if I lose the thing that makes hockey fun because I’m playing for a shit team that hasn’t made the playoffs in years? What if Shane makes me get a— a Chevy. Or God, a Subaru,” he despairs, slumping back into the couch.

“That’s a lot of what ifs.”

“Yes, well, I’m very in touch with my inner voice,” Ilya says drily.

“You’re describing things that might happen as though they will happen,” she points out. It’s not the first time she’s made that observation, and the irony in it is certainly not lost of Ilya. “What could be is not what will be.”

“But it could,” he counters stubbornly.

“Yes. And it also could not.” She uncrosses her legs, leaning forward in her chair, interlocking her fingers. “Ilya, over the past year, you’ve done an enormous amount of work. You’ve identified patterns that have influenced your behaviour for most of your life. You’ve begun to understand where those patterns come from, and have started to change how you respond to fear and loss. None of that disappears because you change cities.”

He tries to hold the reassurance for all of five seconds, before—

“What if he gets bored of being so close to me?”

“Then you’ll communicate your concerns to figure out a way forward.”

“What if he doesn’t want to communicate?”

“Then you’ll work through what you do and don’t have control over, like we’ve done here for the past year,” she says patiently.

“What if—”

“Let me ask you a different question,” Dr. Novikov cuts in, and it’s so rare for her to interrupt that Ilya stops mid-sentence. “What if it works?”

Ilya opens his mouth, and finding no words, lets out a breath instead.

“What if,” she continues, “you move to Ottawa, and the team improves, and you and Shane continue to build a healthy, communicative relationship based on love and trust and mutual respect? What if the distance between you feels smaller instead of larger? What if the thing you’re afraid of doesn’t happen?”

He shakes his head. “You can’t know that.”

She shakes her head. “No, I cannot. Neither can you. That’s my point.” She holds his gaze. “You are very skilled at anticipating pain. What I’d like you practice — as homework, if you will — is allowing yourself to hope.”

"Hope,” he repeats. Though they’re speaking his native language, the word feels foreign in his mouth.

“Yes,” she says simply. “Allow yourself to hope that it might be good. It’s not a promise or a guarantee—” she says, sensing his protest. “Just try. Give yourself permission to imagine that the thing you want might actually be the thing you get.”

***

The summer before the season belongs to Shane, and Ilya wouldn’t have it any other way.

They spend the entirety of the month of August at the cottage, and it’s the closest Ilya’s ever felt to having a normal life. They drive back and forth between Ottawa every other week, so Ilya can take meetings with management and set up his new home, sourced and furnished courtesy of Shane’s extensive real estate peculiarities that Ilya only makes fun of out of principle, despite directly benefiting from his hyper fixation. Shane practices his Russian over Face Time with Svetlana, and insists on helping Ilya fill out the forms for his permanent residency application, and organizes his spice drawer wearing just his boxers and one of Ilya’s too-large t-shirts, and Ilya marvels, time and time again, at this, that he gets to have this — Shane, sun-drenched in the cocoon of this one perfect month, full of such intensive happiness and adoration that sometimes it borders on physical pain.

So, there’s a lot to love about the move to Ottawa. The hockey team is, however, not one of those things.

The Centaurs haven’t made the playoffs in nearly twenty years, and based on their preseason showing, Ilya suspects they won’t be breaking the streak anytime soon. The arena is half-empty on a good night. The power play looks like it was designed by committee, and the committee was drunk. In his first away game, Ilya watches the defence turn the puck over four times in the span of six minutes and has to physically stop himself from asking coach if the players on the ice are, in fact, hockey players.

Ilya had been mentally bracing himself for what playing hockey with the Centaurs would entail, though this was an instance where memory was kinder than reality. He knew, reasonably, that they’d be bleeding goals until they got Hayes, that it would be a couple years yet before Brandon Wiebe made his way to Ottawa, that he’d have to suffer with a turnstile of subpar wingers until Barrett got his act together and got himself traded from Toronto. Until then, he tried to make the best of a middling situation. Zane Boodram is, at least, reliable in his friendship, even if not yet in his board battles, and Evan Dykstra is a solid defensemen, steady, open, whose only non-redeeming quality is that he insists on playing his ‘Hype Country’ playlist in the locker room, which as far as Ilya was concerned was both an atrocity and an oxymoron. He likes them a lot as people — likes their partners, who are interesting and kind, though he can’t help picturing, even in that first season, what it would be like to introduce Shane to all them as his.

The uneven slant of Ilya’s on-ice experience versus Shane’s hits harder that he would’ve liked. Montreal is stacked, and their roster is deep (Hayden Pike aside, of course, but even he’s the best fifteenth option a team could hope for). And Shane — well, he is magnificent. It is, Ilya won’t lie, incredibly hot to see up close.

True, part of the turn on had always been that Shane’s singular, consuming goal of winning was mirrored in Ilya. But he accepts the exchange of winning-as-foreplay with actual foreplay. After all, he can text Shane, anytime he wants, in Russian, with a very detailed breakdown of all the ways Ilya intends to have him the next time they see each other (sometimes he skimps on the details and just focuses on the important bits - his mouth, his hands, his ass). He can FaceTime Shane on road trips, and doesn’t have to pretend to scramble for a reason to want to see his face. Hell, even Shane’s merging of their google calendars is a kind of foreplay — the yearning that comes with counting down the days when Montreal and Ottawa will face each other, or, better yet, when their game breaks align for brief, unbearably precious, uninterrupted time together almost makes the wait feel like a fair trade off.

Almost.

They announce the Irina Foundation in the fall, and it's like the release of a pressure valve, like he can finally breathe — can be next to Shane, talking to Shane, smiling with Shane, without the constant hyper vigilance of wondering if they’re being watched. The world knows about Irina now. The night after it’s announced, he curls into Shane’s chest, wonders idly if he can burrow far enough into Shane’s heart that no one would be able to find him and force him to leave it. He finds his mother at the pond in his dreams, silent, skating, with only the occasional glance his way to reassure him that he is also there with her.

Wyatt Hayes joins the team shortly thereafter, in a trade with Toronto, and Ilya allows himself to feel the slightest glimmer of optimism at the prospect of having a goalie that seems to understand both where the net is and that pucks don’t belong in it. They win their first game with Hayes in net — against Buffalo, mind, but still, a win’s a win — and that night, when they grab drinks at the hotel bar to celebrate, the team cheers as the hockey highlights play in the TV overhead, showcasing some of Hazy’s more impressive stops.

“You pulled off saves like that and that’s with you spending the whole game talking about how the patent for the original fire hydrant was lost in a fire,” Dykstra says, nudging Wyatt in the shoulder.

Wyatt smiles into his beer. “It’s an ironic part of American history,” he says, cheeks red, possibly from the alcohol, but mostly, Ilya figures, from the attention.

The clip rolls into a series of highlights from the game Chicago had played earlier tonight against Vancouver, cutting to a clip of Duncan Harvey landing a hit on a Vancouver player. The player's mouth starts bleeding, one of his teeth scattering across the ice.

Wyatt shudders visibly. “That guy is wild.”

“Who?” Bood asks.

“That one, Harvey,” Wyatt says, gesturing to the TV. Another clip of the same fight, from a different angle. Harvey’s face is frozen in a snarl as he’s pushed away by the officials and sent to the penalty box. “Few weeks ago, he and Pricey — sorry, I mean, Ryan Price — got into it. Price didn’t even wanna fight, but Harvey was like… super aggressive. Head-butted him, trying to goad him into it. Was kind of crazy.”

Bood lets out a low whistle. “Damn. Well, he sat out against us last week — seems like we dodged a fucking bullet.”

“More like a freight train,” Dykstra supplies.

Ilya listens to the exchange, frowning. Harvey had missed the game Chicago had played against them. In fact, he hadn’t even travelled with the team. Ilya pulls out his phone, scrolling to his messages with Duncan, and sees that Duncan hadn’t even responded to his texts asking whether he’d gone to Ottawa, Illinois by mistake. 

While he has his phone open now, he fires off another quick message — is rude to make me text twice in a row — and waits, letting the conversation of his teammates wash over him. He keeps his conversation with Harvey open until a message from Shane pops up, congratulating him for the win.

Ilya clicks away from Harvey’s text chain to respond, and ignores the rapid thumping of his heart.

Christmas at the Hollanders. Christmas was never much of an affair for Ilya growing up, so he revels instead, in the pleasure of a building a new tradition from scratch in this new, impossible, miraculous chapter of his life.

The Hollander home is warm and bright. String lights hang from every available surface. David roasts a duck, and Yuna keeps the kitchen chock-full of butter tarts, which she insists are a Canadian tradition and not just an excuse to eat pastries for breakfast. The tree in the living room leaves pine needles everywhere, a fair trade-off for the smell of cedar that fills the room. Ilya watches Shane move around his family, eyes wide at the casual exchanges of tenderness, David’s arm around Shane’s shoulders, Yuna leaning over the table to brush something from Shane’s cheek. He’s even less certain of what to do as the recipient of their affections, feeling himself freeze when Yuna presses a kiss to the top of his head as she moves behind him to clear the dishes — it was so routine, like Ilya’s always sat in that chair, like he was always going to be sitting in that chair. 

He watches Yuna and David together — watches one moves left while the other moves right, how one smiles fondly when the other looks away. He listens to their voices when they’re out of sight in another room — hears the tenor rise and fall; the intimate, unhurried rhythm of two people who have loved each other for over thirty years and still have things to say.

That night, in the bedroom of his Ottawa home, Ilya lies with his head on Shane’s chest, tracing absentminded patterns into his bare chest.

“Thank you,” Ilya says into the dark.

Shane’s hands curl into Ilya’s hair. “For what?”

Ilya doesn't respond. Where would he even begin? His gratitude is endless and wholly insufficient: for the four hour drives Shane made as often as he could from Montreal to Ottawa. For the unconscious way his body turns towards Ilya whenever they’re in the same room. For eating a quarter of a butter tart, because he knew sharing that memory with Ilya was more important than his diet. For welcoming Ilya in to his family, and for saying ‘it’s not my family, it’s our family,’ each time Ilya brings it up. For choosing him. Again and again. Imperfectly, incompletely. For shaking his hand in a Saskatchewan parking lot ten years ago.

He presses a kiss over Shane’s heart by way of an answer, because no language has the words he needs anyway.

Duncan Harvey dies in January.

When he reads the message — sent in the long-dormant ‘Smells Like Team Spirit’ group chat by Noel Lemieux, a former Chicago player who had since been traded to Philadelphia — the phone doesn’t fall from his hand. His knees don’t buckle. He doesn’t scream or cry or punch through the drywall. He steels himself to wield that terribly familiar grief. He’s bore it well, time and time again, in other lifetimes, and it has finally arrived to this one.

I tried. His mind clenches onto this stray thought, every few hours, when the posts start to circulate and the news hits the major outlets. He doesn’t remember there being an onslaught of social media tributes and RIP Harvey graphics in the past, but perhaps, he hadn’t been looking for them before, and even seeing them now, they feel paltry by comparison. Ilya had tried. He’d befriended Harvey. He’d texted, called, gotten drinks, stayed in touch across conferences. He’d asked — more than once — if Harvey was happy, if Harvey was okay, if Harvey needed anything.

And Harvey had said yes, and fine, and no, thank you and died anyway.

The instinct to analyze, and reframe, and control, comes rushing back with a vengeance. He’s been so lackadaisical, in this lifetime, and death is the penance. He should have tried harder, pushed more, been more direct. He should have called Harvey every day he left Ilya’s message on read. He was the only one with the information that no one else had, and somehow, still, he had failed.

Ilya had never been able to save himself. What had made him think he could save anyone else?

He skips the All-Star tournament for the funeral. For all the lifetimes he’s lived, and for all the times Harvey has died, he’s only attended this funeral once before. Still, it’s painstakingly familiar. Ryan Price is still there. But also, he notes, new faces — old teammates of Harvey from Chicago, Anaheim, Detroit, even a couple of Ilya’s old teammates from Boston. He sits in the back row, trying to find solace in the knowledge that in this lifetime, Harvey, maybe, had reached for others. Maybe he had tried too.

He doesn’t cry at the funeral. He saves that for the drive home, when the highway opens up and there’s no one to see him and the car fills with the sounds of grief that have nowhere else to go.

The year comes and goes. That summer, Shane and Ilya host the inaugural Irina Foundation hockey camps. He gives his summer to Shane, spending each night holding him like he’s both incredibly fragile and utterly unbreakable, tracing the line of his collarbone with Ilya’s mouth, pressing his ear to Shane’s chest and listening to his heartbeat — the steady, reliable percussion of a body that is still alive, and is here, and is his.

He finds himself dreading the start of the season, the long stretches of absence between flares of contact. The separation, the distance, the long months of phone calls and stolen visits, all sit on his chest like a physical weight. He wonders if it’s the same for Shane too — Shane, who’s second round playoff exit has propelled him to new levels of intensity over the summer; who now regards each meal with suspicion; who tenses each time Yuna calls, needing his eyes on a brand deal contract amendment. Shane, at least, seems to carry the weight forward, unlike Ilya, who seems only to know how to buckle underneath it.

A week before the start of the season, Dr. Novikov’s face appears on his laptop screen right on schedule, though Ilya has long since replaced the couch with a five thousand dollar ergonomic computer chair, and the tissue box is his own. 

“I had the dream again,” Ilya says, his mind easing as he settles back into the familiar back and forth of Russian. Without Svetlana as a constant, he finds he’s speaking it less and less, though Shane spent all summer enforcing ‘Russian-only’ days periodically to improve his grasp of the language, it wasn’t the same as talking to a native speaker.

“The pond?” Dr. Novikov asks.

“Yes.” He has taken to doodling — scribbles on paper of meaningless nonsense — as a way to avoid having to look at the camera when he’s doesn’t feel like being scrutinized. He does that here now, tracing aimless cursive shapes over and over again on the paper. “Harvey was there again.”

In the past, when Ilya used to bring up Harvey, Dr. Novikov would always respond something like, ‘Duncan Harvey, from Chicago.’ She would do this with all the characters cast in Ilya’s life — her shorthand to signal she was paying attention. Since January, they’d spent several sessions already on Harvey’s death, on the guilt and grief that Ilya can’t explain without explaining everything else. So this time, she’s silent, and waits.

“He was just… skating,” Ilya says. He traces his pen in a circle, follows the tip of the pen over the same path. “Like the rest of them. They all do the same thing. Sometimes they look at me when they skate past, but most of the time they don’t even acknowledge I’m there. They just…” He makes a circling motion with his finger in the air. “Skate.”

Dr. Novikov considers this for a moment. “You’ve said before you associate the pond with the afterlife,” she says. “Because you most often see your mother there. How does it feel now, seeing Harvey there?”

“I used to see him before he died,” Ilya says, setting the pen down. “And it made me feel… I don’t know. Apprehensive, I guess. Harvey was not in a good place when we last spoke. And I would see him there and it would make me feel like… like the dream was warning me, or something.”

“And how do you feel now, that he’s passed?”

“The fucking same,” he says tiredly. “He’s dead and he’s still there and it… it doesn’t feel like I’m seeing a ghost. It feels the exact same as when he was alive. He’s just there, skating, and I… I fucking failed him.”

“We can only control what we can control,” she reminds him gently — a phrase uttered often in these sessions, though the sentiment never seems to stick. “Who else have you seen at the pond?” 

He sighs. “A few weeks ago, Alexei. Svetlana, before that. Yuna, once.” He wrinkles his nose.

“I imagine that’s a strange sight, seeing your boyfriend’s mother in your dreams,” she says with a soft smile.

“Ugh, don’t put it like that,” he says despairingly.

She puts a hand over her mouth to settle her expression. “We’ve talked before about this tendency to look for… predictive signs around you. In peoples’ words, or actions. Or in our dreams,” she acknowledges.

“It’s stupid, I know,” Ilya says with a sigh.

“I didn’t say that,” Dr. Novikov corrects. “But I do think it may be useful to try and explore other interpretations.” She leans in, a little too close to the camera, in an endearing sort of way. He can see some of the flecks of her makeup, pixelated and blurry through the screen. “Maybe seeing Harvey before and after his death means that the dream was never about Harvey. What if it’s actually about you?”

Ilya’s arms cross. “Okay, doctor,” he says sardonically, slumping back into his chair. “What do my dreams say about me? Should I be lying down?”

“Not sure you have enough space there, but you’re certainly welcome to try,” she replies, gesturing to the camera.

Ilya huffs. “Sarcasm is no fun if you just say yes to everything,” he grumbles.

“I’m afraid sarcasm is a little lost on me,” she says gently. “I do know, though, from our discussions, that sarcasm is one of the tools you tend to use when you’re dealing with discomfort. Are you uncomfortable, discussing your dreams?”

“No,” he says, far too quickly. She waits, plaintively, until he grumbles out a reluctant: “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Harvey is dead,” Ilya says, and the bluntness of it surprises even him. “And I keep dreaming about him like he’s alive. I keep dreaming about my mother like she’s alive. I don’t know what it means that dead people and living people all do the same thing in my head, just skate, just circle, just look at me and say nothing — and I feel crazy for caring this much about a dream when Harvey was real and—”

His voice cracks. He stubbornly rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“I tried to help him. And he died anyway. And now he’s in my dream, skating, like nothing happened. And I want to scream at him — why didn’t you let me help you? — but he can’t hear me, because it’s a dream and it’s not real.”

Dr. Novikov gives him the silence. She’s good at that — knowing when the silence is avoidance and when it’s necessary. This is the second kind, so she waits.

“I keep thinking,” Ilya says eventually, his voice rough, “that if I could just understand what the dream means I could — I don’t know. Fix something. Prevent the next bad thing from happening.”

“Let’s assume there’s nothing for you to fix,” Dr. Novikov says, undeterred. “One school of thought is that the figures we encounter in dreams aren’t understood as the actual people themselves, but instead as projections — aspects of our own psyche, our thoughts, our emotions, our fears, our qualities — wearing familiar faces.”

Ilya’s arms stay crossed. “So Harvey in my dream isn’t Harvey.”

“Harvey in your dream might represent something about Harvey that resonates with you. Something you recognize in yourself.” She pauses for a beat before continuing. “Is there any part of Harvey that you see in yourself?”

