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, Svetlana Vetrova, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Grigori Rozanov, Polina Rozanova

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, POV Ilya Rozanov, Tattoo Artist Ilya Rozanov, Good Friend Svetlana Vetrova

Language:

English

Series:

Part 3 of Vivid Ink | Tattoo artist Ilya AU

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-08 Updated: 2026-04-27 Words: 24,164 Chapters: 4/8

leave on a high note

Summary

During introductory interviews, Ilya always got the same types of questions: when did he start playing ice hockey? Did he learn to skate as soon as he learned to walk? Did he spend his entire childhood on the ice to be as good as he was at ice hockey? He always laughed them off, making the same kind of jokes about being able to skate before he could walk and skipping school to be on the rink instead. Don’t be like me, kids, he told the interviewers and the cameras. Don’t skip school.

The truth is that Ilya’s first love wasn’t actually skating.

Or: part three of tattoo artist Ilya AU, where we find out how he ended up in Montreal in 2020 and started his romance with Shane.

Notes

we are back with tattoo artist ilya au! this time we're taking it all the way back.

if you're reading this, i think it's safe to assume you're knowledgeable about canon and will probably know what canonically happens between 2003 and 2009. regardless, i need it to be said: this first chapter does feature the death of a parent. the event itself is very much skipped over, but it is being somewhat discussed, so if this is sensitive for you, please proceed with caution.

as ever, much thank you thank you thank you to my beta reader and i will catch you either in the comments or for the next one! i'll do my best attempt to post regularly since this is already over half written and going at a steady pace.

Chapter 1: part 1, 2003-2009

Svetlana comes in when Ilya has gone back to cleaning, presumably after seeing Shane and his hockey friends out. She leans in the doorway again and asks in Russian: “Were you making out with him?”

Ilya looks at her over his shoulder. “No. Even better. I gave him my number,” he replies in Russian.

“And you think he’s going to call you?” She sounds oddly sceptical for someone who has fallen for his charm over and over again.

“I don’t think so, I know so,” Ilya tells her. “I’m playing the long game, Sveta. He’s going to marry me. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“God, being a bit less cocky would really suit you well, Ilyushka,” Svetlana says.

“I disagree,” he says, turning back to his work. “It would be really strange.”

“Probably,” she agrees. “Let’s hope it worked on Hollander.”

“I give it a week.” 

Svetlana is still lingering in the doorway, watching Ilya sanitize the needles that he explained the process to Shane with. When he turns around to look at her again, his eyebrows raised in a wordless question, she smiles and comes in.

“I was just thinking,” she starts. “I was supposed to marry a hockey player. A very good one. I mean, I never really believed that, but we always talked about it. We joked about it. And now you’re the one that’s going to marry a hockey player. Maybe you truly are where you’re supposed to be now.”

“So you’re saying we just got it wrong the entire time?” Ilya asks, amused by her line of thought. “We always knew that either one of us was going to marry a hockey player, but we just assumed it was you?”

“Yes.” Svetlana nods, clearly understanding now how inevitable it all is. 

Ilya doesn't necessarily believe in fate. He likes to think he’s seen too much for that. Fate sounds like an excuse for cruelty. He does, however, believe in happy coincidences. But this isn’t one. He knew as early as twelve years old that he was getting out of Moscow. He knew as early as seventeen years old that Shane Hollander was going to play a part in his life somehow. 

And when you know, you know. Ilya always knew.   

“I was thinking about going out later,” Svetlana says. “Are you coming with me?”

Is that even a question? “Of course.”

“I thought you would be -” she hesitates and gestures in his general direction. “With your new marriage plans, I thought you’d stay home. Wait for him to call.”

Ilya has to do a double take. “Sveta,” he says, putting the needle down carefully, ignoring the fact that he’s going to have to clean it a third time now. “You know me. Just because I know Shane and I are going to be together, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop being me. He is out with his colleagues. Now I am going out with mine.”

She laughs, and Ilya realises that he fell for her trap. She probably realised how serious he is about Shane and is trying to loosen him up by joking about it. He’s not usually like this and she knows this too, but Shane is a serious topic for him. 

“You don’t have colleagues,” she points out, letting him off easy for now. He’s probably going to hear about it when they’re in the club later. He’s not planning to go home with anyone, undoubtedly giving her further ammunition to tease him.

Ilya makes a noncommittal noise. “You are the closest thing to it,” he says. She is the closest thing he has to family too. What’s one more title like colleague? “Alright, I will go out with my best friend then.” Just to be obnoxious, he invades her personal space and gives her a loud kiss on her cheek. “And if Shane calls, he will have to wait.”

“If he’s not extraordinarily stupid, he’ll wait for you.” Svetlana smiles at him. “I’ll see you at the front of the shop when you’re ready.”

During introductory interviews, Ilya always got the same types of questions: when did he start playing ice hockey? Did he learn to skate as soon as he learned to walk? Did he spend his entire childhood on the ice to be as good as he was at ice hockey? He always laughed them off, making the same kind of jokes about being able to skate before he could walk and skipping school to be on the rink instead. Don’t be like me, kids, he told the interviewers and the cameras. Don’t skip school.   

The truth is that Ilya’s first love wasn’t actually skating. 

Skating and ice hockey has always been a means to an end. What the end was and for who it was changed throughout the years, but the fact that Ilya didn’t love it the way he loved some other things stayed true. Ilya loved competing. Ilya loved being the best and at ice hockey, he was the best. Ice hockey was a natural fit. In some ways, ice hockey both saved and ruined his life.

Ilya’s true first love was actually colouring and drawing. Much like he was on the ice since he could walk, he was drawing and colouring since he could hold a crayon, a pencil and pretty fast, a pen. It was undoubtedly his mother’s influence. They sat by the dinner table every evening before Ilya’s bedtime, either working on coloring pages or drawing whatever they wanted to. What started with basic landscapes and simple shapes quickly escalated into far more.

His father didn’t hate his hobby at first. He saw the value in learning Ilya to sit still and work on something so dedicated.  Ilya wasn’t in his or in Andrei’s way. 

Quickly, though, the sentiment around Ilya’s shared hobby with his mother changed.

“You are spoiling him,” was an argument his father used, more often than not for Ilya’s ears to hear too. “Both of them. This is not good for them. They need order and discipline.”

“Grigory, they are children,” his mother sighed. “They don’t just need order and discipline. They need space to develop. Creating art is good for his fine motor skills and for his brain! I read in the parenting book -”

“My parents did not need a parenting book to raise me and we do not need a parenting book to raise Andrei and Ilya,” his father said, not needing to try to be stern; he just was, as per usual. “You can’t raise them to be soft, Irina.”

He stalked out of the room then, leaving Ilya with his mother. “Does Papa hate my drawing?” he asked softly, mindful to make sure his father didn’t hear him.

“No, Ilyushka, of course Papa doesn’t hate your drawing,” she reassured him immediately. “Papa is just stressed from work. It has nothing to do with your drawing. Your drawing is great.”

As Ilya got older, the rules changed too. He needed to train well if he wanted to spend any time drawing at all. He needed to do all of his homework before he could even think of getting as much as pen and paper out. His father became stricter, his mother withdrew and Andrei was as Ilya was used to him: always on his father’s side and therefore mostly useless to Ilya. 

As a result, creating art is the first thing that Ilya ever learned to do in secret. It wasn’t a big secret, but it was a good learning experience for his future, far more pressing, secrets. Ilya created art at school, between classes and during classes. Ilya was drawing whenever he was at Svetlana’s parents’ home, which became more and more regular for him as the years passed. No one knew that creating art was Ilya’s secret, so they showed interest and complimented him.  

Then one day when Ilya was twelve, he came home early. Ice hockey practice was cancelled, so Ilya figured he could get a headstart on his homework, study some playbooks in the evening and perhaps even start on a drawing he promised Svetlana he would make for her. 

That was the last he remembered of that day. 

In hindsight, he imagined there had been an ambulance. Andrei mentioned once or twice that Ilya had been inconsolable. He meant it as an insult, to make the point that Ilya was soft and weak, but it just reminded Ilya that Andrei had been the one to hold him and to attempt to console him, as proof that he did care about Ilya after all. His father never talked about it and when Ilya brought Irina up, he got angry immediately.

Ilya never made that drawing he promised Svetlana. He didn’t touch any of his art supplies for months. There was no point. Everything was different. Everything was awful. Art was something private, something joyous, and every time Ilya did as much as think about it, he felt uncomfortable. 

A week after his mother died, his father sat him and Andrei down and told them they shouldn’t speak about Irina anymore. What she had done was a disgrace to their family. If they were asked, they should say that she died in an accident, because that was what it was according to their father. Their mother hadn’t known what she was doing. She hadn’t been of a sound mind. It was an accident, nothing more.

He said the word accident a lot. Unlike the accident itself, that was something that Ilya remembered years afterwards. That conversation. His father’s expression. Andrei’s solemn nodding next to Ilya. The overall suffocating atmosphere. 

“The both of you need to step up,” Grigori said. “We need to be strong as a family unit. We can’t be perceived as weak.” 

He reached out for Andrei’s chin first and stared at him. “You need to work hard to get into university, Andrei, and marry well.”

“Yes, father.” It was an immediate answer, practised and unflinching.

Satisfied with that answer, Grigori let go of his oldest son and turned to his youngest son. He reached out for Ilya’s chin as well and stared at him. Silence filled the room. Ilya hardly dared to breathe. 

“Ilya,” he said calmly, “you need to harden your heart. You need to work harder. You need to be better. You can’t be lazy. You can’t be emotional. Can you do it?”

“Yes, father.” 

Grigori nodded and stood up, turning away from his sons immediately. “Good,” he said. “I am counting on both of you. Make me proud.”

Ilya honestly doubted that he ever did.

At twelve, Ilya knew that staying in Moscow, staying with his family, wasn’t an option for him. They would never understand him. He had a duty to his family too, but who was to say he couldn’t fulfill that from a distance? He was already distant from them when they were close by, so what was the difference? He just needed to make it through six more years and then he could leave. As simple as that.

Two years later, when Ilya was fourteen, his father sat Ilya and Andrei down once more to tell them he met a woman. Her name was Polina and Grigori was thinking about marrying her. Andrei and Ilya needed a stepmother, after all. Ilya doubted that was the reason that Grigori wanted to marry her.

In the evening, when Grigori had left the house after emphasising they weren’t allowed to do anything until they finished their homework, it became the topic of conversation as soon as their father was out of the street.

“What’s for betting she’s younger than him?” Ilya asked without introducing the topic. He knew that Andrei knew who he was talking about.

Andrei, who had been on his way out of the room, presumably to do one of many things he wasn’t allowed to do according to their father, frowned for a moment. “Probably,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t matter. As long as he is -”

What, happy? Ilya had never once seen his father happy, he was pretty sure. “I’m sure she will be younger than Mama too,” Ilya doubled down.

“Ilya!” Andrei scolded him. “What do you care? It’s not like she’s actually going to act like our mother.”

Ilya finally looked up from his biology homework and dealt the final blow to mortify Andrei the most before even meeting Polina. “She’s going to want to have his children.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Andrei stomped out of the room, cursing under his breath.

“You can’t say you haven’t considered it!”

The door was slammed shut.

Ilya smirked to himself and listened as Andrei stomped down the hallway. He knew Andrei wasn’t going to tell their father that Ilya had been annoying, because then he would have to get into the topic that Ilya had been annoying about. Neither one of them was going to say out loud that they didn’t want half-siblings or that they thought Grigori shouldn’t get remarried. Ilya had been thinking it and now Andrei was too.

It was good for his brother to brace for the worst, Ilya thought. Maybe he would get some sense of urgency about getting his life together too, realizing he couldn’t just rely on their fickle father who had always been far too easy to anger. Maybe he was going to idolize him even more. 

Polina was… Nice. She was, just like Ilya had predicted, young, and he saw Andrei’s face twitch uncomfortably when he moved to shake hands with her. She was closer to Andrei’s age than to Grigori’s age and it wasn’t close. Grigori was unnecessarily possessive over her, always touching her in some way and always making it very clear that she was with him. Ilya was very happy not to see too much of it. 

They made polite small talk with her when they came across Polina, usually at family functions or other occasions where they were all invited to, but otherwise didn’t engage. Ilya quickly figured out that Polina was with their father for the prestige and the money. He respected that. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t have to. As long as his father got what he wanted, he would be more bearable and for once, it seemed that he did.  

Ilya was unsurprisingly popular. He was loud, he was at times brash and he was very self-assured. He could draw well, something his peers appreciated a surprising amount, and he was very athletic, something that unsurprisingly drew a lot of positive attention. A lot of the boys in his class and in his team wanted to be him. Practically all of the girls wanted to date him. One or two of the boys wanted to date him too.

Next to his drawing and ice hockey skills, Ilya was also known for his quick wit and smart remarks. While hard to interpret and harder to predict, Ilya was incredibly perceptive and was never shy about letting that be known. He called out behaviours, made harmless fun and flirted whenever he could. At school he made sure to behave just well enough that he wouldn’t get kicked out of the classroom by his teachers. As much as he sometimes wanted to take it further, he knew he couldn’t do it. If he crossed the line, his father would have his head for it.  

“Would it kill you to behave yourself?” Svetlana asked him one day in an unfortunately apt description of his usual behaviour.

Ilya shrugged. “Probably,” he said.

They were sitting in the stands of the practice rink of Ilya’s team. Once he turned sixteen he could sign for a team in the RSL, the Russian hockey league, and hopefully play hockey while going to school part-time, but for now he was limited to after-school practice sessions. He was far better than anyone else on the team and everyone knew it. He was probably better than anyone else in the country of his age. He was probably better than most ice hockey players regardless of age.

Ilya had an arm slung over the back of Svetlana’s seat and his feet on the back of the seats in front of theirs. Svetlana sat turned towards him, cuddled against his side, and was drawing figure eights on his upper leg.

