Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble & Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Galina Molchalina, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Pre-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Post-Episode: s01e06 The Cottage (Heated Rivalry), Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Depictions of Depression On Par With The Long Game, Established Relationship, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, POV: You Watch Groundhog Day And Relate A Worrying Amount To The Concept Of Being Trapped In A Time Loop, which could mean nothing, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, No Actual Time Loops Experienced

Language:

English

Series:

Part 11 of my heated rivalry anon fics

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-11 Completed: 2026-04-17 Words: 32,873 Chapters: 2/2

continuity errors/tuesday again

Summary

The first thing you should know about time loops is that they’re really fucking hard to break. The second thing is that you can never break one in such a way that it is incapable of returning.

The third thing you should know is that everyone around you has probably been stuck in a time loop at one point or another, and they made it out alive. This is only comforting if you’re a numbers guy, or if you’re the kind of guy who talks to others about how it feels to live the same day over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Shame if you’re not; the most important thing you should know about breaking a time loop is that it helps to tell someone you’re trapped in one in the first place.

Notes

i have been wanting to write a fic about ilya's depression for ages but i told myself that before writing it i would have to find the time to read the long game, instead of just reading the highlighted snippets of it people post on instagram, and i finally did (yippee!) and then for very little reason, i chose to set this fic in the 2019-2020 season, pre-the long game, making it a total au and completely canon divergent. but hey, at least i've read the book now!

to be clear: this is definitely a fic where you should read the tags, especially if anything about ilya's depression in the long game was triggering for you. in my honest opinion, this fic isn't a darker take or worse about his mental health issues and it doesn't necessarily go to darker places or go deeper than rachel reid takes it in the book, so i think the warning she puts on the first page of TLG is accurate enough for this fic too: this includes mentions and descriptions of suicide and depression.

i just don't have to be concerned with pacing and plot so i can self-indulgently write 20k words about ilya feeling tired and outside of his body and stuck living in a routine, whereas rachel reid had to get somewhere fast to hold everyone's attention. i don't care about holding people's attention. as someone has kindly pointed out in a comment on another fic of mine, i'm an amateur writer serving up reheated nachos. i can dilly-dally the narrative tension away with a thousand metaphors in two paragraphs all i want. back button is right there, baby!

bottom line though: there is hurt here. there is also comfort. i think this first chapter makes a really good stand-alone fic, but i am also already outlining the second part, where the vast majority of the fluff will be. not to say that this part is really sad. i don't necessarily think that! but that's subjective as shit and i have been told in the past that my angst tolerance is high. so. grain of salt i guess.

lastly, this is dedicated to my irl friend bea, who got so excited when i described this fic to her as my not-a-time-loop time loop fic and then tried to guess what time hijinks i was writing about that could be classified as a not-a-time-loop time loop. i'm so sorry bea, i didn't have the heart to tell you it was just a metaphor for depression.

Chapter 1

By the time mid-December rolls around, everyone on the team who doesn’t already come sick of Christmas movies as their default setting is sick of Christmas movies. So they compromise and watch Groundhog Day instead. It is, technically speaking, a holiday film.

It’s fine, as far as movies go. Ilya isn’t really paying attention, even though it’s probably a fine to be texting his boyfriend during team movie night. It’s not as if they know Shane Hollander is his boyfriend though anyway. For all they know, he’s trying to sort out a very pressing issue regarding the foundation he’s co-running with the Captain of the Voyageurs. For all they know, this is very important business. Captain to captain business that can’t wait until morning, that has to be addressed at 11:32pm tonight, right now.

He tilts his phone screen back, adjusting himself until he’s curled up more firmly against the arm rest of the hotel room’s single chair. 

What are you wearing, he types out, familiar golden edge of his necklace caught between his teeth, metallic on his tongue.

Shane starts typing, then stops, then starts again, which could mean he’s decided to take a picture and can’t figure out the sexiest angle, which is only a problem someone has if they’re Shane Hollander and have no bad angles to try and avoid. 

It could also mean he’s deciding which combination of no, stop, not right now, Ilya he wants to send tonight, but Ilya’s a man built of hope and dreams and, importantly, love.

Aren’t you with your team?? Shane finally replies. Decidedly not a sexy photo, but not an outright rejection. Ilya has worked with less.

He lets the necklace fall away from his mouth as he glances up at the television mounted on the wall. There’s a good foot of space in between his chair and the hotel bed where Wyatt Hayes has claimed the very edge of the mattress, Evan Dykstra next to him and Zane Boodram on the other side. It’s December 22nd and they’re in Anaheim, which Ilya always thinks feels like a made-up place. The Dukes thrashed them so viciously tonight that no one’s been up for much chatting, but maybe that has less to do with the loss and more to do with the date. Half these guys have families and kids they’d rather be with so close to the holiday. All of them, even the ones who don’t celebrate Christmas, probably have a million places they’d rather be tonight instead of here, in this hotel room, in fucking Anaheim.

On the screen, Bill Murray drives himself and the little fortune-telling weasel off a cliff.

Ilya looks back down at his phone. 

He probably wouldn’t have, if he’d known.

It starts slow. That’s what he and his therapist will decie maybe six months into their therapist-broken person relationship. Dr. Molchalina will click her pen against the top of her notepad a couple of times, which is basically a therapist’s warm-up exercise, the same way that Ilya dekes the puck around on his stick when he’s taking it down center ice in a shootout. 

Then, she will ask, carefully, if he’s given any thought to the way this started.

It’ll take a few sessions before Ilya realizes just how much Galina likes open-ended questions like that. She likes the word this without a noun following it, so that Ilya first has to decide what the this refers to before he can even begin to answer the question. And the deciding is apparently as revealing as the actual answer, which Ilya never knows how to feel about. 

Therapy, Ilya will come to think, is a lot like talking to a magic genie or a secret spy fluent in a code you haven’t been given the cipher for. Every word you say has twelve different meanings you never even knew about. Everything is telling. Ilya will, for the most part, come to appreciate this, because it turns out he’s been driving this car of his body around for his whole life without bothering to read the manual, so it’s good that someone knows what to do when the check engine light’s flickered on.

But so anyway, Galina will look at him and ask if he’s given any thought to the way that this started, and Iya will look at the fake plant in the corner of her office and wish to be fluent in himself the way that she is. 

And then he will carefully sound out the beginnings of it, the one day where he woke up and found himself trapped in the same day he’d already lived. It will sound sudden, when he says it, because it’d felt that way. Like a demolition; one moment the building’s there, the next it’s rubble and smoke and a gap in the skyline, wisdom tooth extracted and only the hole in the gum left behind. 

But he will admit, first to himself and then, later in the session, to Galina, that there was a lag, a glitch. Between when it started and when he let himself notice that something had started. 

There was an exhaustion deep down in his bones. He wore the C when the coach handed it to him at the beginning of his sophomore year, Day 2 of training camp, but it’d felt weird on the new jersey. He hadn’t liked the way it looked in the mirror. He knew all of his teammates’ nicknames, but even in his head, he couldn’t bring himself to call them by anything other than their first and last names. He didn’t know them well enough for anything else. And the task of getting to know them felt so big and Herculean it bordered on impossible.

Every game was less and less fun to play. Every phone call with Shane became shorter and shorter. Everything about his relationship with the love of his life started to feel less like he was getting away with something and more like he was on the run with the authorities on his tail, the most precious thing he’d ever held tucked up against his chest for safe-keeping and the road ahead him stretched out long and lonesome, no safe house in sight.

Galina will nod and hum and make a note on the paper in front of her, and Ilya will nod back and say it was sudden and it was not, and Galina will tell him that both of these things can be true at once. Cracks in concrete foundations don’t send bridges tumbling over night, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there before the bridge ever falls, Galina will say, and Ilya will stand from the couch so he can begin to pace, which is another thing Galina will make note of.

The truth will be complicated, multifaceted, impossible to detangle, and hard to put into words. It starts slowly and Ilya notices it all at once, and Ilya can admit to himself, eventually, the ways in which it started slowly. And he will be able to admit to himself, eventually, the way that the slow, unnoticed beginning gets under his skin more than any explosive shrapnel ever could. 

His father’s decay had started the same way: slowly. Ilya had always thought he’d notice the signs when it was his turn to rot, after watching his father ignore them for so long. And yet he didn’t. It took him by surprise. Bowled him over, threw him up against the cliffs like a brutal, stormy tidal wave catches a ship and wrecks heron the rocks.

It starts slow, they’ll decide after the fact, Ilya and his therapist in the cool gray of her private office. Enough time will have passed by then that Ilya will be able to look back and see all the signs spread out behind him, like he’s finally been given the cipher key or at least the negatives that throw all the small details into harsh relief.

But when Ilya first realizes it’s started at all, the version of himself that sits on Dr. Galina Molchalina’s couch and willingly participates in the live anatomical dissection of his brain exists so far into the future it may as well be another person entirely.

All Ilya knows, in the beginning, is that he wakes up just after the New Year, flurries of snow falling outside his window, house dark and cold, and it’s Tuesday again. 

They have a game against the Winnipeg Aviators on December 31 to tie a neat little bow around 2019, which means, of course, they finish off the year losing to Winnipeg, 3-1. 

This isn’t a surprise halfway through Ilya’s sophomore season with Ottawa. It’s not really a question of if they’ll lose these days, but rather how much they’ll lose by. Even the coach’s post-game speech is threaded through with a weary sort of resignation when he talks to them about their terrible defensive play and their low number of shots on goal. 

Ilya sits up in his stall automatically when the coach finishes up and glances at him from behind the safety of his clipboard. There’s not a lot of things Ilya can say, really, but it’s the C’s job to find some amalgamation of encouragement after games like these, even when every game feels like this one does.

So Ilya clears his throat and says something to the team about something or another. 

Something was definitely said, that is, and it was probably said in English, because some people are nodding along like he’s making good points that they can agree with. It’s just that Ilya can’t remember it, not even while he’s saying it, mouth moving of its own volition and static coming out.

Across the locker room, Zane Boodram is looking at him, nodding, mouth pinched and eyes flicking between Ilya’s face and his own discarded states. He looks as drawn thin and worn out as the rest of them do, but he looks a little relieved too. Probably because they’d given the C to Ilya back in August, and Boodram had taken up the dusty A. Ilya’s spent the last few months wondering why they’d entrust the captaincy to a guy who doesn’t know the team yet, doesn’t know the organization. But maybe this is why. Maybe it’d been too hard on Boodram, captaining a sinking ship. Maybe he’d run out of things to tell the guys after four years in this locker room. Maybe the coach had thought Ilya might have a bit of wisdom to share, new things to say that will inspire them to new heights of victory. 

Which is fucking stupid. Boston didn’t win the Cup because Ilya kissed their skinned knees or something. They won because they fucking scored goals.

“Feel the loss if you need to, as much as you need to,” he tells the Centaurs, rubbing at his chest, over the lines of his crucifix necklace hidden under his compression shirt. “Then leave it in this shit year. Yes? 2020 is tomorrow and we will be ready for it. Is our year, I believe that.”

Some of the guys cheer, most of them just grin a little bit ruefully. The rookies straighten up their shoulders and give him steely nods because they’re so fucking young that they don’t realize what it sounds like when their captain’s lying to them. They probably don’t think their captain can lie to them. They probably think this is their year because they think their captain thinks this is their year.

It probably won’t be. Their first game in January is up against the Edmonton Miners, and they’re first in the Pacific Division. If they were facing the Seattle Kelpies, maybe they’d last til the third day in Januay without losing. Seattle’s got the only team worse than the Centaurs in the league; the only thing the Kelpies’ have won in the past few years has been the draft lottery and that’s not really done them much good so far. 

So Seattle, the Centaurs could probably take. But they’ve got no fucking chance against Edmonton. 

Just thinking about the upcoming schedule makes Ilya’s shoulders feel heavy. Home for two games, away for five, home again for five more. 

Is he getting soft in his old age or is hockey getting meaner? Ilya isn’t sure. He doesn’t think it matters; every inch of his body aches. 

He knows when he pulls his car into the driveway, the house will be dark and empty. 

Shane’s probably most of the way back to Montreal by now. They’d kissed each other at midnight last night, December 30th, and Ilya had pretended it was the same. 

He checks his phone after hitting the showers, a couple of notifications from Instagram, activity in the hashtags he follows on Twitter. A text from Shane, sent about an hour ago. 

To be clear, I love you even if you don’t! Shane has said, and Ilya blinks at the message for a moment, eyebrows furrowing. With no preceding text or follow-up message to serve as a context clue, it’s pretty unclear what the fuck Shane’s trying to clear up.

Still, it’s Shane Hollander telling him he loves him, which is always nice. Sweet. A little bite-sized miracle every time.

He pockets his phone without responding and looks up from his stall, skin feeling suddenly less tight, loss already easier to swallow. 

“Hey,” he stops Wyatt Hayes as the goalie walks past his stall with his bag already pulled up over his shoulder. “You played well tonight.”

Wyatt ducks his head and gives him the same rueful smile that Ilya’s getting tired of seeing on everyone’s faces, like they’re—Ilya doesn’t know. Apologizing to him, maybe. 

“Can’t save ‘em all,” Wyatt tells him with a tiny shrug. Like he’s quoting something someone told him ages ago. That’s nice; no one’s ever told Ilya that he can’t win them all. He’d had to figure that out by himself.

He’d like to win one though, eventually, he thinks. Forget all. He’d be happy with just one. 

That’s something he’s realized about himself in the last year and a half, playing hockey with the Centaurs and seeing Shane only sporadically outside of the summer: deep down, everyone’s got the capacity to subsist on scraps. To beg for little slivers of more and promise they’ll be satisfied with that. 

Ilya’s got his name on trophies, on the fucking Stanley Cup, and he’d go down on his knees in a heartbeat and plead himself hoarse for just one regular season win if he thought it’d change anything. 

He spent all of June and July and August with Shane Hollander within arms’ reach, the taste of him in his mouth and fading bruises left by his teeth on his skin, and now he’s pretty sure he’d give an arm and a leg just to hold his hand tonight. Just to—just to fucking see him, in person. In front of him.

Scraps and slivers. No one’s above begging and no one’s above learning to make do with what they have.

He waves Wyatt away, suddenly too exhausted to even try to fake being anything else. “Happy New Year,” he says, and Wyatt claps him on the back as he goes. 

It’s late, after ten, maybe closer to eleven. Most of the players who have partners, which is almost all of them save the really young guys, are eager to get out of here. Probably their wives and girlfriends watched the game from the family suite, maybe with their children too. Big of them, to watch such shit hockey.

But then—better to come to the arena, suffer through sloppy puck turnovers and cheers from the away fans, if only so the person you love most doesn’t have to be alone in the car on the journey back home. 

Ilya knows that, at least. It’s a lonely fucking commute.

He hopes Shane left before the game began. He hopes he’s back in Montreal already. The roads are full of dangerous, distracted drivers on December 31st. That’s why he’d argued that Shane could miss Montreal’s optional skate tomorrow, just stay at Ilya’s place, but of course he hadn’t gotten far before he’d been met with resistance. Shane’s never missed an optional skate in his life. He probably wants to start the year off on the right foot. Probably wants to sit in his stall in the Bell Centre and visualize scoring his first goal of 2020 or something.

God, Ilya loves him so much. Loves him as he comes, serious and competitive and unreasonable and stubborn and dedicated and focused. 

Shane would never come to watch one of Ilya’s games from the family suite of the rink. He’d choose playing against him on the ice every time, even when that means boarding the bus with his team and heading to the airport immediately after the final buzzer. 

Ilya loves him for it, of course. Or Ilya loves him because of it. Because that’s how it started, the love, and this is one beginning that Ilya finds himself scared to outgrow. Even when he’s tired of so many other things, he can’t bring himself to be tired of that. Even when he’s exhausted by it all, at the end of the game, in the locker room, in the car on the way home. 

For a moment, Ilya blinks at the stall in front of him, noise of the locker room fading in and out as the team finishes packing up their shit and goes. 

Eventually, Ilya follows them.

The love doesn’t shorten the commute when there’s nothing waiting for Ilya at the destination. It’s still a long drive through streets he doesn’t know; it’s still a house set back from its neighbors, windows dark, too big for one man.

When he gets into the entryway and locks the door behind him, he drops his keys into the bowl by the doorway and takes off his shoes. It’s almost midnight now, almost the new year. He takes his phone out of his pocket and thumbs over to his text thread with Shane.

Did you make it back ok? He sends. They don’t usually check in like this. Ilya thinks that’s probably because if they started then they’d never stop. It feels like one or both of them is always traveling, pulled along by the currents of the MLH schedule and their own promises to each other. But tonight is different; there are dangerous drivers on the road on nights like this one. It’s a long way to go. 

He takes off his coat and then his game day jacket, hanging the herringbone trench in the closet and leaving the blazer on the ground before padding into the kitchen. 11:14. Last forty-five minutes of the year, give or take a few seconds.

Already 2020 in Russia, but Ilya has been getting better at not thinking about his life like that, has been getting better at not willingly splitting himself into two. 

There’s an aluminum foil-covered plate on the kitchen counter, nestled in between the espresso machine and Shane’s blender. Pink post-it note stuck to the top of it, Shane’s handwriting two neat lines scrawled across the paper. Win! & I love you!

Ilya peels back the edge of the foil. Christmas cookies, the kind with the raspberry jam David makes. Shane must have gone to his parents’ house to pick them up before he left, which is sweet enough that a part of Ilya wants to eat the whole plate of them, just like this, leaning up against his kitchen counter with nothing but the light over the island turned on, like Shane’s love is a thing he can physically taste via jam and flour. 

He breaks one of the cookies in half and nibbles at it, running his finger over the ink on the post-it note. 

Win! & I love you! Two separate sentences, not dependent on the other-–probably. Not to be confused with Win and then I will love you. Just: win, a recommendation. I love you, a reminder. 

Explains Shane’s text at least. 

To be clear, I love you even if you don’t! How far back to Montreal had Shane made it before he started worrying about his little note? Did he get all the way to his condo first, or did he have to stop somewhere along the road to type this out, even though he must have known Ilya was still on the ice?

Shane so rarely leaves pieces of himself behind in Ilya’s house. He is so good at it, the secrecy. He always remembers to take everything he brings with him on the way out. So this is a gift, Ilya thinks. A late Christmas present that almost outshines the leather biking jacket Shane had given him at his parents’ house. 

Win! & I love you! Ilya carefully peels the post-it note away from the foil and then doesn’t know where to put it. 

He takes a picture of it for Shane, post-it balancing on the edge of his thumb, but he stops before he sends it. It looks too transparent, there on the screen of his phone. Too obvious, how rubbed raw and thin he feels. Is it supposed to mean this much? Is Ilya supposed to cherish it as much as he does? 

He doesn’t want Shane to know, suddenly. A holdover of spending so many years trying to keep parts of himself hidden away from Shane, maybe, or just some sort of natural inclination towards protective defense.

He deletes the picture, takes another of the plate of cookies, and slips the note into his pocket as he waits for it to send. Thank you for the cookies, sweetheart, he texts. 

Shane starts typing immediately. 11:29. Past his usual bedtime, but maybe he’s making an exception for the new year. Maybe he was waiting for Ilya to get home first and text him.  

Dad made them, I just picked them up, Shane sends, and Ilya rolls his eyes as he finishes the other half of the cookie, leaning back against the counter. 

Sorry about the game, Shane adds before Ilya can respond. I made it back just in time for the end of it.

Ilya doesn’t want to talk about the game. 

He doesn’t want to text Shane, if he’s being honest. He wants him here, in the kitchen next to him. He wants more dangerous things than that, too. 

