Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

F/M, Gen, M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov & Original Character(s), Ilya Rozanov & Sergei Vetrov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Svetlana Vetrova, Sergei Vetrov, Original Characters, Original Characters (The Russian 5)

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, OHL | Ontario Hockey League, World Juniors | World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, Cultural Diaspora, Developing Relationship, Mental Health Issues

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of the wind blows hard (and the sky is black)

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-28 Completed: 2026-06-07 Words: 49,891 Chapters: 13/13

Toronto

Summary

It was a known quantity, something he could depend on now that every other part of his surrounding world had changed: Canada was nothing like Russia, but Ilya was still good at hockey. Would only get better.

[Ilya moves to Canada, and makes a friend.]

Chapter 1: June 2004

Ilya returns to Russia that summer, mostly because he feels as though it is expected of him; Sergei asks him if he would like to, as if he has some choice in the matter, but all he knows is that not even Canada is a safe enough distance from his father’s displeasure.

Nothing in the city has changed – same loud, same busy. Same traffic. Same air that smells heavy and thick and smoky. He coughs in the single breath he takes between the airport and the cab, and thinks that he didn’t use to notice how much it tasted like an ashtray here. – but the house is unrecognizable. Familiar paintings or pieces of furniture of his mother’s are missing, as is any mention of her; there is a single portrait of Ilya and Alexei together in the entry, but otherwise the house has been scoured of evidence that anyone else once lived there. It is Ilya’s childhood house, but it is no longer his home.

No longer Alexei’s either, it seems. He comes for dinner that first night and argues with Ilya seven times, and their father only once. After the second course is completed he stands from the table without being excused, and he slams the door on his way out; Polina mentions that she hopes he makes it to his apartment safely.

Polina is perhaps the biggest change of all.

She is about as young as his mother had been, but that is where the similarities both begin and end. Her hair is long and straight and muddy brown, flat and thin like a silk scarf, and her eyes are large and keen and rich hazel. Irina had always been slim, willowy, thin like a memory long before that’s all she was; Polina is shorter, much shorter, and solid in a way that makes her feel real. Feels like someone who has always been here, pressing weight into the floorboards until they have learned her steps in a way the previous occupants were always too scared to. She feels like the rest of the house does now, all pale ivory and polished wood, like she has erased his mother and replaced her with her own image, her own essence. She sits at their fine table like she is appraising it for value, and she looks at the brothers like they are diminishing hers.

She is also, he learns during that first dinner, Grigori’s new wife, wed in a small ceremony of only her family and his work colleagues at the start of the spring.

“That’s…” He cannot think of a single platitude to cover the sharp spike of anger he feels at the way his father has buried every trace of his mother’s existence in the grave alongside her, like she never existed to him at all. If he did not want to keep her he should have let her go. “Congratulations.”

His new stepmother thanks him politely, shrewdly, eyes fixed over his shoulder at the future success that his good favor might bring her; Grigori cuffs him along the back of the skull. “Говори по-русски,” he growls. Polina speaks some English, about as much as Ilya had before he moved to Canada, by virtue of being younger, of enjoying the television shows and movies that trickle in from the West, but Grigori still speaks only a handful of words. It’s simply nothing he’s ever needed, or bothered, to know; his position within the government, such as it is, conducts itself entirely in its native tongue. From the very first slip of a ‘whassup’ to Alexei when Ilya first saw him Grigori had snarled out his rule that the language be banned entirely within his home. He does not want to give them the chance to speak against him.

“Moi pozdravleniya,” he drawls without meaning it, and retires for the night to a bedroom that no longer feels as though it belongs to him. The sheets smell like lavender instead of the clean scented detergent that Lisa, Sergei’s wife, uses and the carpet beneath his feet is too plush. There’s too much empty space when he finally lays down on a mattress that is too wide across and too soft against his spine, too many shadows in the room for the childhood fears to hide in. The blankets are too heavy against his arms and too light across his feet, and when he rolls onto the side that he normally finds the most comfortable he finds that the springs beneath him apply pressure in all of the wrong spots, and it takes nearly half the night tossing and turning to find something comparable.

There’s no Svetlana here to curl into the space behind him. He finds, that first night, that he misses Toronto terribly.

The following week, after Ilya skates circles around his old teammates during one of the off-season practices they invite him to attend, Grigori spends so much of the evening bragging to his peers about who his son will grow into under the right guiding hand that he forgets entirely that it is also his thirteenth birthday.

Chapter 2: August 2004

Chapter Notes

Ilya is able to return to Canada a full ten days earlier than expected when he tells his father that he is looking to attend a training camp for young players. It’s not even a lie – there is an upcoming camp for young players, and he does plan to attend. All he does is mention a different start date, a casual off-hand comment to his old coach that he knows drinks with his father most evenings, and suddenly his ticket dates have been switched and he is calling Sergei on a payphone from the airport. “I am,” and the English is harder to come by, having gone unused for eight weeks. The tongue was a muscle he had only just begun to train before relaxing it back into the familiar sounds of his first language, and he is embarrassed by how much he has forgotten in such a short time. “выдача багажа?”

There’s a string of curses from the other end of the phone. “You’re at the airport?” His father had told him, before the car had arrived to drive him to his flight, that he would handle the necessary arrangements with Sergei; Ilya is beginning to suspect that he did no such thing.

It is just before seven in the morning. He left his father’s home nearly twenty-three hours ago, and he had been so scared that he would miss his connecting flight in Cairo that he had neglected to find anything to eat beyond the too-small portions provided by the airlines. He has forgotten the limited majority of the English that he had learned in his nine months in Canada, and at no point during his time back in Russia had Grigori allowed him to visit his mother’s grave. When his mouth opens, nervous to inconvenience Sergei further by also forcing him to wait, he is ashamed to find that the only noise he can conjure is not Russian or even English; he goes to answer the question with a definitive yes of some kind but instead he sniffles a truly appalling sort of noise, and finds that he has begun to cry.

“Sorry,” he mutters around snot and tears and the burning twenty-three hour tired that feels like sandpaper when he blinks, pleased that at least this – this apology, this plea – is something he still recalls. When a passing adult turns for a second look, drawn by the drama of it all, he retreats further into himself and into the drawn hood of his too-large Toronto Guardians sweatshirt. “Sorry, I am—”

Sergei sounds drawn and stressed when he answers, like he does during third period ties and whenever Los Angeles has a power play, and more recently whenever Svetlana comments on a boy she thinks is cute. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he promises. There are muffled noises of travel behind him on the line – doors opening and closing, wind where there had been none, and finally the sort of echo that comes from an enclosed space. And then, as if from a distance, “it’s okay, Ilyusha. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

It’s the same litany of words from that first hug after his mother had died. He hadn’t understood the sentiment at the time, too lost in his shock to try and parse meaning from the disjointed English expressions that were otherwise unfamiliar to him, and had had little luck since. He is feeling okay on days where he is not feeling good, but he is okay on the days after when he is. It is okay when he struggles in his classes because he is still learning the language, but it is also only okay when he excels on the ice. And, most importantly, it is okay when he wakes the household with his sadness that is not always silent, is okay when Sergei roughly pulls him in by the shoulders, is okay in the very rare times that Lisa allows herself to cross the line of Irina’s memory and pull him into her arms.

“It’s okay,” Sergei tells him over the speaker of their phone call. It’s seven in the morning and he’s huddled in the booth of a pay phone next to the baggage carousels of the international arrivals terminal because he could remember Sergei’s phone number but not that of his flight and has been so far unable to locate his luggage. He privately thinks that his father hates every part of him that is not a future NHL star, and publicly thinks that his brother feels the same. And yet, at the familiar words, he finds himself believing that it might be.

Eighteen minutes later a familiar large hand removes his hood to scruff at his curls, and a familiar large man tugs him into a familiar rough hug. And there, in an airport terminal eleven months after his mother dies, he allows himself to grieve.

The week before the camp is set to actually begin, Uncle Slava comes to visit.

That’s how the news is broken to Ilya and Svetlana: over breakfast. The radio in the kitchen is playing some current pop hits countdown, and Lisa hums along to each of the songs as she washes the dishes. At the table across from them, Sergei looks up from his laptop only long enough to impart a single bombshell of a sentence. “Uncle Slava will be here today,” he says as though he has not immediately rocked the foundations of Ilya’s thirteen year old life.

Yaroslav Vasilyev had been one of the five players to defect to the United States at the tail end of the 80s alongside Sergei, though he had been the youngest at the time. He had also been, up until the accident that cost him his career and very nearly his life, the most talented; a generational talent cut short in a single night. It had been the celebration of their second Cup win in as many years. The team had hit the streets of Boston in celebration, hometown heroes elevated for that one night to royalty, and had gotten the sort of intoxicated that usually ended in a hospital visit for alcohol poisoning – not for this. He and Sergei had shared a cab leaving the parties; they had not expected that their driver had been one of the attendees.

Neither of them remembered the accident.

Sergei’s first lucid thought of the night had come at the sight of his friend’s mangled leg, and of trying to stop the bleeding from his face long enough to call for help. Slava hadn’t awoken for another two weeks, and he had never set foot on the ice again.

He had left Boston nearly as soon as he was discharged from the hospital to avoid the team he could not return to, following the woman who was soon to become his wife to a city big enough to disappear into. He works for the New York team now. One of their commentators during games, and a leading anchor for post-game analysis; and something of a mentor for the younger players, a legacy cut short that still maintains a wealth of knowledge and strategy and, in some cases, wisdom for what comes after. Mostly everyone involved in the Admirals, and Sergei’s family, refer to him simply as ‘Uncle Slava’ despite a lack of biological relation; he and his wife Roberta never had children of their own. After the extent of the accident, it was assumed they were unable to. Instead he had a surrogate brother and an entire team of nephews, and a single niece he doted upon.

“Uncle Slava?” Svetlana perks up like Ilya has never seen her before. “He’s coming here?”

Sergei goes back to his laptop, and Lisa goes back to her humming. “They should be here in about an hour,” he says to Svetlana’s excited shriek, and to Ilya’s sudden silence that has, for once, nothing to do with drowning.

Yaroslav Vasilyev. Ilya had worn a version of his jersey for years.

“Uncle Slava!” Svetlana greets a little before midday, rushing to be the first to answer the door; the man beyond it is nothing near the bear of a man who once loomed from the poster on a younger Ilya’s walls. Despite being a handful of years younger than Sergei he looks at least a decade older – the scars on his face look like they might perhaps be signs of aging rather than an accident, and he leans heavily on a cane like a much older man. The doctors had managed to save the leg, but only about fifty percent of its function. That and a spinal injury had left him with an entire hemisphere of his body that was weaker than the other, limited in muscle and motion. – and he is not smiling as he catches the girl who all but throws herself at him. His hair is sandy blond and carefully styled, and his beard is thick and well-groomed. Handsome, despite everything.

Ilya is immediately starstruck.

“How was the trip?” Lisa asks as she takes Svetlana’s place, pressing warm and welcoming kisses against each cheek; Slava grumbles out a halfway affectionate negative.

“Bah,” he says in English that is much better than Sergei’s. He still speaks in the familiar rough sounds of a Russian accent, but his cadence is entirely American now; he speaks English exactly as Ilya would speak Russian: effortlessly. His good arm waves lazily through the air, as though swatting at a fly, and he leans heavily against his cane. “Terrible. She wanted to drive, did you know that?” The she is his wife, a model-tall and elegantly slender woman who looks to have been cut from glass or folded from paper, all sharp angles and crisp lines, who pulls Svetlana and her father into a hug as easily as her face falls into a brilliant smile. “All because she is scared of planes now.”

His wife laughs at him. “Slava.”

Another lazy gesture to clear her objections from the air; his gruff face moves like a rusty door into something that might, years ago, have been a smile. “One tiny plane hit her office building one time and now she wants to drive ten hours to Toronto. Meanwhile, I nearly die in a car accident and she says ‘oh Slava, please Slava, can we please drive to Sergei’s?’”

Halfway through the tirade Sergei approaches and throws an arm around his friend’s neck, pulling him into a fierce hug that contains a long period of back slapping that would look more at home on a younger set of men. “So,” he says into his friend’s neck, “you drove then?”

Another scoff, and an equally aggressive round of slapping against Sergei’s arm. “Of course we drove. You think I am stupid? My wife says we drive to Toronto, I say ‘yes ma’am’ and I get in the car.” Despite his words there’s a tangible bond of affection that runs between him and the woman who appears at his other side, sliding beneath his weaker arm like she is both supporting his weight as well as using him as a shield. She’s wearing a matched linen set, not quite a suit but something equally fashionable, and her copper-penny hair falls in loose waves around her face. She looks like she should be famous, rather than merely married to someone who is. “And you must be Ilya,” he finally addresses the new member to the household.

Slava, Ilya knows, is Sergei’s closest friend; they crossed an ocean together, and played on a line together for years. They survived hell together. Though they share nothing beyond the battles they have won they refer to the other as their blood – brothers, easily explained to anyone who does not need to look beyond. However, in all of those years, he never once met Irina.

He might know of her. Might have heard stories from Sergei of the years before, when they were children. Might even have seen an old photo or two. But he did not know her, and that means that when he looks at Ilya he does not see her ghost.

“I—” and he forgets every English word he has ever known, and about seven Russian ones. “Yes, I,” and somehow the only thing that surfaces is the lessons drilled by harsh words and harsher punishments of his youth, and the script he followed by rote for every one of his father’s colleagues that he met. “It is an honor to meet you,” he says stiffly, and extends a hand.

And, realizing the insensitivity of approaching from Slava’s weaker side, he immediately switches. And then, realizing that this new angle requires Slava to release his grip on his cane, retracts both hands entirely.

That creaking door of a smile kicks open, and Slava laughs. Suddenly he loses a few decades from his age and looks every bit the part of a man who, had his luck been just a little bit better, would most likely still be playing in the top circuits; he is not old so much as he is worn, but it’s something of a sharp reminder the way Ilya realizes that Slava is about as young as his mother would be. “So proper,” he says, drawing out the word like he means something else. “So respectful.” And then, meeting Sergei’s gaze with a crooked smirk and a friendly tap to Ilya’s shoulder, “I’m shocked. You don’t play like a gentleman.”

He feels the words hit him like a punch. And then, in the most embarrassing moment yet today, feels his cheeks and his ears and even his neck and shoulders and chest go hot and pink at the notion that Yaroslav Vasilyev has even a passing knowledge of his performances on the ice. “You,” and his voice is still navigating the rough road through puberty that he has only recently embarked upon. Sometimes it is still the bell-high clarity of a child, and sometimes it is a growling dog. And then sometimes in between, in the times he wishes the world would forget, it is something else entirely – squeaky and strange and almost cartoonlike, a crack of a noise that sounds like he’s inhaled helium or been traded in place with a rodent of some kind. That is exactly the range it chooses to begin in. “You,” and he coughs it back into some semblance of his age. “You have seen me play?”

Slava leans against the arm his wife tucks into his elbow and places his cane into her other hand, already waiting for it. And he reaches out to initiate the handshake that Ilya had fretted to himself over. “I have,” he agrees solemnly. And then he squeezes Ilya’s hand with a strength he had not been expecting, like maybe there was still more to him than a broken old man. “And one day the entire world will as well.”

Both Slava and Roberta – Bobbi, she insists. She still looks crisp and clean like his father’s house did despite the number of times she has smiled at him, laughed with him, rolled up her sleeves and gotten dirty in the yard with him or Svetlana. She is her husband’s opposite, bright and expressive and generally quite happy, and they orbit each other like they are connected not by a string but a rubber band, always springing back to the other’s side. – are easy to talk to. It’s something of a strange experience for Ilya.

He hasn’t had an adult actively want to spend time with him since his mother died.

“So Ilya,” she says his name the proper way, the way nobody in his classes or on the ice does, but with a nasally American accent; he’s found that he loves it, the way that she and Lisa and Svetlana all say his name in a way that doesn’t make him feel like he wants to disappear. He had learned to hide, hearing his name from his father’s mouth like that. When he glances up from his book it’s to see her hovering, and he nods to let her know that she’s welcome – they’ve never spent time just the two of them like this. Bobbi sits on the armchair on the opposite side of the room from him, leaving the entire couch as a boundary to the distance he keeps. “What are you reading?”