“You need a plan, Ilya,” she said softly. 

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. Ilya knew very well what she was talking about. If he let the topic invade his brain, it would be all he thought about. He needed to get away from his strict father, his absent soon-to-be stepmother and his demanding brother. He needed to get away from the place that took his mother away from him, before it took him too. Their house was suffocating and unsafe and Ilya needed to get out of there.

“I have a plan,” he reminded her. “I’m going into the NHL draft. I’ll be drafted first, of course, and then I’ll move to the United States and stay there.” He nudged her in the side. “You should come with me.”

“Do you really think your father will let you go?” Svetlana asked. “Just like that?” 

“Yes,” Ilya said. “Andrei is useless. Someone needs to make money for the family. The NHL pays better than the RSL does. I’ll be the best rookie, so I’ll have the best rookie contract. It’ll also look great for the family.”

Svetlana hummed, seemingly considering this. “And what if it doesn’t work? Don’t you need a back-up plan,  Ilyushka?”

“Back-up plans are for people who aren’t sure of their initial plans, Sveta.”

According to Svetlana’s sigh that was precisely what she didn’t want to hear. She was afraid that his NHL plan, the one that had been in place since was twelve years old, was going to fall through. She was afraid for him because he seemingly wasn’t. 

The truth was that of course he was afraid. Some days it was all he could think about. But he couldn’t let it consume him. In front of everyone else - his family, his teammates, his classmates and yes, even Svetlana - he needed to seem like he had nothing to worry about and nothing to hide. Ilya needed to believe he was fearless in order to get through the day.

“You need another plan,” she pressed. “I’m serious, Ilya.”

“Okay, I will make another plan,” Ilya conceded. “I will become a house husband to the most smart and beautiful woman I know. She will make enough money so we can immigrate to the United States. What do you think?”

She scoffed. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere in this case.”

“Who said I was talking about you, Sveta?”

She shoved him with a roll of her eyes.

Of course he’d been talking about her. She was the most beautiful girl Ilya had ever laid eyes on. That wasn’t a very impressive benchmark considering he spent most of his time either in class with the classmates he’d known for years or at the ice hockey rink with his male teammates, but Ilya liked to think that if he met a lot more girls he’d still be thinking she was the most beautiful girl of them all.  

It wasn’t just about her looks either. Ilya liked to think he was smart, but Svetlana was far more clever than he was. She could very easily keep up with him and was one of the very few people who actually knew what was going on with him half of the time. It was both scary and impressive. 

“If the NHL doesn’t want me, the RSL will still want me,” Ilya predicted. “It’s not as competitive as the NHL. They want to make Russian players better and they think their own league is the best place to do it.”

Ilya didn’t think so. He liked being the best. He liked being made captain of their national teams because he was simply their best player without question. He didn’t just want to join the NHL for the money. He knew that the best players eventually joined an NHL team through the draft and became even better in the NHL. 

“But that’s still hockey,” Svetlana said, considering it. “What if you can’t play hockey? What if, God forbid, something happens to you that means you can’t spend hours on the ice anymore? Then what will you do?”

“Sveta, this is extremely existential,” Ilya complained. 

She shrugged. “Look, my Papa thinks I am a princess and he will get me anything I want,” she said matter-of-factly. “And if what I want is you, then he will be happy for me, Ilyushka. He likes you. I like you. But being a house husband isn’t enough. Not here.”

She was right about that. Ilya had heard it hundreds of times from his father by now. There were certain expectations placed upon him and he needed to adhere to those expectations. He was supposed to become the head of a household as soon as he grew older. He was supposed to provide for his future wife and their future children. He needed to be hard-working and disciplined. If he ever wanted to be taken seriously, he needed to show that he was doing right by his family, like every Russian man should.

Ilya spared a thought for Andrei, who was never hard-working nor disciplined. He just used to be very good at hiding it in front of their father. Ilya used to think that their father had a clear preference for Andrei, with Andrei being the oldest son and all, but lately he’d seen his father change. Perhaps Grigori was starting to see through Andrei and was starting to realise that his best bet of a good retirement was actually his youngest hockey prodigy son.

He sighed. “I will become an artist,” he said. “For this to work it needs to be something that I am good at. I am the best at making art. I can become better. I can practise more. I like doing it, so I won’t have a problem putting in the hours for practice.”

It wasn’t like he wasn’t practising daily either. It was almost all he did during school hours with less of a care about what his canvas was than ever before. Today his canvases had been his chemistry homework, Sveta’s right hand and his biology notes. Sveta’s hand was covered in flowers at this point.

“Why are all your potential careers so unlikely?” Svetlana asked. “You have such a small chance to make it as an artist. You also have a very small chance to make it as a hockey player, but -” She trailed off and gestured at the rink in front of them.

Svetlana had an eye for hockey unlike anyone Ilya had ever met. His father liked hockey, but didn’t have an eye for it, although Ilya would never tell him that. His brother seemed to dislike hockey because Ilya was good at it. His mother used to enjoy it, but she didn’t care much for it on a personal level; she just enjoyed it because Ilya played. Svetlana’s father was a former player from the NHL and the RSL both, so maybe knowing hockey was hereditary. Their potential children had to be hockey geniuses. 

Alas, it didn’t take a genius to realise that Ilya would make it as a hockey player. It was obvious. It was inevitable. 

“I appreciate your concern, but I think hockey player is a fine career for me,” he said with a noncommittal shrug. 

“And then I can be your trophy wife,” Svetlana said with a wink. “You will win the Stanley Cup and when you invite me onto the ice, people will be jealous of you for three reasons instead of the usual two.”

That sounded like a dream come true, but Ilya never kidded himself into thinking that Svetlana could ever just be a trophy wife. “Sveta, you will probably be on the scouting team of whatever team I end up with,” he said. “They will pay you obscene amounts of money for your wisdom and it will never be enough.”

She laughed, the sound echoing off the empty spaces around them. “You can probably pitch in.”

Ilya leaned in towards her, pulled her closer towards him and kissed her. “I might,” he said with a wink.

Ilya’s father got married to Polina. 

It was, naturally, a ceremony in a church in the city centre of Moscow. Ilya assumed that no expense was spared for the wedding. The entire spectacle was to make the point that his father had been doing so well for himself that a woman like Polina, supposedly beautiful and young, was eager to marry him. 

Ilya politely smiled through it, sitting between his brother and Svetlana, his date for the occasion. He met Polina’s parents before the ceremony, who seemed kind and tried to bond with him through their shared love for ice hockey and their enjoyment of HC Dynamo Moscow, the team that Ilya played for. Svetlana did most of the talking and impressed them with a watered down version of her knowledge of ice hockey and the newly formed KHL. 

Naturally, the entire thing was a joke. His father was standing at the front of the church with all his medals on his suit as Polina approached on the arm of her father, a man barely older than Ilya’s father. The ceremony was long and filled with traditions meant to showcase that the two of them were serious in their faith and committed to each other. 

When the ceremony was finally over and they moved to the second venue for the reception, Ilya slipped outside after greeting most of the guests. Svetlana was entertaining some people talking about hockey again and presumably Andrei was getting wasted on expensive vodka with some of their cousins. Ilya understood the temptation, but he wasn’t going to join him. He might have a glass later to dull the edges, but he was going to have to do it when his father wasn’t paying attention.

He lit a cigarette as soon as he was through the backdoor. The darkness was slowly settling in around him after a long day and the city felt suffocating like it did more often recently. He loosened the tie around his neck and leaned his back against the colder tile of the building, wryly reflecting that of all the days he felt his mother with him, this definitely hadn’t been one of them.

Much to Ilya’s surprise, he was joined by one of the two people the day revolved around. He watched how his now-official stepmother stepped through the door and made her way to the spot he was standing in, only to pause and look him up and down like she hadn’t expected to see him. She joined him after that moment’s pause and wordlessly held up her hand.

Ilya didn’t like sharing cigarettes with family members, but he reasoned that he was probably going to steal her cigarettes more often than she would steal his. This also wasn’t the day to be an asshole about cigarettes, so he wordlessly handed Polina his pack and his lighter.

It continued to be quiet between them as Polina lit a cigarette as well and subsequently handed Ilya the two items back. She leaned against the wall next to him and studied the buildings around them, seemingly content to stand in silence. 

When they were both nearing the end of their cigarettes, Polina finally broke the silence. “You should know that I don’t intend to be your mother,” she said.

“Good,” Ilya replied. “You’re not.”

She nodded. “I also don’t want to play that role, even if your father perhaps wants me to. The two of you can take care of yourselves fine.”

“Yes,” Ilya agreed. “You can be the mother of your own children. We don’t need one. We had one.”

“I don’t think I’m going to have children with your father, Ilya,” she replied, glancing aside at him. “I assume that’s what you’re implying. Unless -”

Unless Ilya was already thinking about the inevitable end of her marriage to Ilya’s father and the subsequent second marriage she was going to make? Ilya didn’t think ahead that far. He didn’t think anyone should. He hoped that Polina wasn’t either.

“No, just with my father,” Ilya said. “Good. I will be way too busy playing hockey to ever be a babysitter. I’m not going to babysit Andrei’s future children either.” 

Because he just couldn’t help himself, he added: “If you did have kids with Papa, he would be a father and a grandfather at the same time to similarly aged kids.”

Much to Ilya’s delight, Polina’s expression was clearly annoyed. She had to have thought about it too, then. She side-eyed him, finishing her cigarette, and fidgeted with the remains of it. 

“It’s not happening,” she said. “Half of the time your father calls me Irina. I don’t think he ever got over your mother. He definitely never got over losing her.”

Ilya frowned, because that didn’t at all sound like the man he knew. His father had been busy removing all traces of his first wife’s existence since the moment he sat Andrei and Ilya down and emphasized they needed to be strong as a family unit. He never talked about her. If either Andrei or Ilya dared mention her name within earshot he shot them down immediately. He was devoid of sentiment as far as Ilya knew.

“He never loved her either,” Ilya offered. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you or with her.” Or with us, he added privately.

His father was a stoic man who Ilya assumed had seen too much and seen too little at the same time. Russia had been very different in the time that his father grew up than what it was now. Ilya’s escape plans didn’t have much to do with Russia. He loved his country the way he assumed any Russian loved their country. Grigori loved Russia in his own way too and that was part of why he was how he was.

“I should get back,” Polina said with a sigh, like she’d rather do anything but that. Ilya wondered what the story was there. “Will you be joining us shortly as well? I’m sure your date is waiting for you.”

“Yes, I’ll be there,” Ilya said with a sigh, vowing to himself to give Polina a minute headstart so they didn’t walk back into the venue together. “Sveta can take care of herself, but she would like me to be there.”

“She seems like a good choice for you, Ilya,” were the words that Polina left with, giving Ilya another thing to think about. 

At seventeen, noticing guys wasn’t news to Ilya. He made out with girls. He made out with guys. He slept with girls and he slept with guys. It was pretty much whatever to him. He was hot; of course everyone, regardless of gender, should find him hot. 

His brother has been throwing the f-word around before Ilya even knew what it meant, undoubtedly in a misguided attempt to seem manly. He was an idiot that was missing the point by a mile. His father was happy not to know who he was making out with and instead said whenever he could that Ilya needed to focus on hockey. 

He was focusing on hockey. That was why he was in Regina, a town in Canada that Ilya would consider very small. There was nothing else to do here but play ice hockey. Ilya intended to crush anyone that got in the way between him and the victory of the International Prospect Cup. It was the first time where he truly had to make the point that he was the best ice hockey player of his generation and what better way to do that than by winning?

Although, there was one thing to do other than play ice hockey: admiring cute guys with freckles who were trying to make his acquaintance. Singular, not plural.

Shane Hollander.

He was nice. Polite. Very Canadian. Very pretty. 

Ilya was torn between wanting to push him against the wall, pin him against that same wall and kiss him until he flushed and stammered, or chirp him and make fun of him until he flushed and stammered. Ilya assumed it wouldn’t take much. 

Hollander poked him back when Ilya poked at him and seemed wholly unimpressed with Ilya. That was fine. There was still time to impress him. And besides, Ilya had a tournament to win.

That he daydreamed of freckles and stuttered, polite Canadian words was less relevant. It didn’t have to mean anything.

Russia won the International Prospect Cup in a final against Canada. Ilya shook Shane’s hand and smirked and told him ‘see you at the draft’. Ilya had shown his supposed rival just who would have the upper hand in their rivalry. He’d made his point and he was going to make it again during the draft in the summer. 

Ilya knew he was going to see Shane Hollander again. Shane was the only person that could challenge Ilya. He was the only person that stood a chance at keeping up with him. Shane was everything that Ilya wasn’t, making it a perfect rivalry. The rebel versus the boy next door. The sort of thing that PR dreams were made of. Ilya had no point that the NHL PR machine would love their rivalry for years to come. 

And then he got home. 

In the six months between his victory in the International Prospect Cup and the NHL draft, everything changed. The career in the United States that Ilya worked towards since the moment he decided he needed to get out of Russia turned into an illusion that vanished in smoke as the months passed. Ilya’s father wasn’t doing well. Leaving to go to the United States now would be dishonourable, not to mention selfish. His family needed him. His father needed him. He needed to stay close by. 

Ilya threw all his emotions into hockey. His disappointment. His anger. His sadness. He wasn’t going to school anymore. HC Dynamo Moscow, his team, won the first-ever KHL playoffs and got to lift the Gagarin Cup. Their captain had won the MVP award for the regular season, but Ilya was the obvious choice for playoffs MVP and won that award by a landslide. 

In the offseason the decision was simple enough. He declined the NHL draft and signed a new contract with Dynamo Moscow, making him one of the best-paid players in the league and definitely became the best-paid teenager in the league. The agent that Ilya hired specifically to get him a good contract had done well. He moved out of his father’s house and into an apartment in Moscow, but he promised Polina that he would stay close by.