Usually he is good at not letting himself think about all the things he wants, but it’s so late and he’s so tired and the car ride home was so fucking quiet and it’s already the New Year in Russia, and there is a version of himself somewhere out there who never left Moscow, who is already a few hours into 2020, who has never felt the beauty of loving Shane Hollander and also the tender, painful bruising ache of it.

He wishes there was a version of them out there where Shane could stand in the family suite and watch Ilya’s game among the wives and the girlfriends and the children of the other players. But that’s—that’s a pointless wish. Useless. Shane would have to be a different person for that, and the world would have to be different too. Kinder, impossibly so.

Yes, I have already texted your dad the same thing, he sends, ignoring the hockey, even though this is a lie and he hasn’t texted David Hollander once in the last several days. He probably should, to actually thank him for the cookies, but it’s late and he can do it tomorrow.

What did he say? Shane asks, because he’s learned not to push except for when he really, really wants to, and he gets, probably, why Ilya doesn’t want to text him about hockey right now.

Ilya doesn’t want to text him at all, and Ilya wonders if Shane knows that. If he knows it’s not because he doesn’t want to talk to him but that he never wants to stop. He wants him here, next to him, bitching about the crumpled blazer in the hallway and the crumbs on the counter and the puck Ilya gave away in the second period, because he could survive it, talking about the shit hockey, if he weren’t alone with it.

But—scraps and slivers. You’d be surprised what a starving man will consider a meal.

He was flattered I called him sweetheart, Ilya texts back, and Shane dislikes the message before sending the green-faced, gagging emoji.

It makes Ilya laugh. The sound doesn’t echo around his empty house, but it sort of feels like it does.

11:33. Happy new year, I love you. Ilya sends, and then he goes to bed.

Except when he wakes up some indeterminable amount of time later, it’s like he didn’t sleep at all. He rolls over in bed, stretching out his hand towards the other side of the mattress even though he knows there’s nothing there to reach for.

The exhaustion is heavy on his shoulders, on his mind. It makes it hard to think. The light is watery and gray, hardly morning at all, as it spills through the crack in the blackout curtains. January 1st. Happy New Year. 

It’s a maintenance day for the Centaurs, meant to get them all rested up before throwing them into the meat-grinder of facing down the Miners tomorrow. Ilya should put in an hour or two in the home gym anyway, just something light to keep his muscles warm. He should go to the grocery store. It’ll be three weeks before he will see Shane again, and then it’ll be him making the drive to Montreal, so he can stock his fridge with the kind of food he enjoys and Shane sneers at. 

The enthusiasm he should feel at the idea of texting Shane a picture of a bag of frozen chicken nuggets is distant, muted. More like something he’s been told he should feel instead of something he actually does. What’s the point, who is he kidding? He would never buy a box of hot fudge sundae flavored pop-tarts again if it meant Shane had room in Ilya’s kitchen cabinets for all his healthy food that tasted like shit. If it meant—

He should go to the store anyway, though. He should buy the next week’s worth of food. He should pick up the blazer he’d left in the entryway. He should go outside and take a little walk, maybe. Fresh air, the first of the new year.

But he’s so fucking tired. Another minute here, like this, won’t hurt. The errands will keep. The sun will wait.

And it does. It’s brighter, even, when he finally drags himself away from his bed, no less exhausted but at least a little more awake. It’s nearing ten in the morning when Ilya gets into the kitchen and makes himself an americano that he takes into the living room to drink in the armchair by the stone fireplace.

There’s a few messages on his phone he scrolls through without replying. Shane’s texted a couple of times already, a matching Happy New Year text from last night and then, early this morning, a picture of the frosty river Ilya recognzies as part of Shane’s running route. 

Cliff’s sent a video of some of the Bears at a club, singing what could be Auld Lang Syne if all the words were different; Ilya watches it at half-volume, and even then it’s still too loud for the stillness of the living room. 

He doesn’t recognize most of the faces, but that’s not surprising. It’s been a year and a half now. Trades have been made, rookies have been drafted, call-ups have stuck around and older vets have been sent down. It’s not Ilya’s team anymore, even though maybe a part of it will also always feel like Ilya’s team. 

That’s not how it’s supposed to go in hockey, of course. You’re expected to love the game—you have to love the game, more than anything in the world, because that’s the only way you’re going to survive giving so much of your body and your life over to it. And you’re supposed to love your team, when you play for them; you’re supposed to love the organization that drafted you and wear their jersey with pride and bleed their colors, and then you’re supposed to stop loving it when you hand the jersey back. When you move to a different city and sign yourself over to another team. You’re just supposed to be able to stop it, the loving, like this whole time it’s been a wound you can bandage shut and let scar over. As if that’s how humans and their hearts work. 

As if that’s how Ilya’s heart works. As if he were capable of stemming the blood so quickly. As if he has not moved countries and crossed oceans only to discover that the only kind of love he can grow within him is the stubborn kind, impossible to shake off with distance or common sense. 

He’d still be a Bear, probably, if he loved hockey the way he’s supposed to: above all else. But he’s a Centaur now, the star centre for a shit team, because he is a shit hockey player: he fell in love with something else—someone else—and he loves him more than he loves the game, and sometimes that feels like gold lightning racing through his veins and sometimes it just feels like he’s a rat in a lab, pressing the wrong button and getting shocked over and over again without learning the fucking lesson. 

Ilya locks his phone, uncrosses and recrosses his legs, and puts his coffee down onto the small side table next to him. From here, he can’t see the crumpled heap of his jacket by the door. It’s blocked from view by the jut of the couch, so it’s almost like it doesn’t exist at all.

Fuck, but he hates that fucking couch.

Maybe that is the first thing he will do in the new year. Pay someone to take it away, find a place that will sell him something better.

Probably anything would be better than what he’s ended up with, this burnt orange monstrosity of a sectional that dominates the floorplan and makes his chest feel tight and bruised every time he looks at it. 

He’d made it about six months into living in Ottawa at a condo provided by the front office before he’d dragged Shane with him to look at houses around the city. As friends, of course. Of course Ilya would take advantage of having a native Ottawan as a friend by making him accompany him on a neverending slew of house tours during the All-Star weekend break that they’d both been fined for missing.

And Shane had been good at it, interested in the process. He’d talked with Ilya before giving the realtor a succinct list of what Ilya was most looking for in a piece of property, and then he’d walked through each house she’d shown them with a little notebook he’d used to jot down observations and drawbacks and highlights. 

And of course Ilya had hung on his every fucking word. Memorized all of it, what Shane liked and didn’t like. What he thought about each house, what he noticed was missing, how he envisioned his own space.

Shane disliked galley kitchens and open-floor plans. He liked wood floors and master bathrooms big enough for two sinks. He disliked white tile in the shower, preferred dark stone and a rainwater shower head. He liked privacy, a house pushed back a little bit from the road. He liked a backyard, a patio big enough for a sofa and a firepit. He really liked the idea of a firepit.

The house Ilya ended up buying, a few weeks into March, had been a solid mix of what Shane’d mentioned liking and what Ilya had preferred. Shane had already been back in Montreal by then, of course, but Ilya’d given him a video tour of the place before putting up the down payment anyway. 

It’d been important—really fucking important—to Ilya, for Shane to like his house. He’d only wanted to live in a place Shane could see himself eventually claiming half of. Moving into. Staying in. Living in.

He’d thought that was fucking obvious from the beginning, even if they never really talked about it. Even though they still haven’t, outside of the vague understanding that their future involved waiting until both of them retired to come out as a couple. Other than that, other than the ten years of waiting, everything has been left vague and undefined. What that coming out will look like. Where they’ll live, afterwards, when they both could live anywhere. 

When Ilya bought the house, he’d been thinking: alright. Okay. Maybe this can be that place. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination, that they’d land in Ottawa in the distant, nebulous future. Shane’s parents were here, it was where he grew up. It wasn’t Montreal, which Ilya would always have a bit too much Bear in him to swallow living in. It wasn’t Toronto, which neither of them liked.

So Ilya’d thought—of course he wasn’t just buying a house that would be his. He was buying a house that would be theirs, one day. Eventually. Shane had liked the wooden floors; Ilya had liked the third bedroom on the second floor that the real estate agent had told him the previous owners used as a nursery. Room to grow, that’s what sold him on the house in the end, even though the master bath wasn’t up to either of their standards and the floorboards were already scuffed to hell and back. 

So Ilya had thought, maybe, they’d been on the same fucking page about the house. Except then Shane had shown absolutely no interest in spending any time helping Ilya pick out the furniture to fill that fucking house, and Ilya had gotten—petty, a little bit. And then before he could breathe through it, he’d gone and bought the worst and ugliest couch he could find, something he’d known Shane would hate like he could just—punish him for not caring, for not thinking about their future, for not being interested in it just by purchasing an orange sectional Ilya would have to live with every day.

And now he’s just stuck with it, the couch. Fucking hates looking at it. Fucking hates when Shane’s looking at it, like he’ll be able to see the gorey inside bits and pieces of Ilya’s stupid heart splattered across it and staining the orange upholstrey if he just stares at it long enough.

Ilya finishes his coffee and looks at the couch, thinks about all the ways he could take it apart and thinks about all the ways nothing would change if he did. 

Then he goes to the grocery store. On his way out the door, he steps over the jacket on the floor. It’s cold outside, sun winking out from beneath thin clouds that are still dark enough to hold the promise of snow. 

There’s a moving van parked a few houses down the street, and a little girl waves at him as he drives past. He responds with a wave of his own, running on a second’s long delay. 

The Centaurs lose. It’s snowing, a little bit, by the time Ilya’s unlocking his car in the player’s parking lot after the game. His gloves are stuffed somewhere in his bag or else he’s forgotten them completely. The flurries land on the exposed skin of his knuckles and then dissolve after carefully weighing their options. He feels the cold biting against his nailbeds like his hands belong to someone else entirely. 

It’s late. Ilya’s tired. Emory Kaulkin had checked him up against the boards tonight hard enough to rattle his teeth, and they’d been given a two minute boarding penalty for it and then fucking—nothing to show for it afterwards, save for a new bruise probably forming along his ribs. It’s funny; the pain of the hit had flared up through him for a second, knocked the breath from his lungs, and it’d been the only time tonight he’d felt like he and his body were the same thing. 

And now the game’s over, and the parking lot is cold, or the air is cold, or his skin is cold, or Ilya himself is cold, down to his bones, and they’d lost again and it’s snowing and someone has replaced Ilya’s shoulders with iron weights that he still has to carry around like they’re nothing.

The house is dark when he parks the car in the driveway, because he is not the kind of person to leave lights on for an empty house. Maybe he should start. Maybe that would fix whatever’s gnawed its way through his skull and into the soft flesh of his brain. 

No, he decides after teasing the thought over and over in his mind for the whole of his pre-bed routine. Better not. The last thing he needs right now is to fall in love with false promises. It would be gutting in a way he isn’t sure he knows how to survive, if he left the lights on in the house as he went out to play a losing game, forgot all about it, got back and saw the glow of the porch light and thought—even just for a second—that maybe someone had beaten him home.

He wakes up and he thinks through his schedule for the day, hand outstretched and playing absentmindedly with the edge of the sheet on the other side of the bed. He’s tired still, even though he must have slept for over nine hours. His body is someone else’s, something he is just borrowing for a moment, and it doesn’t fit right—too loose across the shoulders, too tight in the chest.

I’ve lived this day before, he thinks, staring up at the ceiling and cataloguing the steady creep of the watery gray morning light across the white expanse. 

It’s the first time he’s put it into words—the exhaustion, the alienness of himself in relation to the world. He has lived this day before. It will be snowing, a little bit, when he looks out the window. There is no need to look and see it himself; he has already seen this snow fall. He has lived this day already, yesterday. It was Tuesday yesterday, it is Tuesday again today.

He will go to practice, morning skate. They will leave as a team from the practice rink to the airport, catch a flight to Minnesota. Second game of the New Year, first against the Yonder. Ilya has already played this game, caught this flight. They lose. They will lose. They’ve already lost, but Ilya will skate his heart out anyway—not because he thinks it will make a difference but so he feels a little less like he’s lying when he tells the media that they’re leaving it all out on the ice, every game, they just need to ____. Fill in the blank: score, defend, pass, shoot, fight, win. 

They just need to—keep pushing. Keep trying. The W is just around the corner. They’re leaving everything they have out there on the ice, every fucking time. They’re taking the pucks in deep, they’re giving one hundred and ten percent and slamming up against the brick wall of a better team. 

Ilya will go to practice and then he will go to Minnesota and then, after Minnesota, he will go to—what is next? He thinks Chicago is next. And then St. Louis, and then Nashville. More practice skates. More plane rides. More media scrums and shitty airport coffee and laundry. 

It is—not a good sign, Ilya thinks. That the idea of doing laundry exhausts him. He does not even do his own laundry on road trips. The team arranges a laundry service with the hotel that dry cleans their game day suits and presses their fucking socks and underwear every other day. What does Ilya have to be exhausted about? Letting it happen? Living through it?

After Nashville, it will be Dallas. It will not be snowing in Dallas, probably. But it will still be Tuesday, Ilya thinks. 

But maybe it will not be. This thing, this exhaustion, this repetition—it has crashed into him like a rogue wave, coming out of nowhere and taking his breath away. Surely it can recede just as quickly, between one blink and the next. Yes. Surely it is just—this house. The city. 

A change of scenery will be the shock to his system that he needs.

It is very sad, Ilya thinks, to hope that a city like Nashville, Tennessee will act as some sort of  defibrillator to his languishing, exhausted heart. It is a little like wanting to stop and smell the roses but only being able to find dandelions pushing up through sidewalk cracks. Like okay, this is the bright side and it has never been dimmer. But look, look at how yellow these dandelions are. Look at how very bright they are against all this gray.

Begging dogs and desperate men can subsist off of scraps, Ilya knows this very well by now. Scraps mean that there is more food, that there is a reason to come back, sniffing around for more. Scraps promise that there is generosity, just out of reach. That is what needy dogs and starving men really have in common, when you think about it: the hope.

So Ilya will get out of bed, and his feet will feel heavy when they hit the floor. Skates will make them feel heavier, probably, but that is one of the only things he knows how to do with his feet. Put skates on, knot the laces three times, step out onto the ice. 

So he’ll do that. He’ll go to practice. Then he will get on the plane, and then he will lose the game. He will call Shane later, from his hotel room, and he will speak in a quiet voice so no one can hear him through the walls and so Shane will not hear the way his words will wobble and quake and threaten to snap under their own weight. And then he will go to bed and he will pretend it will be enough, to wake up in the morning. To have the chance to skate again. To know that Shane will call him if he doesn’t call first. 

Even when he wakes up in Nashville fucking Tennessee, even if he wakes up and it is Tuesday again. There will be a call waiting for him, and that will be enough.

The Centaurs lose. Ilya sits on the bench in the visitors’ locker room and gives a speech he isn’t sure is in English. He doesn’t think it matters, one way or another. For a second, during warm-ups, he’d laughed with Zane Boodram as they watched Evan Dykstra flip two pucks up and over the net. “Don’t think he needs to practice missing the goal,” Zane had said, and Ilya had laughed like he still thought hockey was easy and fun and that this life was a privilege.

But it doesn’t matter now, trudging through the debris of the loss. It is still Tuesday. “I think we gave it our all,” he tells one of the microphones when it forces its way into his face. “Tonight, our all is not enough, but tomorrow, maybe it is. Keep watching.” 

His phone buzzes against the metal of the locker room bench. One text from Shane, and then another. Ilya doesn’t know what to say, what he wants to say to Shane and what he wants to hear from him, and so he doesn’t even let himself look at the messages. It’s enough that he’s texted at all. Ilya just needs a moment, just—a second. He just needs to take a five minute break, from the captaincy and from the hockey and from the stream of neverending Tuesdays his life has become. 

It starts snowing, a little, just after 11:30. Ilya watches the flakes swirl through the hotel window pane for a second and then he draws the curtains shut. He has seen this snow before. He will see it again tomorrow.

Ilya’s phone tells him that it is the twenty-eighth day of January. Ilya doesn’t know what happened to the first twenty-seven days. Maybe he slept through them. Maybe they happened to someone else. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe they are happening to everyone else and Ilya is standing on the outside, on the sidewalk, watching the cars go by. Maybe he is knee-deep in a river and the water is flowing past him without tugging him along. Maybe it is not that it is Tuesday again, but that it has been Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday over and over again and Ilya is the only one standing still. The last one to get the joke, the slowest one on the uptake. 

How does someone realize they are stuck in the same twenty-four hours? They realize nothing changes, okay. But what if you have the same alarm every morning and you eat the same foods for breakfast and lunch and dinner and you always put on your gear the same way and you are surrounded by people who always stick to their same routines, day in and day out, and none of it matters because you always, always, always lose the hockey game and you always, always, always come home to an empty house and your boyfriend is always, always, always just out of reach?

How does someone realize that they are stuck? How does someone differentiate between being the one frozen in the river as everything flows past them and being on the hamster wheel, running through the same thing over and over? Does it even fucking matter what is moving and who is not? They always lose the game. Shane never stays long enough. Shane never stays. Ilya can’t leave. Ilya can’t figure out what leaving looks like. That makes him stupid; it also makes him afraid.

Tuesday again. He is kissing Shane’s neck, pressing his teeth against the soft skin beneath his jaw and threatening to bite down. He is wondering if anyone else has ever kissed Shane Hollander here, if anyone else knows just how much he shivers from it, how struck dumb he can get when he melts up against the kitchen counter and lets Ilya put him where he wants him.

“No marks,” Shane warns but his voice is high and thready already. He sounds unsure because a Shane who is being kissed by Ilya like this—hot and hungry and desperate and starved—never manages to completely forget his rules but often manages to forget why they’re so important in the first place. 

He is very lucky Ilya loves him enough to obey even when he knows his heart isn’t in the instruction. 

“I know, solnyshko,” Ilya mutters, nipping so lightly at the edge of Shane’s jaw that there’s no chance of a bruise forming. His restraint when it comes to Shane Hollander has always been legendary. He’d worried that maybe the lines would get blurry and his self-control would falter now that they’re together and in love and in this thing hopefully forever, but that hasn’t been the case. Shane hasn’t let him, because he generally cares enough about appearances to hold firm, and Ilya is fucking gone over him that even when Shane slips and forgets and eagerly kisses Ilya back when he drags them into an empty equipment room beneath the Bell Centre, usually Ilya remembers to pull away first. If Ilya can’t stop himself for his own sake, he’ll always be able to for Shane’s, he thinks.

“Ilya, fuck,” Shane moans, head lolling back and hands twisting in the fabric of Ilya’s shirt, tugging him closer, trapping him between his legs.

“Fuck,” Ilya agrees, mouthing down the column of Shane’s neck, pressing a kiss between his collarbones and then turning his head to kiss over his heart. He can’t feel the thump-thump beneath his lips but if he closes his eyes, he can pretend he does. 

“Missed you, missed this,” Shane is saying, babbling, because Ilya told him once a year ago that he likes hearing him speak when they’re like this. Shane’d blushed and told Ilya that he never knew what to say, that everything running through his head when Ilya had hands on him was half-structured sentences and Ilya’s name and broken off pleas for more. Nothing sexy, nothing like what Ilya can do.

And Ilya had told him that that wasn’t the point, that he loved all of Shane’s clumsy words and he could think of no higher praise than listening to the exact moment that the pleasure Ilya gave him made him go nonverbal. 

Which had made Shane blush and bury his head into his pillow, but it’d also made Shane start—tentatively—speaking, more and more, up until the moment he couldn’t, words giving way to breathy sighs and guttural groans and sweet little whimpers Ilya could probably live off of without ever feeling hungry again.