The long answer is that he’s not. He’s trying, but his English is still conversational at best and the words in here are so strange that they hardly even seem to be a known language at all, but he refuses to quit. The teacher at school who recommended it to him had said that it was her favorite book as a child, and he was far too old to struggle with it like this. “The Hobbit,” he sounds out the strange name of the title as best that he can, and Bobbi smiles.

“That’s my brother’s favorite book,” she says without commenting on how far he’s gotten through it or asking him questions like a test, and he puts the book to the side only because he hadn’t known that she had a brother. Slava and Sergei have discussed an entire roster of friends and family and teammates and coworkers in the time that he’s been here, but a brother never once came up.

For a moment he feels too afraid to ask. Maybe the reason he doesn’t know about her brother is the same reason the boys on his team don’t know about his mother. “It is,” he sticks to a safer topic, like the book that he admittedly knows very little about, and hopes that she will not hate him for his honesty. “Very strange.”

Instead, Bobbi grins. “So is my brother.”

Ilya laughs, sharp and startled, and it’s only when he feels the tears begin to leak from the corners of his eyes that he realizes it’s the first time he’s laughed since he went back to Russia. Might be one of the few times he’s laughed since his mother died. It reminds him, in that moment, of his own brother when they were young; they used to be closer, though never close, before the steady chipping of their father’s disdain sculpted him into someone unrecognizable. “What is he like?” he finds himself seeking conversation with one of the adults where normally he would defer to silence. It was how he kept himself safe back in Russia, by pretending to be just another of the statues that lined the formal dining hall of his home there.

Bobbi considers the question. “He’s brilliant,” she says first, voice fond in a way that feels so strange to be about a brother. And yet, he thinks it’s the same voice Sergei uses when he speaks of Slava. “But also a little bit useless.”

Wandering past on his way from the kitchen to the backyard, Slava slows down at the description. “Richie?” he asks like he already knows who she refers to. It’s an easy, casual intimacy that hits Ilya in the chest with longing – not to have that, not necessarily. He thinks he might want to be married someday but doesn’t care much for the domesticity of it, mostly dreaming of the more carnal aspects of relationships. He’s only just begun noticing the girls around town. But he thinks the longing might not be for what they have, but what they do not. These are people who would have made excellent parents, would have loved their children the right way, and instead Grigori has two sons who cannot stand him any more than they can themselves while Slava and Bobbi have only this: open hearts, and an empty home. “Why are we discussing Richard in Toronto, I thought this was my vacation from him.”

Ilya holds the book up in response, and Slava seems to immediately recognize the connection. “It’s very strange,” he warns. “Many made up words. But, there’s a dragon.” This somehow leads to Slava joining them in the living room, perched on the arm of Bobbi’s chair, and later Svetlana; she flings herself onto the sofa with her feet in Ilya’s lap, because for all the walls he hides behind there is always a door in exactly her shape. Between the three of them explaining the foreign terms and the convoluted maze of a story in ways he is not entirely sure to be accurate, Ilya finishes two entire chapters over the week that Slava and Bobbi stay.

Chapter End Notes

Yaroslav Vasilyev my best fucking friend. my favorite guy. my BELOVED.

Chapter 3: September 2004

Although not exactly affiliated with any of the leagues, the training camp was a high-intensity one for teens hoping to land a draft in the coming years. This summer it was hosted at the ACC, though Sergei was the only member of the Guardians staff who was involved. The head coach, and director of the program, was actually a retired center from Calgary who ran the camps twice a year, in the spring and just before the start of the season, and largely relied on the goodwill of his NHL contacts to donate ten days a year of their time to train their future.

Ilya is more excited for it than he can recall being for anything in quite some time.

He arrives for the first day almost comically early; the camp is set to begin at nine in the morning but he was awake by five, quietly making himself and Sergei a quick breakfast by quarter past. He had packed that and a thermos of coffee to go and greeted Sergei in the hallway outside his bedroom after his alarm went off at five-thirty, and the man had stared at him for only a moment before turning around to get dressed. In the car, driving to the center in the dark, he had finally cracked a smile and said, “It’s good to see you excited,” like he knows how hard it’s been for Ilya.

Canada is fine. Is good even. It’s just that it’s only been a year since his mother died and he still hasn’t learned how to feel anything since.

But today? Today is a good day, is what he might even consider a Before day – and he was only thirteen but he measured his life in Before and After, having already survived the worst that could happen. It was the same on the ice, needing to be the first to reach each of the goals set before him. – and he felt energized. Felt eager. Felt like maybe, at least for the next five days or so, he was going to be okay. “I feel good today,” he makes sure to respond in English. Slava and Bobbi had helped with the language, mostly because they were the most he had spoken to anybody in months, but school is starting back up soon and he’s tired of being left behind.

The camp is set to begin for the day at nine in the morning but he and Sergei hit the ice to warm-up at seven-fifteen. 

Before that they do a few stickhandling warm-ups in the parking lot when they arrive, juggling a few practice pucks back and forth before Sergei has him run through a series of Peanuts in his sneakers. Inside the building they head to Sergei’s office, which he doesn’t share during the season but will during the camp with the defensive coach – for the next five days his sole responsibility is working with the goalies, though he handles the entire d-line for the Guardians during regular play – and do another twenty minutes or so of stretches and exercises. They both fall into familiar, though different from each other, routines; they’re different positions with different play styles, and they warm-up different parts.

Once kitted up, or as much as they will for the camp, and on the ice, Sergei begins to set out cones and nets and a few buckets of pucks for later. Ilya forces himself through the figure skating warm-ups that Svetlana has taught him, feeling the burn along his core and his hips as his muscles move in the still unfamiliar ways. They’ve made him faster. Given him better edge control, and a sharper turn. They make him feel like a novice again.

At eight-thirty Sergei hands him a protein bar and a Gatorade and sends him outside because he knows that Irina used to take him for a walk around the rink before games; he doesn’t do quite that anymore but he does take in the fresh air when he can. It reminds him of her.

He hasn’t yet become entirely familiar with the area. Toronto is beautiful, clean and inviting, and as opposite as Moscow as he could picture – the buildings are all new here, steel and glass, whereas Moscow has buildings that predate the international conflicts that led to Toronto becoming the city that it is. Moscow is stone and wood and tradition, is things meant to endure. It’s strange, living in a place now where the people do not have the weight of what came before them bricked into their very being. The people here often say that they are from Toronto but they are not of it, do not carry it with them when they leave; it’s not old enough for that, barely a teenager like he is. Still learning who to become.

The ACC – The Air Canada Centre, though it’s rarely called that, is not only the home to the Guardians; the Hockey World Cup had only just closed out the week prior with a handful of games held there. It’s also the home to the local basketball team, since they play on opposing schedules, as well as other major events. – sits close enough to the harbor that he can hear the raucous cries of the gulls and the distant horns of the boats, and can smell the salt tang of the air. This is something else he would not have back in Russia.

There’s an upper level with an exterior hallway on the same side of the building as the water; if he stands in a specific section he can look all the way across the horizon. That’s where he goes now with his snack and his thirty minutes, hood pulled up over his head and sleeves pulled down over his hands. He’s leaning against the railing when a voice interrupts the peace he’s trying to find. 

“Ilya Rozanov?”

At first he almost doesn’t respond because the boy has entirely butchered his name. Too many syllables in the first part and not enough in the second, and somehow he’s shortened or lengthened nearly every vowel incorrectly. But it’s also the first time someone in Canada has been brave enough to attempt it – usually they get a few sounds in before giving up and getting his attention another way, or not trying at all before asking him to say it for them and not bothering to repeat. A few of his teammates have been calling him Rozy, which he doesn’t respond to, or Eli, which he hates.

He turns around anyway.

The boy is small, even for their age group, and slender in a way that he will hopefully grow out of if he wants to keep playing hockey. His ears are too big and his face is mostly freckles and his hair sticks up all over in a way that can’t be anything but intentional. “I’m Shane Hollander,” he continues, and Ilya actually recognizes the name. Number 24, the player from Kingston; he hadn’t recognized him off the ice like this, out of uniform. He’s clumsy here. Blocky and wooden, not fluid like he is when he skates, and somehow much smaller. “I wanted to introduce myself before camp. I’ve seen you play, you’re—”

He pauses for the first breath he’s taken since he approached Ilya, and Ilya in return takes the moment of time to lower his hood. Screw the cap onto his Gatorade. He’s seen him play too, he wants to say, first in the exhibition game and then through tapes that Sergei gets for him, but feels shy about it. He doesn’t think he knows enough English words to explain that he only started enjoying hockey again after he saw Shane play and finally found a challenge to work toward.

Shane blinks. “Amazing,” he finishes.

Another moment, and Ilya realizes he’s meant to return the compliment. Or, if he cannot, respond some other way – anything but what he does, which is stand there and wonder the best way to ask Do you ever try and skate fast enough to cut circles in the ice? Don’t you think everything would be better on the other side of it? “Yes,” he agrees instead, or maybe just acknowledges. He’s already mostly forgotten what Shane had said about him, only remembering the way he seemed so honest as he said it. “I have seen you play also. You are—”

He wants to say that Shane is good, that he is great even, but it’s not enough. Ilya is good, is great, but Shane is in another class entirely; he’s technically perfect, hours of drills evidenced by the way he moves like the very blueprint for it all, and there’s an undeniable joy about his skating. It’s something almost transcendent to watch. Ilya wants to say that Shane is великолепный when he skates but he knows he wouldn’t understand it, and whatever English equivalent may or may not exist is something that hasn’t come across his vocabulary yet.

Instead, all that he can imagine comes close is the word that Sergei and Svetlana and Lisa and Slava and Bobbi have taught him to mean that he does not need to pretend that he is anything less than he is.

“Okay.”

From the way Shane’s expression shutters, eyes going dark and face going blank and the bubbling stream of sincerity stopping as suddenly as slamming into a wall, Ilya thinks that perhaps he does not have the grasp of the word’s meaning quite right. “Okay,” Shane agrees, voice flat and smooth like the ice. “Well. I’ll see you around, I guess.”

Despite walking down to the rink together, and despite both playing center together, they do not exchange another word for the next five days. Shane stays cold and brittle like a frozen pond and Ilya stays stony and shameful like he did in Russia; he knows well enough when his presence is not more than tolerated, knows every trick to disappear into the background.

Not soon enough the week is up and Shane’s parents drive him back to Kingston and Ilya can breathe again around the comfortable distance that keeps between them.

Chapter 4: March 2005

Chapter Notes

gonna be so real with y'all i forgot about the 04-05 hiatus season until halfway through writing this and had to go back and redo it all

also i seem to have forgotten 2005 entirely despite being there so the amount of times i've had to google 'did they have cell phones in 2005???' 'laptop computers in 2005???'

truly embarrassing

Sergei has been involved with hockey in some capacity since the 70s – it’s safe to say that he knows the sport, and knows it well. He has two Stanley Cups to his name and a series of national and world championships, and would likely have at least two Olympic gold medals had he not defected right before the height of his career. Two separate countries outside of his own have wooed him for his talent and knowledge, and though his current team won’t be a Cup contender likely anytime soon his defensive line has gone from being nearly nonexistent to closing the gap in the league standings under his tutelage. Suffice to say, he’s dedicated his life to hockey and knowing how to play it well.

When he had said the previous springtime that in a year the hockey world of the Ontario province would know who Ilya was? It had not been sentiment guiding his promises, nor even the arrogance of being Ilya’s coach. It was the simple assurance of someone who had been around the highest levels of the sport long enough to be now able to recognize the best.

By the time the NHL season has been declared officially a wash – and that had been a blessing hiding beneath a series of sleepless nights and a few burgeoning ulcers. Having an unexpected string of months entirely free of responsibilities had given Sergei a chance to focus entirely on Ilya’s development. Both his playing, as well as his off-ice endeavors like learning English and passing his history class, had progressed in leaps and bounds. It also gave him far more time with Svetlana and Lisa, their first dedicated family time since he had relocated them from Boston, and that effect was seen throughout the entire household. They finally seemed to have settled in Canada. – Ilya was leading the goal race for the U14/U15 division.

He was also invited to participate in the exhibition games for his age group, which took place over an entire weekend that year in Ottawa. With the Centaurs mostly playing for international teams during the hiatus and none of the other teams sharing their arena, the space was otherwise unused.

Sergei and Lisa turn it into a family weekend. They get a pair of adjoining rooms at a nicer hotel than they would have were it just Sergei and Ilya making the trip; usually when they traveled for hockey like this it was something efficient and easy, close to the rink and somewhere mostly just to sleep. But this time they go for a hotel with amenities, with a heated indoor pool that Svetlana mentions will be here home for the entire weekend, with a room with a king-sized bed for the adults and an adjoining one with two queen beds and a television. Ilya knows that he is mostly going for the hockey, but can’t stop the smile that crosses his face as soon as the idea of a sleepover is floated. As soon as they’ve checked in Svetlana tackles him onto one of the mattresses and bullies him into the most comfortable position for her, and then realizes her error and yells for one of her parents to bring them the remote.

Lisa kisses them both on the forehead as she does so. “I’ll let you watch pay-per-view and order room service if you promise to stay here and behave all evening. You dad and I deserve a date.”

“Yes hello,” Ilya lifts the phone receiver to speak into, “we would like to order seventeen bottles of most expensive liquor to room 863. Lisa has said it is okay,” and then he lets out one of those sharp, surprised little giggles that are so rare to appear when Lisa tickles him suddenly. He still carries the sadness of his mother’s death like a rot in the very foundations of him, eating at him from the inside out, but more and more now they have seen the playfulness that has survived it. The bright eyes and wide smiles they remember from when he was younger. He even laughs now, or something like it, though very rarely – Lisa treasures this moment where he seems to be nothing more than a child.

She knows he has not always been allowed such moments.

“Sounds perfect,” and she kisses them both again, because Svetlana is burrowed beneath a blanket as well as her best friend and Ilya is giggling and between the two of them there is not a trace of the prickly teenage self-consciousness that has all but ended the casual affection between them and the adults in their lives. This might be one of the last chances she gets for some time. “We’ll come say goodnight when we get back.”

They actually order a series of entrees to split – cheesy pasta and garlic bread and french fries – as well as one of each of the desserts on the menu. Svetlana asks for a sparkling water and Ilya asks for a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and they eat tucked into one of the beds while watching Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. They’ve both seen the movie before, and Svetlana spends a good portion of it trying to teach Ilya how to vogue.

By the time Sergei and Lisa return they are both passed out asleep on top of the covers of the other bed.

When the East Division U14/15s hit the ice for their first practice he makes a beeline for #24, falling immediately into an easy pace behind him. “Shane!” he calls softly, not wanting to yell or cause a scene when he’s skating on unfamiliar ice with unfamiliar faces. The other boy doesn’t seem to hear him, so he tries again. “Shane!” And then, irrationally concerned that there might be more than one Shane who skates under the same number, he clarifies. “Shane Hollander!”

Without missing a step he turns around, powerful C-cuts keeping him skating the same speed if not faster now that he’s moving backwards. “I’m ignoring you,” he says simply, and spins back around.

There’s something so completely ridiculous about having felt the need to inform him of that that Ilya can’t help but smile. “Yes, I see.” Another lap and Shane hasn’t turned around again, but he also hasn’t made any attempt to move away from him. “You should stop.”

Shane goes tense, just enough to drop his speed and send him a single dangerous wobble, before he recovers; he’s more in line with Ilya now than ahead of him, and he grimaces when he catches his eye. “Why?”

“Because you are nice Canadian boy.” Shane’s nose wrinkles but his cheeks turn rosy at the statement, though Ilya knows for a fact it’s not the first time he’s heard something similar to this. They’re both only thirteen but Shane has been given certificates for sportsmanship for both seasons he’s played in Kingston now; he is, by all accounts, nice. Which is strange, at least to Ilya, because all he’s thought of Shane as being is honest. “Nice Canadian sportsmanship award winning boys don’t ignore people who are trying to tell them things.”

With a noise that sounds the very opposite of nice, Shane skates for the boards; with a glance behind that definitely is, Ilya takes the cue to follow. “What do you want?” he snarls, all five-foot-nothing of him.

“Sublime.”

He pauses before snapping his skate guards into place. “Isn’t that a band?”