During lucid moments, his father praised his choice not to go to the United States. The KHL was clearly superior to the NHL, he told Ilya over and over again, and Ilya didn’t need those Western values taught to him. He needed to stay right here and do what was right for their family.

When his father wasn’t lucid, he asked for Irina and wondered when Ilya was going to school. Ilya got very good at pretending to go to school when he was actually going home. Some days Polina was a stranger in the home she shared with the man she married, because he didn’t recognise her and tried to kick her out of his house. Time and time again either Andrei or Ilya had to come by to remind him and it always ended in discomfort and heartbreak. 

His father was a very different man when he wasn’t lucid. Ilya found that the most difficult to deal with. The mad and impatient version of his father was what he was used to and knew how to deal with. The more puzzled and dependent version of him was one that Ilya could hardly stand but had to deal with more and more. 

That other version of his father was a kinder version of himself. He was a man that would listen to Andrei and Ilya, not just boss them around without a care in the world. He would go to the doctor when his sons asked. He would take his meds when his sons asked. He would do things because he trusted them not to lead him astray.

Svetlana told him once or twice he should have gone to the NHL draft anyway, but she was wrong. Ilya couldn’t bear the thought of leaving his father behind like this. Polina couldn’t handle it. Andrei was extremely uncomfortable and not nearly as capable as dealing with their father as Ilya was. His father needed him, so Ilya had to stay put.

In July, he watched how the Boston Bears selected a defenseman whose highlights bored Ilya to tears. That was their first draft pick?! What a delusional choice. He messaged Sveta to tell her as much and then watched how the Montreal Voyageurs picked Shane Hollander. Now that was the right choice. Shane Hollander was the man to watch. Shane Hollander would win them trophies.

Ilya should have been there. He should have been the number one pick. He should have made fun of Hollander for losing to him, like he was going to for many years to come. 

Instead he was still in Moscow, overthinking his life choices and inevitably concluding he’d done the right thing. He was in the place that took his mother from him and that was going to take his father too, but it would never get him. He would make sure of it.

Chapter 2: part 2, 2009-2010

The evening after the day Ilya’s father got his official diagnosis, Ilya met Svetlana at his apartment. He gave her a spare key, so he wasn’t surprised to find that she let herself in. He was late because he needed to calm his father down for the evening ahead of them before leaving him in the capable hands of Polina, who was slowly getting the hang of dealing with Grigori and his mood swings. 

Svetlana walked into the hallway leading to the door while Ilya took off his summer jacket and put it on the peg. “Rough day?” she asked without preamble.

Ilya studied her. She was wearing a dark dress with sequins and her hair fell around her face. If Ilya didn’t know better, he would think that she expected them to go out next. He did know better. She didn’t dress to impress anyone but him.

What a privileged position to be in, to have a best friend who knew exactly what you needed in situations when you needed a friend the most. 

He wasn’t good at talking about his emotions. His mother tried to teach him, but Ilya actually thought that his mother was the exception and not the rule. His father emphasized over and over again that they needed to be tough. The only emotions Andrei seemed to be comfortable with was anger and irritation. He didn’t know how to say that he was tired in a bone-deep way, that he was disappointed in the future of his career and irrationally angry at his father.

“Rough week,” Ilya said as he made a beeline for her and kissed her. 

He lifted her from her feet and she wrapped her legs around his waist. They had done this countless times before. They both knew the motions intimately well. Ilya knew what it meant when she threw her head back. Ilya knew how she sounded when she was close to coming. And Sveta, in turn, knew his most sensitive spots, knew his preferences and knew what he looked like when he was so pent up that he needed some kind of release. 

It was a shared language between them, sharing a bed. It was familiar. 

Therefore it wasn’t surprising that Ilya finally started to relax in the afterglow. And when he started to relax, the emotions he’d been trying to hold back the entire day (and maybe even the entire year) started to flood in. 

Ilya pressed a kiss on Svetlana’s neck and scrambled to get up from the bed. She was still half-draped over him, the blankets kicked off the bed in their eagerness to get on the bed together, and let him go when she realised what he was doing.  

“Ilyushka -” she called after him.

Ilya ignored her and made a beeline for the en-suite bathroom. Once he was in there and the door was closed behind him, he stared at himself in the mirror. He could hardly recognise himself. His hair was too short (he’d recently gotten it cut because his father didn’t stop complaining about it), his face looked hollow and he seemed like he had yet to grow into the muscle he’d gained. 

The tears came inevitably, so Ilya turned away from the mirror. He leaned against the sink with his back and buried his head in his hands. There was no point in repressing any of it now. The well was opened. He just needed to breathe through this.

He heard Svetlana open the door of the en-suite and seconds later, Ilya felt her arms around him. He desperately wanted to turn away and wanted to tell her to leave, but she’d just hold on and tell him she wasn’t going to fuck him and not deal with the fallout. She was a good person like that, annoyingly.

So Ilya wrapped his arms around her in return and buried his head against her shoulder, his body shaking and his sobs almost soundless. Svelanta ran a comforting hand over his back and pulled him closer, letting him get it out.

Later, when they’re back in bed, Ilya is wrapped around Svetlana again. They showered together, possibly the most platonic shower that they ever shared to this day, and Svetlana borrowed one of Ilya’s T-shirts without asking. Ilya was just in boxer shorts. It was nothing she hadn’t seen multiple times before, after all.

“What’s the prognosis?” Svetlana asked softly.

Ilya briefly looked up from where he was lounging. Svetlana was already looking at him. He sighed. “Unclear,” he said. “Years, probably. He will just get worse.”

Ilya knew there wasn’t a right thing to say to this news. There was no ‘things will be fine for the long term’ or even a ‘you’ll still have years with him’. Platitudes were meaningless to Ilya to begin with, but in this particular instance he would have liked to hear them if they were truthful.

To her credit, Svetlana merely pressed a kiss to his hair and sighed. “I’m so sorry, Ilyushka. For everything.”

“Me too,” Ilya said softly.

The times that Ilya saw Andrei when they weren’t dealing with their father were sporadic. Ilya preferred it like that. Andrei seemed to take his father’s diagnosis as an excuse to further his mission to be the most useless man alive. Ilya would have been impressed at how well he was doing at that if it wasn’t so counterproductive.

A couple of weeks later, when Ilya came to see their father in the evening, he came across Andrei who was on his way out. Usually he stopped Ilya if he needed money. If Ilya said no, Andrei would keep messaging and calling him until Ilya transferred the money. God forbid the man didn’t spend as much as he apparently did.

“Do you remember the tattoo shop where Denis got his tattoo?” Andrei asked without greeting him. 

Denis was one of Andrei’s cop friends that Ilya had met once or twice. He wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but oddly enough he’d seemed nice. Ilya always assumed that couldn’t be right, seeing as he was friends with Andrei. 

The man recently got a ridiculous tattoo of his wife’s name right over his chest and Ilya had been one of the unfortunate people who had been shown multiple photos of it. The tattoo shop was hardly mentioned in that conversation because it was the one where Andrei, Denis and all of their cop friends went whenever they wanted a tattoo, probably because they could pay under the table.

“Sure,” Ilya said, glancing over Andrei’s shoulder at the open door to attempt to see if Polina was in the house with their father right now.

“The owners were bought out,” Andrei said with a roll of his eyes. “A bunch of Americans took over the place. We’ve been thinking of paying a visit there, if you know what I mean.”

The thing with Andrei was that people always knew what he meant because Andrei was never subtle.

“Don’t terrorise the foreigners, Andrei,” Ilya said with a sigh. “They are welcome here.”

Naturally, Andrei took those words as an invitation to rant about Western values and about how they should stick to their own Russian values. He truly was his father’s son. It was like hearing Grigori’s words come out of Andrei’s mouth.

Ilya agreed with him just to get rid of him and they parted ways shortly thereafter. Andrei was going to play cards with his friends. Ilya assumed that gambling was involved and that Andrei would be losing money, so he was expecting another phone call demanding money soon. Great. 

Grigori was lucid when Ilya walked in and immediately berated him for standing outside talking to Andrei for so long when he should have been inside to greet his father first. While he used to find it annoying and had to bite his tongue not to jump, Ilya was actually glad for these moments now. It showed him that Grigori was still very much in there and sharp enough to have something to complain about. 

When he left his father with Polina for the night, his thoughts strayed back to the Americans in the tattoo shop. Were they aware that the cops had it out for them because they took over their favourite tattoo shop? Ilya could imagine that a bunch of men in police uniforms that probably refused to even try talking English wasn’t going to be a fun experience for them. He should at least warn them.

He was also, admittedly, very curious, so he went on his way.

When Ilya first stepped inside of the shop and took a look around, he realised that the shop had changed a lot. Maybe the word he was looking for was ‘modernized.’ The dingy look with the outdated furniture had been replaced by a new layout with brand-new looking furniture. This actually looked like a shop Ilya might be inclined to trust to work on his first tattoo.

When Ilya made his way towards the counter, a man appeared from the back rooms. He was wearing plaid and jeans and said in the most broken Russian that Ilya had ever heard: “Hello, can I help you?”

God, these people were not ready for Russian cops. Or Russian anything, possibly, if this was how well they spoke Russian.

“Hello,” Ilya replied in English. He reckoned his English was better than this man’s Russian, which was saying something. “I heard you were new here. Wanted to say welcome. Wanted to look around.”

The man’s relief was visible on his features and he smiled brightly. “Oh, thank you,” he said in English as well. “That’s so nice of you. Please, feel free to take a look around.”

“Have others said welcome?” Ilya asked as he made his way closer to the counter, drawn in by the art he saw on the wall behind the counter.

“There’ve been a few people that came by,” the man replied. “Neighbours mostly. I think the customers of the old shop still need to get used to our shop.”

Not a lot of clients then. That made sense. Russians weren’t commonly very trusting of foreigners. Especially when those foreigners were American.

“It is brave,” Ilya said. “Opening a shop in Moscow.”

“So I’ve been told,” the man said with a light grin. “What can I say? I like a challenge.”

He should have picked another challenge, because this one was insane. The only thing he could accomplish here was going broke within the year.

Ilya studied the drawings on the wall and took in the atmosphere. The inside of the shop felt very different to most of Moscow, oddly enough. Being here felt like stepping inside of an alternative universe. One where everything was very Western, down to the music and the paint and the walls, but where that wasn’t a bad thing.

“Do you like tattoos?” the man asked, moving slowly to join Ilya where he was standing.

“I like art,” Ilya replied. “Drawings. I am very good at drawing.”

That seemed to be the magic word, because it was obvious that the man’s interest was sparked. He turned towards Ilya, posture open and eyes twinkling. He looked younger when he looked like that, Ilya thought. 

“Do you have any pictures of your drawings?” he asked.

Ilya got his phone from his pocket and opened his gallery. He didn’t have a lot of pictures. The only one that tended to care to see his work was Svetlana and she was over at his apartment so often that she saw them in real life. Ilya only took pictures of the drawings he was particularly proud of, so that narrowed the selection down quite a bit. 

He found the picture of the drawing of a brown bear that he’d been looking for and showed it to the man. “I made this a couple of weeks ago. I was thinking about tattoos I wanted.”

The man squinted at the picture and then smiled. “You Russians sure love bears, don’t you?” he asked, amused.

“Is national animal of Russia!” Ilya protested. What else made sense?

“Does everyone get tattoos of bottles of vodka too?” the man asked.

Ilya decided he liked him. “They should,” he said. “Would look great.” He smirked for good measure and offered his hand for the man to shake. “I’m Ilya.”

“I’m William,” the man replied, shaking Ilya’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Ilya.” He didn’t even screw up the pronunciation of Ilya’s name as much as Ilya thought he would.

When Ilya told Svetlana a week later that he’d gotten a summer job, she stared at him like he’d grown another head. He didn’t think he would look good with another head. He didn’t think anyone would.

“Ilya,” she said, swirling her vodka in her glass, “you know summer jobs are for teenagers who go to school, right? Not for hockey players who are on their summer break?”

“I want it to be my winter job too, but it will be difficult to fit in my schedule for my other job,” Ilya said. “But we’ll see.”

They were by the bar in one of their favourite clubs. The dance floor was packed and the music was loud. It was exactly how Ilya preferred his nights in the summer. He had his favourite company too, but she was staring at him confusedly rather than drinking her vodka and laughing with him.

Svetlana’s hair was falling over her shoulders in waves. She was wearing a dark top and lighter jeans and, as ever, looked spectacular. Ilya had accidentally matched her by also going for a dark T-shirt and blue jeans. Neither one of them had bothered to change, since they agreed they both looked very hot. 

“Americans took over Andrei’s friends’ favourite tattoo shop,” he explained. “I showed them my drawings, so they offered me a job.”

According to Svetlana’s expression that made the situation more confusing instead of less. “You walked into an American-owned tattoo shop and they offered you a job?” she repeated. “Ilyushka. That makes no sense.”

“Of course it does.” She still wasn’t drinking her vodka, so Ilya stole her glass and took a large gulp. It was excellent vodka. He wasn’t surprised. She had excellent taste in men, cars and vodka. “They needed employees and they saw I was extraordinarily gifted.”

Svetlana stole her glass back from him and glared at him. “So they let you draw on people? With a tattoo needle?”

Ilya scoffed. “Of course not,” he said. “I am just helping out and practising now. But I show a lot of promise, so maybe soon.”

“You are a hockey player,” Svetlana told him like he needed the reminder. “In fact, you are one of the best hockey players in this country.”

“One of the?!” Ilya protested.

Svetlana actually had the audacity to shush him. “I remember attending a press conference very recently where they gathered every sports journalist in Moscow and far beyond to make a big show out of making you sign your next contract. I remember them talking about millions of rubles. Do you have any memory of this?”

Ilya remembered it. The flashing lights of the cameras. The grin he put on to make it seem like this was his dream come true. Everyone seemed to believe it if the articles that were written about him the next day were anything to go by. His father said they could have made it less of a spectacle. Ilya told him he wasn’t responsible for the spectacle; the club had orchestrated it.