Shane gasps when Ilya runs his teeth along the bud of his nipple, pressing forward into the hot brand of his mouth and making this noise that sounds wrenched from the very depths of him. “Missed this so much, missed you,” Shane says, and Ilya—

Ilya lets his head rest right up against the smooth muscle of Shane’s pec, pushing his forehead into the heat of his skin. 

Oh, he thinks, suddenly, without meaning to, bordering on nonsensical. If I died, he would never forgive me.

It’s not a—persistent thought, or anything. Dying. It’s not something that deserves to be called to attention, not something that needs eyes or ears or other peoples’ hands on it. He remembers half-watching Groundhog Day, back in December, when everything about time loops seemed like science-fiction and slapstick comedy. Remembers the way Bill Murray killed himself, over and over, funny enough that the audience could laugh at it. That’s how Ilya’s thought about it, dying, only vaguely, only sometimes, only when the accumulation of Tuesdays begins to feel like road-rash that has scraped him down to his bones.

Like, okay. Dying. It would be like in Groundhog Day. He will deliberate on this action, and he will come up with a funny way to die and then the audience will laugh for a moment and then the movie will end and everyone will leave the theater.

He just hasn’t come up with a funny way yet, probably because he can admit to himself that he doesn’t really, actually want to die. Probably. He probably does not really, actually want to die. 

What he wants, he thinks when he’s being honest with himself, is to be able to split himself in two, so that there can be a version of Ilya Rozanov that goes out and loses hockey games and goes to practice and catches flights, and there can be a version of him that stays in bed a minute longer than his alarm lets him. That just needs a few moments to gather himself and find the energy to force himself awake and out of the house. That can stand in the river without worrying about being left behind by the world.

He isn’t sure Shane would love either version, which is like a cliff’s precipice of a downside, but Ilya has been trying not to think about heights and cliffs and falling. In love, over the edge. Either, or.

“Ilya?” Shane asks, and Ilya blinks his eyes open, lashes brushing against Shane’s skin. At some point, Shane’s grip has shifted, changed, hand moving from the back of his shirt up to thread through his curls. Not tugging him closer anymore, just—holding him, there, pressed up against him and pinned in place. 

Shane’s fingers work their way through the mess of Ilya’s hair, down to his scalp. He scratches at it, the smallest amount of pressure, as he murmurs, “Ilya, are you okay?”

Shane said: I missed this, I missed you.

And Ilya thinks, for the first time: He would miss me forever. If I left.

And then, on the tail end of that thought and so much worse, so much more selfish, so much more terrifying: Or maybe he wouldn’t.

He pushes his head back into Shane’s hold, just to feel it, make sure it’s there, bask in the pressure of being held and having been missed. Before Shane can say anything else or try and get a read on his face, hesitate and pull back and ask another stupid question, Ilya kisses him.

It’s rushed and desperate, too hard, too much teeth. Nothing pretty about it, it’s less of a kiss and more of a branding, like Ilya can lick an indention of himself into Shane’s mouth if he tries hard enough.

Shane doesn’t like marks. Shane doesn’t want anyone asking questions. His team knows he’s gay, which is the sort of freedom that ties you up and waits in the wings for you to trip over yourself. They’ll only have prying questions and scathing judgments if he turns up with bruises, and Shane hates answering questions. 

But Ilya wants to leave a bruise, wants to leave a mark. Wants to leave something of himself with Shane, for forever. Wants to not leave him, not for anything in the world. Wishes he could split himself in two. Wishes this was a movie, where just being with Shane and kissing him and being held by him would be enough to push the clocks forward, to make it feel like a Wednesday.

But it’s still Tuesday when he guides Shane up from the kitchen counter and pushes him up the stairs into their bedroom. It’s still Tuesday when he gets him spread out over his comforter, legs around his shoulders, fingers and mouth fucking him open, deep and slow and starving. It’s still Tuesday when he knotches the head of his cock against Shane’s entrance and rocks against him once, twice, just to tease a little, just to make him go crazy and desperate, the way Ilya feels crazy and desperate. 

Ilya fucks Shane into the mattress of a bed he isn’t sure Shane thinks of as both of theirs, and then he presses his face up against the side of Shane’s neck in the aftermath and hopes Shane’s too cock-drunk to feel the hot spill of tears escaping from his clenched-shut eyes. He hates himself, a little, afterwards. For it still being Tuesday. For fucking Shane without being able to tell him what’s wrong. For thinking about leaving Shane, even while he’s fucking him. 

He hates himself for it because he knows Shane wouldn’t; Shane would never forgive him, and maybe he’d miss him forever or at least every few days and then every few weeks and then every few years, but he wouldn’t be able to hate him either. They’d already tried that, hating each other. All they’d been able to come up with was love.

“Ilya,” Shane murmurs, an indeterminable amount of time later. His fingers are carding through his hair again. It feels nice. “You’d tell me, right? If—I don’t know. If something was wrong. You can tell me. Anything. Okay?”

Ilya is on his side, face still mostly pressed into the space between Shane’s neck and shoulder because he likes to think this is the safest place in the world for him to hide. He doesn’t say anything. It’s been long enough since he last spoke that maybe Shane thinks he’s fallen asleep. He could so easily be asleep right now.

He has been so tired lately. He has just been—exhausted.

It’s not depression, because Ilya is eating everything he is supposed to be eating. He is going to the grocery store and buying exactly the amount of food he needs for each homestand they have in Ottawa. He is getting out of bed and he is putting on the right clothes and he is waving at the family that has just moved in down the street as he drives himself to practice. 

He is going to practice, and sometimes he jokes around with Zane Boodram and Wyatt Hayes and Nick Chouinard and Tanner Dillon and Evan Dykstra on the ice. Sometimes, even, the Centaurs win. Against Seattle, twice. San Francisco, once. 

Low hanging fruit is still fucking fruit, and he still fucking knows how to smile and laugh and bump shoulders up against Boodram after the man feeds him a perfect pass he converts into a pretty fucking goal. And it’s real, the smiles and the laughter. When Wyatt recounts the trials and tribulations of trying to run a one-shot DnD campaign with a handful of the team and their partners, Ilya laughs long and loud and real. And when Shane pushes him up against the door of his apartment with so much force that he knocks the coat rack over, Ilya’s laugh is bright and he feels it down deep in his gut. 

So it’s not depression, because he remembers what depression looks like. He remembers his mother’s smiles and the way the edges of them were always a little sad. He remembers the way her body looked in her bed before it became her deathbed, when she’d retire there eary in the afternoon and stay there beneath the covers through the night. He remembers her hair dulling, falling out in long strands he’d find on the pillowcase, in the hallway—the way it lost its shine, turned from spun gold into something mousy and pale.

His hair is still soft, clean, and curly. Golden. Shane likes running his fingers through it, likes pushing it out of Ilya’s eyes and tucking it behind his ears even though it’s short enough that it never stays there for long. 

The point is that whatever has broken within Ilya is not depression, because he knows what that looks like. He knows all the warning signs or symptoms or whatever they’re called.

This is not that. This is just—Tuesday, over and over and over and over again. 

The Centaurs lose. Shane drives up from Montreal for Yuna’s birthday, spends the night with Ilya. There’s a little bit of snow falling, some late freeze wrapping its fingers around the early daffodils and choking them for their audacity to bloom before Easter. 

March, apparently. It’s early March. Ilya doesn’t know what happened to January 1st. He thinks they must have lost to the Edmonton Miners, but his memories of the game are like he watched it on a television screen through the window of someone else’s house. Distant and blurred.

“I love you,” Ilya whispers in Russian when Shane is gathering his things in the morning. He is so good at this. So good at leaving nothing behind him as he goes. He has his coat in his arms. His shoes are by the door. If it weren’t for the pink post-it note Ilya has squirreled away in his sock drawer upstairs, he’d think Shane was never here at all. 

“I love you,” Shane replies, in Russian, because he is so fucking smart and perfect and he has been learning Russian since Ilya first called him his boyfriend, their first summer together at the cottage. It is this beautiful, wondrous thing, hearing Russian from Shane’s lips, Russian words formed by Shane’s tongue.

It is terrifying. Every time, Ilya feels a little bit more exposed, like a nerve. Like he has just taken a stick to the mouth and his teeth are shards of bone and blood, nerves out in the open and flinching away from the air itself.

One day, Shane will probably be fluent in Ilya’s mother’s tongue, and then what will Ilya hide behind? Where will he go to say these things he needs to say but can’t stand being heard?

“If you loved me, you would not make me watch you leave so often,” Ilya says, quickly and quietly, so Shane will not be able to understand. It is not fair, neither the delivery nor the words, but Russian is not the language Ilya reaches for when he wants to be fair to Shane. It is the language he speaks in when he is at his most afraid and his most honest, which is rarely the same thing. “Darling. Sweetheart. I do not think I can do this for ten more years.”

Shane frowns, halfway through shrugging on his coat. “You gotta slow down, baby,” he says, pouting up at him even though he would never in a thousand lifetimes admit to it. “I caught…dorogoy,” and he blushes a little bit, the way he always blushes when he repeats the petnames Ilya uses back at him. “And gody.”

“Dorogoy, I will love you for many, many gody,” Ilya supplies, because he is at his most afraid when he watches Shane leaving him, and his fear does not always make him honest. “More years than you. I am sure.”

“It’s not a competition,” Shane says, competitively. “But if it was, I’d win.”

What a bold thing to say, standing in the foyer of a house Ilya bought for Shane. “Oh?” Ilya says, moving forward until he can pin Shane up against the wall next to the door. They don’t have long. Shane has afternoon skate back in Montreal, a dinner with the team afterwards. He is not trapped in a time loop, and so he still notices the passing of minutes and hours and thinks they’re important. Shane probably knew it was March 6 without having to be told.

“Yeah,” Shane murmurs, eyes on Ilya’s lips. They’ve already kissed goodbye, but maybe they should do it again. Maybe this time it will take.

“But I will love you for forever,” Ilya says, pouring the words right into Shane’s mouth. In English, because it was the language he was thinking in when he realized he was in love with him for the first time, and it is the language Shane uses when he’s begging for Ilya to fuck him harder and faster and deeper, and it is the language the deed of this house is in, so it is home, a little bit, now. Home enough to be used in moments like these, for sweet, tender kisses up against walls, early on a Tuesday morning.

“I’ll love you for infinity,” Shane mumbles and then he pecks Ilya on the lips. “Plus one,” he adds, which doesn’t even make sense but is delivered with the confidence of a man who’s just put his foot down and won the argument. 

“Wow, that is a big number,” Ilya says when they separate from another kiss. “I did not know you could count so high, sweetheart.”

He brushes his thumb over one of the larger freckles just beneath Shane’s eye, and Shane shivers, eyes going half-lidded and satisfied as he replies, “You can’t count to infinity, asshole. It’s like—a concept. Theoretical. I don’t know.”

“So…is theoretical concept,” Ilya says, nosing along the line of Shane’s cheekbone. “Not big number.”

“It’s a big number concept,” Shane says, but the way his fingers tangle in Ilya’s sweatshirt shows how quickly he’s losing interest in the argument. Probably because, when pressed, he doesn’t actually know that much more about fancy number science than Ilya does. “What, can you count to forever, big guy?”

“Yes,” Ilya tells him, tucking a loose strand of hair behind his ear. “I do this every time you leave. It is forever until you return.”

Shane lets out a noise, a gasping sort of exhale, like he’s just taken a hit in the solar plexus. “Ilya, don’t—don’t say that,” he whispers, leaning back against the wall until he can look up at Ilya with wide, wet eyes brimming with concern that Ilya doesn’t know how to weather.

Ilya blinks back at him. He hadn’t meant to say that in English. Isn’t actually sure he did. Might have used Russian, just slow enough that Shane was able to translate it. But he could have just as easily forgotten to switch, reached for English over Russian by mistake; it is so complicated when you have two homes. 

It is so fucking complicated when you have two languages you can use for honesty, but you still don’t have the heart to stomach it.

Instead of saying anything else and risking everything pouring out of his mouth, Ilya leans forward and captures Shane’s lips with his. And Shane really must love him, because he allows it. He kisses back for a handful of precious seconds that are slow and soft and taste like Sunday morning sex.

“I have to go,” Shane says when they separate. His eyebrows are creased down over his eyes and—for the first time, Ilya wonders if he’d stay, if Ilya asked him to. He looks a little like he would. Like he’d miss his practice and pay the fine, like he’d be a healthy scratch for Montreal’s game tomorrow against the Florida Pantheon. If Ilya asked him to.

But Ilya wouldn’t. Ilya couldn’t. Maybe in another universe. Maybe a different version of himself is able to, allows himself to tangle their fingers together and beg Shane to stay. Maybe this other, braver self will tug Shane away from the door and up to his bedroom. 

No, to the living room. 

This Ilya will not have a couch he hates, and so he will like fucking Shane on the couch, which is soft and navy blue or leather black or suede brown. This Ilya will know the date as a fact and then also as something he can recognize as true, down to his soul. 

“Okay,” Ilya says, because he only has the one universe, and it’s this one, where he is a coward who is in love, and his love doesn’t make him brave but at least it makes him kind. Kind enough, at least. To not argue. To keep his broken bits inside himself for fear of getting his blood on Shane’s pristinely white shoes. 

Shane still hesitates, hand contracting in the fabric of Ilya’s hoodie, as if it will take some third party or higher power to separate him from it. Like Commissioner Crowell himself will have to tear him away.

“You’d tell me,” Shane says, like a question. His eyes are dark and narrowed as they flit across Ilya’s face. Suspicious. Distrustful. Accusatory, even. “If something was….You’d tell me.”

Ilya’s fear doesn’t always make him honest, and his love makes him kind if kindness towards the ones you love is measured in treating them with the same politeness you’d show strangers. Here, you go first. Oh, pardon me, sorry. I’m fine, thanks for asking. And how are you? 

“Yes,” Ilya says, which would be a lie if Shane had actually asked a fucking question. “Da,” he adds, just to make sure that he is a liar in both languages he’s used to tell Shane he loves him.

Shane lingers like he doesn’t believe him, but the pull of time and the river and afternoon practice can’t be ignored for long. It is Thursday, March 6 for Shane, and so he goes, and Ilya has never felt more like he is stuck in the mud, water whirling past him, than he does as he watches him get into his car and leave.

They’ve never kissed in the driveway. That’s not something Ilya’s ever noticed before now, but it’s one of those things he can’t unnotice now that he’s seen the shape of it. The driveway is private, behind a gate, set back from the street and protected by old, thick trees. 

And they’ve still never kissed in the driveway. Ilya has never once followed Shane out to his car and kissed him goodbye against the door, through the car window. He’s never even tried.

Ten years until retirement, maybe. Until they can kiss in the driveway. Once they’re out as a couple, they can kiss anywhere. On the ice, on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, in the parking lot.

But—ten years is a long time. When Ilya closes the door to his house and looks around at its great, vast emptiness, ten years feels like an infinity. Like a big number concept, something it is impossible to calculate or count to or ever actually reach.

How many Tuesdays are there in ten years? How many days will Ilya have to repeat over and over and over and over again before the prison sentence is complete? 

Ten fucking years, and for a moment, standing on the threshold of his house and looking out over the plotted course of his life, Ilya wants to rage and sob and shatter. 

He is so close to having everything he has ever wanted. He is so close to having more than he ever thought he’d get and definitely more than someone like him deserves. 

He has never felt further away.

The Centaurs lose; Shane leaves. Ilya doesn’t scream, but only because it feels very stupid to scream in a house this empty. The echo will fade long before it would give him any sort of false company.

The Centaurs win. A brief uptick in goal-scoring from Zane Boodram, a surprising amount of pulling his own weight from Tanner Dillon, and a mediocre five game point streak from Ilya has them shutting out the Dukes in Anaheim, squeezing out a narrow victory against the Utah Beehive, and winning in a shoot-out in New Jersey. 

Then it’s Hayes’ birthday, end of March. He approaches Ilya cautiously after practice, skating loose circles around him that gradually get smaller and smaller, stick held out in front of him and nudging at Ilya’s skates. It sort of reminds Ilya of how one would approach a feral dog or a skittish horse, hand offered out to sniff, distance respectfully kept. Except it’s unclear which one of them is the dog, because Wyatt’s got his metaphorical tail between his legs as he invites Ilya out to drinks for his birthday down at the bar the team likes to frequent.

It makes Ilya feel like a god-awful captain. The hesitation in the invitation. The fact that Ilya hadn’t known it was Wyatt Hayes’ birthday in the first place. That he hadn’t organized anything for the guy himself. That Wyatt finishes off the question with a nice little but you don’t have to or anything, I know it’s last minute. It’s not an official team thing either; some of my DnD friends will be there, and obviously Lisa’s invited a few of her friends too, so—

Ilya’s a shit captain. For not knowing, for not planning, for making Wyatt Hayes feel unsure about inviting his own captain out for drinks on his birthday. For wishing, very quietly in the darkest and nastiest part of his soul, that he’d been quicker to leave the ice so he’d never have gotten the invitation in the first place.

But of course Ilya goes.

And it’s mostly fun too, even though Ilya is exhausted and he hasn’t been sleeping well and he wastes a handful of minutes frowning at himself in every mirror he sees, trying to decide if it’s just his imagination or if his hair looks a little more lackluster than it did the last time he saw it.

It’s fun, hanging out with the team outside of the rink like this. Ilya gets a drink in him and then another drink to wrap his hand around, and he puts on a mask and he performs the fuck out of being a Good Captain. They’re all good at acting, obviously, they’re fucking hockey players who have to sell their sport and their team and themselves to the cameras every chance they get.

But Ilya’s always been the fucking best at it. At acting, performing. The costume’s a little tight after so long forgetting how to wear it, but it’s fitting again by the end of the evening. The rot’s set in, deep within the soft tissue of Ilya’s brain. Something about him is probably irreparably broken, an old castle crumbling into the sea. 

But he can pretend otherwise, and he can be good at it. He can spend a few hours not thinking about his empty house or the shit hockey he plays or the boyfriend he loves like a stupid rat with its shock button. He can be a Good Captain, and for an evening, he can let himself believe that he believes that it’s Friday night, the world spread out beneath his feet and rife with possibilities.

The Centaurs lose. There’s only a couple of games left in the season, at least. It’s been pretty much mathematically impossible since the end of February for them to make the playoffs, apparently, but now people on Twitter have started leaving them off all of the MLH graphics, like they’re not even on the ice anymore. 

“Look at it this way,” Harris says in the locker room, clapping Ilya on the back. “They’ll remember us at the end of June.”

“They will remember us during Montreal’s Cup Parade?” Ilya asks, raising both his eyebrows. “Why, is MLH social media planning to do Best and Worst superlatives for the season?”

“You’d win Best Dressed for sure, Rozy,” one of the rookies pipes up loyally from across the locker room, and Ilya bows because he started performing at the end of March and he has no idea what day it is now but it’s easiest to just—keep the act going. 

“Dills would win Best Puck Turnover,” Boodram says, and Tanner Dillon throws his dirty sweater at him. 

“Bood would win Worst—just—Worst,” Dillon says, which makes the locker room break out into noise that’s half cheering him on and half ragging on him for being as terrible at chirping as he is at defensive play. 

Privately, Ilya thinks if there really were Best and Worst superlatives for the MLH teams, the Centaurs as a whole would be pretty likely to win Worst. 

“Draft lottery,” is all Harris says when Ilya looks back at him. “I’m not a betting man, but I think we’ve got good odds on getting the first overall pick.”

“Poor kid,” Ilya says, but he grins so Harris thinks he’s joking.