He slowly uncrosses his arms, pressing his lips together for a long while before blowing out a puff of air. “Someone who is hurting,” Ilya says, “and doesn’t know how to say so.”

Dr. Novikov does this sometimes — let’s his own words echo back at him. He hates it. He hates, especially, when it works.

“And he’s still there,” Dr. Novikov says quietly. “Still skating. Maybe the part of you he represents — the pain you don’t know how to voice — is still present too. Still needing attention.”

Ilya stares at the doodle on the paper in front of him. A series of circles, round and round, going nowhere.

“And Svetlana?” she asks eventually.

“She shows up,” Ilya says. “No matter what. Even when I don’t ask. Even when I don’t deserve it.”

“She is a very loyal friend,” Dr. Novikov says pointedly, raising an eyebrow at Ilya. “I suspect she would say the feeling is mutual.”

Ilya shrugs, blushing slightly. “Maybe.”

“What about Yuna?”

“She is ruthless,” he says with a chuckle. “Will stop at nothing for the people she loves. But also…” he hesitates, then presses on. “She puts so much pressure on Shane. Not on purpose but… she is so afraid to let him fail, I think.”

She makes an affirming noise, then presses further. “What about Alexei? Or your mother?”

“Alexei is… impulsive. And… selfish. Sometimes it’s like, he only knows how to take.” Ilya pinches the bridge of his nose. “And mama… I don’t know. She is… love. But also… fear? That love gets taken away.”

Dr. Novikov nods. Ilya wonders if he gave the right answer, or if there was ever even a wrong one. “So the pond is populated with aspects of yourself — your loyalty, your ruthlessness, your expectations for yourself, your capacity for love, but also, your pain. Your fear. Your want for more. Your need for help that you may not know how to ask for.” She looks up at him, meeting his eyes with her steady grey ones. “And they’re all skating, moving. Present, but silent.”

“Yes. I keep waiting for them to say something. To tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Perhaps,” she says, “they’re showing you that these qualities already exist in you. Maybe your dream is simply showing you what you already have within yourself.”

“Lot of good it did Harvey,” Ilya said bitterly.

“Ilya,” Dr. Novikov says, her tone deftly landing somewhere between somber and kind. “Some losses are not preventable no matter how much we prepare for them. That is the extraordinarily painful truth of living.” She gives him a gentle look. “But the fact that you reached out to Harvey, formed this bond with him — that tells me something about who you are. Not who the dream says you are. Who you actually are.”

Ilya wipes more insistently at his eyes, and lets out a slow shuddering breath. “It’s an…interesting idea,” he says. “But…”

Dr. Novikov sits back, nodding at him to continue.

“Why is Shane never there?” he asks, avoiding her gaze.

“Does that bother you?”

“It used to be a relief,” he admits. “The pond was for people who were…” he waves a hand. “Gone. Lost. And I didn’t want him to be either.”

“And now?”

Ilya’s jaw clenches. “Now it’s like. Everyone else shows up. My dead mother, my dead friend, my teammates, my shitty brother, even Shane’s mother, for Christ’s sake. And I see myself in all these people but not in the person I—” he stops. The words still feel clunky saying them to anyone other than Shane. He takes a breath and tries again. “The person I love, I mean.”

She’s quiet for a moment, then says, “You have spent your entire adult life navigating a relationship with Shane — putting in a considerable amount of effort, trying to build a future with him. I wonder if you are more inclined to see Shane as someone you are seeking externally, rather than a quality you need to locate within yourself. He’s not,” she lists them off on her fingers, “your loyalty, or your work ethic, your pain, or your love. He’s a separate person, with his own inner life, his own struggles. His own — well, if you’ll forgive the metaphor — his own pond.”

The image that comes to mind brings the flicker of a smile — the idea of him and Shane, skating in their dreams — before he unhelpfully latches onto the annoyance that even in their dreams, they are skating separately, rather than together.

***

The season begins in earnest. Ottawa is still terrible. And Shane Hollander is playing the best hockey of his life.

They text. They call. They see each other when the schedule allows — precious nights in Ottawa, or Montreal, carefully timed around road games and back-to-backs. But their mornings are stolen by Shane’s routine — in the gym at 5 AM sharp, every day, no exceptions. When Shane can’t sleep, he watches film, so a handful of nights are stolen that way too. Proximity has brought relief — but also, resentment — that they are so close and still so far. They fall to each other each time they’re reunited — Ilya’s presence eases Shane’s anxiety, and Shane’s soothes Ilya’s heartache. But the secret of their relationship pressing on them, and Shane responds to that claustrophobia by tightening his control, making his rules more rigid, organizing the chaos until it fits inside a container he can manage.

Ilya can see it happening, and he knows — from the painful education of having loved this man across lifetimes — that the worst thing he can do is push. So he doesn’t. He swallows the “I miss you,” that lives permanently at the base of his throat. He doesn’t ask Shane to stay when Shane says he has to leave. He doesn’t complain about the distance, or the secrecy, or the devastation of having to say goodbye hours after having said hello. He’s managing his fears on his own, instead of putting it on Shane.

He’s controlling what he can control. So why does it feel like it’s slowly killing him?

The first fractures, when they form, are not really about what they’re about.

Shane comes out to his team at the beginning of the season, and it’s as well-received as it can possibly be. Shane is lying in the nook of Ilya’s arm on the couch, because both had been so wrung out after sex that neither of them could be bothered to make it to the bed.

Shane’s phone buzzes on the table at the couch. He reaches over Ilya’s head, looks at it once, then rolls his eyes and puts it back face-down on the table.

“Is there a Canada Dry shortage?” Ilya asks teasingly.

“Asshole,” Shane says, nestling happily into Ilya’s arm. “No, just J.J.,” he says. Of all the Montreal players, Ilya counts J.J. Boiziau among the least annoying of the bunch. “He keeps trying to set me up with gay friends of his.”

J.J. Boiziau is a fucking villain and Ilya's known it all along. “And?”

“And nothing,” Shane says, oblivious. “I said no, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Ilya repeats, keeping his voice level.

Shane looks up at him, feeling Ilya shift underneath his weight. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not your nothing face,” Shane points out, and Ilya hears the wariness — the uncertainty about whether this is the sort of thing they can joke about or not.

He should let it go. Or communicate, clearly, calmly, what he’s feeling. Instead, what comes out is: “Do you want to say yes?”

“What?” Shane asks, baffled. “No, I just told you I said no.”

“But…” Ilya struggles, trying to find the words. “Do you want to?”

“What?” Shane props himself up, hovering over Ilya. His face goes tight. “Why the fuck would I want to?”

The thing is, Ilya knows Shane doesn’t want anyone else. He hates himself, in this moment, sees the house he’s built with Shane in his mind’s eye, sees all the tools he’s used to build it, and only thinks about how to tear it down.

He thinks: I have watched you choose other people in a hundred different lifetimes, and the jealousy of it is so deeply encoded in my body that I can’t separate this life’s Shane from every other version. He doesn’t say: I am possessive of you in a way that frightens me, in a way that extends beyond any sort of rationality, in a way that has everything to do with how many times I've had you and lost you and had you again. He means: sometimes I look at you and see the ghost of every version of you that chose someone else, and I want to consume you entirely so that there's nothing left for them to take.

He counts the freckles across Shane’s cheeks as a way to calm his nervous system, trying to find the words that will fill the cracks and fissures between them. “I don’t want you to see other people.”

Shane blinks. “Ilya. I’m not seeing other people.”

“I know,” he says, trying not to be defensive. “I know. But I need to say it. I know you aren’t and you wouldn’t. But... still. I need to say it."

The words settles around them. Ilya loosens his grip, in case Shane decides to pull away, but instead, he slowly sinks back into Ilya’s arms, reaching for Ilya cheek, turning his face towards him. “I’m not seeing anyone else. I don’t want to see anyone else.” And then, in Russian: “I love you. I want you. You are everything to me.” He keeps his eyes on Ilya’s. “Is that enough?”

It should be. Ilya wants it to be, desperately. But the feeling in his chest — that hot, coiled, possessive monster inside — doesn’t ease. His body hasn’t caught up with his mind yet.

He nods, and tries — really, truly, tries — not to hold on to Shane too tightly.

Through all of it, Shane is winning. Shane is always winning — games, awards, the admiration of the league and the players and the fans, and, because he willed it to be, another Stanley Cup. Ilya stays hidden on the wrong side of their secret, so fiercely proud of him, texts him you are fucking incredible after the final buzzer sounds, watching the game alone from Shane’s Montreal apartment. He lies in the dark and thinks about the two of them, skating alone in ponds of their own making.

Another summer. Another bright light that falls just short of the edges of Ilya’s darkness.

They run the camps again — it’s good, the two of them together, building a legacy that bears his mother’s name and Shane’s fingerprints — both embossed in the soft flesh of his heart. J.J. brings the fucking cup, because of course he does, but he can’t even be upset about it when it’s clear that the kids are having such a great time. He gets to stand next to Shane (though not as close as he would like) and touch him (though not in the way he wanted) and even smile at him, every now and again (though always with restraint). It’s another summer of loving Shane Hollander in carefully confined ways Ilya is allowed to love him, and still, more than once, Ilya catches himself watching Shane across the rink, wondering if this would be the last one.

His third season with Ottawa begins and it’s — well, better. It clears the previous bar, which had been on the floor and therefore very easy to clear. But they have an amazing draft pick in Luca Haas, and they have Brandon Wiebe’s inaugural season as head coach. He spends the first team meeting asking each player what they need to succeed, writing their answers on a whiteboard, and promising — without a trace of sarcasm or irony — that he would do his best to provide every single one. Wyatt asks if he can add an all-expense paid Antartican cruise to the list, which gets a lot of laughs, and also, a perplexing amount of questions of why Wyatt would want to take a cruise to Antartica of all places, to which his one-word response is: “Glaciers.”

Wiebe, to his credit, is unflappable in the face of consistent, uninspiring loss. He tells Ilya that he’s "looking forward to working with him,” like Ilya is someone to respect, like he is any way calling the shots. He’s the type of coach who says, “we’re building something here,” without sounding delusional. He makes a point to find one kind, honest thing about every player who takes to the ice, even in the face of an six game losing streak to start the season.

The first time Ilya sees Shane after the season starts, they collide with each other so desperately Ilya feels like there’s a Shane Hollander shaped hole in the cavity of his chest. He fucks him earnestly, and when Shane suggests flipping on all fours, Ilya holds him down on his back, so he can keep his eyes locked with Shane’s. He pulls out in time to come over Shane’s stomach and chest, uses the image of Shane — blissed out and fucked out and wholly his — to quell the possessive monster inside of him.

After Ilya’s cleaned them both up, chasing the warm cloth he wipes Shane down with with his lips, he settles into the bed, stretching out beside Shane and curling into him.

“We have the whole day tomorrow,” Shane says softly. Ilya wonders if Shane means it in gratitude — a rare whole day — or if he’s saying it the way Ilya thinks it: like a whole day couldn’t possibly be a fair trade for the weeks they’ve spent apart.

“I have therapy in the morning,” Ilya says, frowning, reticent to give up any of their time together. “Maybe I reschedule.”

“No, you don’t have to, it’s okay. I can make us breakfast while you’re on your call.”

The mild look of revolt that passes over Ilya’s face is completely involuntary. “Your idea of breakfast is not my idea of breakfast.”

“It’ll be healthy!” Shane insists. “A good source of protein.”

“Will need more happiness than I need balanced breakfast, after the session,” Ilya says, and he’s half joking, but also not. Sessions have been heavier than usual, these days. Last time Dr. Novikov had him digging into his fears of abandonment with the prodding precision of a surgeon who hadn’t bothered with anaesthetic. He finds himself clinging to the bright spots of joy through the fog, even if the source of that joy is a frozen waffle covered in Nutella.

“Therapy sounds hard,” Shane says sympathetically.

“Well, you know I feel about hard things,” Ilya says, unable to resist the double entendre, though it’s delivered with none of his usual flourish. He’s tracing his hand down the length of Shane’s chest, thumbing his nipple, moving down the length of his abs, then back up to his face, a steady path.

“You love a challenge,” Shane replies.

“We have this in common,” Ilya says. Then, without thinking: “Maybe you should try it.”

“Try what?” Shane asks distractedly, leaning into Ilya’s touch.

“You know, therapy.”

Shane stills under Ilya’s hand, and Ilya stills his hand in turn. He’d had the thought before, of course, but was inwardly cursing himself for saying it out loud. “I’m fine,” Shane says, eventually.

For no reason at all, Ilya feels a flare of defensiveness, his annoyance turning outward instead of inward. “I didn’t say you weren’t.”

“Isn’t that why people go to therapy?”

“They go for lots of reasons,” Ilya shoots back. “Maybe they go because they think eating grapefruit and cottage cheese is acceptable breakfast.”

“You know that's not what I eat— look, I don’t need someone to tell me what’s wrong with me.”

Ilya closes his eyes. “Shane, that’s not what therapy—”

“I eat well. I sleep well. I train hard.”

“I know you do.”

“So what are you trying to say?”

“I’m not saying anything!” Ilya snaps, louder than he means to. He pulls away to give himself a little space,  “I am trying to say —- having someone to — to talk to — it might help. With the things you deal with. The stress.”

“I deal with stress fine.”

Ilya snorts.

Shane looks like he wants to snap himself, but seems to catch himself. Ilya’s eyes glance down at his hand, laying between them, frozen mid motion, reaching, and watches it clench into a fist. “I’m okay. I would tell you if I wasn’t.” He glances at Ilya through his lashes. “You believe me, don’t you?”

Ilya looks at Shane — shirtless, and flushed, and still smelling like sex, his hand clenched between them, and thinks about all of the lies they tell the world about who they are to each other. He wonders when they’ve started lying to themselves, under the guise of reassurance: I’m fine. I’m okay. I don’t miss you as much as I do. A whole day together is enough. The distance is fine. The absence is fine. I’m not scared.

He lets out a heavy sigh. “Of course I do, moya lyubov,” Ilya says, and uncurls Shane’s fist with his fingers. He brings Shane’s hand up to his lips, kisses the centre of his palm, and adds another lie to the collection.

Ilya throws a Halloween party, weeks later, and is surprised to see Shane at his door, after all the guests had left. He hadn’t sent Shane any photos of his gladiator costume, this time around, hadn’t tried to entice him to come, but still he’s there, a revelation.

He sees, in his mind’s eye, the taillights of Shane’s car disappearing down the road early the next morning, feels the weight of loneliness settling in on him, even now, hours before he’ll be left with the wreckage of his grief. He pulls Shane in through the threshold anyway.

Troy Barrett gets traded to Ottawa from Toronto, and Ilya surfaces the ocean of his own spiral in time to divert Barrett from a night of drinking on his own in a Vancouver hotel room. He makes Bood take the team out to some Korean barbecue place, and tags along mostly because it seems to be the only way to make sure Barrett actually shows up, though the smile it brings to Luca’s face is an added bonus. It’s probably not enough — Ilya knows one dinner doesn’t fix what Toronto broke, but at least, he thinks bitterly, he’s done what he can to make sure Barrett has others he can rely on — anyone, other than him.

With Barrett on his wing, they win a couple more games, and lose a couple more in turn. Wiebe reminds them to be patient, to trust the process, to put in the work. It’s still early in the season — still plenty of time to turn things around. Harris Drover, the team’s communications director, introduces Chiron, the Labrador-Bernese mountain dog, brought in at first as a “therapy-dog-in-training,” though his actual function, as far as Ilya can tell, is to sit on people — Boodram during film review, Haasy’s gear bag right when he’s about to leave the arena. Ilya tries to focus on play design while shoving his face into the soft fur of Chiron’s side, though truthfully, he doesn’t try that hard.

He takes to walking outdoors — the colder it gets in Ottawa, the longer he finds he can go without being recognized. He wants desperately to call Shane; wants to be reassured. Wants the sound of his voice to be the cool balm on the open wound that refuses to heal over.

I’m supposed to be getting better, he thinks bitterly. He hoped, like his fucking therapist had told him to. He was trying not to deny himself joy, like Svetlana had always said. He was — surely — deep in the wolf-filled forest by now. And it was getting better. He presses the heel of his hand against his sternum, like he can push the feeling back inside. Why is it worse? How is it worse?

He wants. He burns with his want. He wants to feel Shane’s lips on his until he’s sick of the feeling, knowing with certainty he never would be. He wants to wake up next to Shane every fucking day. He wants to call and know Shane will pick up. He wants to be held, treasured, adored — he wants Shane to fall apart in his hands — wants Shane to want to be good for him. He wants to cook with Shane and maybe they burn the food but Shane insists on trying to eat it anyway. He wants to fight about whose turn it is to take out the garbage. He wants to know what Shane looks like when he’s sick, feverish and miserable and needing someone to press a hand to his forehead. He wants to hold Shane’s hand — out in public, on a street, in a restaurant, at a fucking grocery store. He wants to say the word boyfriend out loud in a room full of people and watch their faces and not care what any of them think.

He wants to stop being afraid that wanting these things will be the thing that drives Shane away.

And so, the want curdles. It turns. He wants, and the wanting reminds him that he doesn’t have, and the not-having reminds him that he might never, and the might-never cracks beneath his feet and then he’s falling to the place he’s been trying to clamber out of his whole life: the black, airless void of certainty that he has done everything he knows how to do and it is not enough, has never been enough, will never be enough, because the problem isn’t effort, or communication, or hope. The problem is that he is Ilya Rozanov, and that people leave him, and no amount of therapy, or acceptance, or even love, can change the fact that he is, at his core, someone who gets left.

He stops walking. He’s somewhere on the canal path, half a kilometre from wherever he parked his car, and the wind is cutting through his jacket and his nose is running and he can’t feel his fingers because he forgot his fucking gloves — the gloves his mother told him to wear, a lifetime ago — and he thinks: I am so tired of being afraid.

Still. He is afraid, still. After therapy and the pond and the forest and the wolves. After Harvey and the funeral. After the foundation and the camps and his teammates. After learning Shane’s language and Shane learning his, after every single touch and kiss and tear and laugh, after every single hard-won act of vulnerability he’s tried for in this one, irreplaceable life. After all of it — still.