“I can be multiple things, Sveta,” Ilya said. “I can be a hockey player and a soon-to-be tattoo artist.”

“Do they know you’re a hockey player?” she asked, frowning her eyebrows.

“I mentioned it.” Ilya admittedly hadn’t mentioned the scale of his career, but he guessed that was fine. They liked him. He promised he would come by whenever he had some hours left and it wasn’t like the KHL's schedule was that grueling. It would be fine.

He was distracted by a hot man with long dark hair falling in front of his face. He moved towards the edge of the dancefloor, eyes on Ilya, grinning at him. He was wearing a shirt that was almost completely see-through and pants that fit him very snugly. Ilya approved very much.

He was going to take this one home, he decided. 

“I have to go to the dancefloor,” he told Svetlana. “Someone is waiting for me.”

He didn’t wait for her response, which would undoubtedly have been something like ‘have fun!’ or at worst ‘please be safe!’ She knew from personal experience he would have fun, he would be careful and he would be safe. 

The man with the long dark hair found that out too, later that night, in Ilya’s bed.

 

By winter, Ilya was tattooing on the weekly. What started as a summer job of helping out and learning turned into an apprenticeship whenever he was available for a few hours. The owners of the shop, William and Zachary (or Will and Zach as they preferred to be called), were happy with every hour that Ilya could be present. He was the first person they hired in any capacity in Moscow, which Ilya guessed was a big deal to them.

Business was still mostly slow. Not a lot of people wanted to associate with them. So far it had mostly been tourists coming through the doors of the shop, often surprised and then delighted to find that they spoke English. Ilya had given a bunch of people tips on where the best restaurants, clubs and coffee shops were, Will and Zach included.

In the meantime, Ilya continued to play the best ice hockey of his life. It meant that Dynamo was doing very well and was first in the Western Conference with quite a gap to the number two. It was only November, but they were the obvious team to win the Gagarin Cup for the second year in a row. Ilya was a shoo-in for MVP of the regular season. 

Ilya was very good at giving interviews before or after games. He was very good at controlling the narrative to make the journalists asking and the viewers at home understand what they needed to take away from this game. But sometimes, after a boring and obvious win, there was nothing to talk about, so journalists searched for different topics.

They won 5-1 from Chelyabinsk and Ilya scored two goals and assisted another goal. It made him think of a saying that Will taught him the other day: it was another day at the office. Ilya went to the mixed zone for the interviews almost immediately after the game just to get it over with and as a result walked in there shirtless. He was hardly the first person to ever do that.

After the usual round of questions - What went well during the game and what could be improved upon? Any particular takeaways from this game? What did you think of the penalty that was called in the second period? - a journalist that Ilya talked to often was the next in time. He was someone that usually had a more interesting question than, for example, how did the game go.

The man, Oleg, looked him up and down and asked: “Are you planning to transfer to Chelyabinsk?”

“No, I like winning,” Ilya replied without pause. 

Oleg hardly managed to suppress a grin. “Well, the tattoo on your chest looks like their mascot, Roz.”

“No it doesn’t,” Ilya replied. “Just because their mascot is a bear and I have a bear on my chest doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. It’s not even close.” He shrugged. “They wish their mascot looked as good as my tattoo.”

“How long have you had it?” Oleg asked. Truly hard-hitting journalism going on, but that was exactly the point. It just needed to be engaging. They knew what they were doing.

“I got it during preseason,” Ilya replied. “I found a great new tattoo shop  in Moscow. It’s a game changer. Sometimes I tattoo there too.”

“You tattoo?” Oleg repeated. According to his undertone, Ilya had actually managed to catch him off guard. 

“Yes. Do you want one?” Ilya offered, dead serious. “I can make it Dynamo’s logo if you’d like. I have a few sketches ready to go, actually.”

“You should get Dynamo’s logo on your chest,” Oleg replied, apparently having gathered his wits again. “The wolf would look complimentary to the bear.”

“I will get a wolf tattoo if we win three Gagarin Cups in a row,” Ilya replied. “The owner of the shop will be personally responsible for the tattoo if we manage it.”

They shook on it, because that was what was required to make a bet real, and Ilya thought that the fans had something to amuse them. This was the way to keep fans engaged and to keep the sponsors interested. This was how the money was going to keep coming in so they could keep getting the best players. 

He also managed to shout out the shop, knowing full well what effect that would have. Dynamo’s fans would start finding it. They would want to get their tattoos there, because the MVP of their favourite team did too. If they were very lucky, they might even be tattooed by that MVP.

When he arrived at his apartment a little while later, he had a missed call and multiple messages from Will. Ilya grinned as he opened them.

 

Message from: Will

Why am I getting messages about a famous hockey player working in our shop, Ilya?

Oh, you only got away with this for so long because neither Zach nor I watch ice hockey. I am shocked you weren’t recognised at the shop!

When you said you were in hockey, I didn’t think you were Dynamo Moscow’s top scorer and last year’s playoffs MVP, Ilya. 

 

Message from: Ilya

Must have gotten lost in translation

 

Message from: Will

I thought you were playing in the lower league and coaching children or something!

 

Message from: Ilya

Almost same thing, yes?

 

The interview was the most-watched interview on the KHL’s website, ever. The KHL jumped on popularity of the segment and shot a longer interview with Ilya at the tattoo shop that included shots of him tattooing their cameraman, who apparently wanted a tattoo for a while but wanted to make it special. Ilya guessed this was special enough for him.

Will and Zach took all the attention in stride. Ilya didn’t think they were entirely comfortable with it, but they never complained. Suddenly their bookings were all filling up and they even needed to hire a few more tattoo artists, because the business was suddenly running so well that they were planning months in advance.

“It helps having a hockey player tattoo as well, yes?” Ilya asked, smirking.

Will just shook his head. “It would help more if you were actually here full-time. You’re an actual prodigy, Ilya. I’m almost sad that it turns out you’re a hockey prodigy too.”

“Some people are just good at everything, William.”

No one was talking about the years and years of practice at both things, of course. Ilya just woke up one day and was Russia’s greatest ice hockey player and also a very capable tattoo artist. He definitely hadn’t been staying up late to practice drawing in  secret and he also definitely hadn’t spent every midday after school at an ice skating rink running drills over and over again.

All the media attention meant that inevitably, his brother picked up on it too. It was hard to miss. It also meant he realised that Ilya went to the tattoo shop that he threatened to pay a visit to with his cop friends and had done so unsuccessfully since because Ilya had tipped Will and Zach off about it.

Andrei thought the subject was smart to bring up before a church service they were both, with emphasis, asked to attend by Polina. Apparently their father had been asking why neither one of them showed up at church anymore. It was good for appearances as well, or so Polina said. 

Ilya was smoking in front of the building, as one did before a church service, when Andrei showed up and made a beeline for him.

“So what, you’re doing extracurriculars now?” he said, scolding Ilya. “Aren’t you supposed to focus on hockey or whatever?”

“What?” Ilya asked, confused what Andrei was referring to.

Ilya actually assumed that Andrei was talking about his nightlife. Ilya wasn’t making it a secret that he went out a lot and sometimes took men home, but he also never indicated it to his father and his brother. He knew how they would feel about it. It was none of Andrei’s business, though, and Ilya would tell him so.

“You’re off roleplaying as a tattoo artist with those Americans?” Andrei said, practically spitting the words out. “Pathetic.”

“If you wanted a tattoo, Andrei, you should have said so,” Ilya said. “It would improve your looks a lot, so I approve.”

“Fuck you,” Andrei replied. “Stop associating with those Westerners. You know Papa wouldn’t approve.”

Ilya looked his brother in the eye. “He’s not going to remember it, Andrei,” he said. “You don’t want to stress him out, so don’t bring it up.”

At that point Polina showed up, glaring at both of them. “Can you not fight in front of the church your father so desperately wants you to attend?” she asked.

When she raised her hands, Ilya threw his pack of cigarettes and lighter at her, knowing she would catch them. This was hardly the first time she found him smoking by a building with the intention of doing the same thing. 

“Well, I know at least one of our souls isn’t going to be saved by going to church and Papa’s praying,” Andrei snarled.

“Go fuck yourself, Andrei,” Ilya replied bitingly.

Andrei left, presumably not to go do as Ilya told him to, leaving Ilya with Polina who was busy lighting her cigarette. Ilya leaned against the wall of the church, watching Polina from the corner of his eyes.

“I’m going out tonight,” Ilya announced, like he didn’t have practice in the morning.

“I wish I could join you,” Polina replied.

There was no further conversation. They just stood there smoking until the church bells indicated it was time to go inside.

 

Svetlana for once declined to go out with Ilya, so Ilya went to one of Moscow’s most exclusive clubs on his own after stopping by Will and Zach. Ilya didn’t need a wingman, or in Svetlana’s case a wingwoman, to find someone to hook up with. Sometimes it took just lingering by the bar looking handsome for someone to approach him. 

Ilya drank a glass of vodka to start with, then went to the dancefloor for an hour. There were multiple people he danced with and multiple people that found him interesting enough to approach, but disappointingly none of them caught his eye. He guessed he must be feeling especially picky tonight because his day had been such a disaster and he desperately needed something good.

Another vodka might make him a bit less picky, Ilya decided, so he went over to the bar for his second drink of the night. As he was nursing the drink, looking over the dancefloor, someone approached him. Ilya had to do a double take.

He knew this guy. No, he didn’t know him personally, but he had seen him multiple times before. Polina had the annoying habit of watching a stupid soap every evening that Ilya came by the house that she refused to turn off because she needed to know what would be happening next. Ilya thought it was the most predictable show ever and made a point out of predicting what would happen next, usually correctly. The guy that was approaching Ilya looked exactly like one of the main characters on Polina’s stupid soap.

The guy stood still next to Ilya and ordered a drink at the bar. Once he received the drink he turned around, mirroring Ilya, and started to watch the dancefloor as well.

“You’re that ice hockey player, right?” he asked.

“You’re that soap actor, right?” Ilya asked in return without looking at him.

“I didn’t think hockey players watched soaps.”

“I didn’t think soap actors watched ice hockey.”

When the other man started to laugh, Ilya turned to look at him. He caught the other man’s glance and grinned as well. 

The man was pretty in a way that Ilya was convinced would never apply to him personally. Ilya had spent too many years on the ice for that. He was rough at the edges with calluses on his hands, a crooked nose from the numerous broken noses he’d gotten throughout the years and multiple missing teeth with gaps filled with dentures. The man looked every bit an actor as much as Ilya looked like an ice hockey player: smooth skin, blond hair that fell perfectly around his face and sparkling blue eyes that attracted attention immediately.

“I’m Daniel,” the man said, offering to shake hands.

“Ilya,” Ilya replied, taking the handshake as an excuse to move closer to him. “The woman my father married loves your show, so we have to take a picture together.”

“Is this the first time you’ve ever asked someone else to take a picture with you?” Daniel asked, a grin on his face. He was looking Ilya up and down.

“I usually just tell people to pose,” Ilya told him. “But no, I’m usually the person people want to take pictures with. Are there no Dynamo fans in your family?”

“Both of my sisters love you,” Daniel said with a put-upon sigh that made Ilya grin as well. “You just beat me to asking for a picture.”

They posed for multiple pictures. One clearly wasn’t enough. The first one was serious and stoic and the second one had them smiling politely like they were posing for the press. Ilya gave Daniel bunny ears for the third picture and once Daniel saw that on the picture all bets were off. As a result, they had three semi-usable pictures and five absolutely unusable ones, for which the reasons varied. 

Ilya noticed that Daniel was very good at matching the energy that Ilya put in the conversation. As long as Ilya had been distant, Daniel had been too. As soon as Ilya got silly, Daniel went along with him. 

“I’ll send them to you,” Ilya told Daniel. “You can just put your number in my phone.”

“Is this your way to get my number without having to ask for it?” Daniel asked.

That remark gave Ilya pause. Of course he’d sensed that Daniel might be interested in him. The looks they had given each other hadn’t exactly been subtle. But outright stating it mere minutes into the first meeting was bold. It was a good thing that Ilya liked people that were bold.

“Now I don’t have to ask anymore,” Ilya said, shrugging a little. “It’s convenient. Do you want the pictures or not? And do you want to go home with me or not?”

He could be bold too. Bold was his default, but Daniel matched him at every turn so far.

Daniel took his phone from him. “You’re very sure that I want to go home with you, Ilya Rozanov,” he said as he was typing.

“You would too if you were me,” he replied. 

That got a small grin out of Daniel. “Let’s hit the dance floor first. Even cockiness has to be earned.”

They finished their drinks and headed for the dance floor together. Ilya imagined they made quite the pair, both famous in their own area of work and looking stunning together, never taking their eyes off the other person for long. It looked like something it wasn’t. 

It looked like something it might be.

In the morning, Ilya’s alarm clock went off at 6.30. Ilya knew logically he was going to regret going out. Regret always arrived in the morning and never at night, though. It was a good thing he only drank two glasses of vodka. 

The lack of sleep was hitting him the most as he opened his eyes. All he had to do was get out of bed and get some coffee inside of him and he’d be fine. As he turned on his back, though, he found a presence beside him in the bed who was just as annoyed, if not more, about the early alarm clock as he was.

“Jesus, Ilya,” Daniel muttered as he turned towards Ilya. “Why is that thing going off at such an insane hour?”

 “Not all of us have the life of a soap actor,” Ilya said, slowly sitting up. “I have to get to the rink.”

“No, not all of us play a dangerous team sport for a living,” Daniel replied, yawning. He rolled over to Ilya’s side of the bed and wrapped his arms around Ilya’s waist. “Some of us get our adrenaline rushes by doing stunts.”

“We’re both insane then,” Ilya concluded, bending down to kiss Daniel. “But I do have to get out of bed to do my insane job. Do you have yours today?”

“No, we’re not shooting this week,” Daniel replied.