“Is it?” Ilya mostly listens to whatever Svetlana listens to, which is to say that he knows every word to the In the Zone album regardless of his opinions on it, or the rock music Sergei puts on during their practices.

Shane looks like he’s wishing he’d never stopped ignoring Ilya for this conversation. Perhaps even like he’s wishing he’d never introduced himself in the first place. And Ilya knows when his presence is not wanted but knows this is not it, and thinks maybe Shane just wishes he didn’t have to be nice all of the time. “You’re the one who brought it up!”

“That was word I was looking for.” When Shane only stares at him, frustrated and confused and looking exactly as earnest as he had when they first met but not nearly as eager about it, Ilya holds a hand out to beg for a pause. A moment to think over the words, to make sure he knows them all; there’s no one to ask if he doesn’t, but he can trade them out for the ones that he does. It’s a trick he’s learned. “At camp,” he explains. “I did not know word in English, maybe used a wrong one. The word I wanted was ‘sublime.’”

He had asked Sergei as soon as camp let out for the day, but he hadn’t said why. He didn’t want to disappoint the man by causing so much trouble before the day had even begun, and with the player that he had overheard the coaches refer to as the best of his generation.

“Oh,” Shane says, soft and small like he was only just now noticing that Ilya did not speak English as his first language. And then, brow furrowed in thought, he seems to recall the exact context of their previous conversation because his face goes rosy again, this time at the compliment. “Your English is very good,” he says lamely. They tell him the same thing when he has forgotten a word at school, because no one wants to be the first to tell him ‘sorry’ for not knowing enough of their language.

His English is fine. Better than it was, but worse than it will be this same time next year; he shrugs because he’s under no illusions as to how stilted his speech is sometimes. “Is not hard to learn, not like Russian.” Words had less forms in English. Instead of a handful of ways to talk about something there were perhaps only one or two, and he could use the same word in regards to everybody. “I have just only been learning it for a year, maybe year and a half,” he admits, almost shy about it. It’s easier when people don’t realize how new this all is to him, how nervous he is. “I make mistakes.”

The red of his face is shame now rather than the pleased little flush of recognition. His brother has always been the same way, angry red and ashamed red and appreciative red like even their father’s praise comes with a side of anger that it is so scarce and shame that he still craves it. “Sorry then. For thinking you were an asshole.”

Ilya laughs. The noise startles him because it’s so unfamiliar – like a barking dog. The last time he laughed like this had been Before, when he was still a child, and his voice is journeying its way to manhood in even this it seems. “No, no sorry. I am an asshole. Just not this one time,” and the same startled burst of laughter echoes from Shane, teeth white and cheeks wide and he doesn’t look clumsy like this, head ducked down to hide the way he looks younger when he’s happy. “Listen, Shane Hollander. We are both centers, top scorers, two best players in AAA hockey. And we will be the two best players in the NHL.”

And Shane, the nicest player in Canadian youth hockey, smiles that sharp blade of a smile that he does when he’s won. “I actually have a higher point count.”

This time he is expecting the laugh that erupts from his chest, can better prepare for it. A small part of him feels terrible for laughing, for finding joy in a life he only has because his mother is gone, but it’s an easy enough part to ignore for now. “And I have a higher number of goals.” It’s starting to look like being good at hockey is not the only thing they have in common, because Shane also seems like he might be an asshole. “We should be friends. I already have a best friend, you can be number two.” He tries, and fails, at copying Shane’s lethal knife grin. “Is good to get used to, since you will be number two for rest of your career.”

“Wow,” Shane says, flat and smooth and icy; it’s the eyes that give him away, still bright, still with that spark of mischief that he hides apparently very well behind a veneer of nice. “You are an asshole.”

Ilya allows his face to split into a lopsided smile, and he does not think of how it makes him look like his mother. “Yes,” he agrees, and reaches out to knock a fist against the back of Shane’s glove. “I said.”

They’re put on opposing teams, on opposing lines.

Before the drop, Shane knocks his fist against the back of Ilya’s glove.

That evening, after a long day of games and training and various coaches working with players on various small deficiencies, Ilya wants nothing more than to fall into the pillow-top mattress at the hotel and sleep for a solid twelve hours. Instead, he’s facing a dinner where Sergei will tell him everything he did well and Svetlana will tell him everything he did not, and probably another movie with her before she allows him to sleep. Before leaving for the parking lot, he finds Shane. “Do you need ride? To your hotel.”

The other boy shakes his head, hair damp from a shower and no longer in the spikes from when they had first met. “No, my parents are here somewhere. And I’m not staying in a hotel, I’m at home. I’m from Ottawa.”

At the mention of his parents Ilya nods his head like he understands – he doesn’t. His father supports his hockey because it will make them both rich in the future, but he does not love him. His mother had loved him, but she did not support his hockey beyond allowing him to play it; she had wanted something safer for him. Something gentler. “You grew up here?” he asks, just to make sure he understands. Ilya is from Moscow but he is also from Toronto, depending on what people want the question to mean.

“Yeah,” Shane says with a little bit of adoration in the way he stares at the single banner in the rafters – #8, for the sole retired number of the franchise. They’ve never won a Cup. “Yeah, I used to come to every home game here with my parents.” It’s strange, seeing someone genuinely love hockey the way that Shane does. He might even love it more than Svetlana, who loves it like she can’t not.

He nods. There’s no religion in the rink for Ilya, only focus and freedom; it’s different, the way he wants to do this for the rest of his life. Ilya never wants to stop playing hockey, but he would be okay if he had to. He thinks he might be more like Slava than Sergei in that regard. “I go to Guardians games,” he offers to keep the conversation going just a little longer. He is not even sure if Shane has agreed to be his friend or not, but he is the first one that Ilya has made since coming to Canada. “They are not very good, but they are better than Ottawa.”

Shane and Ilya, though only thirteen, are better than Ottawa. From the way he does not immediately defend them, Ilya thinks Shane knows this.

“Ilyusha!” Sergei appears from one of the hallways, having apparently been looking for him. And then, seeing Shane, “and Hollander!” If he is surprised to see them together – and Ilya might not have told Sergei why he needed the translation that he did, but in time he had come clean about the fact that he had managed to alienate the future MVP of the entire league and what that might mean for his career. Sergei had laughed and told him the story of how Slava had once called Lemieaux ‘overhyped and under deserving’ to his face when they were drunk at the same bar. – he does not show it. Instead, he refrains from scruffing Ilya’s hair as he tends to do after games.

Shane blinks. His face is shuttered and wooden again, and his shoulders seem to have migrated a good inch or two closer to his ears. “You’re Sergei Vetrov,” he says like perhaps Sergei has forgotten. And then, like perhaps Ilya has as well, he turns to him and repeats, “that’s Sergei Vetrov.”

While it’s obviously not something he’s likely to forget, what is something that slips from his mind all too easily when they’re in the living room playing Monopoly or when he’s wearing Lisa’s apron and cooking them dinner or when he knocks on the door of what used to be the spare bedroom and leans inside wearing pajamas to remind Ilya, and usually Svetlana as well, that it’s a school night, is that Sergei is not just the affable older man who Ilya has known since he was a toddler. That he is, at least in the hockey world, somewhat of a big deal. “Sergei,” the hint of teasing in his voice is only half-faked, “you have fans?”

“You used to be such a nice boy,” Sergei laments, and gets his revenge by ruffling the carefully arranged hairstyle that Ilya had worked his hair into and then tugging him into a one-armed hug against his side. It does not seem to have the desired effect though, since all Ilya does is lean into him briefly like he appreciates the closeness.

To Shane he explains, “Sergei is my coach.” And then, because it doesn’t feel quite correct – Sergei is his coach, yes, but he is also more than that. Future coaches were probably not the first person called when a woman found out she was having a second son. Were probably not the people who tossed two-year-old future athletes into the air to blow raspberries against their stomachs. Were probably not the ones to drop everything near the start of the season to fly across the globe and hold a young boy together through a terrible loss. His coach in Russia had once thrown a skate at him for missing a pass when he was eight years old; he would never have hugged Ilya out of pride or kept his distance around other teenagers out of respect like a—

“He is also my uncle,” Ilya shrugs, like this isn’t something of a revelation for the both of them. “Sort of.”

Shane nods like he isn’t slightly shell-shocked. “Yeah.” He’s less wooden now but nowhere near the same sharp young boy who had allowed himself even a small measure of ugliness. “My mom used to be my coach, so I get it.” And then, brow furrowed in the way it did when he was recalling a previous grievance as well, he turns on Ilya accusingly. “Your coach is a Hall of Fame goalie! No wonder you have a higher number of goals, you asshole, that’s like cheating!”

Another snort of laughter emerges, that same loud barking sound that Sergei looks at him for like it’s something precious – he’s not sure, in that moment, if he’s laughed at all since moving to Canada. “Shane, he’s Sergei Vetrov. I have never scored a goal on him in my life.” He’s come close a few times, managed a few shots with Sergei playing as defense rather than locking the net down, but for all his skill there’s little hope of a thirteen year old scoring against a lauded professional goalie still in excellent physical health. Sergei has promised, with a sly wink and the insinuation that that is how long he sees it taking, that after Ilya manages to score on him he will play for his first tattoo.

“He practices shooting against my daughter,” Sergei tells Shane – Svetlana is not the same level of goalie as her father, but she’s definitely above the caliber of a U14/15 team. She also, unlike her father, has zero desire to preserve any of Ilya’s sense of pride in himself or his abilities, and therefore is far more ruthless. The reason he leads their division in goals is because they only have players who want to win, not to ruin his life.

The door from the hallway swings open again, and a couple that can only be Shane’s parents slow their steps when they see the three of them. If Ilya stares just a moment too long he can hardly be blamed; another thing, it turns out, that they have in common is that Shane is also his mother’s ghost. “Sorry,” Shane says even before saying hello. “I’m coming, sorry.”

The woman who must be his mother – she looks a little bit like Shane does, only much older. He has her eyes and her chin and her cheekbones, has her practiced niceness and her soft voice. And, right now, he has her wooden frame. – pauses. “It’s fine,” she says like she’s not quite sure if it is or not. She watches Ilya like she’s not sure what he’s doing here, aside from the obvious; he’s not tall but he’s taller than most of the boys on the team here, and he knows that he’s a bit rougher on the ice than the others as well. Canada really is nothing at all like Russia. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh yeah!” Shane is quick to assure her. “This is my friend Ilya, we met at the camp over the summer?” Ilya grins, and hides it by turning to meet Sergei’s eyes – he has made a friend. Sergei looks equally proud. “And then Mr. Vetrov was one of the coaches, he’s Ilya’s uncle.”

From the glance his mother sends their direction, it’s clear she knows exactly who Sergei is – Shane had said she was his coach when he was younger and they used to attend the games when Ottawa played at home so she obviously knows hockey, and Boston would have played here multiple times a season. It’s not too much of a stretch to put the names together. – and from the strange expression Shane replies with it’s clear he’s trying to tell her something in return; normally Ilya is a fair hand at knowing when his presence would be more appreciated away from his current company, but there’s a practiced blankness in both Shane’s expression as well as his mother’s that leaves him wondering if he’s read this all wrong.

Sergei’s hand squeezes briefly at the back of his neck. “Well,” he says in his steady voice – power plays and Svetlana discovering boys aside, Sergei is generally a calm man, the sort who keeps his head as well as his temper. He’s the opposite of Ilya’s father, which is probably why Irina loved him. “It’s been a long day, and I’m sure the arena staff wants us out of here.”

Shane sends another one of those loaded stares at his father, who has yet to do more than stand near the door and let his wife and son navigate beyond – he hovers at the edge of the arena like he’s a stranger in their world, this glass bowl of hockey, and while the blankness from his family feels practiced it feels more instinctive for him. He’s unassuming and, until now, largely uninvolved. “You should have dinner with us,” he speaks up suddenly. “If you’re free, that is.”

Ilya is nodding his head before he glances at Sergei for permission – Lisa and Svetlana are more than used to spending a night or two on their own when Sergei and Ilya travel for hockey events, and it’s not as though they won’t be returning to the hotel in an hour or two. “Please?” he asks Sergei, only the second thing he has asked for himself since moving here, and knows that he will be getting his desired outcome on this from the way Sergei’s face goes momentarily soft, like Lisa’s does sometimes. There’s still too much of him that’s afraid of being an inconvenience against their kindness; Ilya has only asked if he will be allowed to keep playing hockey, and now if he can spend a little bit more time with a friend.

Sergei, as predicted, agrees immediately. “We would love to,” he says politely to Shane’s parents, and squeezes the back of Ilya’s neck again. It’s the same gesture he does whenever he is proud of him, but knows it would be too embarrassing to say aloud. “Let me text my wife that we’ll be out longer.”

Shane’s father, David, does know hockey as it turns out.

He also knows one of the guys that Sergei played with, back during their Cup era, and the father of one of his guys on the Guardians.

By the end of the evening Ilya is not the only one who seems to have made a friend; Sergei and Mr. Hollander exchange numbers and the invitation for Mr. Hollander to join Sergei and some of the coaching staff or friends for a pick-up game next time he finds himself in Toronto. Mr. Hollander, who admits to having not played really since college, looks far too pleased at the idea of playing out of his league like that – from the small, sharp smile that Shane sends him as he accepts, Ilya thinks that perhaps there’s more to the story. After all, no one gets to be as good as Shane is without having someone better to learn against, and while his mother might have been his coach she’s also told them by now that she loves hockey but has never played.

Despite the promise of seeing each other tomorrow as well, the boys exchange email addresses so they can keep in touch before the next training camp. It makes it feel a little bit more real, the promise of friendship, if they do not need to wait to meet on the ice in order to communicate.

That night at the hotel, Ilya asks Sergei if he can borrow his laptop. “I forgot to tell Shane something,” he says by way of explanation, as well as an excuse – it’s just on the other side of the strict bedtime Lisa enforces during the school year, and Sergei upholds during the season. A third request now; he feels as though he has become greedy after the reminder that he is allowed to want things. Like he has been given permission to finally build a life here in Canada. Sergei, correctly assuming that Ilya will not truly rest until receiving a response as well, offers his cell phone instead, that he can text the message to Mr. Hollander’s phone if he promises to go to bed right after.

I wont play nice tomorrow just because you are my friend -Ilya, he sends, painstakingly pressing each of the buttons to select the correct letter; until recently he has only had experience on the small phone he and Svetlana share for emergencies, the one where every number corresponds to a series of letters and the messages are longer to send than they would have been to speak aloud, even with a delay for the call to connect.

The reply comes only a minute or two later. Dont worry Ill still be your friend after I beat you :-) -Shane

Chapter 5: June 2005

Chapter Notes

slight trigger warnings for underage drinking, allusions to underage drug use, and references to underage sex with a sprinkling of like... weird feelings about sex and self worth?

Instead of an anonymous car sent to retrieve him from the airport, Ilya is surprised to arrive in Russia and climb into the back to find both Grigori and Polina seated behind the tinted windows. Polina smiles and kisses the air beside both of his cheeks, hugging him at a distance. Her perfume smells like flowers left out for too long. Grigori smiles at him, and shakes his hand. He immediately wishes that Sergei or Svetlana had been able to make the visit with him.

“Are you excited?” Polina asks him, but does not wait for an answer. Instead she is checking her hair in the mirror, checking her makeup – she is wearing too much, and it somehow makes her look both older and younger than she is.

Ilya is not entirely sure what he’s meant to be anticipating. If she means for another summer spent in Russia the answer is largely a complicated silence. He misses Russia in the same way that he misses his childhood: because it has grown the very bones of him. But he also misses it in the way that he now misses Toronto, in the way that has been the roots and rich soil that have allowed him to grow. Because it is his homeland, but it is not entirely his home – sometimes he feels like the closest he could ever come to truly belonging to either is the airplane between the two, straddling the distance within some great glass and metal cage. He misses the idea of Russia.

He does not miss his father, or his father’s wife, or his brother.

It’s something he can only admit here, in the loneliness of having left the one place where he has learned to be happy behind, and only to himself. Telling any member of the household that used to be his as well would be a death sentence – not a death sentence, though perhaps a lonely nearly fourteen year old’s idea of one. He would be punished not with pain. His father had learned at a much earlier age that pain only made Ilya stronger. It was the absence that left him weak and wanting. Admitting that he did not spend any more time thinking of the Rozanovs left behind than he absolutely had to would result in deprivation. In the instructions that none of them speak to him, or acknowledge him, until he left. He would not be allowed access to the laptop computer that Sergei sent him with ‘for summer homework.’ He might be allowed to play hockey, but only with his old coach for company.