Ilya pulls out his phone. His thumb hovers over Shane’s name. Maybe he could call, and Shane would pick up. Maybe Shane would say hey in that voice — the soft, breathless voice that’s just for Ilya — and maybe the sound of it would ease the pressure in his chest for an hour, maybe two, before the wanting came back and the spiral started again.

He puts the phone away. He begins the long walk home. He doesn’t call.

***

Ilya wakes up on Boxing Day next to Shane after a too-short Christmas with him and his family, and spends most of the morning bracing himself to ask Shane a single question. Finally, early in the afternoon, he broaches the subject.

“What do you think about heading back to Montreal early?” he asks.

Shane’s sitting on Ilya’s couch. He’s wearing his glasses, which Ilya loves, which leaves him wondering whether Shane’s sitting here, wearing them on purpose. He looks up at Ilya, his brow furrowing, and closes his book, setting it aside.

“I was going to drive back tomorrow.”

“I know, was thinking I would get a run in tonight, go to bed early. Next game is in two days, so…” Ilya trails off. 

Shane’s frown deepens. “Well, I can do that with you. I don’t mind going to bed early.”

“Would be boring, no? And you wanted to see Pike, you said,”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“So you get a visit in tonight, then you have practice tomorrow night, yes?”

Shane takes off his glasses, turning on the couch to face Ilya fully. “What is this? What are we doing right now?”

Ilya takes a deep breath. “Just trying to be. You know — what is this word. Think about what is easier for you.”

“Considerate?” Shane asks.

“Yes, considerate. I am trying to consider you.”

“Well, I want to spend the day with you,” Shane says, still frowning. “Do you not also want that?”

Ilya opens his mouth to defend himself — of course he wants that. How many hours of his day does he spending, wanting exactly that? He tries to say it, but his voice gets caught in his throat, and he says nothing instead.

Shane’s frown darkens. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“What?” Ilya asks, shocked out of his paralysis. “No!”

“Well, then I don’t know what’s happening right now,” Shane says, standing up. He runs a hand through his hair, pulling out the elastic that’s tied it back. “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me. I’ve been feeling it for months.”

Ilya feels the ice crack beneath him. “I tell you everything,” he says, and his voice seems so quiet, so small.

“I don’t know what the rules are, anymore,” Shane says. “I thought we were trying to spend as much time as we could together. I thought that was the rule. But now it’s like… sometimes you do this,” he gestures a hand between them. “Pull away, only it’s like… like I’m the one pulling away. But I’m not! I’m telling you I want to be here with you and you’re telling me I want something else.”

Ilya feels a sudden chill — the shadow of dread passing over him — realizes far too late that he’s already in the thing he’s spent his entire life running from.

“What I want,” Ilya says slowly, “Is to go to Bood’s party with you. And what you want is to say no.”

Shane stops, perplexed by the sudden shift. “Bood — Zane Boodram? He’s having a party?”

“Yes,” Ilya nods. He’s on tape-delay, like he’s hearing himself say the words seconds after he says them. “He’s having a Boxing Day party. I want to go. You don’t.”

The frown passes over on Shane’s face. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re supposed to say no,” Ilya says, and his voice is shaking now. “You’re supposed to say, it’s too risky, and I’m supposed to get upset, and we’re supposed to have this argument, and then I tell you to leave, and you do.”

“What do you mean, supposed to?” Shane asks warily. “Ilya, what the fuck is going on?”

“I mean, we’ve had this argument,” Ilya says. “A thousand times.”

Shane stares at him. “You were literally telling me to go a minute ago. Now we’re talking about Boodram’s party. I’m—- I’m fucking confused.”

“I was telling you to leave to avoid this, but I can’t. I can’t avoid it, because no matter what I fucking do, this keeps fucking happening.”

“What keeps happening — Ilya, this doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know it doesn’t make sense!” Ilya shouts. He runs both his hands through his hair, gripping the ends tight, and then releasing them. “I know it sounds fucking crazy, but it’s true! We have had this fight a hundred times before. The fight where I ask you to be with me, in public, and you say no, because you’re afraid of what you’ll lose, and I say I understand but I don’t, Shane, I really fucking don’t understand, and we fight, and you leave, and then—” His breathing is ragged. He can feel the words backing up behind his teeth, water building behind a dam. “And then I get on a plane and I die and I wake up in a hotel room in fucking Saskatchewan and I do it all over again.”

“Ilya…” Shane starts, but Ilya is already shaking his head.

“I know how it sounds! I know you think I’m losing my mind. But I am telling you — I have lived this life before. I have lived it ten times. Twenty times. A hundred times, maybe. I have had this conversation with you in a hundred different rooms in a hundred different ways and it always ends with you leaving and me dying—”

“Ilya, stop—”

“I’m fucking trapped!” The words come out like they’re being torn from his chest. “I’m trapped and I’m begging you — you don’t know what the rules are? I don’t fucking know what the rules are! Nothing I do fucking works—” his voice breaks. “Harvey wasn’t supposed to die!”

Shane’s face goes white. He stands, unmoving.

“I tried to save him!” Ilya is crying now, tears running into his mouth, he tastes salt and he can barely see the figure that is Shane Hollander in front of him. “I tried, Shane, I fucking tried and he died anyway. Because some things can’t be fucking changed and I keep dying on that fucking plane and I keep waking up trying to do it differently and you’re here telling me you don’t know the rules and I’m telling you I DON’T EITHER—”

The room rings with the echo of his voice. A lifetime of silence passes between them.

“Nothing is working,” Ilya says, quieter now, wrung out. “Every day of this life, I have been trying to do it differently. And you’re here, and you’re telling me it’s not working, and I know. I know it’s not.” He wipes his face with his sleeve. “So you tell me, Hollander. How do I get this right? What will make you choose me? What do I have to do to make you stay?”

Ilya finally sees Shane’s face, past the tears. He doesn’t recognize the expression on Shane’s face — fear, maybe? Confusion, certainly. Hurt? Disappointment? Guilt? Despair?

“I need some air,” Shane says, finally.

Ilya watches as Shane walks over to the door, grabs his jacket from he hook and shoves his trembling hands into his pockets.

“Shane—”

“I just — I need some air,” he says, not meeting Ilya’s eyes.

“Please—”

The rush of cold air sweeps through the room as Shane opens the front door and, without looking back, clicks it shut behind him.

***

He doesn’t know where he’s going — just away, just moving — the road a dark ribbon cutting through snow-covered hills. The heat is on, but he’s shivering, a deep full-body tremor that starts in his hands and moves through his arms and into his chest. He grips the steering wheel and focuses on what he can control — the mechanics of driving: check the mirrors, maintain speed, even pressure on the gas pedal, hands at the nine o’clock and three o’clock watch for ice —

Something is happening.

It starts as a flicker — like a channel changing on a television, a half-second of static between images. He sees the cottage, but it’s different — Ilya, standing by the window, wearing a shirt Shane doesn’t recognize, holding a mug Shane’s never seen—

The dizziness hits without warning. A wave of vertigo so sudden that Shane’s foot instinctively moves to the brake, and he pulls the car to the shoulder of the road, gravel crunching under the tires. He puts it in park, and breathes —

Another flicker. He’s in a hotel room, and Ilya is there — but younger, his hair is longer, he’s saying something Shane can’t hear, like he’s under water, and the feeling that accompanies the image is so sharp and specific and so deeply familiar that Shane’s stomach lurches —

He opens the door and stumbles out into the snow.

He doesn’t even know where he is — how long had he driven for? He’s nowhere near a highway, but he doesn’t see the city either —

Another flicker — the images come in fragments — draft night in the hotel gym, and he’s on the stationary bike, and Ilya’s there. But sometimes, he’s not there? And Sochi — in the stands watching figure skating — alone? Wait no, Ilya’s there. No, he isn’t. He’s waiting for Ilya in the hotel room — no, no Ilya’s waiting for him. No, they’re waiting for each other. “Will you come to the cottage this summer?” he asks, and Ilya says yes, thank fucking God, no wait, he’s not sure. Maybe, he says. He loves him. Shane knows he loves him. Shane’s terrified of how much he loves him. He picks up Russian a lot more easily than he would’ve thought — certainly the words ‘I love you,’ — he’s had to have heard them before. Ilya’s face, younger, older, hair shorter and longer, in light and shadow, smiling, frowning, smirking, the same steel blue eyes.

He’s gasping for air. He spins on his heel, trying to get his bearings, and sees the edge of forest tree-line off in the horizon —

Shane Hollander falls to his knees, with the distinct, inexplicable feeling that he’s lived this life before.

Chapter End Notes

This chapter is dedicated to the enforcers.

I don't think I can ever fully express how incredibly touched I am by peoples' comments and connection to this story, but I'll keep trying!!

The Author Has More to Say So It's Arbitrarily Hiding in a Collapse Code

Duncan Harvey is a fictional character, but the circumstances of his life and death are not. I've never read Tough Guy, but I watch a lot of sports, and I imagine that Rachel Reid and I have drawn inspiration from the horrifying reality of how major contact sports leagues (NHL and NFL, primarily) fail to protect their athletes as people-first. My version of Harvey shares a lot in common with Ilya - depression and suicidal ideation aside: Both Ilya and Harvey are men whose value to others is defined by a specific role that is simultaneously the thing destroying them. Harvey is an enforcer — his team needs him to absorb and deliver violence, and that violence is what breaks his body and mind. The NHL loves him for the exact quality that's killing him. Ilya is a performer — charming, gregarious, the life of the room, the captain who says "I love you" in the tunnel. But the performance is also the thing keeping him from authentic connection. Both men are applauded for the mask. Both are dying underneath it.

A couple years ago, a retired player named Chris Simon died by suicide. This piece was written after he died. It says a lot about what I tried to say about Harvey, only better and without fiction to hide behind. Harvey deserved better, and the real men he's based on deserved better.

On a lighter note: I spent an embarrassing amount of time deciding what art would hang in Ilya Rozanov's home, so it is essential that you know that the Muhammad Ali Sting Like a Bee print is real!

ANYWAY I've left a certain someone on the side of the road, so I'll go check on him and let y'all know how he's doing next chapter!!

thank you thank you thank you thank you for reading.

Songs from the Playlist

If Only You Could Ease My Mind by Art of Sleeping: Hold my fear / I won’t run if you want to save me

In Two by Will Paquin: You do the thinking and I’ll do the holding

Guiding Light by Mumford and Sons: If we come back and we’re broken / Unworthy and ashamed/ Give us something to believe in

Chapter 9: I know the wolf

Chapter Notes

ilya rozanov's experience of the time loop is a manifestation of his depression but shane hollander's experience of the time loop is an expression of his singular need to anticipate and control for variables in pursuit of perfection in this essay I will —

The first time it happens isn’t the first time. But of course, Shane Hollander has no way of knowing that. 

He comes down to the hotel gym because nothing today had gone the way it was supposed to, but he figures if his brain is busy making sure enough oxygen gets to his lungs, it won’t have the time to worry about anything else. Shane settles onto the stationary bike, hunches over the handlebars, and tries to pedal his way out of the squirming feeling in his gut that he’d somehow done something wrong by going second overall in the NHL draft. 

Boston was better suited to Rozanov’s play style, his mom had reassured him last week, when they’d started to become fairly certain that he was going to go second. His mom was thrilled, second-place implications aside; she’d been a Voyageurs fan her whole life, and despite growing up in Ottawa, Shane had practically been raised on Voyageurs hockey. The fairy tale of it all was nothing to scoff at. Not to mention, Shane didn’t want to live in the U.S. This way, he could be closer to his home, playing in Montreal — he was fluent in French for fuck’s sake. By every measure, Rozanov belonged in Boston, and Shane belonged in Montreal, so why split hairs between first pick and second? 

The tiny, squeak of a voice in the back of his mind has an answer of course; insists that if he’d been the best — truly, the best, undeniable by every measure that mattered — Boston would’ve had to pick him. Rozanov’s supposed speed and physicality and affability aside, no one passes up on the best there is. If he was the best, he wouldn’t have to argue his case for a roster spot, wouldn’t have to justify the minutes he took up. The best just was, and the world arranged itself accordingly. 

Going second doesn’t mean he isn’t the best, of course. It just means there’s still something to prove. And he’s an NHL rookie. Reasonably, there’d be something to prove either way. Maybe this is better, going second. Maybe he can be the underdog between the two of them, defy expectations. This is the ideal outcome — the best case scenario, even. 

Logic should be prevailing, but isn’t. He pedals faster, like rationale thought is dangling ahead of him, knowing of course — logically — that the bike is stationary, that he’s not going anywhere and neither is the common sense that stubbornly remains just out of reach. 

And then Ilya Rozanov walks in the room, and common sense is nowhere to be found. 

Rozanov gets on the bike next to him. 



No, wait — he doesn’t.

In the periphery of Shane’s vision, the bike is empty, and Shane has to double-take to confirm that Rozanov is actually sitting there. 

He is. He’s there. Shane blinks the sweat out of his eyes, and there’s Ilya Rozanov, long legs, fabric bunching at his hips, hunched over the handlebars, back muscles flexing under his shirt. 

Rozanov adjusts the resistance on his bike. He hasn’t looked at Shane — yet. Shane adjusts his also. Pedals a little faster. 

There — again. Another half-second where the bike beside him is empty, and he’s alone in the gym, even though he’s supposed to be here with— 

Rozanov. He’s there. The hum of both bikes fills the room. They pedal even faster, then faster, until eventually the bikes start to beep in protest at being pushed to their mechanical limit, and one of them slows — Rozanov first, definitely — and sweat is dripping on the handlebars, and they’re panting in tandem to catch their breath, inhales bleeding into exhales.  

Shane won, of course. He managed to catch a glimpse of Rozanov’s RPM before the machine’s screen blinks off — 132 to Shane’s 134, thank you very much. He’s smiling, getting off the bike. Endorphins, obviously. Exercise is a chemical brain hack, and that’s the only reason Shane’s smiling, certainly not because Ilya Rozanov is the most stunning person Shane’s ever seen. 

Shane resolutely ignores that unmoored thought, and they talk instead — about the draft, about what the NHL and their new home cities would have in store. And then, unprompted: 

“I like both,” Rozanov says. “Boys, girls.” And— did Shane know that, somehow? 

It’s certainly not something Rozanov’s said to him before — they’ve had, what, two conversations, if you count the chirping in the World Juniors finals. Nothing about Ilya Rozanov should have led Shane to believe he was, well, into ‘both.’

I knew that, some part of him insists, and in the same breath, another part answers: no you didn’t. 

They’re propped against the mirrors, and Shane sees Rozanov’s reflection, crisp, sharp, tangible, even. If he angles his view of the mirrors, they reflect against each other, and Shane could lose himself among infinite Ilya Rozanov’s. 

The desire, he reluctantly acknowledges, isn’t new to him. Shane has been grappling with that since December; even he could admit to himself that he’d followed Rozanov’s World Junior performance for more than its tactical merit. He feels that same tug in his chest now, watching Rozanov’s throat bob as he swallows water from his bottle; noticing how his quads and hamstrings flex as he shifts to sit more comfortably on the floor, extending his leg out to touch Shane’s ankle with the edge of his sneaker. He is acutely aware of the various places sweat lingers on Rozanov’s body: along his hairline, down his neck, along his forearms, the inside of his thigh— 

Shane needs to absolutely get a fucking grip. He has a girlfriend. A nice one, even. Too nice to break up with him, despite his best efforts, but still. He didn’t go first in the draft, sure, but in every other respect, Shane’s doing exactly what he’s supposed to. Thinking about Rozanov in that way is not part of the plan. 

“I won’t say anything,” Shane says, because regardless of what he’s supposed to be doing, Rozanov is still risking something, and Shane isn’t an asshole. He wants Rozanov to, well, trust him, he supposes, though he can’t source the urge. Rozanov smiles, like he knows something about Shane that Shane’s still figuring out for himself —  

— the room blinks — another half-second where the room is empty, and the only reflection staring back at him is his own, and Shane feels a cold dread — 

“I believe you,” Rozanov says. 



He’s here. Right here. Shane blinks — once, twice — and the room holds still. They part ways, and Shane heads back to his hotel room. He lies awake for a long time after, and wonders at the ease of it — the heart-stopping magic of being believed. 

The thing is, Shane is exceptionally good at staying in the present moment. 

Mindfulness, his high-performance coach had called it back when he’d been an AAA player back in Kingston. In hindsight, it was a kind of gimmick to get teenage boys to care about things like “flow state” and mental resilience. He was already sold on doing whatever it took to make it as a professional player, so if Coach Levy said that sensory focus and mantra repetitions and visualization techniques would get him to the NHL, then he was more than happy to close his eyes and think things like “inhale confidence, exhale doubt.” 

Shane couldn’t deny the benefits. While he’d always been naturally skilled at hockey, his brain wasn’t always his willing partner in that regard. As a child, he had a tendency to try-and-fail to control unwelcome thoughts. He would try, through sheer force of will, to simply not care how bright the arena lights were, or how stale the locker room smelled, or how frustrating it was that his teammates never seemed to pay attention to drills instead of chittering at the back of the crowd. And each time he tried, he’d find himself caught in a game of cognitive tug-of-war that pulled focus from the thing that mattered: playing hockey. 

It’s more than just wanting to be as competitive as possible, though he’s always been that too. He remembers being seven, or eight, maybe, his parents in the lower bleachers at a hockey practice. In the warm-up, there’s a boy in the lane next to him, who, unconsciously or not, keeps pushing a half-beat harder every time they circle the rink. So Shane decides it’s a contest, and by the third loop around, he’s nearly lapped him, finishing well ahead of the pack. While he waits for the rest of the team, his parents wave him over, and he glides across the ice to the barrier, flushed and panting, gratefully grabbing the water bottle on offer. 

“It’s a warm-up Shane, not a race,” his dad says, chuckling. “You don’t have to win this one.” 

Shane takes a sip and hands the bottle back. “I know,” he says, pulling off his glove and wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I’d also be okay with a tie.”

He acknowledges, early on, that having a short memory is useful. He learns to let go of mistakes quickly — stupid penalties he shouldn’t have taken, getting caught on the wrong side of the play when his teammates are in a puck battle. Focus on the next one, and all that. He knows he’s good enough to make up for whatever happened last time ten times over.