Harris smiles back. He has a nice smile, friendly and bright. The kind that comes warmed up, like it’s easy for him, like those are muscles he never needs to stretch. 

He claps him on the back again and then he heads out, and Ilya turns back to his locker room with his hands on his hips. Some of the team is already looking at him, others are distracted with their own post-loss rituals.

“Okay,” he tells them. “Do we need a speech?”

“I think we’re good,” Boodram calls. He’s still got Dillon’s sweater tangled up in his hands. “Unless you want to do a popcorn style one?”

Ilya frowns, confused and a little bit wary. “What is popcorn style.”

“Oh,” Wyatt Hayes perks up in his stall. “Yeah, okay. I’ll start.” He clears his throat. “My terrible team,” he says, in a very shit Russian accent. “You very terrible today. This is not surprising but we will pretend it is surprising. Everyone was very bad. Except for Hayes, who is amazing goalie and also my favorite.”

Ilya blinks and he can feel the line of his mouth waver in between a laugh and a scowl. “I do not sound like that,” he protests. “And I would never say this. Wyatt, we lose against the Aviators 9 to 2 tonight. Was not your best game either.”

“Only two goals? Sounds like you should have scored more, Cap,” Wyatt tells him cheerfully. “Anyway, it’s not your turn. Gnarly, you go.”

Nick Chouinard glances up from his second skate, looks between Ilya and Wyatt and shrugs. “Is one bad game of hockey,” he says, and his Russian accent is somehow worse, mangled by the Québécois one he already has. “You must be like tiny little duck in water, yes? Like my very serious and manly tattoo of duck, which I got after one year with this terrible team, to remind myself to let bad hockey games flow off me. Like duck in water. Wait—no, like water on duck.” 

“Okay,” Ilya says, really fighting the urge to smile now and knowing already it’s a battle he’s going to lose.  “First of all, it is a loon,” he gestures at the ink on his skin. “And I did not get it to—” he shuts his mouth with a click and shakes his head, lips pressed tightly together for a moment, holding something which is everything in. “Fuck off,” he snaps, when Boodram starts laughing. He points at him, as threatening as he can pretend to be with no teeth bared. “I did not get it for you fuckers,” is what he ends up saying, and he can feel the smile win out, stretch across his face.

It’s not an act. It’s not a performance. It’s real.

“Dykstra, you next,” Chouinard calls, ignoring him completely but managing to duck a dirty sock that Ilya tosses his way.

Evan Dykstra grins at Ilya and then around the room. He’s halfway through changing into his street-clothes, but he’s not too busy for—whatever this is. “My awful, loser team,” he announces, Russian accent so butchered it sounds like some mix between Indian and German instead, “I assure you: they pay you by the game, win or lose. So chin up, my contract is okay still. I am crying about this loss into my millions of dollars.”

“Stop, okay,” Ilya interrupts, rolling his eyes and holding up a hand. He thinks he would sound more foreboding if he could capture and contain the smile burning its way across his face. “I know this is not something I have said.” 

“Maybe not, but you’ve definitely implied it,” Dykstra replies with a shrug, dropping the accent, which is kind of him. 

“How?” 

Dykstra smirks. “Your copious amounts of retail therapy,” and the locker room bursts into loud noise that has Ilya wanting to bury his laughter in his hands just to keep it private for a second longer. That doesn’t even make sense though. Something like this, laughter like this, it is made to be shared. When has Ilya’s instincts flipped like that, so that he wants to hide these good things away as well as the bad? What does it say about him?

“Bood,” Dykstra says, “Your turn,” and Zane Boodram puffs out his chest and stands up from his stall with his hands on his hips in a perfect imitation of Ilya’s own stance from a few minutes ago. 

Ilya crosses his arms and pointedly sits down, as if that’ll make everyone else stop laughing. Boodram clears his throat and says, in the worst accent yet, “Yes thank you. We left it all out on the ice tonight, we gave one hundred and ten percent of the effort—”

“Fuck off,” Ilya says, tossing his other dirty sock in his direction. The fucker has the audacity to dodge, which is just too much. If he could show that level of agility on the ice, maybe Ilya wouldn’t have spent half the season running through all his Post Loss Speech material and they wouldn’t fucking be here right now. 

But Ilya—likes it here. In this moment, surrounded by this laughter, these people. Tuesdays feel like a thing of the past, something so far away that they cannot touch him. He isn’t even thinking about his big, empty house right now. He feels—at home, in this locker room. Like his skin fits right over his bones. Like he could love this team, bleed for it and wear its colors and sing its praises, however fucking short the song.

“We are terrible team,” Boodram continues cheerfully, and the guys cheer which is—Ilya imagines trying to explain this to Shane and doesn’t think he’d ever be able to find the words. “Just absolute shit,” Boodram adds, and Tanner Dillon cries, “The Worst,” which makes everyone laugh again. 

Ilya laughs along because they have lost more games than they have won this year and the playoffs are never going to happen for them, not this season and probably not the next one either, but there was good hockey out there on the ice too, amidst all the loss. There were games they won and passes that connected so fucking clean, tape to tape, and goals that they saved and scrums that had them spitting up blood on home ice and goal cellys that had them hugging each other and cheering like they’d won the fucking Stanley Cup in front of the twelve people stupid enough to be season ticket holders of the Ottawa fucking Centaurs. 

And when they played poorly, they played poorly together. Sometimes that meant finishing out a night 9 to 2, and sometimes it meant giving over the puck to the opposing team as if it were fucking gift-wrapped, and sometimes that meant going a fucking week without hearing that stupid fucking DJ Khaled song of their goal horn. 

But—Ilya doesn’t know. The hockey has been shit for so long and he has been exhausted for months, but this feels real. This feels like—like Monday, but only the good parts of Monday. The endless possibilities of the week yet to be set in stone. The lasting warm glow of a weekend well-spent. The anticipation of the coming days, the next weekend already on the horizon, and  a whole lot of life left to live between then and now.

“Imagine this,” Boodram calls for attention, still in his horrible Russian accent that Ilya cannot find the ego to be offended by when there is so much joy and laughter welling up in his chest and in the locker room and in everyone’s eyes. “We are terrible team, yes. But this is how it feels, losing on this terrible team—still good. We lose so good. Imagine how good winning will feel when it is our season, yes?”

The rookies tap their sticks against the ground and there’s a ragged cheer around the room, and Ilya thinks he joins it. Is pretty sure he does, unless he is smiling too big to force the noise out from between his teeth. 

He stands, tugs his sweaty jersey over his head and throws it over to Bood, since he’s collecting them or something.

“All of you, mandatory acting classes in the off-season,” he announces, and the locker room is the loudest it has ever been after a loss so terrible Ilya’s teeth have been hurting since he got off the ice. “And cultural sensitivity training too,” he adds. “You are all terrible. What if we get first draft pick next year and we win the small Swiss baby? You will make fun of his accent too? He will cry.”

“We would never,” Wyatt says, hand pressed over his heart, blinking wide eyes up at Ilya. 

“I’ll take you up on the acting lessons if you’re paying, Cap,” Dykstra says, and Ilya rolls his eyes again. Feels lighter than ever. Has never been happier, to feel like it’s Monday.

“Of course I will pay,” he tells Evan, gathering his things for the showers. “They have given me millions of dollars for betting on losing horse with broken hooves.”

“Hey,” Boodram protests mildly, hands still on his hips and laughter still in his voice. “No horses here, buddy. All I see are Centaurs.”

Tuesday again. Worse this time, now that he has been reminded so clearly of what Mondays can taste like. It makes him feel meaner, shorter, rotten in all the ways that matter. Not necessarily a problem, because Ilya has spent most of the year feeling mean and short-tempered and rotten, pacing around the edges of his cage with his teeth bared. It’s just usually the meanness is self-directed and so all the bitemarks he leaves are on his own skin. 

That’s the one benefit of an empty house, Ilya knows. No one to lash out at, unless you want to start tearing at the walls.

Except today, it’s a problem because Shane is here. He made the drive last night, must have left before the final buzzer of their game against the Aviators because he turned up just a few minutes after Ilya pulled into the driveway a few minutes past 11:30.

And that had felt so fucking beautiful Ilya had had to convince himself to blink, like even just closing his eyes for a second would be running the risk of waking up from the dream that was Shane Hollander, unexpectedly and so wonderfully within arms’ reach.

So it isn’t fair. It isn’t fucking fair, that Ilya opens his eyes when the morning’s gray, watery light begins to make its daily pilgrimage across the ceiling of his bedroom and sees Shane slumped over and snoring on the mattress next to him and his rotten, stupid brain still thinks that it is Tuesday. 

This should be enough to make him happy. Shane, here. In front of him, without being asked, without being begged. Shane, here, despite the fact that the Voyageurs are almost definitely going to win the President’s Trophy, are probably already knee-deep in preparing for a playoff run that has a high chance of winning them a Cup.

Shane, being here, sitting at the counter and pecking at half an avocado and an egg white omelet should be enough to make Ilya feel like he’ll never have to experience a Tuesday again. 

It’s not fair that it doesn’t. It’s not fair that he feels somehow more rotten, more broken. Meaner and more afraid. Unable to hide it.

It takes about two hours before they start bickering. And then, reliable as a forest fire, they’re fighting.

Ilya couldn’t tell you what finally sparks it even if he had the time it’d take to catch his breath and perform an autopsy of the morning. Maybe Shane says something tender and soft, treats him so gently that it can only come off as pitying. Maybe Shane says something off-handed, a needling remark he doesn’t mean, something he has said before that Ilya has laughed off in the past but that now strikes him in his vulnerable underbelly and has him baring his teeth. 

Maybe Shane says nothing. Maybe Ilya’s body is just a stupid creature running wild and mostly on instinct, and he looks across the kitchen island and forgets to see the man he loves in favor of seeing the boy who never backed down from a fight, and that’d been all he needed to strike the match.

And so now they’re fighting, and it doesn’t make Ilya feel any better. If anything, he feels worse, standing at one end of his kitchen and snapping back at Shane as if he is wearing someone else’s body. As if the love he normally has so much of in his chest has been taken out on loan and all he is left with is this great well of emptiness, spreading through him.

“It’s not my fault your team’s shit,” Shane is saying, all flashing eyes and set jaw, lip curling up as if just the mention of bad hockey is enough to put him off his fucking food. 

“What,” Ilya hears himself say, low and quiet and rotten. It punches out of his chest, the word. They hadn’t even been fucking arguing about hockey, but of course now they are. They’ve never really fought about anything else, not really—not an actual fight. They have bickered before, blundered their way through a handful of stiff, emotionally charged conversations regarding their relationship, but it’s always been hockey that they’ve fought about. 

A holdover, from the beginning of them, because if you hold onto the roots of something, you tend to get the good parts and the bad ones too. 

“What,” Shane snaps back, straightening his shoulders and crossing his arms like he’s digging his heels in. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve been fucked up over the Centaurs losing for months now, that’s what’s been wrong with you since—fuck, I don’t know, since you got here, maybe? Since you realized you couldn’t turn the sinking ship around? Since—”

“You think I am upset because of hockey?” Ilya interrupts, carefully putting his hands on the countertop where he can see them. “You think I care so much about winning and losing a game?”

“What else am I supposed to think?” Shane yells back, working his jaw. A stray piece of hair falls into his face and Ilya wants to tuck it back behind his ear. He wants to kiss him. He wants him to go. He wants to spend just one day with him, one perfect day where it is Friday or Saturday or Sunday. He will take a Wednesday, even. He’ll make do with a Thursday. “You won’t fucking tell me anything, Ilya!”

“Is none of your business,” Ilya snaps, which is a lie and not even what he meant to say. But it’s not as if he can take the words back. Or—he can, moves to, opens his mouth to apologize, except he’s already too late. He can see the way they strike Shane, hit him right across the cheek.

Shane’s lips purse and his eyes look wet. “Right then,” he says flatly. “My fucking mistake.” 

Ilya shakes his head, but maybe he nods. “You should go,” he tells him, voice only shaking a little. “You have playoffs to prepare for. Cups to win.”

He pushes away from the kitchen island, stalks out of the room completely, anger making his skin feel tight and his blood feel like it’s buzzing. This is what he always does, when he is angry. He leaves the room. It is a byproduct of growing up in a house with an angry father who always stayed. He can hear Shane follow him, because that is what Shane tends to do when Ilya leaves the room, but he doesn’t turn to look at him until he’s put the length of the living room in between them. The length of the fucking sectional.

“You say shit like that, and I’m not supposed to think you’re upset about your shit team?” Shane snaps, carding his hands through his hair as he stares at Ilya across the growing chasm between them. 

Ilya can feel his lips curling and he turns away, faces the bookshelf behind him so he can rake his own hands through his hair and sort through all the fucking things he wants say. None of them are smart; none of them are kind. Maybe this is what happens when you rot for long enough: everything you try to build collapses. 

Maybe this is what happens when your entire body is a never-healing wound: you open your mouth and all you can spit out is blood.

“Okay, fine. Fine, Hollander. Maybe–maybe I am upset over shit team,” Ilya spits, turning back to him. Venomous. “Maybe is not what I expected, maybe is harder than I thought it would be.”

Shane’s nostrils flare and his lips tighten, like he knows that Ilya is not talking about the hockey, the Centaurs.

Good, Ilya thinks, and it’s vicious and small and hurt, but Shane has—Shane has so much and all Ilya has is a boyfriend who is almost always too far away from him, a house that is too big, a shit hockey team and a broken brain. Shane can hurt. In a moment, Ilya will feel good about it, about hurting him. Right? Surely. Surely this will feel good, in a moment.

“I didn’t make you do this,” Shane says finally, working his jaw before he bites out the words. He crosses his arms, defensive or protective. Those lines blur together easily. They usually mean the same thing. “I’m fucking sorry if it’s not what you fucking thought it’d be, Ilya—but I didn’t—you bought a house, for fuck’s—I told you to find a place to rent, give the team a fucking trial run, but you bought a house—”

“For you!” Ilya snarls, because if he yells now, he knows his voice will break and who knows what will emerge from the cracks. “For us, you—! I bought this stupid house for us, Shane, I was not thinking about hockey team, I was—” he cuts himself off, shaking his head and sucking his cheeks into his mouth so he can bite at the soft insides of them. 

He stares at him, struck and dumb and hurting and alone. He loves Shane so fucking much. And yet he has been so cruel to him; he has gotten his blood all over his white shoes.

And worst of all, it doesn't feel good. It is Tuesday, and Ilya is not sure he will ever be happy again. Maybe happiness does not care about what is fair and what is not. But maybe it does care about who is deserving and who is not, and maybe happiness understands that there is something intrinsic within Ilya that does not deserve anything but losing and Tuesdays and watching Shane get in his car and drive away. 

Shane blinks at him, brows creasing up and eyes so wet and concerned and and confused it’s hard to look at him straight on. “I wouldn’t have asked you to,” he says and that’s good, at least. Good that Shane can be cruel to Ilya in turn. That makes it fair. That keeps it even. He hopes it feels good, for Shane, to say this. 

“My fucking mistake then,” Ilya chokes out, surprised that he sounds almost normal when his hands are trembling so much. He’d thought his voice would be an earthquake to match. He takes a step away from Shane. He’ll have to get closer to get to the stairs, but he can build up to this. Take very small baby steps.

“No, wait,” Shane says, demands, and Ilya stops. Ilya will always stop for Shane. He will always wait if Shane tells him to. “That’s not what I meant,” Shane says, eyes wide and pleading now. Like he is just learning what Ilya has already noticed. It is almost impossible to take back words that have already burrowed their way into someone else’s flesh. Like tulip bulbs or landmines. Once planted, it's fucking hard as shit to tear them up again.

“Okay,” Ilya says, because he is—he is tired again. The anger has burnt through him and exhausted him and he just wants Shane to leave so he can be alone in the house that he bought for them and lives in by himself.

“I didn’t,” Shane snaps, running a hand through his hair again. “I meant—it’s fucking awful, seeing you like this, Ilya, if I’d known you’d—with the team or the losing or—the house, I mean—I’d never have asked you to move. Not if I knew it would make you so—”

Ilya shakes his head, quick. He doesn’t want Shane to finish that sentence. Doesn’t want to hear how it ends.

But Shane is stubborn and clever, and he says, “It’s killing you, Ilya, I can’t stand it, I’m concerned—”

“Stop,” Ilya snaps, raking his hands over the coals and embers of his anger, trying to restart the fire. It works, but only a little bit. Only as an act. “I am fine, Shane, I am—”

“You’re not,” Shane says, crossing his arms and glaring at Ilya. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Ilya, I’m not an idiot, I can see—”

“Fine,” Ilya says, or maybe he yells or maybe he sobs. It is so hard to tell, to hear himself over the river rushing past him. “Fine, Shane, yes, okay—I fucking hate it. Losing and skating like shit and pretending is normal.”

Shane blinks. Maybe he is surprised by the honesty. Maybe he had not expected Ilya to break like this, crack open and spill his blood and guts all over the both of them. “Okay,” Shane says. “Okay, we can—”

“And I hate that it will take ten years before you will let me kiss you in public,” Ilya says, loud. Too loud. Too honest. “Until retirement. I—we will be like this until retirement, maybe, but what happens when the Voyageurs offer you a position as assistant GM? You take? You think they will want me there with you? You think these things go away because we are not allowed on the ice anymore?”

Shane’s eyebrows furrow and he straightens his shoulders, jutting his chin out. Digging his heels in. “You said retirement too, it’s not—”

Ilya lets out an ugly laugh. Real, nothing fake about it. But ugly and angry and full of sharp edges. “You know how far away that is, Hollander? You know how impossibly far away that is right now? How many—fucking—Tuesdays?”

“I—no, I don’t, what?”

“I love you,” Ilya says, because it is true and it’s important to say and he can’t not say it, has forgotten how to choke the words back after a year and a half of letting them run free off his tongue. “And I love this house, but I hate it, too. Is so—so—fine, you want to know what is wrong with me, Hollander? Yes, okay, I will tell you. I fucking hate my couch and I hate the Captain of the Centaurs and I hate that it is Tuesday, that it is always—fucking—Tuesday, and it is killing me, it is—”

“Ilya, it’s not Tuesday,” Shane says, and he takes a half-step towards him, hand raised and eyes so gentle and concerned that Ilya cannot bear it. “It’s Friday. Did you—did you hit your head? Who got you last—I thought it was Steiner, but that was your lower body, your head didn’t connect with the ice, but—fuck Nashville, seriously—have you done a concussion protocol? Baby?”

Ilya tilts his face away, can’t stand to look at him. There’s a hollow sort of laugh building in his chest where the anger burned him out. Bradley Steiner of the Nashville Nightcrawlers had knocked him flat two games ago, hooked his stick around his skate and sent him flying. But his head hadn’t hit the ice, Shane’s right. It’s sweet that Shane remembered; the hit and when it happened and what got hurt. Distantly, Ilya thinks that it’s sweet. 

The laughter wins out, bubbling up out of his mouth before he can choke it down. “Steiner did not hurt me, Shane,” Ilya tells him, suddenly so exhausted that he can barely keep himself standing. “No one broke my brain except me.”

Shane frowns, mouth opening, but Ilya just—can’t. He just can’t.

“You should leave,” he tells him, pushing his tired, stranger-shaped body towards the stairs that will take him up to his bedroom. “You have practice tomorrow. Is important.”

“I—” Shane hesitates, fingers curling around thin air as he drops his arm back to his side. He looks young. Helpless. “Should I…” stay, maybe. Go. Leave. Follow. 

“I don’t know,” Ilya says, which is the truth. “I don’t care,” which is, of course, a lie.