Ilya could survive pain. But he would tear himself apart in the silence.

“Yes,” he responds when he finally realizes that he had gone too long without doing so. It seems to be the appropriate answer by the way Polina takes a moment away from herself to smile at him, and Grigori nods. He leans against the window to watch the cars and buildings move past, and hates that he cannot tell if they are nearly to the house or not. The streets are familiar in the way the city is familiar, in the way the language is familiar – in a way that he cannot recall ever learning, only knowing. But the actual place names, the directions, the simple signs that are used as landmarks? He never bothered to learn them. He never went anywhere alone.

Everything looks just familiar enough that they might be close, or they might be ages away.

In the end they do not pull up to the house, but instead one of the similarly identical government buildings his father works out of. Grigori is in the police force in much the same way that Ilya has learned David Hollander is in banking – in the way that deals not with the public but instead the government that runs everything. He knows that Alexei is a member of the militsiya in the way that he knows their father never was; his uniform is much more discreet, a fine suit and a vague response and the infinite connections that keep guilt or blame from sticking to any of his words or deeds. The car pulls to a stop outside one of the fine glass and gold buildings he recognizes from the parties he has been trotted through like a prized dog, and Polina clicks shut the compact mirror that has so entranced her during the trip. “You can change inside,” she prompts him, and Ilya accepts the garment bag from his father.

“Thank you,” he says instead of asking what they are doing here. Instead of asking if he might also have time to eat something, to rest the sand and grit sleeplessness from his eyes, to remember that just like he must watch the language he speaks here he must watch his tongue as well. Instead of asking if he might call Sergei, just to let him know that he’s landed safely – and perhaps to hear his voice, that solid rock in the earth of him that always feels so calm, so safe.

Instead, he follows his father and stepmother into the building and their directions down the hall to the restroom, and he changes into the equally fine suit they have brought for him.

Alexei is getting married.

Not today. Not here. But sometime in the near future – some time that is close enough to have been announced. Been celebrated. The car has taken him, fresh from the airport and the end of the school year and the hockey season, sleep deprived and shaking from too much all at once, to his older brother’s engagement party. Apparently, in the year since Ilya was last in the country, Alexei has met a girl.

Rather, has been introduced to a girl.

Ekaterina is seventeen and sweet in a way that Ilya knows cannot last, not in the world that his father has raised his brother into; she is sweet in the way that Sergei has told him his mother used to be. Men like Grigori, men like who Grigori have sanded Alexei into shape of, rough and righteous, love to marry sweet girls. They do not always love them enough to keep them that way. Her father was arrested when she was only a baby, his crime something that does not go spoken of but is obvious to the men who crowd the engagement party like Ilya might have expected the women of Ekaterina’s life to do. Her mother was left to the mercy of an older brother, one of the men who had worked with his father back in their golden era as sword and shield, in order to save face. To provide for the infant girl who carried her father’s name and, with it, his crimes.

Ekaterina, her uncle mentions more than once as the event drags on, is a good girl. Meek, and modest. She has been raised to know her place in first her uncle’s home, and now her future husband’s – she is marrying Alexei because he is young and hot-headed and needs a woman to care for him, and because she has proven herself worthy of shedding the shame of her family name.

And Alexei, for his part, seems smitten. He presses kisses to her knuckles as he laughs and jokes with the young men he works with, and the old men his father does. Keeps a hand wrapped around her shoulders or her waist like she belongs at his side. It is only when Ilya arrives, suit slightly too small because he has not stopped growing since the season began to end, that he abandons her to swoop his brother into a raucous, riotous greeting that is more than they have interacted since before they counted their age in double digits. “Ilyusha!” he greets, voice warm and wet with the alcohol he has been drinking, toasting himself and his success.

“Lyosha,” he returns the jostling that might be a hug because there is still some small part of him that believes he will wake up one morning and not be carrying the weight of his mother’s loss alone. “Congratulations.”

The girl left behind amongst a crowd of her soon-to-husband’s peers looks lost. Lonely. She stands on the outskirts of a party thrown in her name like she is unsure if she should be allowed to attend, and when her hands nervously find the hem of her skirt and she rocks slightly back and forth to twirl it, Ilya is reminded that she is only a few years older than he is. When she catches his eye she waves, a small little gesture mostly hidden from the room, and he matches the gesture with a tiny wiggle of his fingers that makes her smile. “Don’t worry, mladshen’kiy,” Alexei releases him, ruffles his hair. Smiles at him like he used to, when they were much younger. “Katya has friends. We will find you a wife too, when you are older.” And then, laughing, “and a few girlfriends to practice on until then.”

He meets a handful of Katya’s friends later in the evening, when he has been commented over by enough men of import that his father’s attention wanes enough to allow him an escape. Beyond the main hall there is a smaller room, a servant’s dining room off the kitchen, that barely contains loud music and loud laughter and a number of teenagers with their pilfered vodka.

Ilya recognizes a few of them – the children of his father’s friends, the ones that he grew up calling his friends because there was no other word for the group of peers assigned to shadow his every move. They might like each other to some degree, or in the right conditions, but above all else they are opponents in the chess game of their parents’ social circle. Any one of them would run to his father, to their father, at the first step out of line. – and leans into the shouts of his name and the arms draped proprietarily across his person. The only one of them he is truly glad to see is Sasha, the son of his old hockey coach, who has never played a single person’s games aside his own.

“Lyulya,” he punches at his shoulder before smacking kisses into the air beside his cheeks, loud and mocking unlike the small, perfunctory gestures of Polina; they somehow feel more honest. “How was your flight?”

He allows one of the others, a daughter of a neighbor, to pass him a bottle of now room-temperature bottle of vodka. “Long,” he says and loosens his tie before taking a sip; it burns his throat because he is no longer familiar with the taste of it. He does not need to forget when he is in Canada. “Cramped. I want to go to bed.”

One of the girls, he assumes her to be one of Katya’s friends by the way she’s a few years older than he is, looks him up and down – not nearly so much down as she might have the previous summer. Ilya has spent the majority of the hockey season growing a bit more into his reputation, nowhere near hockey large now but larger than the other boys in his classes at least. “I have a bed,” she says simply. “If you’re looking for one,” and the rest of the teenagers in the room whoop and yell and call out encouragements far too crass for their fathers’ company.

She is beautiful. Long dark hair and plump red lips, a skirt just too short and a top just too low; she is built like a Botticelli, miles of pale skin on display, and when he does not immediately rebuff her proposal she leans closer, places her hand at his arm and her breasts at his attention. He wants—

He wants to go home.

Instead he laughs, because it is expected of him, and he throws back another shot of the vodka that feels like bile rising in his throat. His empty stomach seizes at the alcohol and his already tired eyes threaten to slump, and he bites the inside of his cheek. Clenches the hand she is not tracing lines down his wrist to into a fist, stabbing crescent moons into his palm. It is a Wednesday. If he were at home right now, he would be curled on the couch with Lisa watching So You Think You Can Dance and pretending he wasn’t as happy there as he was on the ice. He doesn’t know this girl and he definitely doesn’t want to go anywhere with her, least of all to bed.

But he knows the girl with her – her father and his father are the same, the old guard of a recently fallen superpower left clinging to their traditions. Cold like the winters and raising children to survive them, surpass them – and he knows the two boys with the vodka.

“I can’t leave my brother’s celebration,” he says instead of saying no. “I’m expected for photos later.” And then, because photos are not the only thing expected of him, he kisses her; softly at first but then deeper, wetter, following her lead when she opens her mouth to him.

It’s hardly his first kiss. There’s been a girl or two at school, soft presses of shy lips in the hallways or in the dark of the school dances, nothing more serious – and before that there had been Svetlana, who had hunted him down between classes one day to inform him that Eric from math class had told her he wanted to kiss her, and that she needed for Ilya to do so first. “When I am old and writing my memoirs,” she told him as she clutched his chin in her turquoise painted nails, “I refuse to recall my first kiss as having happened with some sweaty meaningless nobody from my math class. If it’s not for love it can at least be somebody who loves me,” and he had leaned in before she had finished talking. Afterwards, she had told him that he might want to work a little harder at practicing that and a little less at swaggering around like he didn’t have weirdly dry lips.

It’s just that this is the first one that felt like a warm-up rather than the end game.

She kisses him more and pulls at his hair and bites at his lips. Places his hand under her dress just under her breast. Breathes directions and encouragements at him, often in contradiction to the same being yelled from their largely passive audience. Alexei laughs when he finds him, sticking his head into the room to yell if anybody has seen his brother. Laughs when he fixes Ilya’s tousled curls, and laughs when he grabs the bottle for them both to do another shot together. As they are posing for photos, unfamiliar and unhappy and wearing the costume of a family that is anything but, he leans down and whispers that he will cover for him, if Ilya wants to get back to his ‘little girlfriend.’

Ilya never learns her name.

Alexei’s engagement has garnered enough of their father’s good favor that Ilya is allowed to have weekends free from his obligations – he trains during the week alongside players that are already sixteen or seventeen, already drafted into their KHL teams, and while he’s able to keep up with them he is not able to beat them. Not at the start of the summer. By the end a few of them are breathless trying to keep up with him and their goalie has punched him in the face twice in two weeks for what he claims are ‘dirty shots.’ Grigori is proud.

Sergei, when Ilya catches him up during their weekly phone calls, is prouder.

“Don’t get too good, Ilyusha,” he laughs into the phone. He does not say that he expects the summer training to reflect when he is back in Canada, or that he expects Ilya will be scoring more goals the next season. Sergei has never once expected anything of Ilya aside that he make his bed in the morning and that he come home before his curfew at night, and that he ask either Sergei or Lisa if he needs help. It’s a very claustrophobic freedom, the way he carries it with him in his chest. “I can’t keep my promise for a few more years.”

And then, when the call has sat in a comfortable silence just long enough, Sergei clears his throat. “Are you ready to fly back to Canada next week?” He sounds apprehensive, like the day may come where Ilya answers any question of a similar sort with anything beyond an emphatic yes; he has said many times that Russia will always be his homeland but that Canada is his home, but much like Svetlana will change her mind on matters of the heart as easily as she changes her outfits Sergei and Lisa keep treating him as though he will do the same.

The difference, he does not want to tell them, is that Svetlana has known nothing but love in her life. She has never learned to ration it.

When he cannot sleep, especially here in Russia, Ilya has taken to listing the things that he loves like counting sheep. It has grown from only his mother to now also include skating, and Svetlana, and Toronto – and, in whispers that he has yet to acknowledge to even himself, Lisa and Sergei. The list is small, but Ilya has learned that to be safer. The more he has to love, the more he has to lose.

“I guess,” he shrugs, although he knows Sergei cannot see him. They have video called once or twice since he came to Russia but the connection is always terrible, and Sergei always holds the screen at an angle that shows either too much of his forehead or straight up the nostrils of his nose; it’s distracting. “I’m...” He hesitates – honesty is always a weakness in his father’s house. “I’m homesick.”

Equal silence from Sergei, as though he is shrugging as well. Or some other gesture, one of the quiet comfortable ones that he falls into – Ilya had been quiet like that when he first came to live with them. Had been the one to shrug or nod or otherwise because his heart was still too heavy for words. But it’s been nearly two years and he’s grown stronger now, can carry that weight and more, and he and Svetlana are more than happy to fill the silence in the family home. It’s Sergei now who watches, orbits, no longer the center of the household universe. He clears his throat again. “If you want to stay longer—”

“Seryozha.” He feels it in his ribs, the way it feels as though his heart has moved somewhere to a suburban couch some four and a half thousand miles from him. That is the danger in loving: the leaving. “I do not— It is not—” Russia still remains in his bones, always will, but it is no longer there in the warm parts of him. “I want to come home.”

There’s a breath that is too noisy, loud in a way Sergei is not, and then the muffled sounds of him putting his hand over the receiver. Ilya has seen him make this same gesture before, usually when he’s saying something to Lisa, only he knows from the previous conversations that neither of the girls are home right now. “I know, Сыночек,” he says in a similarly shaky voice, unsteady like the video connections that he wishes more than ever they were on right now. “Soon.”

Two days before he is set to fly home, Ilya attends a party for Sasha’s birthday; he can’t actually recall when Sasha’s birthday even is, but is pleased enough to not spend more than the final required evening haunting his father’s house that he feigns excitement. Sasha has always been the sort of friend he prefers to spend time with at a distance – Sasha is too loud, too much like the voice inside his head, for him to feel truly safe in close quarters. They have been too twisted inside from their fathers’ distance and their mothers’ absence, and the jagged loneliness reaches out for a similar kind.

“Lyulya!” Sasha is already the slippery sort of drunk when he arrives, despite it being a celebration of his fifteenth birthday. There is little else for their sort to do but drink at parties – rich enough to buy anything except the love they so desperately lack, unsupervised and largely unwanted. Sometimes it’s better even, to drink. To forget. “Will you miss me, when you get shipped back to Canada?”

Svetlana had asked him nearly the same, on the way to the airport in Toronto, only with a much different outcome. “No,” he says with a jagged smile, all teeth – it was not enough to bark in this world, not like on the ice. Here the only way to survive was to bite. – and pulls the other boy into a rough, one-armed hug. “Not even a little.”

Sasha plays offended just long enough for one of the other guests to laugh and then he slithers away, presses their now practiced air kisses to the space near both of Ilya’s cheeks. It had begun as a joke, a caricature of the way Polina did the same whenever there was someone watching, but feels as natural between them now as a handshake. He thinks, privately, that there is intimacy in the distance Sasha keeps between them; where so many are pressing and pulling at Ilya like he belongs to them, he feels more seen in the lack of contact. Since his mother’s death he has shied away from the gentleness of hands that would never again be hers – if he had held on to her last few touches just a little bit longer, a little bit better, she might still be here. It’s hard to not blame himself when he is the only one who could have saved her.

“Come dance with me and Nataliya.”

Sasha snags the cuff of his shirt, tugs him along; when Ilya gives his agreement by following there’s a shuffle and then Sasha takes him by the hand, tangles their fingers. Svetlana often does the same. Nataliya is another of their old friends, a figure skater who used to train at the same rink as Ilya – she was never very good, but she was always very kind. She greets Ilya with a warm smile and the same dry kisses pressed to the vicinity of his face before taking his other hand and dragging them both into her orbit. Off the ice, it seems, she’s a very good dancer. She moves like water, warm and fluid, and it’s easy enough to fall into motions to match hers; she loops Ilya’s wrist around her neck before releasing his hand. “I’ve watched some of your games!” she calls to him over the pulse of the music.

There’s a press of a body along Ilya’s spine as Sasha leans close, wraps one arm around his stomach to keep them together, and then he reaches the other over Ilya’s shoulder to wag in Nataliya’s face. “No hockey!” he scolds the both of them. “I refuse to be bored on my birthday!”

Nataliya snaps her teeth at the finger, but then reaches out with one hand to join their fingers, inviting him to join in her and Ilya’s dancing. “Your birthday is in November.” The fourth, Ilya suddenly recalls, which explains his moments of confusion when receiving the invitation. He twists to look back at Sasha, who only shrugs unapologetically.

“You’re in Canada for my birthday,” he says simply, grin wide and hand warm. “I deserve to be celebrated, Lyulya.”

The three share a few more songs, as well as a few shots of flavored vodka that taste somehow worse than the regular kind, before Sasha is pulled away by a group of teens that Ilya has never seen before. Nataliya makes some sort of face to see them, and frowns when Sasha disappears in their wake. “He’s different around them,” is all she says in explanation, mouth pinched thin; the changes, whatever they are, do not seem to be good ones. Another girl asks Ilya to dance with her after that, which he does, but after only a song or so of her pressed against his front and her hands tangled in his hair he politely excuses himself to return to Nataliya’s side.

Sasha returns thirty-seven minutes later. His hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat and his eyes are no longer the familiar honey-brown that Ilya knows; they are solid black, pupils blown into gaping holes that look as empty as Sasha suddenly seems. He laughs when he sees them and twines his fingers through theirs, tugs them onto the dance floor to move sinuously between them, but it’s hollow. A charade. He is saying the right words and making the right gestures, but there is something not right in the way his gaze never seems to fix on any one thing – it drifts, aimless, unmoored like Sasha has always been. Everyone around them cheers and grins and the music grows louder, the beat sharper, and Ilya feels terribly alone.