A short memory has other benefits too, like forgetting that the winger he gets saddled with at fifteen is a racist prick who won’t stop making underhanded comments about opposing players during period breaks. Shane barely wants to be in the same room with him, let alone pass the puck to him — he has a pretty good idea what the kid probably says about Shane when Shane’s not around to hear it. But hockey’s hockey, and he’s playing in Kingston, for God’s sake; not exactly the cultural pinnacle of diversity and inclusion. If he has to shed the parts of him that make him different on his way to being great, so be it. 

He’d tested this theory years ago with his mom, when he'd been 13 years old and a new teammate had offhandedly remarked that they’d never seen “an Asian” play hockey so good before, and also, did Shane even speak English? That night, while his parents are cooking dinner, he plops at the table and asks his mom if they’re Japanese. 

Maybe over time, Shane’s memory has imagined her pause at the question. But there’s no forgetting her answer, years later: “Baby, we’re Canadian.”

“But Grandma and Grandpa—” 

“Your grandparents are from Japan,” she acquiesces, setting the knife down. His dad slides in without missing a beat to pick up where she’d left off, cutting the garlic on the cutting board paper thin. “And that is a part of who we are. But this is our home. We were born here.” And then, sensing the motivation behind the question, adds, somewhat fiercely, “You’re as Canadian as any other person who was born and raised in this country.” 

Shane nods. He understands, or he thinks he does: you pick one thing, and that becomes the answer. The rest is colour commentary. It isn’t what you are now. 

So yeah, mindfulness. He can be selective about what sticks if it gets him to the league; do the high-IQ player thing, hone in on what matters, and move the fuck on. He’s always liked being good — likes that it matters to be the best at one thing. Shane figures the efficiency of ‘mindfulness’ comes naturally to him, because it’s simple. He likes simple. Thinking about one thing, visualizing one thing, being one thing — it’s cleaner that way. He’d picked what that one thing would be long ago: the best hockey player in the whole damn world.

The same rule applies here, in a hotel gym, eyes settling for far too long on Rozanov’s lips, on the droplets of water that linger there. It applied six months ago, when he was scouting Team Russia from the top of the stands, watching Rozanov carefully and realizing ten minutes in that he hadn’t once looked at the puck. He isn’t… well, he doesn’t finish the thought. Whatever else he might be doesn’t matter, so he doesn’t give it a name.

It had always been a relief, not having to be anything else. And if Ilya Rozanov wanted to roll the dice on containing multitudes — being Russian, and witty, and beautiful, and bisexual, and arrogant, and more than ‘just a hockey player’ — that was his business. Shane had made his choice long ago. 

*** 

It keeps happening. Shane gets these flashes, every now and again, like he’s seeing all the possible outcomes before they happen. He’s always chalked it up to pattern recognition, his mile-a-minute mentality of reading the play and executing. Only, it doesn’t just happen on the ice. 

When Hayden tells him about meeting Jackie, for instance. Pike says, “I’m going to marry that woman,” and Shane believes him. He doesn’t say, “you’ll probably have four kids with her too,” because that’s an objectively insane thing to say when you’re twenty-one and your best friend tells you he’s met the woman of his dreams. But still, he thinks it. Thinks one of them should be named Amber, too, but hey, it’s not his kid to name. 

The brand deals are another case of predictability. Reebok, Rolex, City Seltzer, Speedo — he lets his mom sort out the particulars because she’s good at it, but none of her gets are a surprise really. He’s got a good knack for following a director’s cues too, probably because he’s so coachable, he thinks, resolutely ignoring the eerie familiarity of hitting his mark on the set of the Wheaties shoot in front of a green screen even though he’s technically never acted in front of a green screen before. 

There’s J.J., whose calls to come to the club, to “partir sur une balloune,” ring like clockwork. Shane figures he gets this feeling whenever he reluctantly goes out, like he knows how the night’s going to play out, because they tend to all play out the same. Go to the bar, sandwich one beer with two ginger ales, make meaningless small talk consisting mostly of nods and a few ‘yeah, no, dude, for sures’ and slip out before anyone can realize you’re missing. 

He’s been told — by teachers, doctors, friends, coaches — that he’s not a “people person” for most of his life, but Shane doesn’t really know what that means. He finds people easy, actually — kind of predictable. Sure, everyone likes to pretend they’re into novelty, but most people are just like him — desperately clinging to the same comforts, the same beats. Shane just doesn’t pretend he wants anything else. He knows people can find that off-putting, his cutting desire for same-ness, but most of the time he just doesn’t have the energy to pretend he wants it any other way. There’s a relief of working with known quantities; the flip-side of the relief that comes with having no one to blame but himself when things don’t go according to plan. 

Ilya Rozanov, on the other hand? Well, he’s a world of possibility. 

He never knows what to expect, with Rozanov. Yes, it’s terrifying, having no idea at any given moment what he’ll say, or do, but it’s also grounding, that the one thing he can always count on is that being in Rozanov’s orbit will make him feel weightless. There’s a delight to it, how Ilya’s touch makes him feel like he’s being electrocuted by a live-wire; how he looks stalking over to him in the too-dim light of a middling hotel room, like pure sex on legs. Rozanov makes him want to break all the previous rules he had for himself — he leans into Rozanov’s hands instead of away from them, breathes in the sweat and musk instead of holding his breath. He finds himself often wishing that he could ask Rozanov to leave scars — bite marks, maybe, or fingerprint bruises. He bites his tongue, holds back the plea for Rozanov to hold him down tight enough that tomorrow he sees signs of yesterday, because he’s meant to be fucking present— 

The flickers are worse, when Rozanov’s around. Shane thinks it’s because there’s just so much more variance to account for. Shane sucks him off for the first time after the CCM shoot, picturing the numbing feeling of Rozanov not even being at the shoot at all. Shane slips into Rozanov’s hotel room at the All-Star game, Rozanov tells him to get on his knees, and he does, while imagining variations on the theme — like what if instead of telling him to get on his knees, Rozanov instead told him to be good and held him tight by the ends of his hair and took him apart in the shower and then on the bed and then against the wall… He chalks it up to being horny, to having an overactive imagination where Rozanov’s concerned. Shane wins Rookie of the Year, but imagines it’s Rozanov up there even as he’s accepting the award, because it really could’ve gone either way. 

He dreams, sometimes, what it would be like without Rozanov in his life to push him, to challenge him, to make him question everything he thought he knew about the world and himself, and decides it’s not a nightmare worth dwelling on when he’s conscious. It’s emptier, dimmer, without Rozanov around. And when he confronts Shane on the hotel rooftop in Vegas, reveals something about the weight of home and how Rozanov carries it — Shane wonders if he’s been taking Rozanov’s presence for granted. The shape of this thing between them is precious, fragile, to be treated with care. So he starts and deletes about a hundred different messages before finally texting Rozanov days later, wanting to know him better. He feels a full body relief at Rozanov’s response: let’s try. Shane’s beginning to understand that to be careful with people and with words is a rare and beautiful thing. 


The decision to learn Russian isn’t so much a decision to learn a third language as much as it is a decision to know exactly what Rozanov means when he punctuates his texts in Cyrillic. 

The message from Rozanov that prompts the decision, by itself, is nothing — a chirp about Moscow weather, if the translation he’s Googled is to be trusted. They’re texting about Sochi, the Olympics just around the corner, and Rozanov’s insistence that Canadians only think they know what real winter is. Shane stares at the Cyrillic at the end of the message until his phone screen goes dark, and he has to tap it to wake it up again. There’s a version of Rozanov that lives in that alphabet, and Shane has never met him. 

It’s for Sochi, he tells himself. Team Canada doesn’t need him to speak Russian, but there’ll be signage, taxi drivers, interviews, menus… it’s a reasonable step. He downloads the usual apps, careful to make sure his headphones are secured before starting the audio lessons. It’s nothing to be ashamed of — no different than when a player learns a little French, or Swedish, to get by with their multilingual teammates. He forgets the headphones when he’s at his parents for the holidays, cheeks reddening a little at the curious look his mother gives him when a Russian voice echoes through his phone, asking how much the bread costs. Shane insists it’s to prepare him for the Olympics, and Yuna, mercifully, believes him. 

In Russia, Shane watches Rozanov recede into himself, and Shane keeps at his lessons long after Sochi is done. The further Ilya retreats, the harder he studies. He’s pretty confident now, he could probably sound out most of the Cyrillic of Ilya’s messages, but it’s been months since Shane’s received a message from him, so there’s no way to know for certain. 

When they finally see each other again at awards night — Rozanov with a Cup and an MVP to his name, Shane with a second-round playoff exit, a brewing sense of resentment, and nothing else — Shane lets himself into Rozanov’s penthouse, and at his request, puts on a show. As Rozanov fucks him into the mattress, he says something in Russian that Shane isn’t sure he heard correctly. It sounds like ideal'no — perfect — but it couldn’t have been. Rozanov isn’t the type.

The distortion — the flickers. They linger in the aftermath of Shane shamelessly, eagerly, presenting himself for Rozanov, raising his ass in the air, begging to be fucked. He sees himself, outside his own body, nuzzling his face into Rozanov’s crotch. He sees himself, two knuckles deep in his own ass while Ilya Rozanov calmly sips vodka and watches. He sees himself, back against Rozanov’s chest sitting in that stupid fucking chair, riding him while he jerks himself off. He sees himself give himself over to this man a hundred different ways, and not once, does Ilya Rozanov kiss him. 

“Why didn’t you kiss me?” Shane demands, not even sure it’s this version of Rozanov he’s angry at, or the infinite reflections of Rozanov he can’t seem to escape in his head. It’s feedback well received: Ilya — no, Rozanov — crowds into Shane’s space, opens his mouth against his, kisses him insistently, and fiercely, and Shane thinks: ideal'no.


Perfect. 

The push–pull between them that follows culminates in the best-worst tuna melt Shane’s ever eaten. He runs from Ilya, not because what he feels is uncertain, but because it’s so certain, so clear, he can no longer pretend it’s something else. What he feels is the kind of thing he doesn’t get to feel if the one thing he’s allowed to be is a hockey player. 

So he leaves. He goes back to Montreal. He dates Rose Landry, who is kind, and laughs at his jokes, and comes to his games, and wears his jersey, and doesn’t make him dance too much. He tells himself: he’s doing the right thing. He tells himself, he’s being responsible. And he tells himself these things in English, because the Russian for what’s actually happening is a word he refuses to look up, even though he can’t shake the feeling he’s heard it a hundred times before. Rose sees through him, of course, and for once in his life, Shane is grateful to be perceived. 

He’s tired of running.

There’s an onslaught of flickers at the All-Star weekend — on the pool deck, and at the skills competition, and on the bench between shifts — and every single one is Ilya, smiling at him, looking at him, translucent ghosts of possibility overlaid against his Ilya, who is here, and real, and did he mention, his? Shane thinks: I love him, I love him, I love him. Like if he thinks it enough times in his own head, it’ll be safe to think it at all. He doesn’t say it, though he comes close several times, rushing Ilya on the ice after their Team East win, sitting next to Ilya on the beach, pinkies brushing in the sand, clutching Ilya tight in the dark as he shares, finally the full shape of his fears of home and his father. Instead, Shane keeps his teeth together and his tongue behind them and holds his breath to keep the words from flooding out of him. 

Then Ilya’s father dies, and he calls from Moscow, and Shane has no choice but to accept that his one thing is this: he is a hockey player who loves Ilya Rozanov. 

*** 

Ilya’s hand is warm on his chest in the early morning of their third day at the cottage, his face squished into the side of Shane’s shoulder. He thinks there might even be a little bit of drool on his arm, which should gross him out, but doesn’t. Shane tries to lie perfectly still, listening to Ilya’s breathing — catching, with a small smile, the moment it shifts from sleep-slow to just slow; he’s awake. The light filters through the windows. His pillow smells like Ilya, and he resists the urge to burrow his face in it. There’s a bruise forming on the inside of his thigh from where Ilya had held him too hard last night, and Shane still wishes he’d held him harder. 

“Morning,” he says finally. His voice is still a little ruined — his throat raw. He sees Ilya’s lip twitch, still pretending to be asleep.

He makes Shane feel like a kid — the way he feels compelled to play along. “I guess… I’m awake.” He keeps his eyes carefully trained on Ilya’s face. “Nothing to do.” 

Ilya responds with a fake snore. 

“It’s too bad,” Shane continues to his imaginary audience, starting to shift slightly in the bed. “I’m so fucking turned on right now, but I suppose I’ll just have to go deal with that by myself.” 

“Mmm, don’t you dare,” Ilya murmurs, finally, sliding his hand down Shane’s stomach to his cock, already stiffening. He palms the head of it for a moment, before continuing, eyes closed, down to Shane’s thigh, to press his hand over the finger-print bruises he recalls leaving there the night before. 

Shane’s eyes flutter closed immediately and he groans at the sensation. “Fuck.” 

“You are too pretty to get yourself off,” Ilya murmurs into Shane’s ear, kissing the tender spot behind it. “You need someone to do this for you — I volunteer.” 

“So…” his breath hitches as Ilya’s hand closes around his cock. “Generous.” And then — because he decides he’s going to stop pretending that he knows how to pace himself around this man — he rolls into Ilya, catches his mouth, tugs at his lips with his teeth. 

It’s a slow unravelling — open-mouthed, and quiet, the length of the morning stretches ahead of them. Shane wants Ilya every way he can have him — fast and ferocious, unhurried and tender. Ilya’s hand on the back of Shane’s neck is gentle while the hand gripping his thigh to hitch it over Ilya’s hip holds tight. Shane reaches a hand down between them, grips both their cocks in one large palm, jutting against Ilya. When that stops feeling like enough, Ilya rolls onto his back, bringing Shane with him. He reaches blindly for the bottle of lube and a condom on the nightstand, knocking over Shane’s glasses and phone in the process of reaching for it. Shane asks if Ilya’s still sleeping as he fumbles to open the cap, and Ilya, laughing, bucks his hips underneath Shane so suddenly Shane’s almost thrown off. 

When he finally sinks onto him, and Ilya’s hands go tight on Shane’s hips, their eyes find each other, and Shane catches the tears prickling at the corners of Ilya’s eyes — assumes it’s the last vestiges of sleep releasing their hold on Ilya so he can belong only to the waking world and to Shane. 

They finish like that. Quiet. Wide open. Shane comes first, and Ilya chases it seconds later, and then Shane collapses on Ilya, his cheek on his chest, and remarks on how seen he feels under Ilya’s gaze, even when Ilya’s eyes are closed. 

“I want you to meet my parents,” Shane says, while they’re still lounging in bed. He’s lost track of the time — doesn’t feel any compulsion to follow a set schedule or routine here, but it’s late in the morning. His phone is still face-down from when it clattered on the floor and Shane doesn’t feel any urge to pick it up. With a thrill, he wonders if this is the latest he’s ever stayed in bed in decades. 

“Interesting timing for this request,” Ilya says slowly. “Not like this, I assume.” 

“Gross, Ilya,” Shane says, rolling his eyes. “Obviously not.” 

“So you’ll let me put clothes on before I meet your mother?” 

“Ilya,” he whines, dragging out the ah. “Stop, I’m being serious.” 

Ilya lets out a short breath. “Okay.” He waits, and when Shane doesn’t say anything else, says, “Are you sure?” 

He’s more than sure, in fact. Lately, it’s felt like they should already know him. The fact that he’s not in a full-scale panic at proposing a parental meet-and-greet to his fuck-buddy-turned-loving-partner three days into their sex retreat only serves to affirm that fact. Shane’s pictured it for years — which he won’t dare to admit to Ilya, of course, but the years of proximity between them have always been an inexplicable pang of heartache. They’ve been in the audience for every shared award night, at All-Star weekends, at press conferences, always in the same rooms, perpetual strangers. He’s struck with a sudden memory — a hotel lobby after Shane had won his first Hart Trophy, his mother’s hand on his arm and Ilya across the room laughing — he’s not sure if it’s even a memory so much as a feeling, that at any given moment, he could be near one but not the other. 

They are, collectively, the people who know Shane best, and yet, somehow, don’t know each other. 

“I have to come out to them, first,” Shane says, reasonably. 

“Okay,” Ilya says. “What else do you need to do?” 

“Oh — I mean. I guess I should look at the brand contracts and see if there’s any like, outdated morality clauses or something.” 

Ilya nods seriously, fighting back a smile. “Do we need to write this down?” 

“Do you think we should— oh, fuck off,” Shane says, pushing to get out from Ilya’s grip when he’s finally caught on to the teasing.

They wrestle for a moment and Ilya fights to pull Shane back to him, and eventually, Shane gives in. His heart feels too full for his body. 

He spends the rest of the week obsessing over the idea — thinking fiercely about how badly he needs to have this. He pictures a future of holidays and weekly dinners and family group chats, and in the same stray thought, pictures all of the ways they will be forced apart. The world has conspired to make them impossible for longer than Shane’s been alive. And Shane can only be one thing. 

There’s so much already working against them. Russia and its laws. The NHL and its culture. The scrutiny that comes with being a professional athlete and a public figure. Shane’s own awkwardness, his tendency to freeze, or run when he gets overwhelmed, his own inability to be more than what he is — just a hockey player. 

It’s not like his fears are irrational. He’s watched it play out in real time. Scott Hunter kissed his boyfriend on national television after winning the Stanley Cup, and even that wasn’t enough. Shane has — ill-advisedly — read the comments. He’s lurked silently in the Voyageurs group chat and scrolled past the things his teammates have said. He has a pretty good idea what they would say about Shane if Shane weren’t around to hear it. 

So he’ll do what it takes, like he always has. Mindfulness. Make himself unassailable. Be the best hockey player. The best captain. Win the most games. Be the most palatable public face. Get good enough at existing in the world, and the world will eventually run out of reasons to take Ilya from him. He’ll wait for as long as it takes.