It is also a parting blow because he’s at the bottom of the stairs a second later and then he is gone, moving up them, and Shane is still there below. Standing in his living room, clenched fist resting on the top of Ilya’s couch.

He won’t be there, when Ilya comes back down. It is the playoffs season. He has other things to focus on. More important things. Hockey. Games. The Cup. There is a practice he should not miss, and so Shane will not miss it. And so when Ilya leaves his bedroom, Shane will not be there. Ilya will be alone in the house again.

This is for the better, Ilya thinks as he falls back into his bed and pulls the covers up and over his head. It is for the better that Shane knows. It is like—when you buy a house and everyone tells you to have an inspector look at it first to make sure the foundations are stable and that there is no rot in its heart.

It is like that. Shane should have gotten an inspector. Ilya has rotted through. 

But at least Shane knows now.

And at least he has hockey, still. Good hockey. Cup-worthy hockey. It is an excellent distraction from his broken, sobbing, bleeding wreck of a boyfriend. It is January—no, it is April. It is April, which means Shane will have two and a half more months of hockey for the season, if Montreal goes all the way. And in that time, Ilya will fix himself so that this does not happen again. 

He can do that. He can fix himself. For Shane. Yes, if he just—it is like a renovation. He just needs to overhaul the parts of himself that cannot be salvaged, and then he can fix everything else, and then he will not be so mad or sad or concerning. And Shane will love him. And if he does it right, if he fixes himself up correctly, then Shane will never have to miss him because Ilya will not leave him. 

He has thought about this a little more, leaving Shane. Dying. He thinks maybe the movie is wrong. He thinks maybe there is no funny way to kill himself. And it had felt so bad, standing in his kitchen and watching Shane’s eyes get wet and knowing he made that happen. It would only be worse if—

Okay, he can fix himself. He can do it very quietly. Keep all the blood on the inside this time. Maybe he will hire someone to talk to. A therapist. Not a sports psychologist. But at least someone who understands sports, because how can he talk with anyone about what he’s feeling if they don’t understand sports?

And they will have to understand Russian too, and speak it very well. And they will have to understand being closeted, or at least being afraid. And they will have to understand what it is like to grow up half-afraid and half-daring, already bleeding and always crying but never tearing up. They will have to understand what it is like to find their mother’s body and they will have to understand what it is like to be told she died on accident and know anyway that she meant to die, and then they will have to understand what it is like to know that she meant to die and then spend years and years wondering how someone could mean to die so much that they convince themselves to actually do it, to die, and then what it is like to finally understand it. And this therapist, they will have to understand what it is like to find a love that is worth living for and then how much it hurts to have to swallow it down when you just want to scream it from the rooftops. And, of course, they will have to understand everything there is to know about time loops and Tuesdays, the river and the hamster wheel. Preferably, they will have their own experience with being stuck in a Groundhog Day movie, and so they will know what they are talking about when they tell Ilya how to get unstuck. Maybe, at least, they will know a few funny ways to die, but Ilya thinks if they did, they probably wouldn’t say. Being a therapist and all.

But yes. They will have to know all that and understand all that because Ilya doesn’t think he has the words to explain it, and he isn’t sure they’ll get very far at all if neither of them knows what the other one is going on about.

And it’s important that they get to the bottom of this. It’s important that Ilya gets fixed, because he cannot keep doing this. Waking up and lying in bed for a minute past his alarm and then getting dressed and making breakfast and getting in his car and waving at the neighbors and losing hockey games and losing his boyfriend and losing his mind.

Ilya closes his eyes and turns his face into the pillow. He makes himself hold his breath for a second, and then he makes himself breathe. 

He hasn’t heard the front door open and close, which could mean that Shane is still here. Ilya has no idea how long it’s been since he left him in the living room. Hours could have so easily flown by the same way that January and February and March have. 

Maybe Shane has left. He has practice, after all. And Ilya told him to go. Ilya said he didn’t care if he stayed. Why would Shane stay after that? Ilya hopes he is gone. It is what Ilya deserves, to be in an empty house after Shane has left. It is what Shane deserves, to be very far away from Ilya and all his messy, wounded viscera.

But he hasn’t heard the front door open and close. Which—maybe Shane has had enough practice leaving this house by now that he knows how to do it quietly.

Or maybe he is still here. It is—it would be so much more than he deserves. It would be so beautiful and sweet and wondrous. If he were still here. 

Fucking—it is like Schrödinger’s cat, but only if Schrödinger really wanted the cat to be alive when he lifted the lid of the box. Schrödinger’s cat, except Ilya loves the cat with everything he has, all of his rot and his stupid heart, and he can’t remember why he put the poison in the box to begin with. What point he was trying to prove. If it was worth it. If anything could be worth the dead cat and the empty poison container.

He gets out of bed. This is either slow-going or it isn't. But maybe that's not important, the time it takes. Maybe it is just important that it gets done. His heavy feet hit the wooden floor. He doesn't put skates on them. He walks towards the last place he saw Shane, because that is the other thing his feet know how to do without conscious direction from his brain.

His eyes are red and watery when he catches sight of himself in the mirror in the hallway outside the bedroom. His nose is red. He looks—like a fucking wreck. He feels like it, too. Hollowed out and knocked into pieces. His head hurts. He feels like a child in the aftermath of some terrible tantrum, sneaking out of his room hours later, once all of his tears have run dry, to ascertain how much of his world remains standing.

But Ilya is a twenty-eight year old man who owns this fucking house, and so he buries the part of him that wants to sneak down the steps and peek around the corner. He has nothing to hide. Shane isn’t even here, probably. Shane probably is already halfway back to Montreal. Shane is probably—

Shane is sitting on the sectional in the living room, iPad in hand and glasses reflecting the blue-screen light, and suddenly Ilya wants to cry again. 

Maybe Ilya never stopped wanting to cry. Maybe Ilya never stopped crying in the first place.

He hesitates on the bottom step for a second, discombobulated and stuck and guilty and bruised, in love and in love and in love and in love. Shane’s eyebrows are furrowed over the top of his glasses as he stares down at the screen in his hands. He looks as if he has been crying too, and maybe it is that more than anything else that makes Ilya step off the staircase and into the room. 

Shane’s head snaps up to look at him immediately, eyes widening and back straightening. “Ilya,” he says, and his voice cracks, clean down the center. He tenses, like he wants to get up, but Ilya shakes his head quickly. Doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want Shane to have to move for him.

Okay. He will tell Shane—what? Ilya’s mouth is dry. He didn’t think about what he’d say to Shane. It’d felt too much like hope, because then what would Ilya do if Shane was gone? Now he isn’t, and Ilya is struck speechless by it. By his presence.

He should tell Shane that he is going to fix himself. That's good, that's a good place to start. Shane will like hearing this. He likes when things are in working order. Ilya will inform him that he will fix himself and he will be fine by the summer. He will apologize for his outburst earlier, because Ilya is not a child who refuses to apologize for his bad behavior. He will apologize and then he will tell Shane about his plans to fix himself and then he will reassure Shane that this really does not have to be any of his business, because Ilya will find someone who is in the fixing broken people business, and Ilya will—

“What are you looking at?” Ilya asks when he is close enough to Shane that he can see the iPad screen. Shane is very careful when it comes to his eyes. He has taken the fact that he needs reading glasses as a personal failure that can be course-corrected, which means all his screens are always turned to the lowest brightness possible. So Ilya has to move halfway across the room to catch a glimpse of his iPad.

“Oh, I—um,” Shane rubs the back of his neck, glances at Ilya and then away. His cheeks are flushed, just a little bit. He swallows and then looks back up at him. “Just--couches.”

Ilya blinks. “Couches,” he says blankly, and Shane nods and then shrugs. Embarrassed, maybe. For what, Ilya doesn’t know.

“I mean, I don’t like your couch much either,” he mutters, pursing his lips. “If I’m being honest. And, uh, I—” Shane’s eyes dart away again, and he shifts on the sectional, drawing his feet up onto the cushion and then curling his hand around the ball of his kneecap. “I can fix that,” he tells Ilya. “That’s something easy to—the rest, I don’t….” He trails off, shrugs again and fidgets.

Ilya can fill in the blanks after so long loving this man. He should not even be surprised, really. He should not be so shaken to his core. Ilya gave Shane a long list of everything that is wrong in his life, told him it hurt him and told him he was suffering. And then he gave him a few hours by himself. And things like retirement and coming out and shit hockey teams and scoring slumps are hard and unwieldy things for even Shane Hollander to fix given only a few hours. 

But a couch? Shane can do that. Shane can find Ilya a new couch if Ilya does not like the one he has.

“Oh, please don’t—please don’t cry,” Shane says, alarmed but only because he loves him. Shane loves him. Ilya knows this because Shane—stayed. Because Shane hates his couch too. Because Shane is looking at couches. For him.

Ilya shakes his head. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but he feels shocked. Struck by lightning. Weak at the knees. Fished from the fucking sea, half-drowning and half-alive. 

He doesn’t so much as sit on the couch next to Shane as he does collapse down onto it. Shane reacts instantly, instinctively, tossing the iPad away from him and untucking his knees so that Ilya can push his head into his lap. “Ilya, baby, I don’t…” 

It’s awful, but only because Shane sounds so lost. So lost and so concerned, voice weak with it. With the fear. 

“Tell me what to do,” Shane murmurs, demands, pleads. His fingers push up into Ilya’s hair, stroke through it. Ilya wonders if it’s still as blonde as it was. If Shane, who notices so much about him, has noticed a difference.

He really thought—what? That he could break into pieces and then fix himself and Shane would not want to be a part of it? That he could find someone to talk to and he wouldn’t have to talk to Shane? That Shane would not demand answers? His Shane? Please. Please, when has Shane not demanded everything Ilya could give him?

When has Shane ever allowed Ilya to hold him separately from his life? When has Ilya ever been satisfied by whatever distance he has managed to wrangle from him? Never. Never.

He turns his head further into Shane’s lap, pressing his mouth against the clothed muscle of his thigh.

He is—afraid. What a terrifying thing to say. To admit to. Needing someone. Being broken. It is one thing, for the words to slip out in a fight. One thing for them to sound like an accusation, for Ilya to be so blinded by his own hurt and fury that he rips down the curtain and reveals everything he’s been hiding, as if that’ll win him the argument.

It is another thing entirely, to say it like this. To have Shane quiet and still beneath him, his fingers brushing through his hair. To say the words and mean them, no anger to dilute the truth. Not an accusation like this. Just a confession.

Ilya hesitates. 

“You can…if you say it slowly, you could say it in Russian. If it makes it easier,” Shane whispers. “I think I could understand.”

Ilya shakes his head. Shane probably could, but it would be—it would not be fair. To ask so much of him. It would be too much, to bare himself in that way. It would not be easier. It would just be a different kind of difficult.

How can he explain it? Where does he even begin? How can he make Shane understand—about the Tuesdays, about the alien parts of his own body and his own mind. About the crumbling, about the small steps he has accidentally taken towards his own annihilation. About the river, about the wheel.

But how can he not try? What is he risking if he does not try?

His mother died on a Thursday. For the very first time, Ilya wonders how many Thursdays she lived through before she could not take it anymore. 

How can he not try? Despite the fear and guilt and hesitation. Isn’t everything on the line?

“I think,” he says, very quietly, into the fabric of Shane’s sweats. “You should be worried about me now.”

He is almost whispering. Still, he can hear the way his voice splinters. He can feel the hot well of tears burn at the corners of his eyes. It is—so pathetic.

It is so frightening. To ask for help. To trust that it will be given without the giver wondering if you deserve it or not.

“Okay,” Shane says, too quickly. Like he has not done the math, like he has not taken a few seconds to calculate if Ilya has earned his worry. He says it instantly, like it is a given that Ilya already has it. “Okay, yeah, I—done.”

His voice is choppy too, creaking and cracking. For a moment, his fingers tighten in Ilya’s hair and then they go almost unbearably gentle, as if in apology.

“What else?” Shane asks, because he loves an actionable plan. Ilya wishes he could give him one. Ilya never thought he’d get this far though. He doesn’t know what comes next. He doesn’t know where they go from here. “Okay,” Shane says, when Ilya shakes his head. “Alright, well. We can—figure this out. It’ll be okay. We can—it’ll be okay.”

Ilya nods because he thinks Shane wants him to nod, to agree. He nods because he wants to agree. Because he wants it to be okay. He wants it to be okay so badly that his chest is aching with it, that it’s hard to breathe.

“Not velvet,” he says finally. Seconds or minutes or hours later.

“What?” Shane says, and he sounds hoarse, like maybe it’s been ages since he last spoke. Ilya doesn’t know. Ilya is not the best at keeping the time of these sorts of things right now.

“My new couch,” he tells Shane, and his lips brush up against Shane’s thigh with every word. “Not velvet. You don’t like velvet.”

I want you to like my couch, Ilya doesn’t say because he can’t. Because he has already said so much today. Because some things can keep until tomorrow, until Wednesday. Things like: I want you to like my house, too. I want it to be your house too. I want it to be just as much yours as it is mine so I can never tell you to leave it again. I want this to be yours. I want everything with you and if you need a place to start, we can start with the couch.

“Baby,” Shane says, sounding a little like he’s crying again. Choked up, though, like he’s laughing a little at the same time. Crying and laughing. What beautiful noises when they're paired together. “Velvet was never even on the fucking table,” he says, like he understands everything else too, and maybe he does.

Chapter 2

Chapter Summary

It’s sweet, Ilya decides when he finally catches on. Fucking pointless, to be clear, but sweet too. It’s sweet that Shane doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a nice reminder: as much as Ilya has no fucking clue what’s going on in his own head, Shane’s just as fucking lost and confused and willing to stumble around in the dark as he is. 

Chapter Notes

happy completion day to the fic that netted me not one, not two, but FOUR wellness check texts from friends who know me irl 🫶

this chapter is on the whole i think lighter than the first chapter, and deals much more with what a recovery/back to baseline could look like for ilya. but it's not a step-by-step guide or anything like that because i really, really did not want to write that. it's more like a look at ilya and shane both muddling along and trying to figure out how to make ilya feel ok again without knowing the right terminology or getting everything right on the first go-around. you know that one meme that's like 'he would not say that' - this is like that but it's 'he would not be an expert in this field or understand everything about mental health and therapy and correctly identify his emotions or be able to process them all the time without lashing out' because that's more interesting to me than an ilya and shane who have somehow swallowed a search engine's worth of therapy speak that they can regurgitate to each other.

that being said, damn i had fun writing this while also finding parts of it frustrating to write as someone who has been in ilya's position and in shane's position. it's a privilege to be worried about and it's a privilege to worry about someone else because worry's just trust and care and concern and love and all that shit. goddamn frustrating though sometimes, from both sides lol

i have two fic ideas kicking around in my head (one of them is a very self-indulgent fic about the home economics rookies that ~5 people have asked me to write, i just need to think of an appropriately home/house adjacent title first) and a wip i need to update, so i'll probably post again soon. but if i don't, enjoy the rest of april!

Tuesday again, which makes sense from a numbers perspective. Most days are Tuesdays still. Ilya hasn’t figured out the exact science behind it, hasn’t tried to discern a pattern or even a cause. He probably should, but it’s a little like surviving a shipwreck. One day it will probably matter what made the boat sink, but for now Ilya is just trying to keep his head above water.

So. Tuesday again, and the Centaurs lose in their last home game of the season. They’ll play one more time before they’re finished completely, a roadie that takes them to fucking Calgary, as if this season hasn’t been bad enough already, but tonight was their final effort in front of the home fans.

The half-full arena cheers loudly at the final buzzer, despite the score being 3-2 in the Anaheim Dukes’ favor. Maybe they’re just glad it’s over.

Ilya can relate. At least knowing the season is so close to being finished makes it easier to step off the ice. 

It’d been the opposite with the Bears, harder and harder to leave the Garden at the end of every game the closer they’d gotten to the end of the season. Summer had been his least favorite time of the year for as long as he can remember, because summer meant no hockey, no team, no winning—all things llya defined himself by when they were close at hand.

Now, well. Ilya can’t fucking wait for the summer, because the summer means Shane.

“Howdy,” Harris says, taking a seat next to Ilya in the locker room. The post-game speeches had been very brief tonight. The coach didn’t have much left to say to them; he’d already announced via socials that he’d been offered an assistant position with Chicago. Technically a demotion, but probably didn’t feel like one given the money Chicago had to throw at him and their current standings being higher than perpetually bottom of the league. 

So their coach had just said some mix of I’m sure you’ll do very well next time, keep your chin up and you were all very nice to have in class. And then he’d looked over at Ilya, eyes sort of wide like he was offering to figure out a way to drag Ilya to Chicago with him or something. So Ilya looked at the team, shrugged and said, “Well I bought a house here, so. I will be back next season,” and that was it.

The Centaurs cheered, and Ilya let himself cheer along with them even if there was nothing really to be excited about. Tuesday again, and the Centaurs lost, and Ilya will finish showering and changing, and then he will go home to his empty house because Shane could only stay so many days before he had to go back to Montreal.

“Hm,” Ilya says to Harris, holding out his hand and tilting it back and forth. Harris raises his eyebrows. He’s been testing out new greetings every time he runs into Ilya. He isn’t exactly sure why, but it makes Harris smile. It makes Ilya smile too, sometimes. Having something small and novel with another person. “I do not think I like it. I am not so sure you can pull off cowboy.”

“That’s a shame to hear,” Harris says mildly. “It’s one of my favorite positions.”

Ilya chokes on his next inhale and glances around the locker room to see if anyone is listening, but Harris is enough of a staple in the Centaurs locker room that no one’s paying them any attention at all. “You are a menace,” Ilya tells him. “What do you want from me. A little video?.”

“No videos,” Harris promises, hands up to his shoulders. “Well,” he amends. “No videos tonight.”

“So kind,” Ilya says, ignoring the stiff fabric of his game day suit and picking up the old sweatshirt he keeps above his stall for nights like this one. “So merciful.”

“Maybe multiple videos tomorrow,” Harris says. “To post over the off-season break that some of us don’t get.”

Ilya groans theatrically, because that’s his role to play. Truthfully, though, he doesn’t mind the videos all that much. Harris makes them fun and easy, and he’d take the question of pizza or tacos a hundred times over any of the ones the Ottawa media likes to ask. 

“But not tonight,” Harris says, patting him on the shoulder. “Just swung by to tell you you’ve got family in the family suite.” 

Ilya snaps his head over to look at him, because—what. 

He doesn’t have any family. Not unless Alexei decided, for some fucking reason, to make the trip from Russia to Ottawa, Canada for Ilya’s last home game of the season, which—is so fantastically undesired that Ilya would honestly rather set fire to the rink than set foot in the family suite if that were the case.

“Technically,” Wyatt Hayes announces from the next stall over where the fucker’s been eavesdropping, “I have your family in the family suite,” which does nothing to clear anything up and just sort of makes it sound like a developing hostage situation. 

But if Hayes is expecting ransom for Alexei, he can damn well keep him.

Harris rolls his eyes, but he’s also still wearing that nice smile of his that always looks like it’s easy to summon and weighs nothing at all to wear. “Yes, thank you, Wyatt,” he says, sharing a glance with Ilya like Ilya understands the joke. 

Ilya doesn’t. The only family he has is, well. 

There’s Shane, of course, but Shane has his own game on home ice tonight and it’s an important one to win if they want to clinch the President’s Trophy. Which—knowing how the playoffs usually go for the team that wins the President’s Trophy, maybe Montreal’s happy to lose this one. But Ilya knows Shane and he knows he’s never once been happy to lose a hockey game.