“Well, I’m not kicking you out of bed,” Ilya replied. “You can go when you want to. But I do have to go.”

Daniel stole another kiss. “Alright, I’ll message you.”

“You better.” 

Chapter 3: part 3, 2010-2011

American country music was playing in the tattoo shop. It was the kind that Ilya hated. Will had compromised with him after he complained for the umpteenth time that it was an utter crime to subject Russians to it and now he had control over the sound system for one day per week. Today wasn’t it unfortunately. The argument that they were driving away customers with the choice of music didn’t work either, because the shop continued to be popular now that the entirety of the country knew that Ilya got his tattoo here and occasionally tattooed here too. 

“God, this fucking music,” Ilya muttered, eyes focused on tattoo needle and his canvas: Daniel’s skin. “What a disgrace. I can’t believe they would come all the way to Russia and continue playing their music on my time in the shop. They’re not even here right now. Surely I can file a complaint somewhere!”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Daniel warned him softly. “I’m going to shake. You emphasized three times that I need to lay perfectly still.” 

Daniel knew perfectly well that Ilya was completely fine with Will and Zach playing their own music. He didn’t like it, but he’d made it clear that Will and Zach should very much keep their own identity in their own store. He liked to think that was what made it work. 

Daniel had met Will and Zach a handful of times by now. He’d seen firsthand how much Ilya loved the two men that had made such a positive impact in his life.

A change of music taste hadn’t gone with it, though. Obviously not.

Daniel just got back from three months in Atlanta, where he was shooting the first season of a series he’d been cast in. He wasn’t allowed to say much about it and he was expected back in the United States again in a couple of months for a press run, but Ilya gathered the project was a big deal. By the looks of it, this project was going to be Daniel’s breakthrough in Hollywood. 

It was almost the offseason. Ilya had the intention to work in the tattoo shop multiple days per week as soon as the offseason began. It was perfect timing according to Will, because most of their employees were on their summer holiday for a couple of weeks. They still had a packed schedule, but when Daniel told him he wanted a tattoo Ilya had decided to do him after hours.

He wasn’t supposed to be here right now. It was the day before the final week of the play-offs and he was supposed to be in bed early. Dynamo was playing the finals against Ak Bars Kazan and the first two games were at home. As a result, Ilya could sneak out of bed to go to the tattoo shop with Daniel. He was never going to admit it, but he was more nervous for this round of final games than last year’s final games. Tattooing was almost soothing for him. It was definitely a way to get his mind off things. 

The tattoo of a daisy that Daniel wanted and that Ilya had subsequently made him multiple sketches of until it was perfect was coming along nicely. It wasn’t the most challenging piece he’d had to do thus far, but it was challenging because he actually knew the person in his chair personally.  

“Why did you pick a daisy, anyway?” Ilya asked conversationally.

“It’s my mother’s name,” Daniel replied. “I feel like I mentioned this, Ilya.”

“Sorry,” Ilya said genuinely. “My brain is filled with hockey right now. I’m thinking about tactics and positions and whatever those assholes from Kazan are going to do. They’re really good this year.”

“Are they really assholes?” Daniel wondered.

“No,” Ilya replied. “The nice person to asshole ratio is very normal in their team, as far as I know. I just have to call them that for the week.”

Daniel did not watch any hockey whatsoever. Ilya was pretty sure they didn’t broadcast the KHL in Atlanta so he also couldn’t have watched, but Daniel wasn’t a hockey fan when he was in Russia either. It was refreshing to be around people who didn’t know hockey, like Will and Zach as well, and just treated Ilya as Ilya, instead of as a man who was very good at hockey and just as good as chirping people. 

“God, hockey is weird,” Daniel said.

“Weird to you, maybe.”

Ilya wanted to kiss him, but this was absolutely not the time. He needed to focus on the daisy and he needed to get the two of them out of here without being spotted by anyone. Thankfully no one expected him to be here right now so no one would be keeping an eye on the shop. He should definitely be in bed. 

Ilya let the ridiculous American country music fade to the background in his mind and zeroed in on the tattoo. He dedicated his attention fully to the piece, refusing to be distracted by the music or Daniel’s half-naked form. This was between him and the art now and nothing else.

When he was done, he left Daniel in the capable hands of Will and Zach and started with the clean-up. It was a soothing ritual by now. His hands knew what they needed to do and Ilya didn’t have to put too much thought into it. His mind thankfully wasn’t going back to the game. He knew what to do.

He knew they were going to win.

In four games? Absolutely not. That was wishful thinking. Ilya preferred to do it in five games. Maybe a loss away from home to give Kazan something, at least. He would still be content with six games. Two losses, one at home and one away from home or something. Going to game seven would be unbearable, so they weren’t going to.

He wrapped up. The shop was closed, so Ilya turned off the remainder of the lights and walked up the stairs to the apartment that Will and Zach shared. He found Daniel with them in the living room. Ilya lingered in the doorway from the hallway to the living room, watching them as they rapidly spoke in English.

“Well done on the daisy,” was the first thing that Will said when Ilya came in. “Impeccable lines. It looks really good.”

Ilya wasn’t sure if it was a Western thing or just a Will and Zach and Daniel thing, but they gave their praise and affection far more freely than anyone else Ilya knew. Will and Zach were from Boston or something and Daniel was half-Russian and half whatever he was, he’d never mentioned it, and Ilya had never been around people that were so nice. He didn’t know what to do with that. He hadn’t known what to do with that for months now.

“Thank you,” he therefore said, somewhat awkwardly, and eyed Daniel. “Do you still like it?” he asked.

“It looks incredible,” Daniel replied in his annoyingly perfect English. He got up from the couch that he’d been settled on and kissed Ilya. “Thank you. I wanted my first tattoo to be done by you. It’s perfect.”

“Do you kids want to sleep over?” Zach asked, who was sitting in the armchair and watching them with a smile on his face.

“No, I must go,” Ilya said. “I should have been in bed a long time ago. Coach is not happy with me.”

“That’s why he doesn’t know,” Will said with a wink. He passed by Ilya and Ilya heard him grab his car keys.

“We don’t need taxi,” Ilya told him. “We can get taxi.”

“You definitely can, but I don’t want you to,” Will replied. “Just let me take you home, Ilya.”

Usually, that remark would have been plenty for Ilya to make a joke about, even in English, but Ilya was tired. He guessed that cleaning up after tattooing was somehow meditative for him and now he was properly worn out. After days of overthinking and watching the Kazan versus Salavat Yulaev Ufa semi-final run go to game seven he just needed to go to sleep and subsequently get on the ice. 

So Ilya, for once, gave in. He settled in the backseat of Will’s depressingly boring car with Daniel beside him and let Will drive him home. Daniel got out with him instead of letting Will drive him home too. Ilya guessed he didn’t want to give Will even more work. Daniel definitely shouldn’t be walking home at this hour, so they went into Ilya’s apartment together and got in bed together.

Ilya carefully checked the dressing on the tattoo once more, not coming anywhere near the tattoo itself, and forced Daniel to wear a shirt over it too rather than just sleeping in boxer shorts as per usual. Ilya also didn’t want him sleeping on it, but Daniel wasn’t a side sleeper anyway. He put a bottle of water on the nightstand on Daniel’s side of the bed, grabbed another one for himself and then finally went to lay down.

“You’re taking care of me like I have the flu,” Daniel said, thankfully back in Russian again.

“Tattoo aftercare is important, Daniel,” Ilya replied as he rolled on his side, putting more emphasis on Daniel’s name and his own accent as a result. “Now hush. I need to sleep if I’m going to score a hattrick tomorrow.”

“Alright, MVP,” Daniel replied, a word Ilya was pretty sure that Ilya taught him. “Good night.”

Kazan took it to game six, much to Ilya’s chagrin. They won the first two games without much of a problem, but the third game could only be considered a disaster. They got it back together in the fourth game, making it 3-1 as they returned to Moscow. Ilya wanted to get it done in game five, but thanks to a goal from Kazan late in the third period they were going to game six. 

After the warm-up they headed back into the locker room for a last-minute discussion of tactics. Ilya reached for his phone to check if everything was okay with his father. If it wasn’t, Polina would have called or messaged. She didn’t care that he was one of the best-paid hockey players in Russia and that he essentially had a final to play and he appreciated that.

It wasn’t Polina that he got a message from, though. No, instead it was a picture from Daniel. Ilya took a quick look around the dressing room, but everyone was too busy with themselves to notice him. That was how he liked his team before a game. 

He opened the picture. He knew Daniel hadn’t forgotten that he was playing a game today because he’d been annoying enough about it, so it couldn’t be a message asking if he was available. As it turned out, it was quite the opposite. Daniel sent a picture of Svetlana and him in Ilya’s seats, both of them in a Rozanov jersey. The message said Go win the Gagarin Cup! Sveta says hi. xx

Ilya replied with three hearts and then turned back to the locker room. Usually this was where the captain would give a speech. He was retiring after this season, though, and Ilya sort of assumed that the honour of captaining this team would go to him as the undoubtedly youngest-ever captain of a KHL team. Therefore, he took charge.

He moved to the middle of the dressing room. “Listen up!” he yelled and everyone quieted down. “This man -” he pulled their captain away from where he was standing and into the middle of the dressing room next to him, “deserves a second Gagarin Cup for putting up with us for the entire year while playing some incredible hockey. We need to win this cup now! For the fans, for ourselves, for our team and for this man!”

He took the subsequent noise, loud and boisterous, as agreement. They proved as much during the game, because game six was won with a shutout and three goals, including one from Ilya. The second Gagarin Cup was theirs. It was as heavy as Ilya remembered it to be, but he took a lap around the ice with it regardless.

Was Shane Hollander winning two cups in his first two seasons with Montreal? Ilya didn’t think so. It might be an unfair comparison, but Ilya didn’t care about that. He couldn’t beat Hollander in the NHL, so he was going to do it this way. 

Needless to say, but he was winning.

Since Daniel was expected back in the United States somewhere at the end of the summer, which was when preseason training would be starting for Ilya too, they decided to take an early summer vacation. Daniel had heard great things about some beach town in Spain near Barcelona, so that was where they rented a villa together. 

Daniel was going to pick Ilya up from his father’s house. Ilya had gone there one last time to check in with Polina, to spend time with his father and to make sure that he could actually leave for a couple of weeks. If his father had gotten much worse he would not have gone abroad, or away from Moscow other than for games, but -

“He’s fine, Ilya,” Polina said for the third time. “His condition is stable. You can go. Andrei and I can hold down the fort.”

“No offence, Polina, but mentioning Andrei doesn’t inspire any confidence at all.”

She considered that, then nodded. “Andrei is his father’s son.”

Ilya didn’t want to laugh at that, but he laughed anyway. She didn’t quite know how right she was about that.

Right on cue, his father walked out of the house and into the front yard, where Ilya was standing talking to Polina. Ilya had a lot of conversations in this yard since he moved out, because it was a way to be near his father and keep an eye on him while also managing to have private conversations with either his brother or Polina. His father didn’t usually wander out after them, but with the weather being as good as it was and Ilya’s suitcase standing next to him he might have thought he was expected to be there too.

“Are you going to the NHL draft, Ilya?” his father asked.

“No, Papa,” Ilya replied immediately, by now used to the questions. He had a period where he didn’t ask anything and stubbornly acted like he knew what was going on even when he didn’t, so Ilya preferred this. “I’m going on vacation with a friend.” Anticipating the next question, he added: “We’re going to Spain for two weeks. Remember when we talked about Spain and you said -”

“Not to get too involved with the Westerners,” his father said, nodding. “They won’t be a good influence on you.”

His father: well aware that he was going to dislike the West, no matter the circumstances or the phase of life he was in.

“Exactly,” Ilya said with a nod. “And of course I would never do such a thing.”

It was a blatant lie and he assumed Polina knew that as well. Ilya was hardly going to Spain just for the weather and the beaches. Daniel picked a beach town that he said was known to be ‘gay’ and that they would be completely safe to spend time together there.

Russia was technically safe for queer people as well, of course. There were no laws against them in any capacity. Both Ilya’s father and brother were prejudiced against anything they didn’t understand including foreigners and queer people, so Ilya had always been very cautious in sharing anything about the company he kept. But they weren’t the norm. Daniel ran in circles where people were far more open and welcoming. Ilya’s hockey circle, on the other hand, was definitely homophobic. 

Whatever the case may be, he and Daniel were known as two good friends that met in a club and hit it off since. It was true enough to pass as the truth. 

“Your friend is taking his time, Ilya,” Polina said, pointedly checking her watch. She hated it when they did the ‘talking in the front yard’ thing, because the entire neighbourhood could see them do it.

By now Ilya was pretty sure that the people around them knew something was going on with Grigori. They agreed to keep it between the three of them (Polina, Andrei and himself), but with Grigori retiring a few years early and usually not ever seen anywhere alone, Ilya was sure that people that were paying attention realised something was going on. Will and Zach definitely knew that Ilya’s father was sick, if not the details of it, because Ilya sometimes mentioned hospital visits and specialists if he couldn’t make his usual hours of work. Management at the club knew nothing and that was exactly how Ilya liked it.

Daniel didn’t know anything either. He didn’t need to. Ilya hoped that this short conversation before leaving for the airport wouldn’t be too odd.

“He’ll be -” Ilya started and stopped when he saw Daniel’s car pull into the street. “There he is.”

Daniel parked in front of the front gate, got up from the driver’s seat and made his way over to the three of them. He immediately threw the car keys at Ilya, who easily caught them. Daniel was long used to how particular Ilya was about his driving and was happy to let Ilya drive instead of having to hear his complaints. 

“Papa, Polina, this is my friend Daniel,” Ilya introduced him.

Daniel turned towards Grigori and Polina, naturally greeting them first and naturally starting with Grigori. He immediately offered to shake hands. “Mr. Rozanov. It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about your accomplishments.”