The next week is Ilya’s last week at the cottage before flying back to Boston. Before Shane can talk himself out of it, he tells his parents he’s gay, and that he wants them to meet his boyfriend, Ilya Rozanov. His dad makes pasta, and Ilya insists on bringing flowers and wine, which is left unopened in favour of the Russian vodka David has stored in the freezer. Shane catches himself watching the scene play out, better than any flicker or version he could’ve imagined in his mind’s eye. There is very little he won’t do for this. He will put his whole, preposterous, disciplined, overtrained body between this and the world. He will do everything the world asks of him and more. He will be so good there will be nothing they can come for him with. He will earn, in this war of attrition, a life in which his mother and his father and the man he loves can sit at a dinner table together, and no one will have the standing to take it from him. 

This is what love does, he thinks. It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to wield time like a weapon against the monsters in the dark. The person you love smiles at you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible for them to smile at you forever. And when it’s just the two of you, alone, in the heart of the cottage, you can pretend that this is how it is. That this is how it will always be. 

He knows, even as he thinks it, that this isn’t how it works. But loving someone is its own form of delusion, and he has decided to believe in his.

***

Ilya signs with Ottawa, and Shane feels himself reach for Ilya, time and time again, and has to physically stop himself from doing so. He feels like a kid, like he has to sit on his hands to force himself not to touch Ilya across from each other at face-offs, in hotel lobbies when they brush past, even in his own parents’ kitchen when Ilya is leaning against the counter, making small talk with his father. He pictures a giant DO NOT TOUCH sign hovering over him, if only to create an imaginary rule that he can train his body to follow. 

The important thing is that Ilya is here. Yes, here sometimes means four hours away, or on a different floor of the hotel, or on the other side of the ice wearing the opposing team’s jersey. But he is extraordinarily self-disciplined, and can will himself not to be greedy. If he lets himself want what he can’t have, there won’t be any room inside him for anything else. 

Then Duncan Harvey dies in January. 

He reads the news alert that comes up on his phone because he’s subscribed to NHL-related news. He knows, distantly, that Ilya had been friendly with players in Chicago, but hadn’t thought much of it — Ilya always had a knack for cultivating unlikely friendships. But when Ilya says he’s skipping All-Star weekend for Harvey’s funeral, he realizes he’s missed something essential. He calls Ilya the night of the funeral, and listens to him holding back tears over the phone. 

Shane hadn’t known that Ilya and Harvey had been close enough for Ilya to feel this kind of grief. After he’s listened to him cry, and offered paltry, insufficient comfort from the other side of the continent, he lies in bed and runs through everything he thinks he knows about his boyfriend, and feels, not for the first time, that the list is wholly inadequate.

He knows that Ilya sees a therapist — a woman Ilya speaks to over video calls in Russian. Shane’s always been so proud of him for that, but also, privately, a little ashamed. Therapy is a door Ilya’s walked through that Shane cannot muster the will to follow him through. 

It’s not that he’s worried that Ilya is alone; by all accounts, he’s not. Ilya has Shane, and Shane’s parents, and Svetlana, and a team that, to Shane’s genuine surprise, seems to give a shit about him. But Shane’s also heard people say that there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely, though he isn’t sure if he has the skill to differentiate between them. He wonders if Ilya does. 

The thing is, Shane sees Ilya as the type who likes to know, in any given situation, exactly how close the edge is. It’s the same impulse that makes Ilya so good at hockey — he never shies away from the instinct to skate toward pressure instead of away from it, to meet the hit, to see what his body can do if he pushes it to its limit. It’s what makes him so exciting to play against. The problem is, Shane figures, if you’re the sort of person who keeps looking for the edge, you eventually find it. 

So he reaches for Ilya without reaching for him. He drives to Ottawa on his off days and sometimes on his not-off days, sneaking into Ilya’s house at two in the morning, sliding into Ilya’s bed and into the warmth of him, and waking him up with his lips on the back of Ilya’s neck. He keeps working at his Russian — learns that not all verbs conjugate with the same rules. He offers himself up — mind, body, and whatever third, fourth, fifth thing Ilya wants. He covers Ilya’s body with his own and hopes that enough of Shane, distributed across enough of Ilya, will seep into the parts that he’s hidden away. Ilya lives somewhere between hurting and healing, and Shane can’t always meet him there, not when he’s spent his entire adult life engineering a life in which nothing hurts enough to need healing. 

It doesn’t feel like enough. Shane doesn’t feel like enough. He can be one thing, and Ilya deserves for him to be infinite things. Shane always retreated to hockey when the world feels like it’s spiraling out of his control. The instinct served him well — he has a lot to thank hockey for, Ilya included. But if Ilya needed him to be something else — someone else, Shane isn’t sure he could manage that. He’s looked, a few times, inward at the architecture of his own mind and has found most of it to be locker rooms and an ice rink.

Ilya, by contrast, could probably do almost anything. Ilya is smart, brilliant — he’s funny in every language he knows. Sometimes, Shane is selfishly glad Ilya is a hockey player, because if he’d decided to be anything else, he probably wouldn’t have given Shane a passing glance. Still. He thinks about what he would have to offer Ilya if it wasn’t being the best hockey player in the world, and finds the answer… lacking. All he’d have left is some stripped-down, under-developed, half-finished version of Shane who’s bet his entire existence on skating with a stick. 

But it’s all he has until he retires. He has one thing to give, so he gives it. 

The flickers come and go, and with them, the ever-present, growingly irrational fear that something will take Ilya away from him. 

It lives in his body in the unexplained trepidation that overtakes him when Ilya drives at night, or when Ilya takes a longer time than usual to respond to a text, or the way he exhales when his flight tracker shows that Ilya’s plane has landed safely. Something will come: the league, a country, a camera, a bad road, a slab of ice, a faulty engine, an ugly rumour. They’ll keep choosing each other until they no longer have a say. 

Sometimes, Shane wonders what it would be like to receive a message from Ilya and know, without knowing how he knows, that it’ll be the last one. 

He gets this feeling more often than he would like to admit; he worries that it betrays some weakness, some impulse or intrusive thought that he hasn’t learned how to control for. He’ll be looking at his phone and see an otherwise inconsequential text — was a nice goal, don't score anymore or what noise is coffee machine making or you look delicious or love you  — and the words will shift, and he imagines the same letters in a different order: 

you know you are the best thing. yes? you know this.

я тебя люблю прости меня я тебя люблю прости прости

don't read this part. skip it. I am being stupid

I am so scared shane

be good to yourself. promise me

if you get this

Shane

I loved you in every one of them

every single one

Shane knows he’s being morbid. He tries to normalize it, tells himself that every person who has ever loved another person has worried about what it would mean to lose them. He tries to picture what comes after, hunts the flickers for some clue, but whatever is on the other side of the messages is unknowable. He assumes that it’s because nothing comes after, because nothing could come after, because to not have Ilya in his life is to simply not have a life. 

Shane shakes the thought off. Inhales confidence, exhales doubt. He loves Ilya Rozanov the only way he knows how: with everything he has. 

*** 

The snow has soaked through Shane’s knees.

The sun overhead is shining too brightly. It’s one of the many dissonant moments of Shane’s life, where what’s happening around him doesn’t match what’s happening in his head. If the weather were to reflect the monumental discovery he’s made about the world and himself, it would be a storm. He’s still trying to catch his breath, gasping like he’s coming up from deeper water than he meant to dive into. 

He does not know how long he stays like that. Long enough for the snow beneath him to melt away into slush. He sits back on his heels, tries to come back to his body. 

Shane has memories that aren’t his but also are. Shane has lived lives that belong to him and also don’t. Shane has Ilya now, but Shane has also lost Ilya, many times before. He’s called it pattern recognition, called it the high-IQ thing, called it instinct, called mindfulness Jesus fucking Christ —

The laugh that comes out of him is not a good sound. He finally understands the joke he’s been telling himself for years. 

Shane stands up. His knees are numb. The car door is still open, and the dashboard is pinging — his key is still in the ignition. A few cars have passed by, drivers curiously slowing to observe whatever spectacle Shane’s making of himself, but none of them stop. Shane realizes, suddenly, that he’s unconsciously started the drive he makes from Ottawa to the cottage. 

It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t be possible. And yet, it is. What Ilya said, somehow, is true. If there’s anything Shane’s good at, it’s going from one thing to the next. It’s his professional specialty: hone in on what matters, and move the fuck on. 

He hurriedly gets in his car and pulls the door shut. The dashboard stops pinging. He starts the ignition, cranks a far too dangerous u-turn, and goes back in time, back the way he came from. The edge of the forest flits past the windows, and he keeps his eyes on the road ahead. Shane presses the gas pedal flat, and trusts he knows the way.

He’s going home. 

Chapter End Notes

listen, ilya does not get a moratorium on obsessive trauma spirals! welcome to the party shane :)

the end is near!! I'm getting emotional thinking about bringing this story to a close, but I hope we can land this plane (incredibly poor-taste pun intended) in a way that is satisfying to us all!

we might be a little over a week getting to our last chapter - playoff hockey is in full-swing y'all, and I'm an east coast girlie trying to catch west-coast games, so sleep is nowhere to be found these days, but I thank you all for your patience!! I'm also anticipating that there will be a small ch. 11 epilogue because I'm a melodramatic hoe who can't resist an epistolary moment, so just wanted to signal that in case you see the chapter number shift in the next week!

anyway, I hope we enjoyed this forray into my take on our boy hollzy. I have.... a lot of thoughts about Shane as a professional athlete and how that manifests for him, so this was my brief homage. is it enough to warrant a shane POV tag? idk, y'all tell me.

your comments are so rich and insightful - i feel like I'm learning new things about the story just by reading them. thank you all so so so much. <3

a bientôt !

Songs from the Playlist

Wolf by First Aid Kit: You’re a drifter, shape-shifter / Let me see you run

Love Takes Miles by Cameron Winter: Lonely as hell, walking around / Without moving, I’m not here

Re: Stacks by Bon Iver: Your love will be / Safe with Me

Chapter 10: who guards these woods

Chapter Notes

into the woods we go —

Ilya hasn’t quite finished his foray through all the stages of grief, but sitting on his living room floor, legs stretched out in front of him, head propped up on the couch cushions, he allows himself until the end of this cigarette to hate his fucking life.

It’s been maybe an hour since Shane left, forty minutes since Ilya’s resigned himself to the likelihood that he wasn’t coming back, five since he pulled out his lighter. The light coming through the windows has dimmed to that familiar muted grey of an Ottawa winter afternoon — the only indication from the outside that time has even passed at all. He keeps periodically twisting the chain hanging around his neck with his free hand, pressing the cool metal of the cross against his skin.

Shane hates when he smokes — would hate that he was smoking inside, but whatever — Shane wasn’t here to comment. He’d left, like Shane always did, and taken his right to protest with him.

The cigarette will be burned down to almost nothing, soon enough. And then what?

He’s had to work hard, this lifetime, to resist the urge to replay out scenes in his head — trying to take the life he’s been given exactly as he’s been given it. But occasionally, even in this life, where he’d tried as hard as he possibly could to embrace the terrifying ordeal of being known, this feeling would settle in his gut — that there were things he should’ve said, gestures he could’ve made, that would have convinced Shane to stay. He grasps tightly onto this lifeline, even now, as though he had any control over the truth that had been torn from him.

Fuck this, he thinks furiously.

Because, truly, what else was there to say? Fuck this. Fuck the should’ves and would’ves. Fuck this speculating and wondering. Fuck this trying and trying and trying. Fuck this hope that Shane would choose him, that Shane would believe him, that Shane would love him enough to stay. Fuck this waiting for something to happen that was never going to happen.

He’s not even mad at Shane. It’s the helplessness of the situation. There’s no denying, especially now, that Ilya is just a passenger of his own life. The world took and took and took until the only pieces left of him were broken and splintered, and he was left lying in the great, dried-up river-bed of what could have been. The universe was begging him to see, to understand: the catastrophe was Ilya. His very existence was an affront to the forces of nature.

He takes a long drag from the cigarette. Ilya isn’t within arm’s reach of an ashtray, and he has half a mind to ash it against the leg of the couch, but suspects that if he did, if the plane didn’t kill him in ten days, Shane probably would. So he pushes himself off from the couch to reach for the half-empty mug of cold tea Shane had left behind, sets it on the floor beside him, and flicks the cigarette against the rim.

Ilya had tried. That’s what gets him most of all. He’d thrown himself out to sea. And when he’d felt the tide of inevitability pulling them both under, he’d reached for the truth he’d been circling, lifetime after lifetime, coming in closer on each pass. Shane stood in front of him saying I don’t know what the rules are, and Ilya had realized, with an exhausted kind of clarity, that he’d been the one making the rules, and that the rules had been crushing them both, and also, that he was so fucking tired of carrying them.

So what else was there to do, but grab the words within reach? If this lifetime was evidence of anything, it was that words could do extraordinary things. But sometimes, they are just not enough. Ilya was getting tired of relying on words.

Another drag. His finger slips as he tries to ash his cigarette in the tea mug, and it falls to the bottom of the cup. Oh well.

Ilya muses over the possibility of grabbing another cigarette, certain that Shane probably isn’t coming back. Then again, he’d been certain about a lot of things in his many lives — that staying off the plane would save his life, that being some curated version of himself would make him undeniable, that giving up Shane was the kindest thing he could do to both for them both. By the numbers alone, Ilya has a poor record with certainty.

But at some point, he has to recognize that he has no control over anyone — least of all Shane.  Maybe it wasn’t himself he’d thrown out to sea with his confession, but rather, Shane. That was a helplessness he hadn’t accounted for — the futility of throwing someone you love to an ocean of truth and praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and there’s nothing you can do other than watch. Ilya doesn’t blame Shane for not being able to hold the weight of him.

And yet.

He can’t find it in him to regret it. Shane deserved to know who Ilya actually was.

He tips his head further back onto the couch, staring up at the too-white, too-high ceiling overhead. There was an undeniable novelty to the situation — this revealing of everything, of holding nothing back. There had always been a part of him trying to stave off the terror of this very outcome: of being fully known, and still abandoned. But, he’d said it. And his heart was still beating. His lungs kept expanding. His body didn’t seem to realize that this was the thing that was supposed to kill him.

Yes, he’d fallen into a deep, dark, unkind hole.

But I’m not dead yet.

He twists the cross on its chain, then twists it back, laying it flat against his collarbone. The metal has gone warm under his hand.

And then, the door opens.

Ilya sits up so quickly he gets whiplash. The steeped ash sitting in the mug next to him sloshes on his wrist as he quickly moves to set it on the table. He stands, drying his wrist hurriedly on his sweat pants.

Shane is standing in the entryway.

His coat is unzipped, hanging open. His hair hangs loose around his face, wet at the ends from snow. His face — Christ, his beautiful, freckled fucking face — is completely unreadable. Ilya has spent quite a few lifetimes studying this face, and he can’t remember a time he’s ever seen it look like this.

“Shane,” Ilya says, his voice reedy, thin. He clears his throat and tries again. “Shane.”

Shane crosses the room. Ilya thinks, for a moment, that he’s going to walk right past him, like he’s come back because he’d forgotten a bag, or a wallet, something essential he couldn’t leave without. He marvels, faintly, at the fact that Shane hasn’t even taken his boots off, that he seems so unbothered by the trail of slush he’s dragging in—

Shane’s arms wrap around Ilya’s shoulders.

“Oh,” Ilya says.

Shane says nothing. He squeezes the air out of Ilya’s chest, burrows his face into the crook of Ilya’s neck. He holds him, possibly tighter than Ilya has ever been held.

Ilya tenses for a moment — maybe from the shock of the cold snow melting through Shane’s jacket onto Ilya’s skin, through the fabric of his shirt — before instinct kicks in. His arms wrap around Shane’s waist. He can feel Shane’s heartbeat kicking against his chest. He feels something damp against his neck — more snow, maybe? But Shane pulls away for a moment, trying to catch Ilya’s gaze, and Ilya sees his eyes are red-rimmed and watery.

“I shouldn’t have.” Ilya rushes out, before Shane can say anything. “We don’t have to talk about it. Was being crazy — was a— a bad dream—”

“Ilya.”

“Forget it,” Ilya says, pleading, all his earlier musings on courage and truth forgotten, because what if he only has ten or so days left? What if this is all he has? “Forget what I said, yes? I’m sorry—”

“Ilya,” Shane says again, firmly. One hand goes to Ilya’s face, and Ilya inhales sharply at the cold. He cups Ilya’s jaw, thumb brushing against his cheek. “Stop. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I ruined our last day together—you— you left.”

“I came back,” Shane insists. Ilya’s head feels fuzzy, only catching every other word. “I’m so sorry. I should have stayed. I was just…” Shane shakes his head. “I can’t really think of the right words right now.”

And Ilya can understand that, can’t he? The lifelong journey of attempting to find the right words to give form and name to the wild, churning expanse inside him. “Do you want to try in Russian?” he asks, trying to find the levity that would float them out from the dark unknown they find themselves in.

Shane doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t let go of Ilya either. His hands slide down to rest around Ilya’s neck. He takes a breath, the way he always does when he’s about to switch to Russian, and says, in Ilya’s native tongue: “You were right. I believe you.”

The words land in Ilya's chest like a stone dropped into still water. He feels them going down, down, down.

“What?” Ilya manages. The air has been cut off to his lungs.

Shane starts, then stops, then switches to English, to give him one less thing to think about. “What you said. About the fight. That we’ve done this before. All of it. You were right.”

“I was?” The buzzing in his ears has grown louder. “Shane, what are you—”

“It’s not just you,” Shane says. His eyes are still wet, but his voice is steady. “My… my memories. They don’t make sense. It’s like — déjà vu? I think? But for things that haven’t happened. Though I guess, they have?”

Ilya goes slack jawed, as Shane speaks. His hold on Shane’s sides loosens slightly. “For… for how long?” he asks.

“I didn’t realize until today — until you said,” Shane swallows, and takes a steadying breath. “Always. I think — Ilya, I think always.”