Which means Yuna and David will be there to support him, because he’s their son and they’re his parents and yes, once a month, sometimes more, Ilya will make the drive over to their house for dinner and a board game or dinner and a movie or dinner and a catch-up, but that doesn’t mean they can belong to Ilya in public like that. Enough to watch a game of his in the family suite. 

Then there’s Svetlana, of course, but she stopped trying to surprise him with her presence when they stopped sleeping together; she would have texted to let him know she was coming and then texted him throughout the game too to let him know her thoughts on his play. 

So, really, Ilya doesn’t—

“It’s David Hollander,” Harris says after a beat, probably seeing the confusion on his face and taking pity.

“Shane texted,” Wyatt tells Ilya cheerfully. “Wanted to get a ticket for his dad for the game, thought you’d like it as a surprise, so I got Harris to work with the office and get him a seat in the family suite.” 

Ilya blinks. 

“Sorry to ruin the surprise,” Harris says, not sounding really all that sorry. “I figured there was a good chance of you going straight to the lot if you didn’t know you had a reason to go anywhere else.”

Ilya can feel his head nodding on instinct, which is good because his throat feels a little too tight for words and he can recognize that pause as his conversational cue.

A whole season of games with the Centaurs, two whole seasons of games, and Ilya’s never once trekked up to the family suite afterwards to collect his loved ones from the room. He’s never once had a reason to. He’s never had a loved one waiting for him there. Of course he wouldn’t have checked.

“I can tell him to go though,” Harris offers, leaning forward and lowering his voice like that’ll give the conversation any sort of privacy in a locker room like this one. “There’s not much precedent for family members of hockey rivals showing up to say hello after a loss, but I’m happy to start a standard operating procedure.”

Ilya’s mouth ticks up at the image of Harris threatening David Hollander. “What, are you bodyguard now, Harris?” he asks, telling his hands to relax their grip on his sweatshirt before someone gets the wrong idea and really, actually does try to kick David out before Ilya can see him.

“I work in communications, Captain,” Harris sniffs. “Sometimes those communications can be succinct.” 

“That’s cold,” Wyatt says appreciatively. “I mean, Shane and Ilya are buds, pretty sure, with the camp and foundation and all. Never would’ve gotten him the ticket otherwise, Cap, on my honor,” he tells this to Ilya very seriously, like he actually means it. Which is—something. “But good man, Harris.”

“Ilya?” Harris asks, and Ilya blinks at him for another syrupy slow moment before he wrangles the pieces of himself together into some approximation of normal. 

“Thank you for letting me know,” he says politely. “Let me finish getting dressed and I will go see David. He is good friend. Parent of good friend.” Harris doesn’t look all that convinced, and that’s probably because Ilya is doing a shit job of being convincing and also normal.

It’s just—he was unprepared for this, and it’s startled him. Thrown him for a loop. David is Shane’s in public places like hockey rinks and on game days. Ilya’s never once thought—he never expected—

And for Shane to know this, to notice it…a part of Ilya wants to shy away, course correct. Too vulnerable, he’s been too much. Shane saw something Ilya didn’t even think to tell him and that’s—

“Is good,” Ilya tells himself and also Harris and also Wyatt, because he thinks all three of them probably need the reassurance. “It’s good. Thank you.”

Getting dressed post-game has never been such a blur after that. He has to follow Wyatt through the arena to get to the family suite, which is a little embarrassing because he’s Captain of the team and he doesn’t even know where the family suite is, but it doesn’t matter in the end.

Because there’s someone waiting for him there, and even though it’s a Tuesday and Ilya can feel the drag and weight of the day at the back of his mind, he can’t contain the bounce in his step as he walks through the door. 

David’s near the windows, talking to Lisa and Cassie with a small half-smile on his face and a travel mug in his hand. He looks up when Ilya enters and the polite smile of a man who has conversations with people for a living morphs into something wider. Prouder too.

“Ilya, son,” he says, the way all men of a certain age who grew up in a certain way call men younger than them son. Like it’s natural. Like it rolls off the tongue. No one around them even blinks, no one around them seems to notice or care. David steps forward and wraps his arm around Ilya’s shoulder in a quick hug, gives him a clap on the back. “Good game, kid, you played great,” he says, and Ilya exhales. 

“I lost an edge in the third period,” he says, and David shrugs like he hadn’t seen him fall at all.

“You must have played twenty minutes tonight,” he replies, as if it’s that simple. “And you slipped once? Pretty good average, I’d say.”

Ilya blinks and then, slowly, carefully, purposefully, he lets himself relax into the broad hand David still has resting on his shoulder. He clears his throat and buries the tightness. “Well,” he says, pulling the smirk up over his face. “If you say it is a good average, then who am I to argue against professional math guy?”

David lets out a bark of laughter. “Atta boy,” he says, and he sounds like he does when he’s talking with Shane. He sounds the exact same, and Ilya—wishes it weren’t Tuesday. Wishes it were Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, so he could appreciate this without having to struggle through his brain’s stupid shit just to feel it. 

A father, not Ilya’s but better than Ilya’s, laughing with him in the small room overlooking the rink where Ilya just lost. It is a tiny miracle; it is something so fragile and precious that Ilya isn’t sure how to wrap his hands around it.

He wonders if Shane understands what he has given him with this, with someone waiting in the family suite for him. With that someone being David Hollander. 

It’s hard to imagine that he does after a life of moments just like this one. Surely Shane is so used to his father watching him play hockey and talking over the game with him afterwards that it doesn’t even register as special anymore.

But then, it’s hard to imagine someone experiencing this—a warm hand on their shoulder, a kind word and a proud smile—and not understanding exactly how special it is. To be slammed up against the boards and tossed around the ice for an hour, body a machine more than an animal, made to push against others and bleed for the team that owns it—and then to be touched with gentleness afterwards. To be greeted kindly and called Ilya, son. 

It makes Ilya’s chest feel tight. Maybe David will need a ride home. Maybe Ilya will not make this commute alone. Shane must have known what that would mean to him. Ilya never told him, couldn’t find the words, but Shane must have realized somehow. Must have asked David to be here for Ilya because he couldn’t be here himself. 

It’s enough to make Ilya fall in love with Shane all over again. Even if he can’t quite believe Shane knows the full extent of what it means, what he’s given, he can love him for the giving all the same.

And he does, and he does and he does.

It takes a few times before Ilya notices it.

In his defense, he has had a lot on his mind recently.

And the aftermath of Ilya telling Shane—of their fight and Shane finding out and Ilya crying and confessing and Shane holding him through it all—sees a lot of changes in their routines, actually. 

It’s shit timing. The whole thing. The playoffs are around the corner and Shane’s expected to be in Montreal pretty much every fucking day. There are no rest days away from the rink when playoffs are so close. Not for teams like the Voyageurs. Not for captains like Shane.

Ilya’s surprised the first time he has to remind Shane of this, the day after That Tuesday. He’s startled down to his bones when he wakes up in the morning and the first thing he feels is Shane’s body pressed along his back, arms tightly wrapped around his waist. “Called out of practice,” Shane mumbles into the back of his neck when he must feel Ilya stiffen. “I’m not going anywhere today.”

“Yes, you are,” Ilya tells him. “Get in your car. I will make you coffee for the road.”

And they almost have another fight right there in the very early hours of the morning, before Ilya’s brain has even woken up enough to decide whether or not it is still Tuesday.

But Ilya wins, probably because he is not afraid to play dirty. “You would make Hayden Pike do bag skates until he collapsed if he tried to miss practice so close to playoffs because Jackie had the flu.”

“You don’t have the flu though,” Shane says, stubborn. “You’re—”

“I’m what, Shane.”

And Shane hesitates, chewing through words and diagnoses and Wikipedia pages he probably spent half the night reading, so Ilya takes pity on him and says, quietly, “I’m not going to kill myself the second you leave the house, solnyshko,” which he can admit sounds less reassuring than he thought it would once it’s out in the air like that, all thin and exhausted-sounding.

Shane seems to agree because the first thing he says is, strident and a little bit afraid, “Well, now I’m definitely not fucking leaving,” which is sweet, but also the very opposite of what Ilya wants.

It’s complicated, what Ilya wants. Because a very large part of Ilya does want Shane to stay. Of course he does. Shane’s presence doesn’t—cure him. It isn’t some magical solution to any of the problems digging themselves graves in the soft tissue of Ilya’s brain. 

But it helps. Of course it does. Being around Shane always helps. Being loved by Shane and held by Shane and on the other end of all of Shane’s careful care and addictive attention helps. 

But then there’s the other part of Ilya. The part that knows Shane, the hockey player and the rival and the most ambitious and dedicated guy on the ice at any given time. That guy doesn’t miss practice. Not so close to the playoffs. Not when the team is poised as the Voyageurs are to hoist the Cup by the beginning of June.

And Ilya loves that guy, more than anything else in the world. He loves that guy so much he’d suffer through another hundred or so Tuesdays, another thousand, just for him. And so that’s the part of Ilya that drags himself out of bed, morning after That Tuesday, and makes Shane a cup of coffee to take with him on his drive back to Montreal.

“You can’t seriously think ‘m going to just leave, Ilya,” Shane is saying, standing only a half step behind him while Ilya pulls the espresso shot, scratching at his belly with his free hand. “Not after last night. Not when—”

Shane’s breath stutters and his voice trembles, and Ilya stares unblinkingly at the coffee machine until his eyes begin to water. 

It was shit timing. Probably the most selfish thing Ilya’s ever done, if he thinks about it. Asking for help from a man with so many plates spinning all around him, and now Ilya can’t stand to listen to them shatter. Can’t stand to be the reason Shane drops even a single one. 

“Shane,” he says quietly. 

“You think I’m going to be able to concentrate at practice? Fuck that, I already texted Hayden and Coach, I’ve got a stomach thing. I’m not going to—”

The shot is finished. Ilya dumps it into an offensively neon pink travel mug and then pours hot water over it.

“Shane,” he says.

“—and Hayden can help run the drills, he’s my A for a reason,” Shane is saying, fingers tightening and then relaxing around the waistband of Ilya’s sweatpants. “You need me, they don’t—”

Ilya turns around to look at him, leaving the tumbler on the counter and bringing his hands up to Shane’s face. He rubs his thumb across those beloved freckles, down to trace the whorl of his indented chin. 

“What I need,” he murmurs, tucking a wisp of Shane’s hair back behind his ear, “is for you to go to your practice.”

“Fuck th—”

“What I need,” Ilya says, “is to know that loving me does not make you worse. Okay?”

Shane blinks at him. The skin under his eyes is darker. Bruised already by a lack of sleep. He looks anxious, mouth twisting in on itself. His lashes are wet. He looks tired, like Ilya’s exhaustion is contagious.

I’m ruining you, Ilya thinks but doesn’t say. Not because it isn’t true, but because he knows that he’ll really never actually get Shane to leave if he does. So instead he kisses him, just a little, just as much as he can stand, just on the corner of his mouth. Then he turns back to the counter. “Do you want sugar in your coffee?” he says instead, all business.

There’s a pause, and then Shane’s head comes to rest between Ilya’s shoulder blades. Ilya lets himself exhale, slow, and he can feel the echo of Shane’s matching exhale slide down the ridge of his spine. “Of course I don’t want fucking sugar in my coffee,” Shane says, which is as close as white flag as Ilya’s ever gotten from him.

“I know,” Ilya whispers back, which is as close to an apology as he knows how to give. He finishes screwing the lid on the travel mug, and then he passes it over to Shane and walks him to the door.

And before Shane leaves, he tugs Ilya into his arms, kisses him on the mouth and then the cheek and then the forehead.

And it takes Ilya a few times to notice, but then he’s had a lot on his mind recently. And in his defense, Shane starts coming and going a lot more frequently after that first morning. He’s back by ten o’clock that night, gone again before nine the next morning. Again and again and again.

It can’t be healthy, driving all that time. Hours and hours of it, miles spinning into nothing beneath the wheels of his car. He never fucking complains though, never says anything at all. Doesn’t even try to skip practice again, as if he knows Ilya’s got the last month of his schedule memorized.

Ilya doesn’t say anything about it either. It’s a compromise within himself, between the most greedy, selfish parts of him and the parts that love Shane enough to let him have this without saying anything in protest. He just takes the dirty travel mug from his hands every night, washes it and makes him another coffee to take back to Montreal in the mornings.

And every time Shane leaves, he kisses him on the mouth, then on the cheek, and then, lastly, lingering the longest, against his forehead, sometimes his temple, pressed up against his curls. Like he’s trying to kiss it better. Like he’s trying to tell Ilya’s rotten brain to be good to him while he’s gone. 

It’s sweet, Ilya decides when he finally catches on. Fucking pointless, to be clear, but sweet too. It’s sweet that Shane doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a nice reminder: as much as Ilya has no fucking clue what’s going on in his own head, Shane’s just as fucking lost and confused and willing to stumble around in the dark as he is. 

That’s nice to know. To be on the receiving end of. The brush of Shane’s lips against his forehead isn’t a time travel machine; it can’t fast-forward through the Tuesdays. But there are worse things in the world than repeating the same day over and over again, when that day begins with the person you love more than anything else, kissing you tenderly against the side of your head, like this time will be the time that he can take away the pain.

There are far, far worse things than a litany of Tuesdays that all begin with Shane Hollander by Ilya’s side. Notably, of course: the Tuesdays that don’t.

After the season ends—stubborn and snarling, a game that goes to overtime that goes to a shoot-out that ends with Boodram potting a neat five-hole that has the Calgary goalie steaming—Ilya finds a therapist. 

Dr. Galina Molchalina speaks Russian and she has blonde hair and carries herself with the air of someone who knows exactly what she expects out of every room that she enters. She has a black and white photo of a field of flowers on her wall and another photo of two dogs on her desk. The flowers are identifiably generic, but the dogs are ugly enough that Ilya knows that they’re hers and that she has to love them to have them displayed like that. 

It helps. Makes him trust her a little more than he wants to at first. He likes that she can love ugly litlte things enough to be proud of them.

It’s a logistics thing, waiting until the end of the season. Ilya is pretty sure Shane’s been looking at different therapists in the Ottawa area since That Tuesday and that the only reason Ilya has been allowed to put it off for another month is because Shane found some article or another that told him he shouldn’t pressure someone into therapy before they’re ready to start their healing journey or whatever.

And—alright, it’s a little bit about reluctance too, the waiting. Dragging his heels, like if he waits just a few more weeks he’ll finally feel okay again and never have to talk to anyone else about his brain. 

That’s not how it works, obviously, but it’s not just that. It’s a logistics thing, and he’s not shy about telling Dr. Molchalina this. About where therapy sessions fall on his priority list. It’s best to make sure everyone is on the same page here; he learned this early on when he was spending almost every other night in strangers’ beds. Arrangements like that only work if both participants know where they stand. And for Ilya, of course:

“Hockey comes first,” he says. “So if that limits how often we can meet, then it limits how often we can meet. And if medicine affects the way I play, then I will stop taking the medicine. Okay?”

Dr. Molchalina makes a few notes in the journal in front of her, and Ilya narrows his eyes as he watches her write. Then she clicks her pen and taps it a few times against the top of the page as she looks at him. “Would you say that hockey is your first priority, Ilya?” she asks.

Ilya studies her in turn. It is a Thursday, not a Tuesday, and his mind feels sharper for it. He’d been a little exasperated, this morning, when he woke up and he felt fine. It was a bit like making an appointment at a doctor’s office to get antibiotics for a nasty cough only for the infection to clear up before the appointment comes around. He wants to promise her that no, really, he’s actually sick and it’s bad even if he looks fine, but maybe she knows that anyway. Maybe she is like an opposing center on the ice, one who can read through all of his defenses and knows exactly how to get the puck past him.

Maybe it is not such a good way of thinking, viewing his therapist as his opponent ten minutes into his very first session with her.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it is not that hockey is his first priority, but that it has twisted him and warped him in a thousand little ways, an ancient river that has carved its way through the soft soil of him until every thought and desire and experience he has naturally runs downhill until it hits the scar tissue of hockey weaving through him. 

“I have a partner,” he says finally, because he’s talked about this with Shane and they’d both read up on Canadian patient-confidentiality laws, just to make sure there wasn’t some exception to the rule if the information shared was really, really juicy. 

There isn’t. 

“He is before hockey. In my priority list.”

It feels—incredibly reckless, saying those words. Saying those words as a star centre, a professional athlete who has dedicated the best years of his life and his body to this sport which has in turn given him so much.

It feels incredibly reckless, saying those words, that pronoun, in Russian. It feels a bit like committing a crime out in the daylight, right in front of a dozen cameras. He has never said that before. In Russian. Never had a reason to. He wants to keep going, see what else this language can hold. I love him. I love Shane Hollander and he is my partner and he is the best thing in my life and sometimes the only thing that matters and feels real, and I would never tell him this, but it is true. It is the most honest thing about me, the way I love him. 

He swallows down the words. Maybe he can practice them later, privately into a mirror. Maybe he can give some kind of twisted amalgamation of them to Shane. He is becoming so good at Russian. There is a very good chance he’ll be able to understand him, and Ilya finds, suddenly, that he wants that. To be understood.

Dr. Molchalina nods slowly, her expression carefully blank but focused, the way good goalies look when you’re approaching them in a shoot-out. Expectant but reserved.

“But he supports me doing this. Therapy,” Ilya adds, because that’s important and it also happens to be the truth. Shane supports him. Hockey wouldn’t, if it knew.  “He loves me. If you prescribe me a pill and it doesn’t work or there are bad side effects, like I lose my hair and my skin dries out and I get terrible mood swings all the time and I am not interested in sex anymore and we fight about how often I forget to put my melted ice packs back into the freezer, he will still love me.”

Hockey won’t. Hockey would never take him if he broke; it hardly cares about him when he’s whole. So if the meds don’t work, if they get in the way of his play, if they work but they’re not enough, if they work but he can’t score a goal, then—then—

Dr. Molchalina blinks at him, thin eyebrows raising up, half a question in her eyes that goes unverbalized but perfectly audible anyway. “Oh?”

“He told me this last night,” Ilya elaborates. President’s Trophy already theirs and only two games left until the playoffs began, Shane’d been scratched with an upper body injury that everyone and their mothers knew was just the coach protecting him from getting an injury before they could face off against Carolina in the first round.

So he’d made the now-routine drive to Ottawa and Ilya’s house, like there was no other place he’d rather be, and last night when the both of them were laying on Ilya’s new couch, Shane had nudged him with his toe and said all of these very lovely things very fast until Ilya had realized he was scrolling through side effects of medicine Ilya couldn’t even pronounce on his iPad instead of watching game tape like Ilya’d thought.

“He promised me that he would make me cry if I even thought about touching the thermostat in the house,” Ilya says, smiling softly down at his hands.

“That’s…nice,” Galina says, like she isn’t sure if that’s the right word. Ilya isn’t sure it is either. It’s sort of everything, really, if Ilya is being honest. Because Shane digging his heels in about the correct temperature of their house is Shane telling him that he’ll fight over it instead of leaving. It’s Shane telling him he’ll stay. 

Ilya shrugs and then nods, because Dr. Molchalina isn’t fluent in Shane the way Ilya is and he doesn’t trust her enough yet to translate for her. 

“We can touch more on this later,” Galina says, “but I do want to assure you that there are other ways to treat your symptoms without relying on chemical intervention if you’re concerned with what kind of effects that may have on your life. Not everyone wants a medical prescription, and that’s a valid desire.”

Ilya thinks about his mother’s hand, hanging off the side of the mattress. The coldness of it against his finger when he’d reached out to touch. Did anyone tell her this? Did anyone tell her there were other options? For treatment, for escape.