He understands now what Nataliya means by ‘different.’

“Will you remember me?” Sasha asks near the end of the night. The aching hollowness of his stare has thawed into something tired, something searching, and he no longer dances like he can feel the music in his limbs. He’s more draped across Ilya’s back or against his side, sliding into the distance that Ilya usually keeps people at; he strangely fits there. The two are of similar enough height, though Sasha is nothing but long lines and lanky limbs – he lacks the solidness of Ilya. The steadiness that he has learned from Sergei. Sasha is built like a boy looking to be swept away. “When you are back in Canada?”

It’s different this time. This time all he seeks is the knowledge that he exists, will continue to exist, even in this world that threatens to bury them.

Before Ilya can tell him that he will Sasha moves, warm and fluid, to catch the words from his lips; he kisses Ilya like the girls back in Canada had kissed him, not as a prelude to anything but perhaps a bit as a promise. And Ilya—

Ilya kisses him back, like he kissed the girls back in Canada, because he finds that there is very little difference for him.

He has always thought of Sasha as being pretty. There’s a grace to him, a delicateness to his bones that translates to his movements, and his lips have always been just slightly too pink for the voice that oozes from them. In the pulsing lights of the dance party, that wispy beauty becomes something ethereal – Ilya’s mouth goes dry the same way it had when Nataliya had grown bolder and pressed up on her toes, hand braced against his chest, to whisper a comment or two into his ear. The same way it does now when Sasha pulls away with a brief pop of their lips and then fills the gap with Nataliya’s; she kisses Sasha only inches from Ilya’s face, a hand tangled loosely in his curls, and he’s not sure which one of their places he wishes he could take.

“I think,” Sasha says after that, exhaustion in his eyes. He does not seem to be carrying the same weight of confusion that Ilya had, only the bone-deep weariness of having finally admitted to a weakness. “That I would miss you more if you stayed.”

Chapter 6: September 2005

Chapter Notes

the opening paragraph(s) you are about to read are products of their time and may contain within them the generalizations and prejudices that would have been, in such a historical context, accurate and even acceptable for their times. while they may not necessarily reflect the views of the author, to change the narrative to erase such viewpoints would serve to erase that such negative, hurtful stereotypical thinking ever existed at a mainstream level. thank you.

(for clarification this is in regard to prose depicting the Ottawa Senators or any similarly branded team as incapable of making it to the play-offs. no one is more shocked than i am to see you guys doing it this season)

As had been the case back in March, the Corel Centre is available to host the OHL’s summer prospect training camp. The arena remains largely unused outside of the regulation season; there’s no other team using the space, and the Centaurs haven’t even made the play-offs since their inception back in ‘92, let alone won a Cup. The space is dormant from April through the end of September, beyond one or two team events that garner limited fan attendance – Ottawa is fond of the team, perhaps even proud to host them, but have not been given much cause for the same devotion of other cities to their hockey teams in the thirteen years since they began.

It’s so different for Ilya, coming from Toronto like he does. For better or worse or even forty-year drought, the city loves the Guardians.

“So,” he greets Shane in the hallway outside of the locker room, eyeing the largely blank walls. Despite being a younger team there’s still a sadness to the lack of paraphernalia around the arena, aside from the few murals of the cartoon centaur adorning the otherwise blank grey walls. The red and black accents are limited to poles and stairs and doors. “This was what inspired you onto the ice?”

His friend glares, but also tugs him into a brief back-slapping hug. They have communicated fairly frequently since the exhibition games over email and, occasionally, text messages to the point that, despite not seeing each other for nearly six months, there’s no awkwardness. No sense of absence. Shane has become, as he promised, his second-best friend, and he returns the hug easily – one thing that feels strange after all this time not seeing each other is the way that Shane has also grown. They’re still generally the same height, Shane perhaps an inch or two shorter, but he’s far from the scrap of a player he’d been when they first met. Then even when they last saw each other.

“Shut up,” he says around a mouth that is fighting the urge to smile. “It’s not like I ever want to play for Ottawa,” and there’s that sharp little victor’s grin, the one that lets the world know that beneath the layers of nice is a boy who knows exactly how much better than the others he really is. Ilya grins back, wide and wolfish, because he gets it. “Besides, you can’t talk. You’re a Guardians fan.”

He’s been living in Canada, in Toronto, long enough now that there’s some deep seated urge to defend his hometown team – no one knows better than Ilya, who shares a house with the defensive line coach, how good their team isn’t. But equally there is the knowledge of how hard they work, and how far they’ve progressed, and how much they belong to the city that stands by them and—

“Okay,” he acknowledges with a nod toward the centaur prancing with unfounded confidence across the wall beside the locker room. “That’s fair.”

Another razor blade of a smile as Shane recognizes that he’s won. “How was visiting your family?” he asks carefully. Shane doesn’t know as much as Svetlana might, Ilya’s been sure of that – he keeps his stories from Russia vague and impersonal, mostly because that’s all the house there has become since his mother’s death. His father never cared for his children beyond their serving as tokens for him to polish and trade for political favor, and Polina has yet to show herself in possession of the emotional capacity to care for any of them beyond herself. When the time had come for him to depart, the only person he had said a sincere goodbye to had been Katya. She was too good for his brother, for their entire family, and he knew that she would be unrecognizable for it by the following summer. – but he knows that there’s a reason beyond hockey that has a teenager living across the globe from them.

Shane’s father had emailed Ilya to wish him a happy birthday the day he turned fourteen. His mother had reached out to Sergei to see if at least Ilya would be free to join them for dinner one night of the training camp. There’s no comparison to how his time with his own family had passed.

“I survived it,” he says honestly, because Shane is his second-best friend. “And I do not have to think of it again for another nine months.”

He does not have to think of his trip to Russia, but he probably will – he had gotten back to the Vetrov house and immediately curled up under Svetlana’s blankets with her, and sometime in the hours of the night that were more technically the morning he had slipped an arm around her and murmured into the back of her neck, “Sasha kissed me.” And then, when her response had been only the silence of someone who knew him well enough to wait, “and I kissed him back.” She had taken the hand from her stomach in both of hers, hand tangled their fingers together like their lives had become, and she had pressed kisses to his knuckles like she always did when he ended up in a fight.

“You have always liked beautiful people,” she had told him, like maybe this was not the revelation for her that it had been becoming for him, but she had the advantage of searching the deepest, most hidden parts of himself from the comfort of the daylight above. He was the one left fumbling through the darkness.

He was not an idiot, nor was he one of the closed walls of his father’s country; Ilya knew about gay people, about bisexual people, and felt no more hatred or disgust for them than he would anybody else. Love was such a foreign concept that he hardly cared who a person gave theirs to, more interested instead in the notion of having something of the sort to give. But he was not stupid and was not as intolerant as those who had not broadened their lives and their horizons by moving to a place that had both accepted and legalized all acts of love (He had been in Russia, when the news broke back home. Gay marriage was now legal across the entire country, though many of the provinces had already passed such laws previously. No one had emailed him, but Lisa had informed him when she picked him up at the airport. At the time it had felt like an accusation.).

He pulled Svetlana closer. He loved her in a way that he could not put into words. Not because he did not understand it – he did not understand love but he understood this, the way that she was all the best parts of him and therefore the easiest thing to love, a victory on the many days when he could not find the reasons to love himself – but because he did not have the words for it. The language simply did not exist, not in English or Russian or in the handful of French words he had learned since the beginning of the school term. “Sveta,” and his voice so rarely cracked and broke now, but her name came out with the high reediness of a child. “I think I am bisexual.”

She kissed his hands again, but otherwise nothing changed. The world did not stop turning, nor did the ground open up and swallow him. The only noticeable shift was the way that, for the first time since his breath caught in a dark room in a country that was no longer his home, he felt as though he could exhale. “I’m glad,” she told the fingers that no longer clutched hers as though terrified they would lose her, “that you told me. I love you.” And then, when the pounding of his heart and his mind had finally quieted, just as he was drifting off to sleep, she shoved and bullied her way into facing him. “When you first met Slava you forgot how to speak for a few minutes. I need you to know this.”

Sometimes, the best parts of him were the worst parts of her. He loved her regardless. “We’re never talking about this again,” he informed her. Begged her, a little bit. “As my best friend you have to forget this.”

“Did you guys get my mom’s email?” Shane switches the topics of conversation as smoothly as he might adjust directions on the ice, sensing correctly that Russia is something kept as removed from their friendship as it is geographically – he does not fully understand the extent to which Ilya divides his life into two distinct, never-meeting halves, only that he does. It’s not unheard of for dedicated athletes, to keep more intense parts of their lives from bleeding over; Shane does not let school and its social stress make its way to the rink ever. Tries to only allow his coach and never his mother. It protects his focus, and his peace.

Canada, he has begun to suspect, is Ilya’s hockey.

He brightens, some of the weight he’d gained over the summer only across the tension of his shoulders resolving; Ilya had grown in Russia in the way that all fourteen year old boys grow. Quickly. Constantly. In clawing, gaping bouts of hunger. He had come home having lost the softness in his cheeks, and having burdened the weight of everything left behind across his back. “Yes!” and it had been an immediate agreement from all four of the adults, letting Ilya return to the Hollander family home one evening for dinner. The second day had made the most sense, given that it was the only one that ended before six p.m. Privately, which Ilya had only mentioned to Svetlana – and she had come along this year, though Lisa had not. It was more the lure of finally meeting Shane than anything hockey related. – he enjoyed that it was the same date as their first disastrous meeting. A well-earned do-over.

“Cool,” Shane matches his enthusiasm, though only for those who know what to look for – he’s quieter than Ilya. More contained. It’s the same razor-sharp precision of his play, the one that reads as clinically detached to anyone who has never loved something to the insanity of passion.

“And then Sveta made plans for us on the tenth,” he informs Shane with the tiniest bit of malicious enjoyment that he is no longer the only troop under her inarguable command. “I have been informed that we will have fun.”

Though they have never met in person, Shane and Svetlana have spoken over the phone before, as well as the emails and texts that half of the time come from a phone she shares access to; he’s as familiar with her personality as anyone could be without ever being subjected to it in person. “That sounds like a threat.” His face is blank, almost confused, like he wasn’t until that moment sure how much of her he had exaggerated in his mind or built up as a misread of her tone.

“It absolutely is,” Ilya assures him, and wraps an arm around his shoulders to drag him off toward one of the locker rooms.

Ilya had always played winger back in Russia; this year, the coaches decide to try them on the same line for the first match. Just a suggestion, an idea, since they’re both such stand-outs individually.

It’s only after Ilya dekes past the defensive line and fires a wrist shot backwards, directly into Shane’s waiting blade, that they really start talking about it more seriously.

The Hollander family home has not changed in the six months since Ilya was first in it; it is still situated along a sleepy little street outside the city. Still a modest home of off-white that leans just a little bit more toward the off, and soft blue trim that is not any shade designed to draw attention; still unassuming, for the home of a future superstar.

It is still warm and open and inviting. The door is unlocked when Sergei drops them off, windows lit from within by the lights of a family that lives there rather than simply inhabits the space. Mr. Hollander, wearing an apron of some faded floral, greets them in the entryway and exchanges friendly pleasantries with Sergei as the boys kick off their shoes and Shane yells various hellos to his parents before dragging Ilya inside. They end up in the living room before the thorny roots of Russia catch Ilya around the ankles. The Hollander house is warm and open and inviting. It feels like the warmth of the fire in the wood stove now, the fire where his mother used to sit with him and tell him stories that he never had the time to learn were fairy tale or family history.

It feels too much like he is the draft carried in from outside, slushing all of his cold homes and hollow rooms in like tracked snow.

He feels self-conscious and small, and when Sergei goes to leave he makes sure to catch his gaze from across the room. “Ты в порядке?” he asks in the same soft tone he uses when he talks to Lisa. To Svetlana. There are miles of difference between Sergei the coach and Sergei the man, and equally so Sergei the father. He nods, eyes darting toward the kitchen where Shane’s mother is emerging. It feels rude, speaking in this language they do not understand when they have welcomed him into their home, a lesson left over from his father’s banishment of English. Like a prized pet he has been well-trained in how to behave nicely and never quite feel comfortable in family homes. “I’ll pick you up in a few hours, okay Сыночек?”

“Okay,” he manages softly, voice hovering somewhere around the doorway where he wishes he still stood. Mrs. Hollander says goodbye to Sergei then, and hello to the boys. Shane greets her with a one-armed hug that looks like he’s dangerously close to outgrowing in the same way teenage boys do with the rest of their old clothes, and Ilya with a tiny wave and a more Canadian version of the script his father had taught him at a too-young age. “Thank you,” he tells her, “for having me in your home.”

She smiles at him, soft eyes and sharp edges like Shane smiles, and waves a hand. “It’s wonderful to have you, Ilya. Would you like something to drink?”

He nods, managing only a small thank you. Ilya still isn’t sure how to speak to Mrs. Hollander. How to stand near her. How to look her in the eye. He is as fascinated by her as he is afraid of her, because there is a familiar tragedy in a mother who lives so wholly for her son that she forgets to do the same for herself; he isn’t sure which of their endings is the mistake. He’s skittish and rabbity around her as he is around all mothers now, because he doesn’t know what to do with the ones that are still alive. (And he ignores the instinctual way that he leans into Lisa’s touch at home just as easily as the way that he slides beneath it like a nervous cat when they are somewhere that might be seen. Not because he’s ashamed that someone from his school might think that he has a mother who loves him, but because he doesn’t want her to feel ashamed that someone has thought she is his.)

Mr. Hollander is much safer. Ilya is only afraid of fathers that are his own, after all.

“Do you like chicken parm?” he asks Ilya before he and Shane and their clutched soda cans – ginger ale and Diet Coke – disappear back to Shane’s room to play NHL 2005 on his GameCube while the adults finish in the kitchen. Ilya has spoken to him over the phone a few times now when he has called for Shane, as well as when he’s walked into the room as Sergei calls him. Mr. Hollander is quiet, and kind, and the sort of steady that does not seem capable of changing; he reminds Ilya of a mountain. Strong and steady and sure. He does not seem like the sort to don a flowered apron and cook, but apparently he does – and quite well, Shane had told him in the car on the way over.

Chicken parmesan had been one of the first meals Ilya had had when he moved to Canada, and it remained one of his favorites. “Yes!” he says eagerly, and then feels the phantom touch of his father’s reminders of how to act in the homes of his colleagues. “Yes, thank you Mr. Hollander,” he says again, and ignores the soft tug of Shane’s hand at his sweatshirt; he has not yet been excused.

Mr. Hollander smiles at him, and at Shane, steady and sure. “Good. Why don’t you boys go play, dinner will be ready in about thirty-five minutes.” He shares a glance with his wife, something quiet and questioning – they know about as much as their son does as to the circumstances that brought Ilya here, but bring with it the context of being parents themselves. There is very little, if anything, that could convince them to send their son across the globe like this – but ultimately fond, before Ilya gives in to the pressure at his sleeve and scurries after his friend.

Svetlana has already laced her skates and is doing tight circles and figure eights in front of Ilya as they wait for Shane to get dropped off; for all that she spends a good part of her week acting as the goalie determined to cripple his self-esteem, she has actually been in training as a figure skater since she was young. On the ice she is graceful, moves like liquid or silk, and she has not braided her hair for this trip so her curls bounce along with her in the morning sunshine. When she lunges toward him, turning only at the last possible second to spray his ankles with a shave of ice, he is filled with an overwhelming fondness for the place she has taken in his life – and where she now stands, moving to tangle their fingers.

“He will like you,” he assures her, tugging her hand and, when the motion pulls her against him, her waist; for as tall as he has grown this last year she has followed, the top of her head still brushing directly beneath his jaw. She’s wearing fleece-lined leggings and the Guardians hoodie that she has stolen from Ilya, who had originally stolen from Sergei, and it makes her look like she does in his memories of her from Russia – young and brash and bursting with noise. “He does not have a choice.”