It’s hard not to feel like the floor is dropping out from under him. He reflexively squeezes his hands into Shane’s jacket, releases it, then squeezes it again. It had been so long since he’d contemplated the possibility of being with someone in this endless, tumultuous torment of lifetime after lifetime that he doesn’t quite know what to do with the knowledge that he’s not alone.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Shane says again, after Ilya says nothing. One of Shane’s hands has twisted unconsciously into the ends of Ilya’s hair. “I should’ve — well, I didn’t know. But I feel like I should have known.” Ilya watches his eyes carefully, wishing not for the first time that he could know Shane’s mind the way he feels he knows his heart. “It's like I’m just catching up to something you’ve known forever… for longer than forever, even.” He hesitates suddenly. “Do you need me to give you some space?” His eyes flicker down to his arms, still around Ilya. “Is this okay?”

What a funny question. What could possibly be not okay about being held by the love of his life? He wishes Shane would never stop holding him. He wishes Shane would go back to holding him tighter, actually, so he could spend the rest of his life being slightly crushed by this man who loves him.

“You’re not leaving,” Ilya says, both an answer and a question.

Shane presses his lips together and shakes his head. “Never.”

Ilya nods, accepting this. He should have so many more questions, but something about Shane’s resolve makes everything inside him go quiet. “Okay,” he says. Then he puts his hands on either side of Shane’s face and takes his mouth with his.

Ilya feels like he’s thawing. Shane seems reluctant to put more than a breath between them, and Ilya is all too happy to take advantage, even if they have things to discuss, space-time-continuums to sort through, words to say—

“I need this,” Ilya says, between kisses, cutting what he’s certain will be Shane’s protests off at the knees before they can materialize. He leans into Shane until their foreheads touch. Shane is not leaving. Shane is here. “Please, please, I need to feel you, I need you on me, please.” He’s switched to Russian at some point, he can’t place when, and because Shane aims to please he listens and leans back in, and the kiss becomes searingly hot. He feels Shane’s hands stroking down his back, over his ass. Ilya remembers—Christ—that first time, how they’d kissed so fiercely his lips had felt swollen for hours afterwards, his mouth bruised. Ilya groans now into Shane’s mouth, at the feeling of his tongue brushing against his teeth, the spit and slick of it. He keeps his eyes closed, feels the press of the kiss along the line of his jaw, on the indent of his temple, the ridge of his brows. He’s so, achingly hard, dick straining in his pants, high on oxygen, but revels in the feeling of it — of being so in his body — that he’s disinclined to do anything about it.

He pushes Shane’s jacket off his shoulders, has to do it one arm at a time since Shane seems so unwilling to release his grip from Ilya entirely. He sees that look glaze over Shane’s eyes — has seen it a thousand times, the second before Shane drops to his knees — and holds fast to his arms to keep him at eye level.

“What?” Shane asks, dazed. “I want you.”

“I know, my love,” Ilya says, still in Russian. They do this sometimes, in the throes of it — Ilya in Russian, Shane in English — using their language as scaffolding to reach each other across worlds. “You have me. You have me anyway you want me.”

“I missed you,” Shane sighs — and it’s a silly thought, Shane was gone for barely an hour, but Ilya, of all people, can understand how hours can skip past, stones on the ponds of lifetimes.

Ilya laughs, not at Shane, but at the disbelief of being with him, both in space and in time. He pulls him back, tripping over his own feet. “I’m right here,” he murmurs, catching his lips. “I’ve been right here.”

They make it to the bedroom, eventually. Ilya doesn’t pay attention to how. They move and undress and lay themselves down in the covers like they’ve done it hundreds of thousands of times before, and Ilya thinks, watching Shane’s mouth drag down the hair on his belly to his cock, perhaps they have. Shane licks it, kisses it, tips it into his mouth. Ilya groans, God— he used to be so fucking proud of his ability to take Shane apart, but now— he pushes at Shane’s shoulders. He has to show him— fuck — Shane moans softly, the soft slide of his velvety lips — he has to make sure Shane feels him everywhere, needs to meet Shane in every place he’s ever loved—

Ilya flips them around, works Shane open, slides his fingers in, three, then four, until Shane, voice strangled, lifts his head up from the pillow. “In me, fill me, fuck, Ilya—” and he’s so hard, he’s leaking, his dick leaves a wet trail along Ilya’s chest and abs as he slides himself back up to kiss Shane hard on the lips. Ilya presses in, the tight heat sucking him in, and Ilya would give him everything— but no, he doesn’t need to give him everything because he has built Shane within him — wonders what of Ilya is in him—

“I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in skies. Across mountains. Fuck—” Ilya feels like a man possessed, the words tumble out of him, Russian and English intermingled, everything is coiled tight, every muscle flexed, Shane is moaning in Ilya’s ear, Ilya’s hands are on his chest, then slides one down to grip the underside of one of Shane's enormous thighs. He hikes Shane’s leg up until its hooked over his shoulder, and his cock is so hard and hot inside of Shane, every thrust makes his nerves light up, he feels like he’s on fucking fire— “I’ll be all the poets and artists and songwriters — I’ll kill them and I’ll take their place so that I can be all the people that ever had fucking thing to say about how much a person can love another person—”

“I’m yours,” Shane says, reaching, grasping for him, and Ilya’s hand finds his. “You’re mine.” His pupils are blown wide. “I love you.”

A lifetime of searching for the right words, and Shane picks seven of the most ordinary ones and slots them in Ilya’s heart just so.

He reaches down, wraps his hand around Shane’s cock, sweeps the pad of his thumb over the head of it, and Shane gasps, his breath stuck in his throat—

“Ilya— fuck—”

Shane’s leg slides off Ilya’s shoulder, and Ilya surges down, swallows Shane’s breath as Shane comes in ropes, splattering between them.

Ilya moves, as if to pull out of him, and Shane’s arm shoots up, grabs Ilya’s bicep. “No,” he says, his voice hoarse, “no, keep going, I want it, I want you—” and he goes pliant as Ilya fucks him full, and lets go.

Ilya’s trembling, his arms shaking — Shane is as well, he realizes, his thighs, twitching involuntarily. They’re both sticky and filthy with sweat and come. Ilya takes a few deep breaths as he pulls out, and moves to go find something to wipe them both down, but Shane’s hand is still gripping him tight, and he shakes his head, pulling Ilya down to fall into the crook of his arm.

“In a second,” he murmurs. “Let me hold you.”

Ilya lets himself be pulled in, and nods. “Okay.”

Later, after Shane’s allowed him to grab a damp cloth to clean them off, he lies on his back with Shane’s head on his chest, playing idly with Shane’s hair. He’s lost track of how long its been, but figures he has a few more minutes before Shane’s instincts rush in, to organize and solve and sense-make, and—

“Explain to me how it works.”

Ilya sighs, continuing the steady motion of his fingers running across Shane’s scalp. “I don’t know,” he says, truthfully. “I think if I understood it I wouldn’t still be…” he traces a circle with his finger in the air.

“Just try,” Shane insists, lifting his head up into Ilya’s hand, and fuck him for knowing that Ilya’s never known how to say no to those stupid dark eyes of his.

“There is this fight,” he says, reluctantly. “You and me. It has always been — a bad one.” He feels guilt squirming in his gut, forcing Shane to confront the reality of their relationship across lives, and all the ways it fails them both. “Bood has this party, and I want to take you — I ask you to come with me, and you say no.” He makes a face. “Sometimes there is no party, but there’s— this choice. This choice to be together, or not be together.” He shakes his head. “I’m not explaining it right.”

Shane is quiet, letting Ilya stumble through without interruption, so he continues.

“Once, it was about a charity event — thought we could go together.” He presses his lips to form a tight line. “Or, a trip — a vacation, somewhere warm. Suggested we go to the beach, once. I guess you didn’t want to see me in a bathing suit, that time.” He tries for a joke. 

“And I say no,” Shane repeats, not smiling.

“Sometimes, I say no,” Ilya says, offering the words like a balm. “Like today. I try to avoid it. Keep you away from me, a little, but you always — I mean, you can usually tell, something is wrong.” He tips his head back to look at the ceiling.

“Okay,” Shane says, though nothing about this is okay, and they both know it. “Then?”

“Then usually a couple weeks later, I get on a plane, and the plane goes down,” he rushes out. “And I wake up at 2008 World Juniors and I do it all over again.”

“Saskatchewan,” Shane says. “You said that.”

“Yes. Before the gold medal game. Day after we met.”

Shane considers this for a moment. “So you’ve been reliving the last twelve years.”

Ilya swallows. He’s never had it spelled out quite so plainly before. “This is the saying, yes — time flies?” he tries meekly, looking down at Shane, who’s eyes haven’t left his face.

“Ilya, that’s…” Shane sits up, and Ilya reluctantly allows him to, sliding his hand out of his hair. “You remember all of it? All of them?”

“Only bits. Pieces. It is a long life.” He’s not trying to offer reassurance, necessarily, only the truth, but the words come out that way anyway. “It is not a perfect memory. Some things I remember better than others. It’s more like… flashes. Like a dream.” Shane shifts against the headboard of the bed, finally tearing his eyes away to look down at his lap. Ilya turns on his side to face him. “You said — your memories…”

“It’s not the same for me,” Shane says. Ilya can hear the tinge of frustration, as hard as Shane tries to bite it back. “I’m not… I don’t remember waking up in Saskatchewan, or— It’s more like… more like a feeling, I guess. I’d see you and I’d think — I know what he’s going to say, and then sometimes, you’d say it. I’d watch you play and think, I’ve seen this move before, and…” He waves his hand as he trails off, lets out a hollow laugh. “I thought it was because I knew you so well.”

“You do, moya lyubov—”

“But not well enough to realize what was happening,” Shane says simply. “You’ve been stuck, and I’ve just been… been letting you be stuck.”

Ilya’s shaking his head. “You couldn’t have known,” he says, sitting up himself, reaching across to Shane’s cheek, turning his face to him. “I’ve never told you before today.”

“Not just that, Ilya, I mean, fuck, I wish I could’ve clued in to these — these loops, but,” he reaches up for the hand at his face, and holds Ilya’s hand in his, bringing it down between them. “You want to be out.”

This… was not the direction he’d expected Shane to go. “Well… not exactly.”

“Try to explain, please. I need to… I need to know what you want.”

“I don’t know Shane,” Ilya says tiredly. “I don’t know if I’m ready to be out, to have people know me like this. But some days…” he pauses, then presses forward, feeling Shane’s hand in his. “Some days it feels like the weight of this secret will crush me.”

Shane is silent, but squeezes Ilya’s hand while he considers this. Finally: “I’m scared.”

Ilya lets out a small laugh himself, more an exhale than anything. “Me too.”

“I don’t know what will happen if—” he shakes his head. “What if we can’t keep playing?”

There it is, again. The dichotomy of their lives, laid out before them. “Hunter is out,” Ilya points out, then shakes his head. “Sorry, bad example, will think of hockey player from this century—”

“Ilya…” Shane warns.

“Barrett is gay,” Ilya offers instead. “He is not out, but, we know there are others. It is possible.”

“I just… I don’t see how.” Shane sighs, frowning. “I don’t see how we keep playing this sport and get to be together. I want to be wrong. I’m just… I’m scared of losing what we have. We deserve to play until we decide we don’t want to anymore. We’ve worked so hard.”

Ilya sighs, pulling his hand out from Shane’s. “I’m scared too. But if this is the choice — the choice between this,” he gestures between them, “and hockey — and everything else that comes with hockey…” he exhales out a shaky breath. “Would you choose me?”

Shane’s eyes widen. Ilya wonders if he’s there now, seeing the question play out across lifetimes. “Yes,” he says finally, firmly. “Ilya, yes.”

“You would?” he asks again, earnestly, but still disbelieving — he can’t help it, having spent so much of his many lifetimes convincing himself the opposite was true. “Would you, truly?”

“I would,” Shane insists. “Ilya, I do. I choose you — as far as I’m concerned, I made that choice a long time ago.” He combs his hand through his hair — it does nothing to make it look less a mess than it did a second ago. “It’s, well— if it weren’t for hockey, you wouldn’t have chosen me.” A pained expression passes over his face.

“Shane…”

“No, look, it’s not like, woe is me, or whatever. But everything about me is hockey. If I wasn’t the best player in the NHL—”

“Fuck you, second best.”

“—would you have even given me a second look?” Shane continues without missing a beat.

“Well, it’s the same for me, yes?” Ilya asks, curiously.

Shane scoffs. “Be serious, Ilya. Look at you. Everything about you is— fuck. I don’t know. You’re smart, and beautiful, and funny. When you retire, you’re going to be fine. You’ll, fuck, I don’t know, become a broadcaster,” Ilya makes a gagging noise, “or coach, or become a mysterious, sexy recluse.” Ilya smiles fondly, makes a pillow with his arm, shifting to rest fully on his side, looking up at Shane. “And then I’m— everything about me, is just—”

“There’s no just about it, Hollander,” Ilya cuts in sternly, quietly reeling at the depth of Shane’s insecurity.

“It’s who I am,” Shane insists. “I like who I am. But outside of hockey, I’m not…” he trails off, avoiding Ilya’s eye. Ilya reaches up, tugging Shane down, until he relents, mirroring Ilya, resting on his side, arm crooked underneath his head. 

“I love you. All of you. The hockey and the not-hockey.” Shane blinks as Ilya finds his hand again, carefully interlocking their fingers. “The not-hockey bits especially, some days.”

Shane smiles, soft. “Just some days?”

Ilya’s brushes his lips across their interlocked fingers, delighting in the way they went Shane, then Ilya, then Shane, then Ilya, all the way to their thumbs. “Today, especially,” he murmurs.

Shane blinks slowly. His eyes are still wet. “I choose you, Ilya. We’ll… we’ll figure it out. I’m… I’m tired too. Of carrying on like you’re not the most important person in my life. I’m tired of lying.” And the way he says it, Ilya know he’s been carrying that exhaustion possibly as long as Ilya’s been carrying his. “You’re my whole heart. I won’t lose you.”

Ilya says nothing at that. He kisses their intertwined hands once more, lets his lids fall heavy. He wants to believe Shane — wants to believe that love is all they need, against time and death and all the forces conspiring to keep them apart. He’s just not sure it’s enough.

“Marshmallow,” Ilya says in Russian, after a while.

Shane lifts his head from the pillow, brow furrowing for a moment as he translates. “Are you calling me a marshmallow?”

Ilya kisses his smile into Shane’s forehead, switching back to English. “No, I mean, I want some — s’mores,” he decides, clinging to the sudden surge of nostalgia and cottage summer nights. “I want s’mores.”

Shane shakes his head. He tugs Ilya close, pulling him with Shane off his side of the bed — decidedly the long way around. “Whatever you want.” And isn’t that something — maybe Shane hasn’t figured out how to say no to Ilya, either.

Ilya doesn’t have graham crackers, or chocolate squares, or, in fact marshmallows. But he has a sleeve of plain salted crackers from when Yuna and David had brought him soup a few weeks ago when he’d had the flu, and he has some leftover Reese’s peanut butter cups hiding in a cupboard from Halloween. Shane victoriously finds a box of those pre-made hot-chocolate mixes, gifted to him from one of the Centaurs staff, with miniature marshmallows inside. Ilya watches, heart far too full, as Shane opens up a few of packets onto a plate and painstakingly picks out the marshmallows one-by-one.

“Do you remember us first hooking up?” Shane asks, absorbed by his task.

Ilya understands what he means. “You mean— from before.” Shane nods. “Yes, some of them.”

“Is it always like it was?”

Ilya smirks. “Do I always make you come in twenty seconds, you mean?”

“Asshole,” Shane mutters, carefully gathering the marshmallows in his hands and bringing them over to the baking sheet, where he’s carefully laid the crackers down, and the peanut butter cups on top. He’s setting the marshmallows now, precisely, using the pad of his finger to keep them still. “I mean, is it always… good. The way it was?”

Ilya wants to keep prodding and poking fun, but Shane’s question is tender, would bruise too easily— a real marshmallow of a question, he thinks. “It’s perfect. Every time.”

Shane nods, seemingly satisfied. “What about, um, Rose?” He winces at the face Ilya makes. “Really? Every time?”

“Just… most times,” Ilya confesses. “Is not so bad, you could do much worse than Rose Landry.”

“I’m sorry,” Shane says. “You have to go through all this — wait for me to realize that it’s you I want to be with.” He catches a marshmallow rolling away, then offers it to Ilya, who pops it in his mouth. “I wish I could… go back and undo it.”

“I don’t,” Ilya says simply. “Is who you are. A man who loves me and won’t accept anyone other than famous movie star as his beard.”

Shane busies himself with the baking sheet, setting the oven rack as high as it’ll go, and sliding their makeshift s’mores directly under the broiler. He turns the oven light on so they can watch the sugar bubble up and blister.

“And Ottawa? You always leave the Bears?”

“Usually, yes.” Ilya leans next to Shane on the counter facing the oven, keeping his eyes trained on the air, bending in waves under the heat of the oven. “Have tried, you know, other things. Stayed in Boston. Gone to other teams. But.” He shrugs. “Is not worth it, if we’re not together.”

Shane considers this, then slumps a little, dropping his head onto Ilya’s shoulder. “You can’t die,” he says simply.

Ilya turns instinctively to kiss the top of his head, notes how they are both avoiding each other’s gaze for this. “I don’t want to die.”

“You don’t?” Shane asks, and Ilya has to remind himself that Shane, contrary to his own misgivings, does know Ilya, exceptionally well, well enough to know that Ilya carries wounds deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

“I don’t want to die today,” he says honestly. “Most days. I usually don’t want to die on the day I die.”

Shane turns to kiss Ilya’s shoulder. “But some days?”

Ilya combs his hand through Shane’s hair, then gently urges him up so he can catch his eye. “Some days I think I could want to. But, it is like…” he shrugs. “Like weather. It comes and it goes. Most days, it goes.”

Shane nods. The freckles splattered across his nose and cheeks have faded a little in the depths of winter, but they are still there, still Ilya’s for the counting. “I can’t lose you,” Shane says. Ilya hears the difference from Shane's earlier words that evening. Not, I won’t — the words of a man perfectly willing to break the world to prevent the worst from happening. I can’t — the words of a man that is beginning to understand, finally, that the world is just as capable of breaking him right back.

Ilya leans in for a kiss — their lips just barely pressed against each other. He says, against Shane’s teeth, “I think the marshmallows are burning.”