“I know,” Ilya says. “But I think I want the pills. If you think they would help. With whatever is wrong with me.”

Depression is a beast of a word, curled up in the corner of the room and sucking in more than its fair share of oxygen. Ilya wonders if he could get the prescription, get fixed, get his brain straightened out, without ever having to say it. Maybe not everyone Galina talks with in this little gray office wants to name their problems while looking at them dead on. Maybe this is a valid desire also.

“We can certainly discuss it more,” Galina hedges, probably because Ilya is going about this the wrong way. He is supposed to come into her office and exchange pleasantries and then talk for long enough about himself and his life to convince her that he is sufficiently broken enough to need her expertise, and then they are supposed to talk about solutions. 

He is probably not supposed to come in, sit down, talk about his boyfriend, and then demand a prescription for medication that can so easily be a weapon when put in the wrong hands. 

But Ilya is a hockey player who has only really ever been a hockey player. He doesn’t have time for the normal way of doing things. Doesn’t Dr. Molchalina understand how it feels to go over the boards? You’re given thirty seconds, maybe forty, maybe fifty, to get the puck and get it where it needs to go before you’re called back to the bench. 

So if Ilya has it on his stick, he’s going to shoot. He doesn’t know how to bide his time.

It’s the summer now, for him. The pre-season is miles away. If he needs medication to fix his brain, then they need to find the right combination now, in the off-season when he isn’t expected to be on the ice, scoring goals, performing for the cameras. If it doesn’t take at first, if it takes a few times to find the right medication to fix him, then all the experimenting needs to happen now. 

Ilya has the puck on his tape. He needs to fire it and he needs the goalie to let it in because there’s only so much time he has on the ice and there’s only so many days in the summer he can waste on trying to fix his stupid brain and there are only so many times it won’t be Tuesday, where it’ll be Thursday and he’ll have the energy and drive and hope that he can be fixed at all.

How can he make Dr. Molchalina understand all of this? He hasn’t even been able to find the words for Shane.

Dr. Molchalina looks at him consideringly. She taps her pen at the top of her notepad again, three times in rapid succession. “Well,” she says. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

So Tuesdays are bad, obviously. Invariably bad, just different levels of it. The best kinds of Tuesdays are the Tuesdays where it feels like he’s moving against a wind channel or a river's current, every step forward taking him ages. But progress is fucking progress.

The worst Tuesdays are the ones where there are no steps forward at all. Where he gets out of bed a few minutes after his alarm and goes to the store and waves at the neighbors and holds Shane tight against his chest and lets him kiss his forehead and feels nothing at all except the slight pressure of his lips against his skin. 

Mondays are good, even though most people would probably disagree with him. But they don’t know shit. Mondays are good; they feel like—like anything could still happen. Ilya wakes up and it’s Monday and he has the whole of the week spread out before him, all of that potential just waiting for him to get out of bed and get his hands dirty with it.

Thursdays are good too, mostly because they’re not Tuesdays.

Wednesdays are polite but never really kind. Wednesdays, if you want to be cyclical about it, if you still like to think that the days of the week line up in the correct order and wait for their turn to arrive and then never overstay their welcome, mean that you’re as far away from a Tuesday as you’re able to get. So every Wednesday turns Ilya into an optimist for a moment. He’s the first person to leave the shelter after the storm has passed. Not a second to spare; time to see what’s survived the floods.

Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays are mostly all the same, only minor differences between them, like how the last few days of spring careen into the first few days of summer which in its own time mellows out into the proper height of the season. Can’t always put your finger on it, on what makes May 31st feel distinct from June 1st, but if you’re paying close enough attention, you can feel it. 

Fridays are like waking up from a winter-long hibernation and feeling the sun on your skin for the first time in days. 

Saturdays make him feel alive. 

Sundays make him glad to be.

And then it’s Tuesday again. Tuesday, over and over and over again.

“If they push it to Game 7,” Shane says over Facetime, every inch the ice hockey captain in the middle of the Stanley Cup Finals, “It’ll be on home ice.”

Ilya grunts in agreement as he re-racks the bar and sits up. He swipes at the sweat along his temples and glances at his phone, propped up against a stack of weights and the edge of another bench. “Yes,” he says. “But you will not let them push it to Game 7.”

It comes out sounding more confident than Ilya necessarily feels, which is probably good. The Voyageurs had won the first three games against the Aces—not handily, not easily, but a win’s a fucking win, and Shane potting a goal to break the 1-1 deadlock thirty seconds before the end of the third period of Game 3 had put the team up, 3-0 in the series. 

Then Los Angeles had won Game 4, flew to Montreal to thrash them in Game 5 and now they’re back in California, getting ready for Game 6.

It’d be a legendary comeback story, if the Aces won the next two games. Stuff of storybooks. Their star centre broke his ankle in a bad hit back in January, something all the pundits thought was the final nail in the coffin for the team’s chances this season. Then the coach’d left and the GM had hinted about being halfway out the door himself, and the new coach had dragged up the star centre’s brother from the AHL after the bye-week, put him on the starting line and gave him a shot. It’d been nothing less than a miracle that it’d worked, that they’d managed to claw their way into a wild card spot. A week before the first round against the top seed of the Western Conference, the same coach’d pulled their prospect from college into the team, took him right off the ice after his last game in the college circuit, gave him an Aces jersey, and put him on the call-up’s wing. They’ve been fucking lighting it up ever since, a ragtag bunch of young blood and nobodies poised to take the Stanley Cup back to California with them.

They’ve been making movie fucking magic out there in Los Angeles; Ilya wants them to lose so bad that his teeth ache with it. Wants Goliath to take this one. Wants Shane to win because it’ll make him smile. It’ll make him happy. 

God, but Ilya wants Shane to be happy.

“If they push it to Game 7,” Shane says, rubbing a hand through his hair and blinking long and slow at Ilya through the camera lens. He looks exhausted, playoffs exhausted. There are dark circles under his eyes and he’s been moving gingerly since he picked up the phone. One of the D-men had gotten a good hit in, middle of Game 5. Shane’d been knocked up against the boards and then down onto the ice. His ribs are probably bruised. Maybe they’re even halfway to broken, but it’s not like Shane’s going to be honest about that until after he either lifts the Cup or watches the other captain do it. 

“Then it’ll be on home ice,” Shane says, and Ilya pauses in wiping his cheeks with the bottom of his shirt so that he can peer at his tiny face on his phone. He doesn’t think Shane hit his head after Kurlan knocked into him. Shane blinks back at him, seems to steel himself for something, and then says, “I want you there.”

Well, now Ilya knows Shane’s gotten a concussion somehow.

They don’t do that.

“I know we don’t do that,” Shane adds, even though Ilya’s pretty sure he hasn’t managed to move his mouth and say anything yet. “And I know it’s like—selfish. To ask that of you. You can say no. I just wanted to…ask. I just…want. That.”

Ilya blinks, considers. Is it selfish? To want your boyfriend to watch you win the Stanley Cup? To want your boyfriend in the same arena, in the same city as you if you don’t win? He doesn’t think so, when you put it like that.

But if your boyfriend is also a hockey player, does that change anything? If your boyfriend had a middling season on a terrible team, couldn’t secure a wild card spot, couldn’t even drag his team up one ranking, then is it selfish? To want him to watch you win when you know it’s his dream too?

How many games has Ilya played in Ottawa where he’s thought about how it would feel to have Shane sitting in the stands, in the family suite, cheering for him? Where he’s wanted it so badly his whole body’d felt bruised from it? If he can spare Shane from that feeling, then of course he will. If Shane wants him there, if Shane is asking for him to come, then of course he will.

Maybe it is a little selfish. But they are in love; they are not in the business of keeping score. Not unless they are both on the ice, wearing different colored jerseys.

“People will notice,” Ilya says carefully. He hates himself for saying it even as he does. He just—maybe Shane has forgotten, waist-deep in the playoffs and weeks out from seeing Ilya after he spent the last month of the regular season seeing Ilya every day. Maybe Shane has forgotten, what they have to be to each other in the public eye.

They’re friendly now, friends now. They run the Foundation together, organize the summer hockey camps. They’ve moved past the narrative of rivals on the ice and enemies off of it. But that’s still so far away from coming to cheer Shane on in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals that it’s almost laughable. 

Shane sets his jaw, nose wrinkling slightly the way it does when he is digging his heels in. Making a stand, preparing to fight. “It’ll be good publicity for the Irina Foundation,” he says, like he’s thought about it.

Ilya lets out a bark of laughter. “What about you winning the Stanley Cup is good publicity for my foundation?” He asks, standing from the bench and snagging his phone from its position so he can take Shane up from his home gym and into the kitchen. He’s hungry. Shane’d asked him to call in the middle of his workout, and now Ilya is finished and he wants strawberries. And also maybe hot cheetos, if he can eat them just out of sight of the camera so Shane can't see.

“Don’t say that,” Shane snaps, the way Ilya knew he would, because no hockey player is above a little superstition. “And anyway, it’s our foundation.” 

“Hm,” Ilya says, drawing the noise out. Like he isn’t already planning to come. Like there isn’t something fragile and soft blooming within his chest because Shane has asked. Like he needs convincing, to be there for Shane if Shane wants him there. Of course he is; of course there is; of course he will be.

“It’ll show—I don’t know, unity or something,” Shane is saying because Shane wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t already prepared a thoroughly thought out argument and action plan built around the understanding that he will be getting his way. “Look, I texted Ryan, he’s willing to come up too. And you could get Wyatt on board, we could see where Leah and Max are, see if they can make it. That’d be five of this summer’s coaching staff. More than enough to, you know. Hide you.”

“We could make matching t-shirts,” Ilya says. “Shane Hollander’s Cup Final, 2019, very big on the front, Irina Foundation very small on the back. Everyone will think you are so needy, solnyshko.”

“I don’t care what everyone thinks,” Shane snaps, blushing a little, but so focused. “If it means you’re there. If I get to have you there. Make the stupid t-shirts.”

What a risky thing to say. What a goddamn beautiful thing, too.

“Okay,” Ilya tells him, popping a piece of strawberry into his mouth. “Yes, okay. You buy me ticket and I will come to your little after-school game.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but Ilya can see the way that his shoulders slump down—relieved, as if he thought for even a second that there was a chance of Ilya saying no. 

There is a joke, somewhere here, that Ilya could make. Something about how Shane only wants him to be in the stands so he can pull him on the ice and kiss him after lifting the Cup like Scott Hunter did with his boyfriend a few years ago. Something about how as much as Ilya wants to come out, as much as he wants to kiss Shane in public and not have to wait until retirement to do it, he refuses to be Scott Hunter’ed. 

But they haven’t talked about that. There hasn’t been time. Too many Tuesdays for Ilya, too many games and captain duties and responsibilities for Shane. Both of them have been living mostly in the present since That Tuesday, worrying about the future only in selective ways. 

It’s too big, too unwieldy, too sharp and uncertain to joke about now. Not when there is a very small part of Ilya that would be fucking—thrilled. If Shane won the Cup and then kissed him on the ice. 

Better not to joke when the hope has fangs.

“They will not force a Game 7,” Ilya says instead. “You will win tonight.”

“Ilya, fuck, don’t say that,” Shane snaps irritably, and Ilya laughs.

Ilya is right though, in the end. The Voyageurs take Game 6, 5-3 in Los Angeles. Hayden Pike scores the insurance goal, but it’s Shane that gets the tiebreaker early in the second.

Ilya watches the game from Wyatt’s couch, a handful of Centaurs who haven’t yet managed to leave Ottawa spread out on the furniture around him. In another universe, maybe, Ilya goes to Game 7 because Shane asks him to, and he gets to be there in the rink when Shane lifts the cup. He gets to be there, in his Montreal apartment, when Shane stumbles back in in the very early hours of the morning after the first few hours of Cup celebrations. 

But what does Ilya know about other universes? He just has this one, where he watches through the camera as Shane beams and beams and beams, Cup in his hands and over his head for a moment before he’s passing it to Pike. 

“That’s gonna be us next year,” Boodram says wryly, and some of the guys laugh. Ilya laughs too, a beat too late, tearing his eyes away from the television screen only when the camera moves away from Shane to follow Pike on his victory lap around the ice. 

What does he know about next year, about other universes? All he really knows is that today, this afternoon, Shane had called him and asked him to come to a Game 7 that will never happen. But the asking is still—it still means something. To have been asked; to have accepted.

It’s a Friday, which is infuriating only because Shane has decided, for some reason, to pick an argument over the stupidest fucking thing in the world. As if it is not a Friday. 

“I don’t understand,” Ilya says, very slowly and very carefully. Shane is sitting at the kitchen counter, and Ilya is standing in the doorway to the living room. He has been trying to do something new lately, where he gets angry and then doesn’t leave. 

Galina thinks it’s about trust. Galina thinks it’s important that Ilya understands that he is not capable of hurting Shane the way that angry men in his family have always been capable of hurting people they’re supposed to love, that he can be angry at him and stay in the same room with him and nothing bad will happen.

Ilya isn’t sure, but he doesn’t argue with his physical therapists when they tell him to do another set of shoulder exercises even when he thinks they're not making a difference, and this is approximately the same thing. 

So he is trying out this new thing, on the orders of his mental therapist, where he gets angry and plants his feet, which usually means that he gets angry and then finds the closest doorway to lean against, because maybe it is about trust, but it is also about calculated risk, a little bit.

And Shane isn’t something Ilya is ever going to risk. Not even when he is angry at him. Not even when Shane has decided to dig his heels in on something Ilya was so sure would be a non-issue that he’s already fucking packed his stupid suitcases.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Shane hedges, crossing his arms and leaning his weight on the counter. He still has half a waffle on his plate, syrup bottle at his elbow. He’s probably still a little hungover from the Cup celebrations. It’s only been a week or so, Ilya thinks. It’s only been a few days into June, and Shane came here, came home, as soon as he could.

So Ilya doesn’t understand.

“What do you mean,” he says. Very slowly and very carefully.

“I think,” Shane says, in a perfect mirror of Ilya’s tone, “that we shouldn’t go to the cottage this summer. I don’t think it’s a good idea. We could stay here instead.”

Ilya narrows his eyes. “Yes, that is what I do not understand,” he tells him, in his most media-neutral voice, the kind he only whips out after heavy losses. “You have gone to the cottage every year since you had it built, Shane. And now you want to stay here? In Ottawa?”

Shane shrugs, purses his lips. Picks at his waffle with the tines of his fork even though Ilya knows damn well he isn’t going to eat anymore of it.

“Is this because of me?” Ilya asks, blunt. He stares hard and unblinking at Shane’s bowed head until his eyes begin to water. The possibility of it is so terrible that he wants somehow to steal the words back from the air. Make Shane forget he ever said anything at all.

But it’s the thought that’s been festering at the back of his mind for the last hour, ever since Shane mentioned, purposefully off-handed, that he was thinking about getting involved in one of the youth hockey programs in Ottawa so he can practice coaching in the run-up to the Game Changers hockey camps.

Does Shane not want him there, at the cottage, when he is like this? When he is very broken sometimes and only feels like himself every so often? He can’t think of another reason. Not when Shane loves going up to his cottage.

And Ilya, for his part, loves seeing Shane when he is there, the way his eyes are so light and his smile comes so easily, and his shoulders are always relaxed. 

And yes, okay, if Ilya is honest, he’s been—hesitant. About going up to the cottage this summer. He has been reluctant to bring it up, reluctant to keep an eye on the calendar and pinpoint the exact day they’ll go, torn between wanting it and being terrified to have it. 

Tuesdays have no business existing at a place as soft and sweet and beautiful as Shane’s cottage. And Ilya, who is made up of Tuesdays, well. He doesn’t—he wants—he won’t—

The metal of Shane’s fork clips against the ceramic of the plate. Shane doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no either. Instead, he says, “I thought maybe we could remodel the master bath here,” like home improvement is a peace offering. “I’ve got a Pinterest thing going if you wanna see—”

Which is just—confirmation. It’s confirmation. It sounds like confirmation, because otherwise, Shane would just say no, Ilya, of course this isn’t about you and your broken brain. I just really want to dick around my hometown and teach little kids how to shoot a puck. 

“Don’t—” Ilya shakes his head, a sharp jerk of motion. He swallows, even though his throat feels tight. “Shane. Don’t.”

“What?” Shane says, putting his fork down and turning to look at Ilya. His eyebrows are furrowed, but llya doesn’t know if it’s out of concern or anger or confusion. “Don’t what?”

Ilya clenches and unclenches his jaw. It’s not irritation at Shane that’s corroding his stomach lining, he doesn’t need a therapist to tell him that. He knows it’s himself he’s angry with in this moment, but there’s no fucking way to leave himself without—well. Without leaving everything, and that’s something he’s promised not to think about when he’s around Shane because it always leaves him feeling so goddamn guilty after the wave’s receded. 

So it’s easier to be angry at Shane, even though it’s not fair, not completely. “Don’t treat me like I am fragile,” he spits out the word. 

Then he turns and strides through the doorway because being angry and staying anyway is about trust and calculated risk, but it’s also about thresholds. How much you can stand before you need a second to breathe.

No one’s told Shane this, of course, so it’s not a surprise when Ilya hears the scrape of the barstool against the kitchen tile before Shane’s following him.

“I’m not, Ilya,” Shane’s protesting as Ilya rounds the edge of the couch and stands next to the television, arms crossed. He must look so stupid with nowhere to go. “What the fuck?”

“Either just say you don’t want me there or tell me the truth,” Ilya barks. “Don’t talk about—about youth hockey and bathroom remodels.”

“That is the truth,” Shane snaps back, putting his hands on his hips. 

“If you want new bathroom, fine, send me the designs, I can find a contractor to look at it in the fall,” Ilya says. “It does not have to be now. We can go to your cottage, we can have the summer—”

“You don’t want that,” Shane says, raising his voice just enough to cut Ilya off at the knees. “Ilya, baby, you don’t. I’m not fucking stupid. You've been cagey about it all week, and I'm not going to drag you along and let you pretend you want to be there when I don't have to fucking go.”

Ilya scowls. Drops his hands, doesn’t like how it feels. Crosses his arms again. “Of course I want,” he says, even though it isn’t that easy, isn’t that clear-cut. At least it’s the truth when he says: “I already fucking packed.”

“Fucking unpack then,” Shane responds. “Look, I don’t—it’s not something I have to do, every summer. I like it up there, it’s good, it’s great, but it’s not—I can skip one summer, it’s not going to k—”

Kill me, he doesn’t say because he cuts himself off, makes himself not say it. As if even saying the words will put some sort of nasty, unshakeable idea of dying in Ilya’s head. It makes Ilya want to roll his eyes and scream and strangle Shane, get on his knees and beg for him to stop treating him like he’s broken and past the point of repair. 

“That,” Ilya snarls, gesturing at the pinched face Shane is making. “Fucking—stop that!”

“I’m not doing anything,” Shane argues, drawing his shoulders back. “I’m just—”

Ilya shakes his head, rubbing his hand over his jaw and turning away from Shane. It feels so fucking stupid, to argue about this. Shane's right is the worst part. Ilya doesn’t even fucking want to go, not really, not the way he should. But he doesn’t want Shane to give up going for him. He doesn’t want to be the thing that makes Shane change his plans, his routine. Doesn’t want Shane’s concern or his fucking—kid gloves. Doesn’t want to be an inconvenience because inconveniences are burdens that have to be handled. That, eventually, are left behind.