She grins at him as she wraps her arms around his waist, wiggling her cold hands into the pockets of his jacket; the physical intimacy of their friendship is an unshakeable part of it, even now that they have reached an age where she at least is beginning to date. Ilya has kissed a number of girls and a much smaller number of boys, but he has never felt anything for them close enough to an emotion to do something such as a relationship. He knows that he has a heart because he can feel it beating in his chest, and he knows that it can love because it did so once and shattered in the loss, but he does not think that it healed properly – like when a cup has broken and the few missing shards mean that it can never again hold water. “Because I am amazing and everyone is in love with me?” she asks him, teasingly.

She is amazing, and while he cannot speak for everyone he knows that he is, and always will be, the smallest bit in love with her. Not in a way that feels romantic, not in a way that feels like he wants to marry her one day, but more in a way that feels like in the long process of stitching his heart back together after his mother died, she sewed a little bit of herself in to fill the gaps. “Also this,” and he can see the now familiar car of the Hollander family pull to a stop, see the now familiar head of tousled black hair emerge from the back over Svetlana’s head. Shane has his skates tossed across one shoulder and he waves a goodbye at whichever of his parents has dropped him and a matching hello at Sergei, who has volunteered to sit on one of the benches and go over some tapes for work while the teens skate the canal.

Svetlana had read about the Rideau Skateway a year or so back and had immediately wanted to go; she was never as content in the rink as she was on the frozen pond in their neighborhood, citing the open skies and the fresh ice as better somehow. And so, when the camps had announced their pre-season would be held in Ottawa, she had informed her father that she would be coming along, and she had informed Ilya (and Shane, by proxy) that they would be spending a day exploring the entire seven-point-eight kilometers of it.

“But mostly because I know you will not give him the chance not to,” he finishes, and waits as Shane trades his sneakers for hockey skates. He is dressed in a Montreal Metros hoodie, which Ilya has known for some time now is his favorite team – he was loyal to the Centaurs in the sense that they were his neighbors, but the Metros were the team he was building himself up to play for. Twenty seasons, he had told Ilya, at least, and five cups. And then he would retire and his number would hang from their rafters and the two would be tied to each other for the rest of time, a legend and a legacy all at once. He was loyal to the Centaurs in the way that Svetlana and Ilya were loyal to the Guardians, but he loved the Metros the way that they both loved Boston still. – and he stops about ten feet from them with his hands tucked into his pockets. He’s gone wooden again in the way he does when he is uncomfortable.

“Hi,” he greets, eyes flat and tone flat and Ilya hates him like this, this lifeless projection of his friend. He shakes off Svetlana and skates over, keeping a careful bit of distance, and when the ice across his shoulders seems to thaw he opens one arm in invitation; after a moment too long of hesitation, Shane moves in for a slight hug.

He stands exactly as Ilya had in his home the other night, like this is a place he has never learned how to belong in. “Shane,” he drags him over with an arm slung across his shoulders, mindful of the way that he had confessed in a late night instant messaging conversation sometime between their birthdays that he had never quite had a friend before, “this is your second best friend, Svetlana.” She squawks at him in outrage. “Sveta, this is your second best friend, Shane. You both of course will always like me more.”

It’s so absurd an introduction, so casually arrogant, that Svetlana forgets how to be too wild and Shane forgets how to be too worried and they instead both share a glance between them as if to say can you believe this? and fall into an easy agreement. There’s a scuffle as Svetlana tries to yank his hair and Shane tries to shove him away, and then suddenly they are nothing more than three teenagers on the ice, laughing in the cold. “Nice to meet you,” Shane tells Svetlana with one of his knife-life smiles, the ones that never seem nice but always seem real.

She looks him up and down as though she is examining him, and then at Ilya as if she is expecting him to understand what she has found. And then, in a gesture filled with so much restraint that it is entirely unlike her, she holds open her arms. “Are you a hugger?” she asks instead of simply grabbing at him, instead of manhandling him as she does to Ilya.

Shane’s eyes are bright and his hair has fallen across his eyes, and he looks loose and relaxed and liquid, the way he does when he’s playing hockey – his freckles are far more noticeable in the outside lighting like this, and for a moment Ilya is struck with the urge to count them. He knows that Svetlana has three freckles in the dip of her left wrist, can find them unerringly with his eyes closed like a map to the heartbeat that he holds close like an anchor. And then, just as easily, he acknowledges that it would be weird to ask. “Not really,” Shane admits, shoulders beginning their climb back toward his ears in shame.

She shrugs, and holds out a single hand instead. Waggles her fingers when he only stares at. And then, when his shoulders begin to lower and his smile begins to sharpen, she takes his hand and tugs him alongside her. “Race me.” His smile widens into a grin and, with a bright shout of agreement, he takes off like a bullet across the ice; it startles her into a second or two headstart that should all but assure his win. Svetlana laughs loud and clear like a bell. And then she blows a kiss to where Ilya stands frozen, content enough to watch his two best friends race and wrestle like the children they still have the luxury of being, and she chases after.

Two seconds is not enough. Svetlana overtakes him in only a few hundred yards, and passes him easily.

Later, when the three are tired and cold and all but falling to the bench where Sergei has set their shoes and the takeaway cups of hot chocolate he purchased for them, Shane leans to his side so that he can press his shoulder against Svetlana’s. “You’re fucking terrifying out there,” he tells her with an admiration that borders on awe. There is none of the starstruck attraction that Ilya has seen from the boys at school, no false assurance of skill or beauty or grandeur to win her attention; he simply means it. Says it like a fact, like when he had said that he had the best puckhandling in the division or when he acknowledged that Ilya had a stronger shot for goals. “What’s your secret?”

She leans her head just a moment against his arm before returning to her skates, tugging wet laces free as best as she can with cold fingers. “Figure skating,” she responds. Svetlana is good at hockey because her father is great at hockey, and because she has copied the exercises he uses for himself and his team – but she is the skater that she is because she has as well trained an entire set of muscles, has trained in speed and precision and in using her body to lethal efficiency. She might not be able to beat Shane in a face-off or in a one-on-one pickup, but she can quite literally skate circles around even him on casual ice. “You should try it, it would help with your turns.”

On his other side, Ilya nods his agreement; his curls are damp with sweat and beginning to drip cold water down the collar of his shirt, and despite it being about eleven degrees all day he thinks he might have gotten a sunburn across his cheeks and nose. “Да,” he says, knowing by now that Shane knows at least this in Russian. “Sveta started working with me when I settled in Toronto. Good for edges.”

Skates exchanged for street shoes, they sit in a tired lump and enjoy their drinks while Sergei walks back to get the car; Svetlana is now fully leaning against Shane’s side, who no longer seems to mind, and Ilya has let his head fall back across the back of the bench to stare at the sky. “There’s a few figure skaters at the rink I skate at,” Shane finally says. “I can ask one of them maybe?” She hmms an agreement, or an encouragement – they’re just enough alike, the two of them, that they don’t need as many words to communicate. They’re also vastly different enough that their friendship could serve to change them in small ways. It already has, Shane allowing the casual affection that Ilya and Svetlana never before thought could be unwanted. And then, quietly, “this was,” Shane pauses. Takes a sip of his drink, and spends three times as long holding the cup in his hands like he’s waiting for it to find the words for him. “This was really great. Thank you. It’s nice to have friends.”

Her hand falls open across his lap, fingers wiggling in a now familiar gesture. Without further prompting Shane reaches out, tangles their grip. “Best friends,” she corrects him once he has made the move to accept the way her hand curls around his, nails finding grooves to slide into like they have always been meant to be there. “Lyulya,” she barks suddenly, and he snaps to sit fully upright; when he meets her gaze she is staring at him pointedly, and then to where she and Shane are holding hands. “Do not make me demote you.”

In the same way that he knows that he has a heart, in the same way he can feel the beating in his chest, he knows that she could never. “Best friends,” he agrees, and shyly extends his own hand to Shane as well.

With the same warm hesitation, he takes it.

Chapter End Notes

sorry for the crazy delay in chapters, i was afflicted by the ao3 curse (hospitalized, medically sliced and diced, largely unconscious)

Chapter 7: June 2006

Chapter Notes

OKAY first things first before anyone who knows hockey comes for me: yes. in 2006 the OHL priority selection was held in May, not June. they had also switched to a fully digital draft process in order to save money back in 2000 (but are returning to in-person this year!!!) and therefore would not have been at the Memorial Centre. furthermore, the exceptional status described in this fic for Ilya and Shane wouldn't have existed in 2006. i believe it was created in like 2023 as part of the wcdm??? but the simple fact of all this is that i simply do not care. thank you for coming to my ted talk.

His father allows him to defer his return to Russia later than usual once the OHL announces their draft dates for the year; he normally is sent a plane ticket dated a couple of days after the school year ends and a returning one that gives him a week or so to adjust before the training camps, expected to pass the majority of his free time representing his father’s success and growing hard under the training of his old coach. This summer, for the first time since moving to Canada, he is allowed to spend his birthday with the Vetrovs.

“Happy birthday!!” Lisa crows the words through an ear-to-ear smile, pressing noisy kisses against both of his cheeks, sweeping the hair from his brow to press a third to his forehead. It’s humbling, the way that she loves him in the same way he thinks his mother would have – Loudly. Openly. Unreserved. She makes no effort to hide how proud she is of him, or how happy she is to see this milestone with him. When he first arrived in her home, silent and small and struggling beneath the imbalance of everything he had known suddenly ripped away, she had always seemed so large to him. Something insurmountable. Now she is a few inches shorter than he is, the top of her puff of coils the only thing keeping them of height, and when he returns the hug with an arm draped messily across her shoulders he is reminded how slight she is.

Just as the memory of a mother lost has become easier to carry, so too has the knowledge of one gained.

He laughs when she goes in for a second round of dry, embarrassing kisses – this is normally a torment inflicted upon his return from his homeland, but the entire family has been so pleased to keep him just these two weeks when he is in neither school nor training the majority of his day. “Thank you, Lisochka,” he manages around the rosy blush that seems to have temporarily stolen his tongue. He has not fully celebrated a birthday since Before, his twelfth.

Svetlana is still asleep. He knows this both because it is seven in the morning, a time she would only see by force, and also because her bedroom door had been firmly closed when he passed down the hallway. He has always been the earlier riser between the two – too many routines from coaches or from his father to allow him to lay about in bed for too long. Even, especially, on his birthday. “You want pancakes?” she asks, turning back to the stove. So far the only thing awake in the kitchen besides themselves is the coffeemaker, but she reaches a questioning hand toward the stovetop. “French toast?” And then, turning back with a sly smile, she gestures toward the front door where the family’s outside shoes sit. “McDonald’s run?”

He loves her.

It hits him then, early in the morning on a day he usually does his best not to think about: he loves Lisa. It feels very terrifying, admitting that, because once he has started he feels as though he cannot stop. He loves Lisa, and Sergei, and the house in Toronto, and the room that has not been for guests in so long now that it has become unrecognizable. For only the second time since his mother has died he feels the grief and longing for something simple – a kind word, a warm touch, the feeling of safety of a mother’s call – threaten to spill over. Instead, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood, he manages to keep the proof that he has more to lose now than ever from escaping his lashes. “If we hurry,” he says, voice sounding as tellingly wet as his eyes feel, “we can hide the evidence before Sergei is back from the rink.”

She reaches out to fondly swipe at the mole beneath his eye, or so they will both tell themselves, before jangling her keys from the bowl on the counter, and taps her finger against the tip of his nose in the way his mother used to when he was very small. “That’s my boy.”

The OHL draft is held over the final weekend in June; Ilya goes into it nervous. Not that he will not be chosen, because he knows that he will. He and Shane have been the breakaway stars of the AAA since they were preteens and they are all but assured places amongst one of the twenty teams in the league. Instead, he finds that the uncertainty of where he will spend the next few years of his life to be altogether more nerve-wracking.

Privately, in a voice that sounds too much like an echo of his father and his brother, he thinks that this is what happens once you love something. It becomes so much easier to have taken away.

It has been less than two weeks since he finally acknowledged the secret that he has been hiding beneath his ribs for years now. That his home is not Russia or even Canada but instead a two-story home on a sleepy street, one with too much hockey flowing from the walls and the shelves and the VHS cupboard but an equal amount of love helping to shore up the edges. And now, having finally allowed himself to have this – it has never been about the wanting. Ilya wants. He has wanted and coveted and craved since the day he was born, tiny hands reaching out to the world that he could not yet fully see and clawing at the unknown for some scrap of comfort. Ilya has always wanted. It is only recently, in these last few months, that he has allowed himself to have.

“You look like you want to throw up,” Sergei leans over to whisper against his hair. They are both dressed in suits, though Ilya’s is just a touch too large. Lisa had insisted, saying that there were chances he would be called up at any point during the following season and would need a good gameday suit, and that he was growing now less like a weed and instead something much wider in the shoulders and arms and thighs, and this would serve him until his official rookie campaign begun. “Not like you are going to,” Sergei is quick to assure him, when Ilya flinches at his words, “but just that you want to. Are you worried?”

He’s not worried, he realizes. He’s sad. “I don’t want to leave home,” he admits quietly. “What if I get drafted and end up in Pennsylvania and you are all so far away again?”

There’s a soft intake of breath beside him, and then Sergei has clasped one hand in between his two much larger ones; there are still bumps from broken bones and callouses from the places his goalie stick would land, and Ilya feels very childlike at how small it makes him feel. “Ilyusha,” Sergei’s voice is even softer. There are two officials still in the introductory stages of their nightly speeches and the crowd has more or less lost their restless edge, but he creates a bubble for only them – and Shane, seated at Ilya’s other side, who glances over with concern to see the comforting that is taking place between the two he has so rarely seen even be serious with the other. “Lisa has already uprooted her life once for hockey. I don’t think I would be able to stop her from doing the same for you.”

And now Ilya does want to throw up. “Lisa would move? For me?”

Sergei looks at him as though he is still that scrap of a child he scraped out of the frozen earth of his mother’s grave. Like he is small and soft and in need of protection. Like he looks at Svetlana sometimes – like he is imagining the infant he once held in his too-large hands, and imagining the adult he is now watching grow up in front of his eyes. He looks at Ilya in the same way that Ilya has seen Mr. David look at Shane.

Like a father.

“I think there is very little Lisa would not do for you, сыночек,” he says completely seriously, and squeezes the hand he is still holding in his own. They both pretend they do not notice the way the words have hit Ilya like a dirty check, have not stolen the words and the breath from him and left him frozen, blinking tears from a blank stare. “Now tell Shane you are okay, he looks like he’s going to cause a scene.”

He does, but only for people who know him well. He is still sitting in his place at Ilya’s side, his parents on the other side of him – they had secured five seats in the Kingston Memorial Centre for the priority selection ceremony through a contact of the Hollanders. Shane, after all, had been training and playing for the teams here since he was twelve. With the selection in the process of switching to a fully digital affair the seating had been limited, and they were lucky to have the row they did. – and at first glance does not seem to be moving at all. It is only the sharp, wooden set of his shoulders and jaw and the white knuckled grip he has on his own hands that gives away his unease. Without blinking Ilya pulls away from Sergei, and reaches over to slide one of his hands between Shane’s, loosening his clenched grip and tangling their fingers together.

“It’s okay,” he says, and squeezes Shane’s hand much in the way Sergei had just done for him. “The waiting is making me nervous.”

Slowly the harsh lines of Shane’s upper body loosen, and his jaw releases; he squeezes Ilya’s hand in return. In acknowledgement. “Yeah,” he agrees softly, “me too.” For the next fifteen minutes of speaking that seems to be directed largely to the cameras and their online audience, probably narration that is overlaid across footage from the previous season they cannot see from their vantage point, they sit in the dim lighting with their hands clenched together, curled toward the other like parentheses.

And then, finally—

Shane goes first in the draft.

It’s not a surprise, not really. The boys might be more or less evenly matched in talent but the Frontenacs had the first round pick this year – Shane has been playing in their city and for their affiliates for years now. The only way he could have been selected by a different team would have been if someone else had been given the chance to claim him first. His name is called by the head coach of the Kingston Frontenacs, a man he has known since he was eleven, and while the rest of the arena audience (and perhaps the at-home crowd as well. Lisa and Svetlana had spent an afternoon at The Source purchasing a set of cables that would allow them to play the stream from a laptop to the large television in the living room the week previous, though had not tested it before Ilya and Sergei had left for the trip.) had hooted and cheered and applauded, Shane had only allowed himself a small, private smile and the whooping full body hug Ilya had leapt up and dragged him into.