Shane pulls away frantically to salvage the melty, sugary Frankenstein concoction he’d pieced together for Ilya’s sake. What he’d said was true. He wants this life — the life where his boyfriend humours him on bad days and challenges him on good ones — this life where the person he loves may wander away, sometimes, only because he is pushed and pulled by the tide of his feeling, and even if he goes where it takes him, he always finds his way back. Ilya does want to live.

Curious, how when you love someone, they become your reason. It’s as simple as that. Simple, he amends, and complicated, as most true things are.

They eat their s’mores standing by the kitchen window. The sun has set now, and snow is falling steadily outside, gently blanketing the neighbourhood. Ilya savours the melted chocolate, runs his tongue over his top teeth to prevent the chocolate and marshmallows from sticking. Shane allows Ilya to feed him one bite, catching Ilya’s hand as he pulls away to suck the melted chocolate from his fingers.

They don’t talk for a while, after that. They clean the mess Shane tracked in when he arrived, and Ilya brings them to the couch. Shane tucks himself under Ilya’s arm, one hand splayed over Ilya’s stomach.

“Have you tried—” Shane starts.

“Yes,” Ilya says, already knowing where this is going.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Shane insists.

“Yes, I do,” Ilya replies pointedly. “I have had a much longer time to think about this than you, Hollander. There is nothing you can suggest I have not thought of myself.”

Shane bites his lip, falling silent. Ilya hears the clicking and whirrs of gears turning in his mind, finally extricating himself from Shane’s hold so they’re sitting facing each other on the couch. He waves his hand in a flourish in Shane’s direction. “Fine. Go.”

“Have you tried a different flight?”

“Yes.”

“Have you tried not flying with the team?”

“Yes.”

“Have you tried missing the game?”

“Yes, Hollander, yes.”

“Have you tried—”

“Buying the team a jet? Yes. Driving instead of flying? Yes. Faking an injury? Yes. Real injury? Yes. Missing two games? Three games? The whole season? Yes, yes, yes.” 

Shane frowns. “Okay, you’ve made your point.”

“Haven’t tried getting giant weather machine in the sky to cancel the game for me,” Ilya muses.  “Maybe we try this next.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Good idea, write that one down.”

“Well, we need to be thorough, Hollander,” Ilya retorts smoothly. “Maybe you finally agree that I should get my pilot’s license so I can fly the plane myself.”

“Sure, that can also go on the list. At the bottom,” Shane huffs out. “Below teleportation and chartering a space shuttle.”

Ilya chuckles, a dry laugh that only barely eases the pressure in his chest. “There is something in me that is on that plane, no matter what plane I am on. I do not know how to stop it. I think I have probably tried everything. I—” he hesitates. The thought’s been nagging him for hours, since shortly after Shane stepped back over the threshold. “I don’t know that we should try anything else.”

A dark look passes over Shane’s face — there it is, the look of that I won’t, again — “Ilya, no.”

“No, listen. I’ve never told you before. Maybe that’s what’s different. And maybe the rest just— just is.”

“But what if that’s not enough?” Shane insists. “You said it’s — it’s what, ten days from now?” he asks, digging out his phone, already shaking his head as he clicks into his schedule. “We play Washington, that day. Well, fuck it, I’ll just skip it.”

Ilya’s eyes widen. “Shane, no, you’re not going to miss your game.”

“Ilya, you’re telling me that this plane goes down.” The tears have welled up in Shane’s eyes again. “You can’t expect me to play a fucking game if I know you’re— you might—” He chokes off, squeezing the tears out of the corner of his eyes. “Fuck, I hate this.”

“Sweetheart, look at me,” Ilya says, covering Shane’s phone screen with his hand to push it down. He reaches for Shane’s face, catches his chin with his fingers to tilt him up to meet Ilya’s eyes. “Missing your game won’t help. What does this accomplish, hmm?”

“I’d— I’d meet you in Tampa. Or—”

“No,” Ilya says firmly. He’s caught in a sudden vision of Shane being there, seeing them carry his body from the plane, and shakes his head vigorously. “I don’t want you anywhere near Tampa.”

“You don’t get to make this decision alone,” Shane insists. “What if it were me? And I kept dying—”

“Well, it’s fucking not,” Ilya snarls, not willing to entertain the discussion further. “It’s me, and that’s how it’s been and I don’t want you getting any fucking ideas about trying to make it go differently.”

Shane makes a face that reminds Ilya, distantly, of all the other times he’s seen him on the other side of a face-off. He catches Ilya’s hand in his. “You don’t get to need me more than I need you,” Shane says, voice steady. “If you died — Ilya, I would die. A part of me does die, every time. Don’t you get that?”

Ilya’s been on both sides of this grief. He’s not sure which is greater — to be the one that leaves, or to be the one left behind. “Whatever is causing this — magic or science or the universe — it doesn’t care about us,” he says fiercely. “Time doesn’t care about us.”

“That’s why we have to care about each other,” Shane says, tiredly. “You have to let me love you.”

Ilya feels weary, defeated. He leans his head on the back of the couch, and Shane follows him there. He wishes he still had anger in him, wishes for his ferocity. But he's wrung out — like damp kindling that won’t light. “Don’t come to Tampa. Please,” he says quietly. “Let’s just keep going. Maybe this is enough.” Please, let it be enough.

Shane reaches out to catch the tears streaking down Ilya’s cheek — he doesn’t remember putting those there. Shane doesn’t say anything, and Ilya doesn’t know where that leaves them. He thinks he catches an imperceptible nod, but perhaps not. They have learned, if nothing else, to lie to each other tenderly.

“Whatever happens,” Shane says finally, “however it happens. I’ll find you,” he promises, and Ilya never feels so mortal as when he stares directly in the face of Shane Hollander’s conviction, pure and unflinching. “I’ll find you, and I’ll know you, and I’ll love you.” He takes his free hand to trace the outline of Ilya’s face. “Okay?”

Shane’s face is soft, and beautiful, and bright — a sun full of stars.

“Okay,” Ilya says.

That night, Ilya decides that each kiss pressed to Shane’s skin somehow slows time, so he drags his lips down the scar tissue along his collarbone, the centre of his chest, along his sides. He kisses Shane like he’s starving for it. Shane keeps them awake until midnight, then, with a smirk, goes down on Ilya, with a reminder that, if what Ilya’s said is true, Shane’s never sucked his dick on December 27th, 2020, and he was in the record-making business, after all. They fuck, and kiss, and Ilya tries to satiate his insatiable hunger for Shane Hollander, who, for once, knows him fully and completely.

The next morning, they drink coffee at a table by the window, and Shane makes them protein pancakes, which Ilya, reticently admits, aren’t terrible, and they talk about their next few games, and Shane gives his thought on Wiebe’s line changes, and they look at Hayden’s family holiday photos, and they don’t try to plan or solve. Ilya doesn’t tell Shane what a good job he’s doing at not letting the impending inevitability of his death ruin their morning, and Shane doesn’t reveal one of the many lists Ilya is sure Shane was working on late into the night.

The only indication, from the outside looking in, that all is not as it should be, is that Shane suggests missing practice at several points, each of which Ilya firmly shuts down.

“We should not set such a dangerous precedent,” Ilya says wryly, clearing their plates.

“For staying with you?” Shane shoots back. 

Ilya kisses the top of Shane's head as he stands. “For avoiding everything else.”

When it’s finally time for Shane to leave, Ilya kisses him slow, against the doorway, and then again, in the threshold of the open door. “I’ll see you soon,” Shane promises and then he gets in his car and drives away.

Ilya watches him go. He’s gripped by that same old, instinctive fear — that the last time he sees him will be the last time he sees him. He tries to put down his fear of the future — decides it is too heavy to carry. Wherever they’re heading is where they’re heading. He picks up the present instead.

***

The Centaurs first game after the holiday break is in Buffalo, and they lose. Ilya’s turnover rate is abysmal — an errant backhanded pass that gets tipped away on their power play, leading directly to a short-handed goal. On the plane back, Ilya leans his forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the grid of farmland slide underneath them, and thinks about the fact that if his life does indeed only have eight days left, he spent one of them losing to fucking Buffalo.

played like shit, he texts Shane from the tarmac when they touch ground, already seeing the typing bubbles pulsing back, a fraction of a second after he hits send.

McCord’s been on a tear. Not your fault, comes the message back, and Ilya rolls his eyes, but takes the offering of reprieve for what it’s worth, and puts things in perspective.

at least I’m not dead yet, he tries, letting some of his teammates file past with the sort of tired dejection that only comes from a particularly rough road loss before stepping out behind them. 

Not funny. Ilya chuckles, locking the phone, and sliding behind Hayes out into the airport. 

They lose to Boston at home two nights later, and while Ilya would typically take a loss to his previous team as a personal affront to his honour, he finds he can’t quite source the rage. After he showers, and dresses, and delivers on a perfunctory media scrum, he sits in the locker room, long after the rest of the team has filed out and accepts that he can’t even make himself care about the fucking Bears when he half-believes and half-doesn’t that he’s going to die in six days. He declines the offer to go out with some of his old teammates. Instead he spends an hour thinking about how to respond to consolation message from Yuna, and her invitation in the family group chat for Shane and Ilya to join them for dinner next week after Ilya’s road trip if their schedules would allow it.

The home loss to Pittsburgh the night after that is uglier. He gets a holding penalty in the first period and a completely unjustified slashing call in the second. When he gets called for hooking in the third, he's already skating to the box before the whistle has blown, and they lose 5-1. Even Wiebe has a hard time spinning this one, but he nods through the post-game pep talk and thinks about how he is supposed to be the captain of this team, and that he’ll need to figure out what it means to be the captain of this team if he is, against several lifetimes worth of evidence, still alive next week.

After the game, on the way to the player’s lot, Barrett falls into step beside him.

“You okay, Roz?” he asks.

Ilya glances sidelong at him. “Yes,” he says, and then, surprising himself, he thinks of Harvey, and says, “No, actually. Not really.”

They haven’t spoken much since the holidays. Their last conversation had been in December, when Barrett had knocked on his door to console him after an equally painful loss to New York.  Here though, Barrett nods, like they’re old friends, simply accepting the truth of Ilya’s not okay. Ilya muses over the Troy Barrett of lifetimes past, and wonders if some people are just people you are meant to share a story with.

“If you need anything…” Barrett offers.

Ilya nods. “Thank you.” Barrett’s face seems carefully composed, like he’s uncertain how the offer would be received, but otherwise, gives little away. “Am… working on something.”

“Cool,” Barrett says. He hitches the strap of his bag higher on his shoulder. “Hope it’s what you need. I’m around, either way.”

They walk out into the lot together, and Barrett peels off towards his car, lifting a hand goodbye without looking back. Ilya stands by his own car for a moment, his breath materializing in a fog in front of him, watching Barrett’s taillights pull out of the lot. He thinks of Dykstra, and Bood, and Wyatt, and Luca, of his old teammates in Boston, of Coach, of Svetlana. Thinks of the promise of next week, to Yuna and David.

Yes, he might die, but he’s alive now. And yes, sometimes living is heavy, and hard, and complicated, because fear makes it so. But maybe Ilya’s done what he can, to surround himself with people who will help him carry the weight of it. He feels the cross hanging on his chest. Maybe he carries them with him.

So when they win against Carolina, Ilya lets himself imagine, surrounded by the joy of the locker room, being the captain of this team, winning with this team, having a family dinner next Sunday, and bringing Shane to Bood’s next party, and getting a dog, and raising a family, and being thirty years old, and spending all his summers in the cottage.

Because who knows? Who knows anything, really. Who knows what will happen next, or who’s pulling the strings, or why, or how? Who knows if he’ll loop again, or he’s looping now, or if his fate is just a matter of how he tells the story of his own life. Everyone grapples with mysteries in their own way, and just because he can’t see what happens after the plane from Raleigh to Tampa, that doesn’t mean time doesn’t carry on. No one can see the love he holds in his heart for Shane Hollander, which is proof that some of the most wonderful and powerful things in the world are invisible.

He opens his phone for a message from Shane even though he knows there won’t be one waiting for him — not since the я тебя люблю Shane had sent this morning — what with Montreal’s game against Washington starting soon. He lets the wave of the team’s celebration carry him to the airport. The tsunami of grief and revelry and anguish and bliss and love — the heal and the heartbreak of it all — it all rises up to meet him, as he settles in the plane, in the seat by the window, and buckles in.

***

At the boundary between space and sky, forty thousand feet in the air, Ilya thinks of the dream he’d once had in Regina, Saskatchewan, of falling in love with Shane Hollander.

He falls in love, again, and again, and contrary to Shane’s concern of the difficulty of restarting, it’s easier, actually, every time. It’s like walking into a cottage he’s been to before, and recognizing the furniture, and the pictures on the walls, and the utensils in the drawers, and the books on the shelves, and knowing exactly where the edge of the land meets the water. He could find his way around this love in the dark, if he had to.

What was the exact moment Ilya fell in love? He can’t remember, now. He can’t imagine how such a infinitesimal moment could contain such an enormity of feeling. Maybe that’s why he keeps going back. Maybe it’s because the love he feels for Shane couldn’t possibly fit in one lifetime — it’s the strength of years, centuries behind it, a moment crafted in time long ago, that Ilya arrives at, again and again, the place he was always meant to be.

The seatbelt sign clicks off, and Bood gets up to stretch his legs, and Ilya clutches the cross that hangs around his neck.

He is not the same man who had that dream. He is changed. Just like everything around him is changed — his team, and his city, and his relationship, and the people he loves. He catches the faint outline of a cloud outside — a dark shadow over a dark silhouette — and thinks that clouds, like light, and stars, and waves, are all in the process of making or unmaking. Everything is in a state of change. He wants that — needs that — to be enough. He knows he is not perfect — does not dare to be. There is light, after all, pouring out of the cracks of his fractured self, and he needs that light to see—

The plane jolts.

He promised, Ilya thinks. The team hasn't realized yet what's about to happen, as laughter echoes around the cabin, Bood stumbling on the floor. But Ilya does knows, and alone in his knowledge, the thought anchors him: Shane promised to find him. To know him. To love him. Or Ilya would find Shane — dark hair, dark eyes, freckles — like he has a hundred times before. They were tethered, and maybe there’d be knots, and twists, and loop-de-loops, but they would always find their way back, even through the unknown of a boundless wood —

A loud bang echoes through the cabin, and the plane drops, and everyone screams and —

He opens an Instagram message to ShaneHollanderHockeyPlayer.

I love you, he writes. Always. Maybe from the first time I saw you.

There are no words. That is what lifetimes of finding the last ones have taught him — that when the future comes to collect what you owe, you’ll find you’ve already paid what you have to the past. He squeezes his eyes tight, trying to prove to himself that there’s no limit to what his heart can carry —

His phone vibrates in his hand. He looks down.

I loved you first.

He blinks, frantically wiping the tears from his eyes. Shane. Shane is —

Actually, we can tie, ShaneHollanderHockeyPlayer says, and Ilya—

Ilya tunes it all out. The plane on fire. The captain overhead. The rattle of the engine. Because Shane is not playing hockey right now. Shane is, somehow, here, with him.

I’m sorry, Ilya types. I don’t want to leave you.

You won’t. The messages come, one after another, like Shane is sitting next to him, murmuring them in his ear. You won’t leave me, because you’re with me. You’re always with me. And I’m always with you.

The tears cloud Ilya’s eyes — his hand shaking as he finds the letters on the keyboard. You are my whole heart, he says. You keep me safe.

We guard each other, Shane types. I’m right here.

The plane tilts — to one side, then the other — and then the thud of the wheels hitting the solid ground below reverberates through his teeth. His team — his beautiful fucking team — cries out in relief and joy and —

we landed, he types, and then his phone is ringing in his hand, a voice call through Instagram, and he doesn’t even process that he’s answered until he already has—

“Ilya.”

“I’m okay,” he rushes out. “We’re okay.” His throat has closed, and the noise around him feels deafening, and the flood of emergency vehicles surrounds him. 

“Where are you?” Shane asks. “Do you know where you are?”

Ilya shakes his head, still stuck somewhere between laughing and crying. “Where are you?”

“I’m here. I’m in Tampa.”

“You— what?”

“I’m waiting outside, okay?” Shane sounds like he’s crying too. “It’s fine. It’s okay. We’re okay, like you said.”

Ilya nods, takes a second to process what’s happening around him — his teammates clapping each other on the back, some of them, also on the phone, Harris reaching for Barrett—

“I’ll find you,” Shane says through the phone — his voice skips — probably the WiFi — but even every other word is a word worth catching. “We have time. I’ll find you, okay?”

“Okay,” Ilya says, smiling. “You find me.”

“I’m coming.” Shane says. And the call drops.

Eventually, he’s ushered off the plane, along with his teammates. He thinks, as he stands at the top of the metal staircase that’s been wheeled to the the plane doors, that he’s never seen any of this before — not stairs, not the great expanse of the tarmac, not all the other planes coming and going.

“Roz,” Bood says behind him. “Holding up the line.”

There’s no memory waiting at the bottom of these stairs — no trapdoor of recognition, no ice cracking beneath his heel. There’s Ilya, and, somewhere, beyond the edges of this terminal, there’s Shane.

Ilya takes a step. Then another. The metal creaks underfoot. He slips into the rest of his life, and goes to make the world his own.

Chapter End Notes

well !! I, like these beloveds, am also at a loss for words, which, if you know me (and for those that have been following, I feel that you really do, in some ways!) is an unusual circumstance.

I struggle with endings, for all the obvious reasons, but I believe that stories find a way to carry on, and we are blessed with a rich and beautiful fandom that allows us to live in a world where Shane and Ilya really can fall in love again and again.

this ends the story proper, but we have an small epilogue to go, probably coming later this week :)

to quote Ilya Rozanov: I love you, I love you, I love you.

see you soon !

 

Songs from the Playlist

Stay Alive by Mustafa: A plane in the sky, the only starlight on this never-ending street

Cosmic Love by Florence and the Machine: Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too / so I stayed in the darkness with you

Sometime Around Midnight by The Airborne Toxic Event: So there’s a change in your emotions / And all of these memories come rushing / Like feral waves to your mind

There Will Be Time by Mumford & Sons, Baaba Maal

Chapter 11: he knows the way through (epilogue)

Chapter Notes

The Player Tribune

I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Ilya Rozanov | Ottawa Centaurs | September 24, 2021

You don’t owe anyone your story. But, there is a part of you that wants others to know. So, okay, you try to tell it, in bits and pieces, reveal the parts of yourself you have decided you are okay with sharing. But still, it is not the whole thing. 