If with accomplishments he meant failing to raise Andrei and stimulating Ilya to be nothing more than a hockey player, then he’d heard plenty. Ilya tried to hold back on criticising his family, but he got so comfortable with Daniel that sometimes things slipped past his defences.

Ilya’s father responded exactly as Ilya expected him to: matter-of-factly about those accomplishments and with an assessing look at Daniel, clearly to determine whether or not he was good enough to hang out with his son. Polina also responded exactly how Ilya expected her to, but that was the opposite of normal. Ilya had, after all, befriended an actor from her favourite soap and failed to mention that when he said Daniel was coming to pick him up.

“Mrs Rozanova,” Daniel said, offering to shake hands. “I heard you’re a fan of the show.”

Polina looked between Ilya and Daniel, not taking his hand until Grigori sternly told her to. Ilya wanted to laugh at her, but he managed to disguise his chuckle with a cough behind his hand. 

“It’s - uh - nice to meet you - Daniel,” she stammered through the sentence, breaking eye contact and letting go of Daniel’s hand as soon as she considered it appropriate. She turned towards Ilya immediately. “Why didn’t you mention he was -?” She didn’t finish the sentence and instead gestured at Daniel.

“I thought I did,” Ilya said. “I mentioned he was an actor, right?”

He did, but she’d definitely forgotten about that. Even if she’d remembered he said that, she would never have connected the dots. Famous people met other famous people. His family tended to forget that he was famous unless it was something that benefited them personally, such as Ilya being able to pay for all of his father’s private clinic visits and treatments. 

His father was looking between Polina and Ilya, clearly unsure what they were getting at right now. Ilya was pretty sure he had seen some episodes of the soap simply because it was always on television in their house, but if he didn’t remember the specialists he met before Ilya had no hope that he was going to remember Daniel from seeing him on his screen.

“We need to catch our flight,” he said. “I will see you in two weeks.”

He turned towards Polina then. “You will call if -”

“Yes, I will call,” she said with emphasis. “You can go, Ilya.”

Daniel wrapped a playful arm around him. “He loves Russia so much that I can hardly believe I managed to talk him into going to see Spain with me,” he said. “I promise I will deliver him back to you in two weeks.”

“We’ll see for ourselves how much better Moscow is than Madrid, Daniel,” Ilya said, putting extra emphasis on his accent for Daniel’s name before shaking off the arm around his shoulders. “See you in two weeks, Papa.”

Because it was the polite thing to do, he shook hands with Polina and subsequently hugged his father. The entire neighbourhood was watching according to Polina, Ilya assumed, so he almost made a show out of it.

Daniel loaded his suitcase in the trunk of the car. Ilya briefly glared at him for it before turning back to his father with a smile. They said their goodbyes once more before Ilya headed to the car as well. He sat down on the drivers’ seat and started the car before Daniel finished putting his seatbelt on.

“You really don’t know how to deal with a Russian family, do you?” Ilya asked as soon as they were out of the street.

“I have a Russian family, Ilya!” Daniel protested. “You know, courtesy of me being half-Russian and all that? I just don’t think that anyone is ever prepared to deal with your family.”

He was probably right. Ilya didn’t think that half of the time he was equipped to deal with his own family either.

“Well, good thing we’re putting distance between us and them for the next two weeks. Spain was a good call, Daniel. A lot of distance to cross.”

“That’s exactly why I picked it.”

Later, Ilya was going to kiss that stupid smirk off his face.  

Spain was perfect.

Daniel had found a beach town that he rightfully called ‘gay’. It was unlike anywhere Ilya had ever been before. They could walk hand-in-hand through the streets, day and night, and no one bat an eye at them. The other tourists and the citizens seemed to find it normal. In fact, they were doing the same thing, and they were also indulging in PDA too. 

But that was only the beginning. There were hotels, restaurants and shops that were advertised as queer. According to Daniel there were over twenty queer bars in the town. It wasn’t just that queer people were welcome in this beach town in Spain; it felt like this was a place they belonged and should be. This was a town that was meant specifically for them. It was something that Ilya found hard to wrap his mind around at first, but he guessed he’d been right all along; that Western lifestyle definitely had some things to recommend to it.

They spend their days relaxing and exploring. Some days they were on the beach, while on others they took a roadtrip. They checked out Barcelona for a day and agreed that while it was an incredible city, they were very partial to their favourite beach town. They either made dinner in their villa or tried yet another restaurant where the servers didn’t bat an eye at the fact that they were together. Ilya tried to fuck Daniel on each and every surface in the villa, but had to admit defeat on that halfway through the vacation; there were too many surfaces for just a two week stay. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t tried. 

Their evenings were reserved for going out. Sometimes they went to the more lowkey places, where they sat and drank by the bar and played pool and darts, but usually they decided to go clubbing. They drank, they danced, they people-watched and they made out. Once there was an incident, for a lack of a better word, in an alley behind a club, consisting of condoms and lube and hushed words. 

For the last evening, though, they decided to stay in. They would be leaving tomorrow in the afternoon and most of their stuff was already packed. Ilya cooked dinner that they had in the backyard together. That was where Daniel found Ilya when he returned from cleaning up and setting the dishwasher.

Daniel sat down beside him after kissing him. “So I was thinking.”

“Please tell me this is not about Scott Hunter again.”

Daniel laughed before Ilya even finished the sentence. “It could be, if you wanted it to be.”

Ilya didn’t want to talk about Scott Hunter again. It was one of the most unexpected topics of conversation this summer and not in the least because Daniel didn’t watch any ice hockey.  They’d been doing a round of people-watching in one of the busiest clubs in town when Daniel suddenly said ‘Hey, isn’t that the guy from your American hockey?’

It had, in fact, been ‘that guy from Ilya’s American hockey’. Scott Hunter in the flesh, looking out of place and slightly uncomfortable. The question ‘what the fuck is Scott Hunter doing here’ burned on Ilya’s lips, but he realised he knew the answer too. Ilya was never going to be the only queer hockey player in the world, but he never put that much thought into that fact. As he watched Hunter awkwardly interact with the man that just approached him, Ilya realised he might want to put a bit more thought into that fact.

They’d mentioned him once or twice since, always in private of course, and Ilya kept wondering about him. Were there no boring men in New York for Hunter to hook up with, or was he so paranoid that someone would recognise him that he had to head over to Europe to get laid? Ilya didn’t think he was that famous, but Ilya admittedly also hadn’t thought that Daniel would be able to recognise Scott Hunter. All those evenings watching NHL had clearly done their work there.

They had teased each other about whether either one of them should be picking up Hunter, since Daniel thought that the common ground he had with Ilya would work, whereas Ilya was sure that Daniel had to be Hunter’s type. Ilya then pointed out that Scott Hunter was ancient enough to have seen dinosaurs in real life, a discussion that spiraled from there. 

“I really don’t want it to be, Daniel,” Ilya said with a long-suffering sigh.

“Alright, I’ll let your obsession with Scott Hunter slide for now.” Ilya was about to elbow him when he continued to talk. “So you know how I’m supposed to be in L.A. for our press run soon?”

“Yes, you’ve told me this.”

“I was thinking of maybe staying there.”

“It doesn’t make sense to go back and forth between Moscow and L.A. if you’re going to be doing press on and off, Daniel. Of course you’re staying there.”

“No, I meant permanently.”

Ilya turned to look at Daniel directly. He was looking at Ilya already, clearly trying to gauge his response. The fact that Ilya turned was all the response that he got, because Ilya’s expression was carefully neutral. He was well-used to not showing any emotions in the moment.

He wasn’t saying anything, which seemed to prompt Daniel to continue talking. “Nothing has aired yet, of course, but we’re already in talks for a second and third season. And if the show gets nearly as big as the critics say it will be, it could be huge for my career. It makes more sense to be where the auditions happen and where I will be invited to events to socialize with people who make things happen.”

“So you’re going to be a huge Hollywood star,” Ilya said. “Congratulations. I am very happy for you.”

“Thank you,” Daniel said, a tentative smile breaking through on his face. “Are you sure you’re okay with it? You don’t have to be, you know.”

What difference would that make? Daniel was moving to L.A. regardless of how Ilya felt about it. He was telling Ilya, not making it a conversation.

He leaned back against his chair, folding his hands together, as he thought about it. Maybe he was upset about the wrong thing. He wanted to have been able to move to the United States and have his dream career. He hadn’t been able to do that and instead dived headfirst into other things to distract himself. Now he had an incredible ice hockey career in Russia, he was establishing himself in his second career as a tattoo artist and he was kept busy with making sure his father received the care he needed. He never stood still for long enough to consider how he was doing after losing what he worked towards for years.

It didn’t mean that he begrudged Daniel for going after this opportunity for his own career, though. He deserved to have what he wanted too and he shouldn’t have to be held back by anything in Russia.

“Yes, I’m sure I’m okay with it,” he said, glancing at Daniel, smiling as well. “You deserve the success, Daniel. I’m proud of you.”

He leaned over to kiss him too, just to make sure he was getting the message across. He didn’t want Daniel to think that Ilya was genuinely mad about this.

“And you’re not mad about it because -” Daniel gestured between them as though to say ‘you and me.’

There was no Ilya and Daniel, realistically. They were two men that enjoyed each other’s company and had gone all the way across Europe to Spain to have two weeks of it. Now reality was crashing back in and Ilya was going to have to be realistic about that too.

“No, I’m not mad,” Ilya said. “I will miss you, but I’m not mad at you for leaving. We’ll text. I’m sure you’ll be back in Moscow at some point and then we can see each other again, if you’d like.”    

“I would like that,” Daniel replied. “I had the best two weeks with you, Ilya. It meant everything to me that we could do this. And -” he paused to push his shirt upwards. The two of them studied the tattoo that Ilya did for him. “This means everything to me too. That you tattooed it and then a week later won the Gagarin.”

It was a snapshot of a life, Ilya guessed. A really good snapshot. The highest of highs. 

Odds were he was about to go home to the lowest of lows.

“You should tell everyone in Hollywood that you got the tattoo done by a Russian hotshot tattoo artist,” Ilya said, half-joking. “That should give you some edge.”

“You think I don’t have edge?”

“I know you don’t have edge.”

Naturally, that discussion spiraled into a make-out session and subsequently they found the motivation to defile the last surface of the villa. Ilya vowed to himself this would be the last time. He needed to move on from this.

At night, with Daniel wrapped around him, Ilya reflected that he’d been careless and stupid. If his father had been, well, his father, there would have been no European vacations and hours spent at an American tattoo shop. Everything would have been focused on being the best at ice hockey. That Ilya was still the best despite all of the distractions was a mere coincidence, or perhaps just meant that everyone else in the KHL was distracted too.

The trouble was, though, that Ilya was in love. He wasn’t in love with Daniel and while he might love this beach town, that love felt like a temporary fantasy at best. No, Ilya was in love with being careless and stupid, with doing everything he wanted to at once and living in a haze. He had nothing and no one holding him back with his father not always present and Andrei distracted by his cop friends and the women he was chasing after. 

It was going wrong eventually. He knew that. He just hoped the consequences wouldn’t be disastrous.

In the meantime, he needed to make sure that he didn’t fall too far. He had to start taking back control.

By the end of the summer, Daniel was gone. Ilya and him called every now and then. Polina figured out that Daniel’s character in the soap would be written off and had been annoyed by that spoiler in the way only a serious fan could be. If only she got into hockey instead of Russian soaps. In the years that Ilya played for Dynamo so far the team had never been predictable and had always won.

The season started like they’d never stopped playing last year, as if the break was of no consequence to their form at all. Their captain had retired, which predictably made Ilya the new captain, and he pushed his teammates harder than their old captain had done. He wasn’t about to lose now. He refused to.

He continued to tattoo on his days off and saw multiple teammates as well as players from other teams come in for a tattoo done by Ilya personally. Slowly but surely the rest of the Russian entertainment industry found him too; he saw a few actors, a few singers and a daytime talk show host. He dutifully posed for pictures and made small talk as he tattooed, giving Will and Zach’s shop the publicity it deserved when the photos subsequently ended up on social media. 

His father was mostly stable, thankfully. Andrei got engaged to some girl that Ilya swore he never mentioned before and asked for a lot of money for their wedding. It was the first time their front yard talks ended up in yelling and Polina reminding them that the entire neighbourhood could in fact see and hear them. Ilya financed the wedding regardless. 

Dynamo lost the semi-final of the play-offs. Ilya was livid about it. This was the first season he wasn’t distracted by any other factors and the first season he was captain and this was the season they actually managed to lose the Gagarin. And not even in the final, for fuck’s sake. 

Oleg, the journalist from some tv-show that Ilya didn’t watch that he had a bet with, reminded him that at least he didn’t have to have the Dynamo logo tattooed on his chest. Ilya replied he’d rather have that tattoo if it meant they would win the third Gagarin. 

His priorities were with his father, with hockey and with tattooing. He was doing the right thing. 

Regardless, when Svetlana asked if Ilya wanted to go to Boston with her for a couple of weeks in the summer, there was only one answer he could give.

“When are we leaving?”

“As soon as possible.” 

Chapter 4: part 4, 2013-2014

Chapter Notes

a trigger warning for this chapter in particular: the death of a parent is featured. since this one isn't directly canon compliant (it happens years later in canon), i'd rather be safe than sorry.

enjoy the chapter!

Svetlana and him went on vacation to Boston in 2012 as well, after another year where Dynamo was stopped in the play-offs. Ilya had been slightly less mad about it than the year before. Only slightly. When it became time for 2013, after a third play-off loss, though, Ilya unfortunately could only give one answer when she asked again.

“I can’t.”

Svetlana looked him up and down, as if she was trying to find the reason why he would refuse to go to Boston with her a third summer in a row in his expression. It wasn’t visible in his expression; he looked as stoic as he usually did. Some of the  Western guys in the locker room called it ‘Slavic stoicism’. Ilya called it ‘being normal in Russia.’

“Why? Do you suddenly hate Boston?”

“You know why, Sveta.”

“Oh.”