They present him with a sweater at the ceremony. This more than anything reveals how much of a done deal the franchise had considered him – there was no ambiguity toward his number, toward his belonging with them. He was Ottawa’s son but he was Kingston’s star. He and his parents pose for pictures with the coach, with the league officials, the stark black and gold and white of the uniform making his eyes and freckles stand out even further.

Ilya laughs. The uniforms are based on the Boston team’s from the era Sergei still played with them – Svetlana will be thrilled. She had threatened to not support any future teams that did not have a good color scheme.

In the moments before the second name, both Sergei and the Hollander parents assure him would be Ilya’s – he doesn’t feel even a twitch of disappointment that he has not been chosen over his friend. Not when it means that he does not need to move to a city hours away, not leave his home, not when the team with the second choice is—

The Oshawa Generals coach is a middle-aged man with a kind, Canadian face, and their rink is under an hour from the Vetrov house. When they welcome him to the team they do so with the sort of pride he is more used to seeing from Sergei and Lisa than people like his father, his stepmother, his old coaches. Like they see in him the potential rather than the profit. They seem shocked to have gotten him, halfway convinced that Kingston might have wanted him instead, and promise to have a kit for him by the time he is eligible to be called to play for them in January – both he and Shane had been granted the exceptional status that allowed them to be drafted at fifteen, but not to play. The league had ruled instead that they could be eligible for play in only the second half of the season, and no more than twenty-five regular season games. Instead, he returns to the empty seat beside the Hollanders with a dark blue hoodie with red and white accents that looks, all things considered, staggeringly familiar.

“Boston and Montreal,” Shane laughs at the colors of their new teams, and taps his fist to the back of Ilya’s hand; Ilya taps back against Shane’s knuckles, and then at Shane’s forearm the way he usually does his stick. It is, by now, an instinctual gesture between the pair.

Boston and Montreal, but not the way they had planned. “Yes, well,” and Ilya cannot stop the way his smile tugs wide with happiness that he can have this – the career, and his friend, and far more importantly, a home. He can have all of these without needing to lose one for the others. Neither he nor Shane will need to relocate for the next few years, and they will play against each other with far more frequency than they do now. And then, when the time comes for their next level of play—

“Don’t get used to it,” he grins. “We’re switching back later.”

He has missed Alexei’s wedding. He and Katya said their vows in the grandeur of the Храм Христа́ Спаси́теля back in the springtime to a crowd of their father’s and uncles’s peers and a handful of their friends, and had moved into the Moscow apartment that Alexei had kept since their mother’s death. The only person who seems irritated that Ilya was not present is Alexei himself, who snarls a few words about the future superstar upstaging him from a world away before he drops Ilya at their father’s doorstep and speeds away. He assumes this means that news of the upcoming draft had been discussed at some point during the event, though he has not heard from his father since the week before the draft itself when he called to inform that the tickets would arrive soon.

Grigori and Polina are not home; a note left in the front hall informs him that they are visiting her family and will return in a day or so of his arrival.

For the first time in his life he does not mind the quiet – there had been enough noise from his brother between the airport and the front door to remind him that sometimes, in some cases, it was not the quiet that cut at him. There’s a world of difference between the noise of the Rozanov residence as there is that of the Vetrov house, and just the same between the quiets; the stillness of being the only one in the building is softer than that of the tip-toeing when he is not, the minefield between what he thinks and what he says and what his father allows. The quiet of being alone is not the quiet of being ignored.

He takes his bag to his room, which has changed little if at all since he last lived in it full time, and begins the methodical process of unpacking the parts of him brought from Canada and finding space to store them here in Russia. He doesn’t bring much with him. Someone, he suspects Polina, keeps his wardrobe here stocked with clothes of the newest fashions and his current size so that he might always be a proper reflection of their household; they still speak of him as though he is in any way theirs, speak of the distance and time spent away in training for his inevitable prodigal, and profitable, return. The majority of what she buys him is expensive and nearly all of it is solid black, so much so that he now associates the color with his time there.

He changes out of his clothes from the plane and into a pair of grey sweatpants that have been washed so many times they have gone cloud soft and comfortable – they still smell like the detergent Lisa uses. And then he tugs on his Generals hoodie, the blue one that he had brought partly to show his father that he has made something of himself and partly to show himself that he has people waiting for him back home.

It doesn’t quite fit across the shoulders, and the sleeves leave about an inch of his wrists exposed. It doesn’t fit the way that it did before he had packed it into his bag.

Glancing down reveals the familiar logo of the Montreal Metros, and the distance between Moscow and Toronto – or, in this case, Moscow and Ottawa – has never before felt greater. Shane and Svetlana had helped him pack, though their helping had been more sitting on his bed and watching him pack; he must have grabbed the wrong sweatshirt during the chaos of it all, three loud teens and a duffel bag strewn across a full-sized bed. It had not been the first time the similarities in colors had been mentioned, though the Generals uniforms for play were more akin to those of the New York Admirals (something that delighted Slava to no end). He brings the sleeve to his nose and inhales the familiar brightness of the Hollander household, the fireplace warmth, and wishes very much that he could be there instead of this otherwise empty tomb of a building.

Another tug at the sweatshirt reveals a crinkling from the pocket, which reveals itself to be a scrap of paper torn from the notebooks Ilya and Svetlana and Shane use for school – See you in September! reads the familiar slanted writing, note signed with a familiar smiley face. Not an accident, then.

He wants to cry. There are times in Russia where he feels so alone it’s like he won’t be able to survive it, clawing his way one day closer to returning to a place that doesn’t keep him close with an iron grip around his ribs – he can barely breathe in Russia, can barely exhale through the crush of expectations and etiquettes and the moving dangers of his father’s and his brother’s ire. He rarely speaks of it to Svetlana even, and never to Shane, though they both know he dreads the return to his homeland to near illness, driving himself to nausea and nights without sleep in the days leading up to his flight and returning quiet and cold. But this?

He had packed his Generals sweatshirt to remind him that there were people, an entire team, waiting for him to come back to Canada. Instead at least one of his best friends had conspired to send him with a reminder that there are people waiting for him to come home. He feels—

He boots up his laptop and waits impatiently for it to connect to the internet. Waits even more so for Skype to load, for him to be able to select the familiar name and call without a second thought as to what time it is back in Canada. Is nearly vibrating when the call connects and a sleepy, familiar voice greets him, thick with the seven hour difference. “‘lo?”

“Sveta,” he says urgently, and waits for her face to appear on the screen from the previous view of only pillows and blankets and the back of her arm. She smiles, faintly, when she sees him. “Sveta, I am having a crisis.”

She tugs the silk bonnet that covers her curls down by the wide brim to also cover her eyes. “You haven’t been in Russia long enough for a crisis,” she informs him, and he watches with fixated horror as one carefully manicured finger enters the video, moving for the button to hang up on him – it is, the more he thinks about it, somewhere in the vicinity of five in the morning for her.

“Sveta!” and the finger pauses at the urgency in his voice. “Shane sent his Metros sweatshirt with me.”

Slowly, like a butterfly emerging after a long period in a cocoon, the image of his best friend slowly appears again; she has tugged her eyes free and pushed her pillows to the side, and from where she has placed her laptop it feels as though he is curled up next to her. He wishes very much that were so. “Yes,” she tells him simply, but watches him through the screen with eyes that have traded their sleepiness for something sharp. “Yes, I watched him do it. He wanted to make sure you remembered that you have friends if you got lonely there.”

The grip around his chest is not the suffocating one of his father’s idea of him, nor the sorrowful one of his mother’s absence – this one instead feels very much like he had felt on his birthday, when the feelings he had stuffed into hiding finally grew too large to deny. “What the fuck,” he asks Svetlana, and a little bit himself. She has already leaned back into her pillows, though she’s kept the call open in invitation. It’s the same when they share physical space, and he catches her assessing glance through the computer screen one final time. “Svetlana,” he tells her with the same seriousness he once told her once, in this same bed in fact, that he was not sure what a heart was for. “What the fuck.”

She looks at him like there are not thousands of miles and seven hours between them; she looks at him like she has already seen into his very heart and was only waiting for him to find her there. “Shane is very pretty,” she admits like this is not the first time she’s noticed it, and the acceptance in her eyes is soft and open. “You have always liked pretty people, especially if they’re better than you at hockey.”

He is in Russia for the next four weeks, in a house where he has no more allies than he would in the entire country at large, and he has just discovered the likely months belated realization that he has feelings for his male best friend. He immediately places the sweatshirt, the epiphany, and the entire conversation into the deepest corner of his wardrobe, and he closes the door. “We’re not talking about this,” he tells Svetlana’s sympathetic expression through the screen of the laptop. “Not here.”

His father’s house is not a place for such hopeful lines of thought.

The Vetrov (slash Rozanov, though he found there was very little need or want for the distinction) household measured the off-season by three distinct events. The first was Ilya’s return to Russia, usually within the first weekend of freedom and extending torturously close to the end; he was always delivered back to them in time for the training camps, which his father considered more a part of Ilya’s duty than anything else, but often caused him to miss the first half of the second era of the off-season. This was, of course, the week or two where Slava and Bobbi drove up to Toronto to spend time with their surrogate siblings and niece and nephew, though there had been discussions that perhaps the following summer might see Ilya and Svetlana old enough to fly down to New York instead. Slava and Bobbi stayed until the weekend before the week of camp, as the pre-season usually stampeded in directly on the tail end of the camps and both Sergei and Slava had their teams to return to.

However, thanks to the draft shortening the time Ilya was required to present himself before Grigori’s inspections, this summer meant that he was back in Canada well before the annual visit.

“Uncle Slava!” Svetlana is always the first to greet them, a hug for the gruff man who still pretends that he is not glad to see her and then another for the woman who is visibly thrilled. She has only recently begun dying her hair to echo Bobbi’s in tone, the same hint of admiration that she had teased Ilya for feeling for Slava somehow a surprise to herself.

This year is the first where Ilya does not feel self-conscious about hugging Bobbi back; it has been easier speaking to Mrs. Yuna as well, now that he no longer places such a minefield around the word mother. “Hi Bobbi,” he says to the still too-glamorous redhead that has somehow become a few inches shorter since he last saw her; she had seemed to tower over him when they first met, and now they are of height.

She holds his face between both of her hands and turns his head this way and that, smiling the entire time. “Who is this creature and where is that slight little child who used to read The Hobbit to me? Lisa, what are you feeding this boy?”

“Everything,” Lisa says with a joking smile and complete seriousness in her tone, and reaches up to tousle Ilya’s curls before she and Bobbi share a joyful reunion of a hug – despite the few years between their age and the ever increasing years between their time spent sharing a city and a place in the stands (the WAGs of the five Russian players had always maintained a separate relationship than to those of the rest of the team. Two of the players had come over already married, their Russian wives left to the fringes due to their differing language and customs, and Sergei and Slava had already had their accident and cemented their brotherhood before the final bachelor settled down. This had left Lisa and Bobbi in something of a bubble all their own, and each still maintained that the other was their best friend despite the miles that now separated them.) the two are as much sisters as their husbands are brothers – which is to say entirely, and yet not at all.

After Sergei and Svetlana have had their way with him, Ilya shyly stands shoulder to shoulder with Slava and presses against him. Not quite a hug, but much more than he’s previously allowed himself; they speak on the phone monthly, and Slava watches tapes from Ilya’s games which he dissects with the same impartial judgement that he does the professional players under his unofficial care. It’s something that Ilya has come to appreciate, the way that Slava is no more inclined to preserve his dignity than Svetlana is. He loves that Sergei loves him, but thinks he might need the relentlessness of Slava’s critiques if he ever wants to be the best. “Thank you,” he says softly. “I got your present.”

To celebrate the draft and the start of his final season in the AAA, Slava had mailed Ilya a belated and unexpected birthday present that had been waiting for him when he returned from Russia: his old sweater from the KHL, before moving to America. It was in Oshawa red and white, but with a much more Russian star in blue across the chest and the crisp name across the back in the familiar blocky Cyrillic letters. Васи́льев 81. It was the number he had worn all through his Russian career – he had switched to #13 in the NHL, the number that had not been officially retired into Boston’s rafters but had, out of respect and nearly two decades of mourning, never been worn since.

It was the original version of the many copies Ilya had worn as a child, and he had held it for a few minutes reverently, and a few minutes longer once he’d finally understood what it meant.

The thing was, Ilya had never quite had a number. He had skated as #6 back in Russia and #37 in Toronto, but only because they had been provided to him with the uniforms – he knew that Sergei had never played a game without the #66 across his back, knows that Shane had his #24 tied somehow into his identity by now, knew many players who felt as strongly for the digits that were as much their name as the ones their parents gave them, but it had never been him. The Generals had asked him, when they had drafted him, if there was any preference he might have had, and he had hesitated; he knew what he wanted, but not if he deserved it.

Desire won out. And when he presented the newer jersey, red and white and blue so much like Slava’s old one that Ilya had worn when Sergei took him to sign the paperwork, later that first night in Toronto to Slava as a gift, the older man had taken one look at the back – ROZANOV 81 – before pulling him into a hug.

“It looks good on you,” he whispers against Ilya’s curls, the softest he has ever heard Slava’s voice before. “I’m honored you would wear it.”

“Thank you,” he tries to reply in English, in Russian, and can only manage some mix of the two. “For thinking I am worthy of it.”

Slava ends the hug abruptly, holding Ilya at arm’s length by his shoulders; his face is gruff and worn from pain and loss but his eyes are bright, sharp as glass. “It is only a number, Ilyusha,” and his voice is like the ice, solid and soothing; Slava is charismatic, despite the brusqueness he wears like an old coat, and magnetic. He speaks in such a way that commands to be listened to – after the accident and retirement and his relocation he had taken a job in the Admirals arena as one of the commentators, and usually led the post-game breakdowns on the local stations. He was someone who spoke simply, and people believed him. “What gives it worth is the man who wears it.”

There’s just enough time before the season begins for his U16 team to order a new kit. By the time the training camp is set to begin, he never again hits the ice without the number 81 emblazoned across his back.

Chapter 8: May 2007

Chapter Notes

if you saw the chapter count go down by one no you didn't.... I cut a chapter that was basically just filler in the name of getting to the actual plot, please ignore the eleven month time skip

it will probably get discussed at some point

Shane turns sixteen on a Thursday.

The only reason the day of the week is important is because the three have school the following day in cities some four and half hours apart from the other, and therefore cannot celebrate together – Svetlana and Ilya crowd into his bed around his laptop for a Skype call that Shane takes, smiling in that so rare unrestrained way of his, on his living room couch. It’s easy enough to pretend, for a few minutes at least, that they are crammed onto the same soft brown loveseat, too far into each other’s spaces for anything except very close friendships. “My favorite old man!” Svetlana crows into the camera, leaning close to press a kiss against it. “Soon they’ll let you behind the wheel.”

Both Ilya and Shane make matching expressions – scrunched noses, lips pulled thin. The thing is that Shane would be a wonderful driver. He’s cautious and focused and he follows rules with exacting precision, and he has an awareness of his body and the space it takes up in a way that would translate as easily to the road as it does the ice. It’s just that he’s equally, if not more so—

Well.

“Shane’s too neurotic for that.”

“Driving makes me anxious.”

They make the same matching expressions – eyes wide, brows drawn, lips turned down in a way that feels too intentional to be natural – as they realize they are speaking over each other to say essentially the same thing. Svetlana only laughs, loud and brash and unapologetic, at the both of them. “You two have become the same person,” she says, fondly and only slightly jokingly, and laughs louder as they both immediately go to protest the statement.

That night, after Shane has had dinner with his parents and Ilya has had dinner with the Vetrovs, he sits on his bed and he hits the fourth speed dial on his cell phone – after years of sharing an old Nokia between them, and mostly after the draft that would keep Ilya in a separate city for the majority of his days sometimes, Lisa had relented and allowed each of the teens to have their own phone. They had chosen a matching pair of Moto Razrs, though Svetlana’s was hot pink and Ilya’s was a sort of midnight blue, a similar navy color as his Generals hoodie. The first week he’d had it, Svetlana had attached a Hello Kitty sticker to the back panel that he’d pretended to mind much more than he actually had, and had retaliated by attaching a hockey themed charm to hers.