The problem is, now, everyone thinks they know the whole story. This is what happened with my mother, I think. When Shane and I announced the Irina Foundation in the fall of 2018, which raises awareness for mental health and suicide prevention, I shared that it was named in honour of my mother, who struggled with depression and eventually took her own life. People hear me tell this story, and they think that her depression and her suicide is her story. It is not. It is not even the end of her story. That honour rests with her children, and her children’s children. Maybe through us, she will live forever. Wouldn’t that be something. 

This story doesn’t tell you very much about my mother. It tells you nothing of how she worked very hard to give me and my brother a good and happy childhood. She made sure the news was never playing when we got home from school, because news in Russia in the nineties was usually not good or happy. Sometimes she would take us to get chebureki from the street stalls — this is like, deep-fried pizza pocket, very delicious. She was always the one to start circle dances at family gatherings — was funny, how uncles and aunties would look at her, waiting for her to decide it was time to dance. And then she gets up, and everyone would smile, because finally! The party can start now. 


This story doesn’t tell you about how my mother took me to the frozen pond by my grandfather’s cabin and taught me how to skate. The last time we raced, I was seven years old, and she was still faster than me, and so in my mind, she will always be faster than me, even now that I am a professional hockey player who got drafted first overall in the NHL. Very convenient, mama, that we do not get a rematch. Some things, you do not get to take from your mother. 

Photo: A black and white portrait of a young woman in her twenties, photographed from the shoulders up. Her hair is pinned back loosely. She is wearing a dark sweater, with a small cross on a thin chain hanging around her neck. The photo is posed; she looks like she has been told not to smile but still managed a faint one at the corner of her lips. The photo has a grainy quality to it.

Caption: My mother. Moscow, 1989. 

When you lose someone, especially when you are young, you only ever want to remember the good things about them. Your life with them was already cut short, why dwell on hard memories? Except, remembering only the good things is like only remembering half the person. Irina was a whole person, who deserves to be remembered as a whole person. She was playful, yes, but also, stern, when we did not keep our rooms tidy and perform well in school. She was indulgent, yes, but also uncompromising in her expectations for her sons to be good boys who attended church and listened to their parents. She was so happy, except for when she was so deeply sad that she slept for what felt like days. 

I didn’t know my mother was going to die. But after she did, I felt like, if I tried hard enough, I could be ready for any other bad thing that might happen, by pretending bad things weren’t so bad. I have spent a lot of time trying to control things around me by picturing how I want them to go in my head. This was how I tried to heal the scar that her death left on me — by pretending there was no scar. But the scar is always there. It doesn’t go away. 

When you feel like so much of your life is like trudging through knee-deep water, like every step is dragging you under, it is a miracle to have one thing in your life that is easy. That is what hockey was to me: the easiest thing in the world. 

In Russia, focus is on skills. You keep your head up, eyes forward. You look down, or look back, and it’s over. Emphasis is on flow, short passes, like chess on ice. Coach would tell us never to dump the puck. You circle and pass to get it into the zone. If you dump it, then you have to work twice as hard to get the possession back. You don’t have to work to get back something if you never let it go to begin with. 

Also, it is not Russian hockey, to just shoot the puck and score as many goals as you can. (This is a big shock, I know, because Russians are very good at scoring goals). No, the rule is: you play for your partner. You play for your team. Every shot is a risk, and every risk must be calculated. 

“But what if I know I’ll score, coach?” I would ask. “Is it okay to shoot it if I know I’m going to score?” 

“The puck does not belong to you, Ilya,” coach would say. “Even when it is on your stick, it is not your puck. Even when it looks like it belongs to you, you are not its master. You do not control it.”

So, after coach gives me this speech, I remember I had this one game where I scored thirteen goals. After that game, I had that feeling again, like I knew exactly what was going to happen, every time I skated onto the ice. I would score. We would win. 

Coach said I was allowed to shoot the puck, after that. And mostly, I’m right: I score. We win. 

Photo: A team photo of the 2008 Russia World Junior team, posed on the ice. They’ve tried to form three neat rows, but the teenagers are instead collapsing on each other, holding up the gold medals hanging around their necks, some holding up their index fingers: number 1. They are holding a banner: WORLD CHAMPIONS: 2008 World Junior Championship. At the front, sitting on the ice, trophy in his lap, is Ilya Rozanov. While most of the boys are laughing, looking at each other, jostling ea ch other, some caught mid-blink, Ilya is grinning, looking directly at the camera.

Caption: 2008 World Juniors, Regina. We won.

There are exceptions. I lost the World Juniors in 2009 to Canada. I lost the 2010-2011 season scoring race. I lost Rookie of the Year. Yes, it is no coincidence that many of my losses come to Shane Hollander, second-best hockey player in the world. I lost many, many games playing for the Bears, and many, many more playing for the Centaurs. I understand now, like I understood then, that it is impossible to win every time. And still, I believed, every time I took to the ice, that I knew what would happen next. 

At the start of each game, when you walk out through the tunnel, and all you see is centre ice and all you hear is the crowd, it’s hard to see or hear or consider any other possibility. Maybe this is why they call it tunnel vision. I am still learning this truth: thinking you know what’s going to happen is not the same thing as knowing what’s going to happen. Even if you are brilliant like me and convinced you have it all figured out. The more convinced I was that I knew what would happen next, the more the future would close itself off to me. This is what happens when you put your head down, and only see the puck, instead of keeping your head up, eyes forward, to see all the spaces on the ice you and your team can go. 

Another thing about Russian hockey: we are not so big on fights. An old inheritance from Soviet-era hockey. We mostly have Anatoly Vladimirovich Tarazov, Father of Russian Hockey, to thank for this. He famously said: “Fights defile hockey. They pervert the essence of the sport.” I suspect Coach Tarazov would have some not-so-nice words to say about the Centaurs vs. Voyageurs playoff series last season, where I dumped the puck twenty times, scored with a shot from the blue line twice, and got into three fights. Even though we won, they say Tarazov was a purist, and he cared about winning “the right way,” whatever that means.

I used to tell Duncan Harvey that he would be a big deal in the KHL. “They need lots of fighters in the KHL?” he asked. No, they don’t, Harvey. That’s the point.

Hockey was supposed to be for Harvey the thing it was for me. The easiest thing in the world. The thing that gets you floating when you feel like you’re drowning. But for Harvey, for Sam Moreau, for Dennis Brimiard, for Roy Riddisdale, hockey was not that life raft. In hindsight, I have been asking a lot of a physical, violent sport known for its racism, homophobia, and general disregard for safety. But you can’t always choose the thing that saves you.

After Harvey died, I went back through every text I had with him. I didn’t have many. I read them backwards, looking for the missing clue. Here? Was it here? Should I have called? Should I have asked one more time? I tried to be a detective of my own friendship. How could I see every single thing that will happen next, and not see this? 

Harvey, Moreau, Brimiard, Riddy — they played the same game as me. They struggled with depression and substance use and mental illness. We talk about them in past tense, and they’re just gone. I have more in common with these men than most would realize. There are times I wonder if I might be next. 

I wish Harvey could tell his own story. It might not be a story of highlight-reel goals, or record-breaking hat tricks. But once, he sent me this video of a highland cow. You ever see these? Did not know they had these in Canada. So cute. He sent it with no caption, just the cow. I think he sent it because he thought it would make me smile. It still does. 

Harvey was a good friend. I miss him.

Photo: Apart from the specs of grass and the faint, blurred, out-focus shape of a white fence in the background, the frame is taken almost entirely by the face of a Highland cow, shaggy red-brown coat, with a long fringe covering its eyes and an enormous wet nose. The cow is eating what looks like an apple out of an outstretched palm. 

Caption: Photo credit: Duncan Harvey 

Maybe it is true, that some things can’t be changed. That we cannot rid hockey of violence and danger altogether. But let us at least try to listen to Tarazov. Let’s not defile hockey with dangerous culture that encourages harm. This is a beautiful game, but it is not worth dying for.  

It is important for you to know that, yes, I have been bisexual the whole time. 

I know, we are covering a lot of ground here. Maybe it is a bit much to have mother who died from suicide and to be bisexual and to be depressed yourself. Would be enough of a list without being the best hockey player the world has ever seen. I am maybe hogging all the fun. 

Being bisexual is not as fun as you might think. Ah, but you don’t have to choose between men and women, you can be with anyone, is not a real risk for you, Rozanov! No. Of course not. People don’t realize, maybe, what it was like in Russia, and what it is like now. Before 2013, Russia was as progressive as any other place  — there were people, like me, and we were mostly left alone. Was not such a crime, to love people of the same gender. Then anti-propaganda law was passed. Then, anti-blasphemy law. Then, adoption ban. LGBTQ+ people are harassed, arrested, censored. 2014 Sochi was a difficult time. On one hand, I am asked to represent my country on the largest world stage. On the other hand, my country is making it very clear they do not want people like me to exist. 

But, I exist. Even on days when I sometimes I wish I didn’t, still, I exist. 

After “the cat came out of the bag” (funny saying, this one, who is out here putting cats in bags), after the playoffs, Shane and I sat in a Tim Hortons parking lot and planned our wedding. We googled for a justice of the peace, and picked out our wedding bands, decided who we would invite, and then after this was done, we got a box of timbits for the Irina Foundation staff meeting. (Before you say anything, do not worry, we got donuts too, we wouldn’t be cheap like this).

Anyway, now Shane Hollander is my husband!!!!!!!!!

I asked Player Tribune not to take out any of my exclamation marks. They have promised me they will not. 

You might ask me, what does it mean to you, to be out? Mostly, it means I go to the grocery store with Shane and we argue over whether to buy name-brand spices or store-brand. And then we hold hands in the parking lot sometimes if the cart isn’t too full. It means, Shane and I get to walk our dog, Anya, best girl in the world, through some of the trails near Ottawa, and nod at other people and say “hello” when they pass. You know this is a rule, all hikers must do this. It means, sometimes I post a photo of Shane on my instagram, and people comment “wow, nice pull,” and I reply, “duh, amazing pull, actually, I have exceptional taste.” 

The thing is, I’m here thinking I know what’s going to happen next. And so is everyone else. They think, if queer and trans people play sports, and are maybe, amazing at them, it will upend society as we know it. If people love who they love, and be who they are, this will somehow compromise deeply held beliefs about how the world works, what is normal, and what is fair. They are so certain that these debates about peoples’ identity and right to exist will distract from the game. 

I cannot speak for all LGBTQ+ people, but I will say this: I agree. These debates are a distraction.

So let’s stop having them and let people play the fucking game! 

How many of us who play this game need this game — have looked to this sport to be a lifeline when things are dark and hopeless? Queer and trans kids, they need this just as much, if not more, as any other young person. I have seen it first hand at the Irina Foundation camps, when kids can just exist, no reservation, and play the game they love. All these people who are trying to “preserve” the best of hockey, do you really think you would have the best version of this sport without Shane Hollander? 

Photo: A cluster of young players on an ice rink – the backs of forty or so kids pooling out of the edges of the frame, wearing mismatched jerseys, half of them in helmets, half of them holding their helmets in their hands. At the front of the crowd, a group of coaches stand in a loose line. Most are laughing or smiling.

Caption: Game Changers Hockey Camp, Ottawa, July 2021. Coaches, left to right: Scott Hunter, Wyatt Hayes, Ryan Price, Leah Campbell, Max Riley, Zane Boodram, Shane Hollander, me.

I wish I could tell these people: when you spend so much of your life thinking that you know what’s going to happen next, it is kind of amazing to be wrong.

I wasn’t wrong about everything, of course. The league is still the league. People talk a lot of shit. Not everyone is so eager to accept that the best players in the NHL are in love and are married and spent their honeymoon partying in Ibiza.

But everything I was afraid of, none of it even comes close to comparing to the joy and happiness and elation (I looked this word up) I feel getting to play the sport I love with the man I love. Sometimes I look around at my life and think — wow, is this my life? Really??

First day of Centaurs training camp this season, we have a new Russian rookie, Demyan Marchenko, you will know him soon, very good winger. He comes to me before the first drills, and he is, you know, nervous. I am wearing my jersey, I am wearing the C, obviously I am a big deal to Russian players, so this is expected. He says, “Captain Rozanov—”

I tell him, “Call me Ilya. Or Roz. Rozy, after your first goal,” because see, I am trying to be a good mentor. I am ready. I am gracious. I will be the person this young man looks up to. 

He says: “Mister Captain Ilya, could you introduce me to Shane Hollander?” 

Because this is why you are really here, yes? You read this far because you are dying to know what it’s like to play with Shane Hollander. Okay, so I will tell you: 

He can shoot at full speed, from anywhere in the zone. Some scorers, they have a spot. Hollander’s spot is that whole area from the blue line to the boards. He’s going so fast sometimes, you have no idea what’s coming next, because he’ll either put the puck on someone else’s tape or just let one go. He can make you believe he has no idea where his linemates are, so you keep your eyes on him and forget that he leads league in assists four out of last six seasons. But he knows. Always, he knows. And, I would never tell him this, of course, but he’s got the best wrister in the league. Back in Boston, scouting report on Hollander used to show us these crazy shots of his, how he uses the defender’s legs to his advantage to screen the angle, with this once-in-a-generation shot. I kid you not, defence asks Coach, “How do we defend it?” and LeClaire says: “You hope he misses.” 

I mean, come on. I am only human. How can you not fall in love with a guy like that? 

Photo: The edge of a lake at golden hour. The water looks glass-still. Shane is crouched on one knee on a wooden dock in a t-shirt and shorts, barefoot, hands outstretched to a young, floppy-eared, long-haired dog who is mid jump trying to get her paws up on Shane’s shoulders. His profile is to the camera, and he is laughing, eyes crinkled. 

Caption: Shane and Anya, summer 2021. I took this one. 

Probably I should write something profound here, about him. I have spent a long time trying to find the words to describe what I feel for Shane Hollander. 

I will say this: I have known Shane Hollander since I was seventeen years old. I have known him in many different cities, on many different sides of many different hockey rinks. At some point — could not tell you when, exactly — I would find him across the face-off and think: ah. There you are. Like everything made sense. Like the world made sense. 

And then, usually, I win the face-off and score. Heh heh. 

So Marchenko, if you’re reading this, I don’t blame you for wanting to meet Shane Hollander. I was lucky no one had to introduce me — he found me first. 

And now, we get to play together. We are going to be very good. I am sorry Eastern Conference. 

(I am not, actually, sorry). 

This is still not my whole story, okay. These are just the parts I am willing to share. 

I have spent so much of my life thinking: I know what comes next. I have it figured out. If I just do the right thing, be the right person, say the right words, the future will arrive exactly how I expect it to.

It has taken me many years, and many people, and many losses, to understand, that when I waste time chasing what I thought was supposed to be, I’ll run right past what is actually there. I missed my own life, sometimes, looking for the version of it I decided was inevitable. 

You cannot skate forward while looking behind you. You cannot live life by trying to control it. 

You have to let go. 

Letting go of the past does not mean you forget. I am never going to forget my mother. I will never forget how she shaped me. I will never forget the scars her death left behind. Scars are not a thing to be ashamed of. Scars are evidence. They mean: life happened. They mean: the wound healed, eventually, even if it took a long time, even if it left a mark. I would rather be covered in scars than have never lived life at all. 

There is this saying in Russia: if you’re scared of wolves, don’t go into the forest. You can stand at the edge of the trees your whole life and never get hurt. 

Or, you can be scared, and go in anyway. And sure, there will be wolves. There will be other things too: cougars maybe, or stinging nettle, or ticks or black flies, or rockslides or eroded banks (Canadian wilderness is very dangerous, I am learning). But you might also find a pond in the forest that you can learn to skate on. You might become the best hockey player in the world, in that forest. You might find a boy you grow up with and fall in love with and get married to. You might find a dog who is best girl in the world and name her Anya. You might find your whole fucking life in those woods. 

I don’t know what is going to happen this year. I don’t know if we’ll win. I don’t know if the league will change to be better for people like Harvey. I don’t know if there will be more kids, like me, like Shane, who are waiting for their chance to play the game they love with the people they love. I hope there will be.

What a beautiful thing, to be surprised by your own life. 

Let’s go make some new scars.

Chapter End Notes

This epilogue is styled as a Player Tribune article. The Player Tribune publishes first-person stories from athletes and tells incredibly beautiful and impactful stories. I have linked some of my favourites below. I think it's very poignant that about an hour before I published this last chapter, it was shared that former NBA athlete Jason Collins sadly passed away from cancer today (May 12, 2026). Jason Collins was the first active male athlete to come out as gay in a major North American professional sports league, and published a really beautiful Player Tribune article when he retired in 2014, which you can read here.

Other Player Tribune Favourites:
Kevin Love (NBA): Everyone is Going Through Something: One of the first NBA players (after DeMar DeRozan, who I love and sadly does not have a Tribune article) to talk openly about mental health and mental illness, after experiencing an anxiety attack in the middle of the game.

Nick Boynton (NHL): Everything's Not Ok: this one reminds me of Duncan Harvey's story.

Evgeny Kuznetsov (NHL): How We Play Hockey In Russia: I love that this is written in a very Russian voice (a few of the Russian hockey player articles are like this heheh). Very much tried to mirror this for Ilya's article.

Courtney William (WNBA): Courtney Williams Is a Problem: What's it like to be branded as a "problem," both in and out of a sport context. Love this article.

Incorporating and listening to your many song recs was my favourite collaborative experience I've ever had with a fic I've written. I have gone back and added curated song recs for each chapter in the chapter end notes, with links to the playlist and a lyric that resonated with me.

With that said, the last three "Songs from the Playlist" recs shall be used to satisfy my legally mandated CanCon requirements

September Fields by Frazey Ford: You better grab the best of your life / I know you’re ready

Moondog by Leif Vollebekk: It’s my life and I’m living in it

The Returner by Allison Russell: If you think you’re alone, hold on, I’m coming