He’s supposed to be giving Shane whatever he wants, being a good partner for him, being a good boyfriend. But ever since That Tuesday, all he has been doing is taking. Taking Shane’s time, his attention, his forehead kisses. And now he is going to take Shane’s summer as well? He’s sick of it. Of himself. Of being like this, of being someone Shane thinks he has to look after instead of someone capable of looking after him. 

So his voice is sharper than he intends when he says, “I wish I never told you.”

It’s mean, bordering on cruel. Ilya didn’t realize he was capable of it. Being this cruel to Shane. Being this cruel on a Friday. Maybe that’s the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the problem though: it’s not the day of the week that’s the issue. It’s Ilya. Ilya himself is just rotted through, invariably. Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, it doesn’t matter. The bad thing is inside of him, an intrinsic part of him and he carries it from day to day.

Shane’s nostrils flare; Ilya can see the way he flinches from the words and what they mean before he pushes himself straight again. He doesn’t back down from a fight, that’s not the kind of man he is. Ilya loves him for it; Ilya hates himself for it, too. For being the kind of man who goes around itching for fights.

“Sorry,” Shane snaps, not sounding very sorry at all. “But you fucking did, so fucking—get over it.”

Ilya sneers back. Arguing with Shane is something he can do on autopilot. He can match him tone for tone, they can both go for each other’s throats. “I never would have if I’d known you’d be like this,” he says, and it’s not—it’s not true because he wants to be cruel, but that doesn’t mean there’s not truth to it. 

That’s what makes it so fucking complicated. Because Ilya loves the way Shane kisses him on the forehead before he leaves the house. He also wishes he didn’t feel like he should. He loves how often he’s gotten to fall asleep next to Shane since That Tuesday; he also wishes Shane’d never started making the drives between Ottawa and Montreal, that he never realized how fucking fragile and close to shattering Ilya was. That he never knew so he never had to change his life to accommodate all of Ilya’s fault lines.

But it’s cruel, telling that to Shane. Or only saying parts of it. It’s cruel to mention the regret without mentioning the love, too.

“Like what, Ilya?” Shane snaps, beautiful. Cheeks flushed red, eyes spitting fire, hands clenched into fists at his side. So beautiful. “Like fucking what?”

“Like I am different now! Like it is—like I am broken!” Ilya shouts, when he didn’t mean to raise his voice at all. His legs tense, eager to leave the room. Not because of the anger, not because he thinks he will hurt Shane, but because he thinks—there is a very good chance that he’ll cry again soon, now. He doesn’t want an audience for this. It would only make his argument look even weaker, to have a breakdown in front of Shane in the midst of trying to convince them both that he is fine.

Shane throws his hands up in the air and then runs them through his hair. “Of course it’s fucking different, Ilya!” he shouts back, all heated anger and exasperation and pain. “You’re a fucking idiot if you thought it wouldn’t be! If you thought I wouldn’t—that it wouldn't--” he purses his lips and scrubs his hand over his face. His shoulders drop, and when he speaks again, the only thing left in his voice is his exhaustion. “Shit, Ilya,” he says, “I almost fucking lost you. Of course everything’s different. Course I can’t be fucking normal about that. Sorry, or whatever.”

Ilya blinks. He opens his mouth, closes it. There’s a couch in front of him, and he doesn’t hate the color of it anymore, so he sits down at the edge of the cushion. “I never told you that,” he murmurs. 

It’s the truth. Not even during their most fraught, most revealing conversations that they’ve blundered their way through since That Tuesday has Ilya ever found the words or the strength or the selfishness to tell Shane about all the funny ways he has thought about dying. About all the ways he has thought about being lost to Shane.

Shane shakes his head, lips wet and red from where he’s been biting at them. He sits down too, at the other end of the couch, spreads his legs and puts his hands between his knees. “You didn’t have to,” Shane admits quietly. “You’re fucking Ilya Rozanov. You don’t do anything by halves, baby, you don’t have it in you. I’ve known that for years.”

Ilya blinks again. He can feel his eyes start to sting. “Shane,” he says, and his voice wavers, snaps clean in two. Mortifying, maybe, if Shane weren’t the only person around to hear it. If Shane didn’t already know, apparently, all the ways Ilya is a broken wreck of a person.

Shane looks at him from the other end of the couch; then he opens his arms, and says, “C’mere.”

Ilya’s never moved faster, he doesn’t think. He fits himself into Shane’s arms, curling in on himself to make it work, and Shane leans back against the couch’s arm, feet kicked up on the cushion so that Ilya can cover him almost completely.

“I’m sorry,” Ilya mutters into the worn-out collar of Shane’s shirt. He closes his eyes when he feels Shane’s fingers start to slowly stroke through his hair. Sorry doesn’t feel like a big enough word. Doesn’t feel like enough gauze to cover all the places they’re both bleeding, so he says it again. “I’m so sorry.”

For too many things. The fight. His brain. Being so fucked up and broken and not being strong enough to pretend otherwise around Shane. What he said when he didn’t mean it. The things he said that he meant, a little. Meaning them. He’s sorry for meaning them. 

“I’m sorry, too,” Shane says, even though Ilya doesn’t think he really has anything to apologize for. But Shane clears his throat, adds softly, “I’m, like. Terrified. Of fucking this up.”

“I am already pretty fucked up, solnyshko,” Ilya points out. When he moves his mouth, his lips brush up against the soft thin skin of Shane’s collarbones. “I can’t think of something you could do to make it worse. I am sorry for—if I made you think otherwise.”

Shane hums, probably because he has already thought up a very long list of things he could do that could accidentally harm Ilya. But he doesn’t say anything else, and Ilya doesn’t either.

Mostly because he doesn’t know how. He thinks maybe he should have said something else. He should have said how afraid he is, too. Of fucking this up. This beautiful thing that’s between them. The love and the promise of a future where he gets to have this for the rest of his life.

“You asked me to be worried,” Shane finally says. Ilya doesn’t know how much time has passed, doesn’t want to take his face away from the curve of Shane’s neck to check the light coming in from the living room windows. “And I don’t—maybe I don’t always know how to do that, like, in the best way, but…”

He trails off and Ilya exhales, shifts on Shane’s chest until he can get both of his hands wrapped around him, trying to hold him the same way Shane’s got him. 

“But you don't get to take that back,” Shane says, a hint of steel now in his words. “Okay? You can’t, and I know it’s a lot and that—I can be a lot, but you asked, and you can’t take it back, and you can’t—even when I get it wrong, you can’t—dictate what that looks like. What worrying about you looks like.”

“Okay,” Ilya whispers. “Yes. I’m sorry, Shane. I know I’m—you are perfect. And I love you and I wish….”

I wish it were easy, loving you. I wish it were easy, loving me. But since it isn’t and since it can’t be, I’m just so goddamn happy that neither of us knows how to take the easy way out. 

“I know,” Shane says, even though Ilya never finished the sentence. Maybe he doesn’t have to. Maybe Shane just knows. Or maybe Shane has his own wishlist full of things too fragile and tender to survive the violence of being spoken out loud, and so he understands. “Me too. I love you too.”

Ilya nods because it’s easiest just to nod. Then he says, as a kindness for the both of them, “but you do not love my master bathroom?” 

Shane exhales a small huff of laughter. An acceptance and a thank you all on its own. “I have some suggestions,” he sniffs, which means he hates it. Ilya smiles and pushes his smile up against the tattoo of Shane’s beating heart. He knows exactly what Shane wants to change. He knows already that he will give him everything he wants.

“You have a Pinterest board of suggestions,” he corrects, and Shane shifts beneath him, like he’s shrugging.

“It’s only a few pins,” he mutters, which could mean five pins or could mean twenty. “I’ll pay for it.”

Ilya closes his eyes. He wants to say that this is their house. That Shane doesn’t have to cajole Ilya into agreeing with him. That the price isn’t the issue. That the money isn’t. This is Shane’s house. Shane can do whatever the fuck he wants with Ilya’s master bathroom. Shane can decide to gut the kitchen and put in five different dishwashers if he wants. Fuck, he can decide to toss the microwave and forget to install a stove and make them do all of their cooking over the fire pit in the backyard, and Ilya will still love it and him and his stupid wacky Pinterest boards. 

“Of course you’re going to fucking pay for it,” he says instead, because he wants to say everything else but he is not quite ready yet. “I know exactly how much of a bonus a Stanley Cup nets you. You are paying for groceries this week too.”

“Oh shit,” Shane says, sounding so soft and so fond even though Ilya isn’t sure he deserves it yet. Shane’s forgiveness, so readily given. “I guess that’s right. You did win the Cup once, huh? I forgot.”

“Hollander,” Ilya warns mildly, without opening his eyes.

“Sorry,” Shane tells him, all very polite Canadian. “It’s just that I’ve won it three times since then. All the stats get jumbled up in my head.”

“That’s probably the lingering concussion from 2017,” Ilya says. 

“Nah, that healed up ages ago. Can’t even remember how it felt, honestly.”

“Really? Would you like a reminder, solnyshko?”

“Whoa now,” Shane says. “I don’t think both of us should have broken brains, baby. What would your therapist say?”

Ilya can feel the laughter bubbling up in his chest, and it’s such a beautiful feeling that he doesn’t hesitate to give it over to Shane, even as he uses his grip on his waist to flip them over before summarily shoving his boyfriend onto the floor. “I don’t know,” he says, and it’s Friday again, and it feels like one. Feels like the last few days of spring that are just warming up to the idea of summer. Feels like waking up and shaking the cobwebs from his body, feels like opening his eyes first thing in the morning and falling in love with the beauty of the light pooling across his bedsheets and the man next to him and the world he gets to live in and laugh in and cry in and breathe in, over and over and over again.

Ilya raises his eyebrows, looks down at the glint of Shane’s smile, the pink promise of his parted lips. “Do you want to find out?”

Tuesday again, but it doesn’t mean what it used to. Tuesday again, but Ilya can move his limbs through the drag of it, smile and mean it and remember all the reasons he means it. Tuesday again, and the team is on a bus somewhere in New Jersey. The Centaurs have lost; 2-0, nothing really respectable but nothing too humiliating either. They’re on the way back to the hotel for the night, and it’s Tuesday again, but Ilya feels—for the most part—alive.

It’s December. Cold outside, and gray, but that may just be New Jersey. It’s December, and it’s Tuesday again, and Ilya has already texted Shane to tell him good luck on his game in Los Angeles. Secretly, he wants the Aces to win this one, but he’s not stupid enough to tell this to Shane.

He’s gotten better though, about saying other things to Shane. The important things. He’s gotten better at a lot of things. Things like talking about his feelings and staying in the room when he’s angry and thinking through his anger before he lets it become shrapnel leaving his mouth.

And other things, too, because Galina has suggested that he find a few hobbies to break up the monotony of a hockey player’s schedule. He knits now—or, he has the supplies for knitting, at least. A book of designs and a couple of balls of yarn and the little knitting sticks too. 

And he keeps plants in the sunroom of his house, because Shane read somewhere that they were good for people with broken brains and David and Yuna both promised to come by and water them while he’s out on longer roadies. He thinks he's mostly keeping them alive. Or if he's not, at least Shane's parents have been replacing the dead ones before he notices.

And he scrapbooks now, because he’d hated the idea of journaling but liked the idea of keeping a book of memories that his brain couldn’t rewrite for him in the midst of the worst kind of Tuesday. So instead of words, he’s gotten good at taking pictures of moments and drawing terrible little pictures to put alongside them, recording dinner menus and movie reviews and carefully pressing flowers from the banks of the river outside their backdoor into the pages.

So it's Tuesday again, and the Centaurs lose and Shane is somewhere in California, probably getting ready to go onto the ice and crush a rookie’s hopes and dreams beneath his skates, and Ilya is—mostly okay. Mostly fine. Sometimes he is on fire. Mostly he’s just—fine. 

Maybe he will learn how to play the guitar. Shane would like that, maybe. Or, Shane would probably enjoy hearing him play once he’s become really good at it. He’ll appreciate it if Ilya concentrates all of his fumbling lessons on the days of the week where Shane’s in Montreal and can’t hear him fuck up a chord progression or whatever. So actually maybe Ilya will learn how to play the guitar in June. Maybe he should learn how to play the electric guitar. Yes. Maybe he should buy an amp, too. He’s been told he never does anything by halves, after all.

“Hey, Cap,” Troy Barrett says suddenly, leaning over the back of the seat in front of him to catch Ilya’s attention. When he has it, he says, “You know the movie Groundhog Day?”

Ilya blinks, takes out one of his headphones and looks sideways across the aisle at Bood, who shrugs.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “I’ve seen it.”

“Cool,” Barrett says. There’s a nervous sort of energy in his eyes that makes Ilya uncomfortable, mostly because he doesn’t know what to make of it. Barrett's been on the team for three weeks now, and he moves through the locker room like a fox might navigate a pack of hounds. Like he’s already decided the killing blow is lurking nearby and he just doesn’t know who’s going to be the one to deal it to him.

“Cool,” Barrett says again. “So, how would you break a time loop? Like if you were stuck in one like in Groundhog Day. What would you do?”

“Time loops aren’t real,” Ilya tells him blankly, and Troy Barrett rolls his eyes.

“Okay, boring,” he says, and looks across the aisle at Bood. “Boodram, what would you do?”

Bood considers the question. “Are you asking what I would do if I knew I could start fresh tomorrow, no consequences? Or what I would do to try and get back to normal life?”

“Both,” Barrett says. “Either, I guess. I mean, obviously if you could do anything with no consequences, you’d—”

“Steal a train,” says Wyatt from the seat behind Ilya.

“Go skydiving,” says Ilya, because he has looked into this and his contract prohibits skydiving under any circumstance which has only made him want to do it more.

“Ruin the friendship,” says Luca, across the aisle from Barrett, before he blushes a deep, beet-red color.

“Pet the lions at the zoo,” says Zane, nodding.

Barrett blinks. “Skip morning skate,” he finishes, eyebrows pulling together. “You’d steal a train, dude?”

“I’d give it back,” Wyatt replies, unbothered. “I just want to see if I can drive it.”

“I think it’d be pretty easy to drive a train,” Zane says. “You’re already hooked onto the tracks, right?”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Evan says. “My cousin’s a train conductor, and—”

“Your cousin is a train conductor,” Ilya says, “and you are a professional hockey player, and you expect me to think you talk about his job during family events?”

“Cold,” Wyatt says approvingly. “Dykstra, invite me to your house for Christmas. I want to hear about your cousin’s trains.”

“I don't think they’re his tr—”

“So say you’re in a time loop,” Barrett interrupts loudly, crossing his arms on the headrest and leaning up against the back of his seat. “How would you break it?”

“I think Haas here has got the right idea,” Bood says after a second’s thought. He kicks the seat in front of him gently with his knee and Luca snaps to attention. “Kiss the girl, yeah? True love breaks all sorts of curses in the movies.”

“I’d do a lot of deep soul-searching,” Wyatt volunteers. “You know, figure out what I was trying to prevent from happening. Let it happen and live with the consequences. I think that’s how it’s fixed in that one movie.”

Barrett nods, thoughtful. “Sounds boring as shit,” he says, and Ilya snorts, mostly because he agrees with him. Soul-searching does sound boring as shit. He’d much rather kiss the girl. Or, in this case, Shane. 

“Rozy?” Barrett prompts, peering back over at him. “You’re in a time loop. What are you doing to get out of it?”

“Eh,” Ilya says, like he’s never thought about it before, like Groundhog Day is nothing but a movie he watched a year ago, like this is the very first time he’s been asked to think about what he’d do if he woke up and the weekdays did not fall into their natural, cyclical order.

He is nothing if not a dirty liar. Probably, in a future session with Dr. Molchalina, they’ll talk about this too. 

For now, he shrugs and says, “I would tell someone.”

Bood scoffs. “Bud, you tell someone you’re stuck in a time loop, you’re going to be going through concussion protocol and on your way to the hospital within the hour.”

“I’d still tell someone,” Ilya argues, because it’s the truth. Because he would. He’d hate doing it and he’d probably regret it sometimes and the regret would make him mean and nasty and churlish, but he’d tell someone. He’d tell Shane. Over and over and over again.

“Nobody would believe you,” Barrett points out, and Ilya shakes his head.

“The right person will,” he says stubbornly. It’s that simple. That easy. That goddamn difficult. You’re stuck in a time loop. How could you not tell someone? How could you think, even for a second, that you can make it alone? That you deserve to have to try? 

“Boo,” Barrett says, and Boodram snorts in agreement. “Waste of time, You’d just be stuck trying to convince someone else to believe you over and over again.”

“Worse things you could be stuck doing,” Ilya sniffs, putting his earbud back in and looking out the window. 

Idiots, the whole lot of them. Thinking it’d ever be a waste of time, trying to not be alone. Trying to find someone who will hold your hand and kiss your forehead and tell you it’s going to be okay.

“Like what?” Barrett challenges before Ilya’s music can drown him out.

Ilya sighs dramatically, waves a hand through the air. “I don’t know,” he says, the first few notes of a song that always makes Ilya think of Shane swelling up through his earbuds. “Stealing train. Being eaten by lions at the zoo. Playing a hockey game wearing Centaur colors.” 

He gets boo’ed again for that one; but he gets laughter too, and the laughter is so sweet that it doesn’t feel like Tuesday at all when he looks down at his phone and sees a new text waiting for him there. A little miraculous gift, every time. The text, the love. The laughter, too.

The offering of a hand. The acceptance of it.

Chapter End Notes

1) troy barrett hates stewing in post-loss silence and he just watched groundhog day on the plane from ottawa to new jersey, so that's why he's trying to get a discussion going, BUT i think the ending scene is funniest if troy barrett is actually stuck in a real time loop and he's trying to crowd-source ways to break it but ilya thinks he's talking about a metaphorical time loop so he corners him in the hotel lobby and gives him the number of his therapist

2) ilya isn't allowed to sky-dive in his contract because no way are the centaurs risking their star centre like that. he's also not allowed to skateboard during the season for the same reasons, which he only finds out when he tells harris about buying a new board so he can learn because galina suggests he find a physical hobby that has nothing to do with winning/losing/hockey

3) so ilya starts running all his prospective hobbies by his agent first after the skateboarding fiasco. farrah shoots down rollerskating and racecar driving. she also shoots down beekeeping when ilya suggests taking lessons to get certified. she asks him if he has a deadly allergy to bees. he says he doesn't know and he thought maybe that's one of the things he'll learn in his beekeeping lessons. she starts billing him for the hours' worth of headaches she always gets after his calls.

4) in this fic, the almost-plane crash would still happen in january because that's not dependent on any of the characters' actions changing. and ilya would still send shane a bunch of instagram dms as he thinks the plane is going down, and then he'd still call/text him a couple of times afterwards to tell him that he's fine and he should ignore the dms. but in this au, shane sees the texts saying ilya is fine and then sees the dms that read like a goodbye letter and he doesn't think they're weird texts. he thinks that ilya's never once done anything by halves and he thinks ilya's done something awful or tried to or got so far into almost doing something irreversible that he sent shane a suicide note and so he flips the fuckkkk outttt. there's no waiting to get to a private place and holding it in until he can call ilya from the hotel. there's like immediate breakdown worry bawling heart-wrenching panic right there in the locker room.

which probably wouldn't change the homophobia and disgust the montreal team shows shane after finding out about him and ilya, but would probably like. change something about that whole plot. definitely bring it forward. and at least probably shane would lose it the first time someone says something bad about ilya too soon, while shane's still recovering from the 0.5 seconds of thinking he's-lost-him-he-couldn't-save-him-he-couldn't-help-him-he's-worse-again-he's-hurt-he-hurt-himself-he-tried-to-kill-himself-he-almost-lost-him-he-has-lost-him. like he'd at least probably punch someone. maybe a couple of times.