Oh, indeed.

They were sitting in the living room of Svetlana’s apartment, where they had gone after having sex on her bed. An ice hockey game was on in the background, but neither one of them was paying attention to it. Sveta was lounging around in the shirt that Ilya wore when he walked in earlier and Ilya is just in the sweatpants that she left at her apartment for him. Her hair was predictably messed up, though Ilya assumed that his hair wasn’t in a much better state. 

He loved moments like this, when it was just him and her without any expectations or a charade that needed to be upheld. Svetlana was probably the only person that Ilya could be himself around. Being around her felt like a luxury, more like an indulgence, and he wanted to have that for the entire summer. But if she was going to Boston, he also wasn’t going to ask her to stay.

“Is he doing so badly?” she asked.

“I would have been out of here by now if he wasn’t,” Ilya said with a sigh. “He’s not quite bedridden, but it’s close. A few days ago the specialist said that he might not even make it through the summer. It’s my father, so he will make it through the summer just because someone had the audacity to suggest he might not, but I still have to be here.”

The nature of his father’s form of dementia, as it turned out, was that he was slowly deteriorating. There was no logic or a pattern to follow in the short term. He was different every day and every hour too. In the long term Ilya had seen him get worse. The man that was diagnosed when Ilya was seventeen was a very different man than Ilya was faced with now. He hardly talked, found it difficult to walk and slept a lot, but he required constant care.

“You never told me,” Svetlana said. “Not that I expected you to, but still.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” Ilya replied. “I wanted to be distracted from it.”

Svetlana knew him. She knew he would never voluntarily talk about how his father was doing or how he felt about that. It just wasn’t what they did. If there was anyone he would talk to, it was Svetlana, though. He dropped bits and pieces to Will and Zach, but they knew they couldn’t ask about it. If they asked, which they tried a few times, they would never get an answer.

“Then we stay in Moscow,” she said, like the ‘we’ part of the equation was a given. “We can find other things to do. Moscow is a city with many layers, Ilyushka.”

Ilya knew all about Moscow being a city with many layers. Every street and every building told a completely different story from the next. It also told a different story for Ilya on a personal level. Some places he loved, some places he hated and some he was neutral about. But he very much preferred leaving it behind every summer to find a place that he might love, and more importantly, that might actually love him back. Boston loved him in the summers he spent there. Moscow didn’t stand a chance.

“We?” Ilya asked. “You and I we?”

“Yes,” Svetlana replies. “I’m not leaving you here to go to Boston on my own. We can go next time.” She glanced aside at him. “We’re a package deal, Ilya. You have to know this by now.”

“You can go if you want to, Sveta,” Ilya said. “I wouldn’t hold it against you. It’s okay. You don’t need to -”

He was interrupted by Svetlana. “I’m not going on my own,” she said, loud and clear. There was no room for discussion.

Ilya settled down against her, his head on her chest, and kept his eyes on the television. He could see no more than shadows moving. He wasn’t even sure what two teams they were watching and if it was the KHL or the NHL. They both watched a lot of NHL too and had a shared soft spot for the Boston Bears. Svetlana’s father played for the Bears, of course, and Ilya assumed he would have been drafted by the Bears if he’d gone into the NHL draft. Ilya liked to think that objectively the Bears were the best NHL team, period.

Svetlana’s fingers gently ran through his hair. It was a motion that Ilya was happy to lean into. He might start dozing off here, he figured, and she was going to have to wake him to get him back to bed. At least neither one of them was going to pretend like Ilya had any plans of going home tonight. He was fine where he was.

“Ilyushka?” Svetlana asked, breaking the silence and Ilya’s just-gained peace with it. He hummed in a response, so Svetlana continued. “Do you want to get married?”

It was a question that was far less out of left field than it could have been. At the moment, Ilya could think of many reasons why she would ask him that and needed clarification on what direction she wanted to take it.

So he gave her possibly the worst answer to a proposal. Not even a ‘no’.

“Why?” he asked. “What are you thinking about?”

“I’ve been thinking about the rumours about the new laws that have been doing the rounds,” she said, uncharacteristically softly. “I need you to be safe. Marrying me would keep you safe.”

This was the other far too serious topic that Ilya didn’t want to think about but had to deal with regardless. Of course it was just his luck that he couldn’t just have to deal with either his father dying or his rights as a citizen of Russia being threatened. No, these two events had to occur at the same time.

Ilya had never known Russia in the 90s, but he knew enough about it to have some understanding of the country he lived in his entire life and represented at international tournaments. The Soviet Union fell in the year he was born; the Berlin Wall had fallen two years before that. Not too long afterwards the country became what others called ‘more liberal.’ Queer people were allowed. Accepted was a big word, but they were visible and somewhat left alone. It was far better than it had been, at least. 

The Russia that he grew up in hadn’t been kind to him, but it had never been outright hostile. He had always been allowed to be queer. Not everyone, including his own father and brother, liked it, but everyone saw it as a part of everyday life. Some people were queer. Most of them weren’t. All of them had a favourite hockey team, a favourite brand of vodka and presumably a demanding family; the quintessential Russian experience boiled down in three key words. 

Of course, Ilya wasn’t entirely blind to sentiments changing in recent years, but he figured that would come and go. He also figured that with the upcoming Winter Olympics taking place in Sochi, their government would take a more liberal stance to make their point. Perhaps that had been terribly naive of him. The government had taken a whole different turn. While Ilya couldn’t dream to claim he understood the rumoured new laws word for word, he understood enough. He understood that he couldn’t be openly queer. He understood that he needed to be far more careful going forward and might have to stick with hooking up with women only.

“I will be safe, Sveta,” Ilya told her. “I’m going to be a model citizen. I’ll win the gold medal for them, alright? I’ll be a living legend  and no one will think twice about me.”

“The more famous you get, the more people will think twice about you,” she pointed out. “But the visibility also gives you safety, so I understand that. Although you have to know that if they ever catch you…”

She trailed off. Ilya didn’t need it spelled out for him.

“I know,” he said softly. “But if I don’t do anything wrong, they can’t catch me doing anything wrong either.”  

“Is that sustainable?” Svetlana questioned.

“It has to be.”

When it rains it pours, the saying went. Ilya was well-aware of this. Before, he reckoned it was a chain of actions and consequences (his father was ill and therefore he couldn’t go into the NHL draft, for example), but right now the two main events in his life had nothing to do with each other. His father dying and Russia becoming far more strict had no correlation whatsoever.

Unfortunately the next thing did have a correlation to the latter. He should have seen it coming, but he’d been so busy with his father that everything else ceased to matter comparatively. His life was on autopilot currently, even now that it was the offseason. If he couldn’t be with his father he just wanted to stay in his apartment all week until Svetlana forced him to go out with her. The only other thing he did was work at the tattoo shop, because the awareness that he needed to keep working on his second career nagged at him in the back of his mind.

Ilya was still the most popular artist the shop had to offer, something that wasn’t helped by his limited hours during every season that wasn’t the summer, but he’d noticed in the bookings that the entertainment industry stayed away this year. Maybe everyone in that industry who wanted a tattoo of his had it by now. He also noticed that the shop wasn’t as busy as he was used to when he walked in early midday, but he wrote that off on the time of day.

When he walked his last customer out he found both Will and Zach by the counter, clearly waiting for him. As soon as Ilya closed the door behind the customer Zach appeared behind him to lock it.

“You will murder me?” Ilya asked.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Will replied behind them.

Well, that wasn’t a no, but to be honest Ilya would trust these two men with his life. If he would be getting murdered in this scenario that would be fully on him for not listening to his family’s warnings about the westerners infiltrating Moscow. 

He followed Will and Zach up the stairs to their apartment where he, much to his surprise, found a mostly empty apartment. The hallway was completely empty, immediately giving away what was going on, and the living room looked barren too. A few last pieces of furniture, the couch and the armchair, were pushed to the side, and a few open boxes were haphazardly scattered throughout the room. Ilya gathered they had been packing while they waited for him to wrap up downstairs. 

“You are packing,” Ilya concluded unnecessarily. “You are leaving.”

“We don’t think that the current political climate in Russia as a whole is beneficial for us,” Zach said behind Ilya, using a lot of complicated English. “For our own sanity and safety, we decided to leave.”

“Because you are foreigners, yes?” Ilya asked.

“No, because we’re gay men, Ilya,” Zach said.

It marked the first time that either Will or Zach said what had been implicit for all the years that Ilya knew them. Ilya had known since the first time he met Will that he was probably queer, but that was down to Ilya rather than Will; Ilya had a way of just knowing these things. No one ever had to say it out loud. Ilya had never said anything about him being queer either. He just introduced them to Daniel and mentioned Daniel would be sleeping over at his apartment and kissed Daniel in front of them and that was that. 

Ilya guessed that if they were ever going to mention it, this would be the moment. It was also the safest moment, because by the looks of it they would be gone before the new law went into effect. 

“I understand,” Ilya said flatly.

Ilya didn’t want to understand it and he didn’t like to understand it, but he did. He understood that while he could very easily pass as straight and fly under the radar, especially in the profession he was most known for, not everyone had such a luxury. Will and Zach came to Moscow together, lived together and ran a business together. Ilya wasn’t sure of their exact marital status, but the truth was unavoidable there.

Plus, another thing to consider that Ilya just couldn’t afford to get into with himself right now: maybe they didn’t want to hide. Maybe they saw the necessity and decided together they couldn’t do it. 

“Look, if we thought you would consider it, we would have asked you to come with us,” Will said, sounding exhausted. “You’re our best tattoo artist. You are so well-known. We would love to have you work for us in the US too. But I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”

“You’re right,” Ilya said as he turned around to look at both of them. “Sveta tried talking to me about this as well.” Her solution wasn’t immigration, it was marriage, but was what it that all those English-speaking people said? Potato potahto. “But I will be fine. Is fine."

Will and Zach exchanged a glance that to Ilya implied that they both doubted he would be fine. He understood where they came from, but he didn’t have the space to go along with them. He couldn’t right now.

So he decided to give them the clarification they needed. “My father is dying. I can’t leave now.” 

Will and Zach knew that there was something wrong with Ilya’s father. Ilya had a family emergency a number of times throughout the years, though he’d never once left tattoo appointments for it. They’d have to reschedule for him sometimes at best. Ilya had never gone into details before though, because that wasn’t what he did.

Will was next to him within an instant and wrapped his arms around him. Ilya was unused to letting someone hug him that wasn’t Sveta, so he stiffened up at first. When Will didn’t let go he slowly wrapped his arms around the older man in return, leaning his head on Will’s shoulder. 

“I’m so sorry,” Will said. “I want you to come with us. I want that so much. But I also understand why you can’t leave now.”

Ilya said nothing. There was nothing to say. They were leaving and Ilya was staying and that was that. Another good part of his life was lost across an entire ocean, like so many before them had been. And just like everything else before this, Ilya couldn’t possibly blame them. They needed to stay safe. Staying here was very risky for Will and Zach.

Will let him go and rubbed the tears out of his eyes right for Ilya to see. If he ever dared to cry in proximity of anyone, he made sure to step out of the room. He couldn’t show weakness like that. Will, on the other hand, looked like he actively couldn’t care less about Ilya seeing him cry. It was completely irrelevant to him. 

“Look, if you ever change your mind, our doors are open for you,” Will said. “We’ll give you our address and our phone numbers. You can always reach us, alright? We might be leaving, but we’re not going anywhere. We will always support you.”

“Thank you,” Ilya said stiffly, just as unused to an open show of loyalty as he was to seeing someone cry. “I will think about it.” No, he wouldn’t, and he assumed they all knew that.

Then, because he was trying and because these two men deserved far better from him, he added: “I will miss you.”

“We will miss you so much,” Will replied immediately, wrapping an arm around Ilya once more. “I don’t know what I expected when you walked into our tattoo shop all those years ago, but it definitely wasn’t this. I am so glad you showed up.”

Well, they had Andrei to thank for that one. Ilya had never quite gotten around to telling them that one of the cops that used to come by for shits and giggles was his brother. Thankfully there was no visible family relation between Andrei and him whatsoever. 

“I am glad too,” Ilya said. “It was nice to know you.” He glanced over at Zach, who was watching them from a few feet away. “Both of you.”

“Maybe come and visit next time you go on vacation in the United States, alright?” Zach suggested. 

“I will try,” Ilya said. For this, he wasn’t sure if he actually would or not, so it was better to leave it open.

Then something occurred to him. Will and Zach leaving was personal to him, but that wasn’t the only thing that was going to change. As they left, the tattoo shop would close too. Ilya was pretty sure that any other tattoo shop in Moscow would be happy to have him, but he didn’t think he wanted that. He wanted to tattoo here, not anywhere else.

“So are you selling the shop?” Ilya asked.

“Yes,” Zach confirmed. “Though we’ll handle most of the logistics from Boston. Our main concern right now is leaving safely.”

“We were actually thinking that you might want it,” Will added. “You’ve done so much for this place, Ilya. I don’t think it still would have existed if it wasn’t for you. It’s the only right thing to do to offer it to you first.”

Ilya was genuinely touched. He didn’t think he did as much for the shop as Will and Zach believed he did, but he understood what they were coming from. Since the day that Ilya casually mentioned during an interview that he tattooed here the shop had always been busy. A lot of famous people in Russia, and sometimes even from the rest of Europe, came to see him specifically at the shop, but a lot of hockey fans also took Ilya’s word that the shop was good. 

Subsequently every famous person that posted their visit to the shop on social media also confirmed to their fans that the shop was good, thus securing a very large amount of people that knew about the shop. They never had to deal with the ‘foreigners starting a tattoo shop in Moscow and showing us they know better’ ever again, because Ilya, someone who was seen as Russian through and through, tattooed there because he thought it was fun.

Regardless, Ilya didn’t consider himself a businessman. He had investments because both Svetlana and her father insisted upon it. Other than his penthouse apartment he   owned another two homes that he rented out. He had a few sponsorships that his agent insisted upon and that made him money. It didn’t mean he was in any way cut out to run a tattoo shop.

“I don’t think I know how to run a shop,”  Ilya said. “Or that I will have the room. But -” As he thought about all the reasons why he couldn’t do it, he also realised he knew exactly who could do it. “I think Sveta will do it. If you want to sell to her.”

“Your friend Svetlana?” Will asked. 

“Yes,” Ilya confirmed. “She is good at business. She is very smart.”

Will and Zach exchanged a glance. It was the time of glance that spoke a thousand words. It spoke of a lifetime together and understanding in non-verbal communication alone. It was, for once, something Ilya could understand too.  They wanted Svetlana to be interested. They wanted to keep the shop in safe hands and if it wasn’t for Ilya, Ilya’s best friend would fit the bill too.

“I can call her?” he asked.  “See if she wants it?”

“Yes, please do,” Zach said, speaking for both Will and himself.

Ilya got his phone from his pocket and dialed. He wasn’t surprised to find Svetlana picking up within a couple of seconds. She was worried about him. She probably assumed he was in trouble and needed her to help him if he was calling at this hour. 

“Ilya, are you okay?” she asked as soon as she picked up.

“Yes, I’m okay,” he said. He wasn’t, not really, but this really wasn’t the time to get into that. “I have a business proposition for you.”

“A what?”

A few days later, Ilya personally took Will and Zach to the airport in his least conspicuous car. He didn’t take the sunglasses that he’d been wearing in the car off when he walked them all the way to the terminal. He hugged both of them, wished them a safe flight and promised them he’d call and text. They were going to have to stay in touch during the transition of ownership from the tattoo shop from them to Svetlana anyway.

“Even once the paperwork goes through, I need you to call, Ilya,” Will emphasized for the third time. “Monthly, at least. I know you’re busy playing hockey and tattooing and God knows what else you do, but you need to stay in touch.”

“Yes, yes, I will.”

He got a deserved side-eye from Zach, who didn’t believe a word he was saying. Ilya was willing to admit he was going to try, but he knew how he got and he knew what his life was like right now. Autopilot didn’t go well with monthly phone calls to Boston. That was probably also why they wanted him to call, though.

“You need to catch your flight,” Ilya said. “You do not want to miss it. You have to go. Sveta and I will take care of the shop.”

He hugged Will once more and watched how both men walked to the counter for their check-in. They waved and looked back and waved again and then they were gone. 

Ilya assumed he was never going to see them again.   

A few weeks later, Svetlana was the proud owner of the tattoo shop. In the meantime the work had continued like nothing had changed. She intended to keep it that way, she said. She kept the same staff, the same equipment and even the same furniture. She rented the upstairs apartment to one of the full-time tattoo artists and that was that. It had been a seamless transition. 

Eventually, preseason began again. Ilya spent his hours at the ice, in the gym, at his father’s house and in the tattoo shop. The only two things he did at his own apartment were eat and sleep. He did what he was supposed to do. The pressure was on him, because all anyone could talk about was the Winter Olympics. The ice hockey team needed to win the tournament to prove for once and for all that Russia was superior in everything, including hockey. As the obvious choice for captain of the team, Ilya already knew how impossible that was going to be. 

The best they could do, realistically, was third place. If they by some miracle, perhaps by avoiding both Canada and the United States in the bracket, could make it to the final, they would lose to either one of the two teams. But that was the best case scenario. Only the best teams made it to the Olympics and Ilya could see at least three or four more of them beat Russia. The team was mediocre on a good day. He wasn’t, of course, but everyone else was. 

The least he could do was be at his best, Ilya supposed, and make sure his teammates were too. Bag skates were the order of the day multiple times per week, because Ilya wasn’t going to tolerate anything less than the best from his team. They needed to be able to outskate any other team if they were going to outplay any other team. 

“Are you trying to kill them, Roz?” the manager asked after a particularly punishing training after a loss.

“They have to stay alive if they want another Gagarin,” Ilya said. “Or their first one, in many cases. It’s been years since we won. I won’t let the fans wait another year.”  

The only thing that made Ilya feel slightly better was that Shane Hollander had yet to win the Stanley Cup with Montreal. Not even the best player of a generation was capable of carrying the entire Montreal team on his back. Ilya had two Gagarin’s to Hollander’s zero Stanley Cups, though Hollander might be about to win both the Stanley Cup and the Olympic gold this year. 

Then, on a night in October, he got a call from Andrei. It was 3AM and Ilya had been peacefully asleep until he heard the noise. He rolled over to his nightstand and picked up the phone with “Andrei, this better be fucking imp-”

Andrei interrupted him. “You need to come to the house. It’s Papa.”

Ilya didn’t even bother to respond. He finished the call as he jumped out of bed, grabbed the first pair of sweatpants he could find and put them on alongside a t-shirt he found in the laundry. He ran to the door, where he quickly put on a pair of boots and grabbed his jacket from the coat peg. 

This was why he’d gotten an apartment near his father’s house. Andrei was further out, the stupid idiot, but Polina probably judged she had a better chance of Andrei picking up than she did of Ilya picking up. As if Ilya wouldn’t pick up the phone the moment either Andrei or Polina called. 

When he ran into his father’s house, using the key he’d gotten from Polina years ago, he found Polina in the living room, bleary-eyed and exhausted. She approached him when she saw him, seemingly wanting to reach out, but stopped short.

“According to the doctor he’s almost gone,” she said softly, surprisingly steadily. “You can say goodbye if you want to.”

Ilya stopped on his way to his father’s room just long enough to put a hand on her shoulder and thank her. 

Ilya paid for everything for his father’s funeral. He was told over and over again that was what a good son should do. No one asked the same thing of Andrei, of course. All their family members and all of his father’s former colleagues seemingly knew how useless Andrei was. Ilya made sure everything was how his father would have wanted it to be. Ilya made sure everything was perfect. 

His father’s belongings were split down evenly in three ways; to Polina, to Andrei and to Ilya. It wasn’t much. They used most of his savings for his treatments. Polina and Andrei were looking at Ilya now, so he had to lay down the law. They couldn’t live off him forever. He had no plans of letting them. For Polina, he paid off the mortgage of his father’s house and signed the deed over to her. Andrei didn’t want to sign off on it until Ilya gave him one of the houses he invested in. He emphasized with them that soon enough he’d have his own family and couldn’t take care of them as much as he’d always done.

Obviously, he had no such plans. The plans he was starting to make were of a very different kind. It was the kind where they had to take care of themselves because Ilya wasn’t going to be in Russia to do it anymore. 

A week after his father died, Ilya was back on the ice. His team needed him. He postponed his work at the tattoo shop until further notice. Svetlana, who had been his companion at the funeral, had told him to take more time away from hockey too. He couldn’t do that. The hockey season waited for no one. There was nothing to be done now. His father was already gone.

With Ilya back on the ice, Dynamo started a win streak unlike anything else the league had ever seen. Ilya was focused and ready to crush any opponent that got in his way. His form was looking good for the Olympic Games. The journalists, even the foreign ones, said that Russia had a shot at the gold.

It proved yet again that journalists knew absolutely nothing. To say that Russia hadn’t played well at the Olympics would be putting it nicely. The team was no more than a selection of men who played in the KHL, with only a number of exceptions, and who weren’t used to the playing style of the other teams. Only a very few of them, Ilya included, could keep up with the opponents they faced. It was never going to be enough.

Ilya watched the game for the gold medal in the arena with Svetlana. They watched how a star-studded United States won the game from Canada. It was only what Ilya had expected. It hurt regardless. He was forever going to be known as the captain whose team did so poorly at the Olympic Games that it should be some sort of negative record.

“You did everything you could,” Svetlana said.

“It was not enough,” Ilya replied. 

She put a comforting hand on his arm that Ilya wanted to shake off. She deserved better from him than that, though. On the ice, Scott Hunter lifted the cup, looking both ecstatic and completely lost. Ilya wished he couldn’t relate to the latter so much. It reinforced once again that he needed to find a way to get out of here. The person that kept him here was gone. He wasn’t safe here. His mother would have wanted better for him than staying here.

He looked aside at Svetlana, who was watching the ice. She would want him to go too. Ever since they were sixteen years old she kept emphasizing to him to make better plans because his current plans weren’t going to be good enough in the long term. She’d been right all along. She might even go with him.

They left the arena, arm in arm and while Svetlana was talking about the power play that Canada scored on, to no avail for the outcome. According to her, Shane Hollander had been underutilised. Ilya pulled her along for a shortcut after they ascended the first set of stairs, reckoning that they were never going to tell Ilya Rozanov he couldn’t be there right now. This was his turf, after all. The United States might have won the game, but this was Ilya’s country.

To Ilya’s surprise, they found Shane Hollander in the hallway Ilya led them into, a few hallways away from the dressing room. He was still in multiple layers of hockey gear, was very sweaty and looked understandably devastated. He was tapping on his phone. Ilya wanted to guess he just finished a call.

Hollander saw Ilya and Svetlana and naturally the first two words out of mouth were: ‘I’m sorry.’ Ilya hadn’t expected anything else. “I’m sorry, I’m probably not supposed to be here, I’m going back to my dressing room right now.”

“Do not worry, Hollander,” Ilya said, feeling how uncomfortable the English was to speak now that he’d hardly spoken it in months. The only English he used at all since Zach and Will left was after calling Will (twice) and at the Olympics with the athletes from the other countries, sparsely. “We are not supposed to be here. We are passing through.”

Beside him, Svetlana was entirely useless. Her English was better than Ilya’s English, but no words seemed to be forthcoming. She was staring at Shane Hollander like she was starstruck. Ilya was going to laugh at her for it later. 

Clearing his throat, he added: “Canada should have won final. You played very well.”

“Thanks,” Hollander said weakly. 

Ilya assumed Hollander had no idea who Ilya was. He’d been told before he looked very different out of his hockey uniform. If Hollander had recognised Ilya he would have told him that Russia played very well as well, even if they hadn’t. He was polite like that.

Deciding to leave Hollander and his beautiful freckles alone (the man was very hot, even in the face of a crushing defeat), Ilya pulled Sveta along through the hallway. When they were through the next door and definitely out of earshot from Hollander, he heard Svetlana exhale in a sigh.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”

“You are usually so cool, Sveta,” Ilya said. “Are you such a fan of Shane Hollander that you panicked? Should we go back and ask for his autograph? Do you want a selfie with him?”

Svetlana elbowed him in the side. “Shut up, Ilya.”

Her response made Ilya very happy. He was going to bring it up again later.

They passed through another hallway and then accidentally walked into the mixed zone. Journalists seemed to be fighting for their lives to get an interview with whatever player of the United States appeared there first. They seemed to have wrapped up the interviews with the Canada players already. 

Ilya found Oleg idly fidgeting with his pen somewhere near the end of the line. He didn’t seem too concerned with the interviews. Ilya guessed that maybe the broadcaster he worked for had some kind of contract that made sure they would get their interviews.

He excused himself from Svetlana and made his way over. “Having fun talking to foreign ice hockey players instead of the same ten Russians every week, Oleg?”

Oleg looked up, seemingly deep in thoughts, and smiled as soon as he saw Ilya. “Roz! Hey! What are you doing here?” He didn’t wait to let Ilya answer that question and immediately moved on from it. “Honestly, I prefer the regularly scheduled programming. The international attention isn’t doing anyone any good.”

He was right about that. “It’s such a great honour for Russia to host such a tournament as the Olympic Games,” Ilya said, an answer that he knew was going to sound off to a man who interviewed him for years now.

There was a noise coming from the right of them. Ilya and Oleg watched how Scott Hunter walked into the mixed nose and was approached by about twenty journalists almost immediately. Ilya had no doubt they all had the most stupid question prepared to ask first of all: how does it feel, Scott, to win the Olympic Games?

Ilya wasn’t jealous. He was annoyed and bored with it. That was all.

He redirected his attention to Oleg, who was one of the few journalists who wasn’t immediately jumping to interview Hunter. He almost looked bored. Ilya realised that this spectacle was completely wasted on Oleg. He racked his brain trying to come up with facts about Oleg that supported this hypothesis. He knew Oleg had studied journalism somewhere in Europe. He knew that Oleg was more interested in slice-of-life questions than questions about hockey tactics, which made him one of Ilya’s favourite journalists to deal with. It was a low bar, but still. 

Oleg didn’t want to be here any more than Ilya did. This was supposed to be the biggest event of his career to report about, but he made absolutely no move to go do that even as Scott Hunter started answering questions. 

Ilya only had one question for him. Why did everyone look so damned lost and out of place in this godforsaken Sochi ice hockey arena?

He made a decision. “Come and find me before the Closing Ceremony tomorrow,” he told Oleg. “There is something we need to discuss.”

Three months later, HC Dynamo Moscow won its third Gagarin Cup in five games, exactly how Ilya liked it. Ilya had been an absolute tyrant on the ice for the remainder of the season. What the team had experienced of him before the Olympic Games absolutely paled in comparison to what he’d been like afterwards. He wasn’t sure he even cared. They won the cup. Everyone around him was very happy. Ilya wasn’t feeling much at all.

In the chaos of the post-match interviews, Ilya went to find Oleg. He had been solidly present for most games during the season and for all of the games during the playoffs. He congratulated Ilya, a grin on his face. 

“Is it everything you dreamed of?” Oleg asked, off the record.

“It’s everything I needed,” Ilya said. “I need you to do it. A week from now exactly. I’ll make sure I’m gone by then.”

Oleg didn’t ask if he was sure. He knew Ilya was sure. Oleg just nodded. 

He was going to collect whatever keepsakes from his mother he wanted to take with him, - he kept the most important one close to him, of course - make sure that all his bank accounts were accessible from overseas and book a first class plane ticket to Boston. Then he was going to tell Svetlana and inform Will and Zach. He was going to say goodbye to his mother and his father and that would be that.

Ilya was getting out of here. At last.