“Hey,” Shane’s familiar voice comes from the speaker, not sounding even the slightest bit confused as to why he is calling for a second time in a single day. Birthdays aside, they frequently call or text in the late evenings. Shane is an only child and Svetlana no longer crawls into Ilya’s bed except for on the very worst nights, and sometimes they both find there to be too much in the silence; it’s common enough, one of them initiating a call for a voice to chase away the lingering darkness.

Ilya leans back against the headboard and tries to find something to do with his hands. “Next season we get to play against each other,” he picks up the threads of a conversation from nearly a week ago. They’ve had many others since, but this one had been interrupted by a practice and had yet to be revisited. Kingston and Oshawa are not quite division rivals within the Eastern Conference – Kingston and Ottawa are usually billed as long-standing opponents, and Oshawa has a long-standing hatred for Peterborough in regards to hockey that not even Sergei seems to understand. – so they aren’t likely to play the other more than six times a season, but that’s a good six more times than they usually see the other a year.

There’s a puff of air across the line that is recognizable as Shane’s subdued laughter – and he laughs, he does, but it’s usually something that sounds as though it’s been surprised out of him. Like he’s felt it before he’s had time to think about it, to overthink. This is the more normal noise, but it’s frequent enough that even the tiny speaker cannot disguise it. “You’re so excited to lose,” he says in a tone that sounds very much like his sharp little smile looks: victorious.

“Fuck you,” but Ilya is laughing too now. The current season saw neither of the teams making it to the playoffs, but the Generals had come out an entire point ahead of the Frontenacs that he easily reminded Shane of. It was the same with their defense of their hometown professional teams; neither was currently great, but one was always slightly worse.

Just recently, the Centaurs had beat the Guardians 1-0. In overtime.

“Did Sergei say it was okay?” Another thread of a previous conversation, picked up easily; there’s usually at least three or four current topics between the two of them that are traded between without much of a transition. It’s the same way with Svetlana. With people who know each other very well.

This one is in regards to the summer – before going to Russia, again after his birthday thanks to the father that didn’t care enough to update the schedule from the year previous and instead merely sent a nearly identical copy of the email to whichever of his many underlings would be responsible for booking the flights, the Hollanders had invited Ilya to spend a week with them at their cabin near the lake. It was a few hours from Ottawa, but it was where they spent their summers. And, this year, they had thought he might like to join them for some time before he was required to fly across the globe.

He nods, then makes a more affirmative noise when he recalls that Shane can’t actually see him. They Skype with enough frequency that it’s become habit, assuming there’s video. “He said it was fine. We’re waiting to hear from my father, so he can have me fly out of Ottawa instead.”

There’s a strained silence then. Ilya does not mention his father unless he is brought up, but has managed to say enough that Shane does not like him. Ilya is fairly certain that he doesn’t like his father either, but that thought is usually swiftly followed by a series of reminders in the very man’s voice that sons are meant to respect their fathers. Privately, in the same parts of himself that he will never admit that have counted Shane’s freckles across a series of computer screens and that still sometimes wish his mother had taken him away with her, Ilya can admit that he does not much respect his father either.

He does, however, in the way all little boys do, crave his approval. He knows he will never have his love.

And so he pushes himself on the ice, far beyond what Sergei and the team coaches ask of him, because at least then he can tell his father that he is a winner. That he will be drafted to the NHL and take his team to the Cup. He returns to Russia in the summers where he allows his father to brag about him in public and berate him in private, and where he pretends that Polina means anything to him at all. And this – he will not spend time with his friend if his father will not allow it, because he might be Ilya, Lisa and Sergei and Svetlana’s Ilya, but he is equally still a Rozanov, and their bloodline is like iron. Like chains.

“If he says no,” Shane finally allows, voice flat and pissy in the way it gets when he argues with opposing captains or with rink officials, “maybe you can come to Ottawa instead? Earlier, I mean.”

If he says no, Ilya does not say, he will likely have Ilya returned to Russia like an escaped dog before the month of May has even ended. Will likely never allow him to leave again, across the world to where he is allowed such things as friends and freedoms and other frivolous distractions that allow weakness to fester.

“Yes,” he says instead, because he has not yet been able to mail his birthday gift to Shane and this is something he can give him instead. “Maybe.”

Ilya is told that he must return to Russia by the seventeenth of June at the latest – for once, it does not feel as though it is a prison sentence. Instead the email comes from Alexei rather than their father, with the added news that the seventeenth is Katya’s due date and that he simply has to be there to meet the niece or nephew he had not previously known he was expecting.

The tickets, however, show a departure from Ottawa rather than Toronto when they arrive; a concession offered from someone he knows is not his father. The only response received from Grigori since the end of Ilya’s season was that he hoped he would learn discipline before his season began again in Oshawa – this was in response to his asking to spend a week with Shane’s family. The email informing his father that he had been recognized both for having the highest amounts of goals in the entire Toronto U18 league as well as being a member of the All-Stars lineup had gone, for weeks now, unanswered. Equally ignored was the voicemail left on Sergei’s cell phone, some angry three in the morning call from Russia that he had informed Lisa and Ilya with that quiet humor of his was hardly worth his time at breakfast the following morning.

Since the Hollanders usually don’t leave for their cottage until a bit later in the season – Mr. David’s work usually increases exponentially for the month of June as the financial year ends, and then he spends a well deserved month or two out of his office and out of reach of his employer. However, as Ilya’s been told countless times now, he is always welcome in their Ottawa home; Sergei drives him over on the tenth of June with his suitcase (and the gearbag that he is so rarely without in Canada) for the week packed and his suitcase for Russia stowed in the Hollander garage for his flight in a week. In the driveway, when the engine has shut off, neither of the two moves for a moment.

“This is somehow harder than dropping you at the airport,” Sergei admits. His voice sounds the same as it has when he sends Svetlana off on her dates, or when he told Ilya that of course Lisa would move with him if needed – like he has blinked and suddenly his children are much more grown than he was prepared for. For a single moment Ilya is gripped with the insane, irrational urge to tell the Hollanders nevermind, to tell Sergei to drive him back home and let him rot on the couch for the next seven days before he goes back to Russia. It feels like the way he used to cling to his mother, used to wrap his chubby toddler fingers in the ties of her dress and follow along after her like they were always meant to share space.

For a single moment, Ilya wants to tell Grigori to keep his silences and his stern remarks, and that his is no longer the approval Ilya so desperately strives for.

Ilya fidgets with the threads that slither from the distressed patch near his front pocket; he had made the mistake of throwing his jeans and his skates into the same bag one morning with no idea where his guards had ended up, and the jeans were now slightly torn in three different places. “It is only Mr. David’s and Mrs. Yuna’s house,” he says in a way that he hopes is comforting. He has never been in the position to comfort anybody before, but has more than learned how to do so – his first teacher was the very man he is now trying, largely ineffectually, to emulate.

A huff of a laugh is the response. Sergei is rarely a loud man, though he is a large one – his wife is usually the one to do the talking in their relationship, a bright and brilliant woman with the personality that drew everyone, even soft-spoken hockey players who barely speak her language, to her. Svetlana takes after her father in nearly all regards except the quiet. Ilya thinks he is the opposite, that he is the most like Sergei in the times when he cannot find the words and instead says nothing at all. – and he laughs like someone who was once scolded for doing so. “I have celebrated your birthday every year since your birth,” he says softly. Steady. “But only once with you in my sight.”

The Rozanov-Vetrov unit had celebrated his birthday a few days early, with dinner and presents the night before. The standout had been a combination from the four main adults in his life: a week in New York City with Slava and Bobbi when he returned from Russia, which Slava assured him included some time on the Admirals’ rink. It was the second best birthday he could remember, despite being days removed from the actual event, and topped only by the year previous where he had been allowed, for once, to celebrate and be celebrated with those who loved him.

“I am used to sharing you with your father,” he shrugs off the mention of Grigori in the way that he always does. If possible he has become even less fond of the man over the years that Ilya has spent in Canada than he was when Irina was still his wife – there has been a very good reason that neither he or Lisa have returned to Russia since bringing him away from it. Ilya strongly suspects that it is because at least one of them, most likely Lisa, would end up detained or worse were they within reach of his father again. “But I am not yet ready to share you with the world.”

He wants to laugh at the absurdity of the sentence but finds he cannot. There is something, something that feels very much like the way his mother used to hug him, that has seized the air from his lungs. “Is only the Hollanders,” he repeats, this time in a voice that sounds like it had when he was younger.

Sergei’s familiar hand settles at the back of his neck. “For now, Сыночек. But very soon also the world.”

It is not only pride in Sergei’s voice, but certainty. Like the inevitability of Ilya’s rise to the NHL is nothing more to him than a simple fact. The ease of his belief is humbling. “Seryozha,” and in that moment Ilya realizes that he has never before learned how to miss this man in any way except as he does in Russia, when he leaves his feelings from Canada in the luggage beneath his bed and becomes yet another of the carved marble statues that stand at the fringes of his father’s home. He has never once, since coming into his home, been away from him and still been himself.

Another huff of a laugh and Sergei finally reaches for the handle of the door. “I know, I know. Sveta is right, I am getting weepy in my old age.” He is forty-two years old. Grigori is some twenty years older and has never once felt anything for Ilya stronger than disappointment that he has not somehow found a way to avoid being a child altogether. He wonders what might have changed so greatly in the decades between their birth that allowed Sergei to grow up knowing how to love. “Come on, Ilyusha. Let’s get you inside.”

The boys spend the week in the way that teenage boys are supposed to, and in the way they so very rarely have had the luxury to. They sleep late – or, in Shane’s case, merely later. For years now he has been awake at four in the morning to make the nearly two hour drive to Kingston in time for training and practices, and finished assignments for classes in the two hours home. Both he and Ilya attend schools local to their practice rinks, but not always in person; Canada has enough programs to aid the serious athletes who come to train that a number of schools have dedicated hybrid programs for hockey players. Ilya attends in person more than Shane does, largely due to his practice rink being a mere twenty minutes from the Vetrov home. – and spend too many hours playing video games together. They play soccer, or a sort that feels more like hockey, in the Hollander backyard.

They hit the ice. Of course they do. There’s a public rink available for skating and a few rinks more than excited to let them practice or even join a pickup game or two with their home players. Ilya thinks their friendship would somehow change fundamentally if they did not take an opportunity to compete on opposite sides of the red line.

They roam downtown Ottawa; Shane is a terrible tour guide. Despite living the majority of his life there (and technically he has never moved, he has merely been spending more time in Kingston as the years have gone on) he is woefully unfamiliar with much of the city – he knows the financial buildings that his father works with and he can point out the major landmarks, but when Ilya asks him about museums he only shrugs off knowledge of any beyond the Sports Hall of Fame and Ilya laughs until he feels lightheaded. “You are so boring,” he says, lips curled in a fond grin and voice still slightly hiccoughing from the bout of laughter, and Shane doesn’t look even the slightest bit offended.

They go to the movies once, catching a showing of the third Ocean’s Eleven film; it isn’t very good. It’s fun in the way of the first film, which neither of them knew had become the first in a series and therefore had never seen the sequel, but also in the way that does not feel removed enough. Ilya spends the majority of the screening making slightly too-loud comments in Shane’s ear that have him shushing him through tiny snorts of laughter and, on one occasion, throwing an entire handful of popcorn at him.

For his birthday Mr. David and Mrs. Yuna surprise him by taking them all to a late breakfast at a diner that he had expressed an interest in – Mr. David had talked about the waffles there and how when he and Mrs. Yuna had been younger they used to go there for dinner sometimes, would order breakfast at nine in the evening and spend far too long laughing together in the booths. To a teenage boy the idea of waffles good enough to lure parents out of the house that late was enough that Ilya had sworn he needed to try them. – and had arranged, very much behind his back, for the Vetrovs to join them. Ilya had seen them on the sidewalk outside and frozen immediately, had looked over at Shane’s smug little smile with an expression that Svetlana would later tell him looked like he had just survived a horror film and was facing his rescue, and had flung himself at Sergei so forcefully that he had nearly knocked the man over. Had lifted Lisa off of the ground when he hugged her in greeting, had not shied away from the sixteen kisses she smacked against his forehead and cheeks. Had even allowed Svetlana to mock him for the emotional outburst in English rather than Russian.

And then, on his final day in Canada – his flight was set to depart from Ottawa the following day at around nine in the morning, just enough time for a final breakfast in the Hollander kitchen before Mr. David had volunteered to drop him off at the airport. – Shane mentions in that offhand way he does with things that are not about hockey, the casual and almost careless way of things that are simply not important to him, that a few people from his old practice rink that he keeps up with have invited them down to skate. Some of them used to play with Shane all the way back in mites. A few others are apparently figure skaters he’s met through the old teammates. He doesn’t call them friends, but he’s friendly enough with them that they’ve spent time in the off-seasons together.

“What do you say?” he shares one of those knife-sharp smiles with Ilya like he isn’t suggesting they absolutely humiliate some U18s that he’ll have to see for another few weeks. “I bet we can play on the same team for a game before they catch on.”

And Ilya cannot agree fast enough.

They have their gearbags in the car before Mrs. Yuna has even finished the tea she said she would drive them after drinking; she rolls her eyes at them fondly from the front door, cradling the mug in her hands, and takes another two sips before giving in. From the driver’s seat she meets Shane’s eyes in the rearview mirror – Ilya has been allowed Shane’s usual seat in the front due to the two inches of height he still has over his friend. “I’ll come get you in a few hours,” she says, and continues before he can voice the protests that he has opened his mouth to release. “Ilya has a long day tomorrow, he needs to get some sleep. And we would like to have one last dinner before he leaves.”

Shane’s mouth shuts with an audible click at the reminder that Ilya is leaving soon. Beside Mrs. Yuna, Ilya feels a similar tension snap into place across his shoulders.

She drives them to the Civic Centre where one of the trainers, either for the hockey players or the figure skaters, has rented them the ice for a couple of hours; the 67’s are off for the season and the facility often plays host to local U18s and under when available, so it’s easy enough for a trainer to purchase some private sessions, with the promise to return by four. Ilya nods his head in agreement and Shane flips his phone open to set an alarm as a reminder. Across the parking lot is a small crowd of other teens, maybe five or so people, and one of them waves when they see Ilya and Shane approaching. “Hey,” Shane greets, voice quiet and face bland.

“Shaney!” one of the guys calls, and jostles their shoulders together once they are close enough; Shane allows it, but does not return it. The guy standing next to him does the same as the first one reaches out a fist to knock against Ilya’s. “Hey man,” he says with less familiarity but with the same level of warmth – Canadian friendliness at its finest. Ilya makes a conscious effort to plaster a mild smile across his face in an attempt to look less—

Well.

“Oh shit,” says the second guy like he’s suddenly seen something dangerous. “From Toronto, right? Number 81? Fuck, I saw you at the exhibition games.”

“Hi,” Ilya manages to avoid turning a smile gone smug and mean at the recognition on Shane, who is already muttering something decidedly very not nice beneath his breath, and knocks his fist against both of those that have been offered to him. “I’m Ilya, I am looking forward to,” and now he does glance at Shane. Ignores the way his brow has furrowed and he shakes his head minutely. “Well, beating you.”

“Fuck off,” Shane mutters louder, like he hasn’t been the one to plan for them to play two on three against these old acquaintances of his that are likely preparing for nothing beyond the college level, as the two guys laugh and chirp back. It’s the same in Toronto; players seem to like Ilya more the meaner he is to them, like he’s somehow an exotic novelty among the teams of nice Canadian boys. Like maybe hockey players are glad for the people they know they can drop a bit of the politeness around. The third guy that Ilya assumes plays hockey, broad and brash when he knocks his shoulder into Ilya first, and then Shane, even offers his hand for Ilya to shake.

They’re heading inside when the final two teens, a lanky boy with the long lines of a figure skater and a girl with long hair the color of milk chocolate, crowd over; there’s enough similarity between the male figure skater and the second hockey guy – they have the same ice-blue eyes and the same cleft chin, and when the skater reaches over to pluck the baseball cap from the hockey player’s head and plant it on his own there’s a familiar swat in retaliation that Ilya recognizes from the number of times Sergei has done the same to Slava – that Ilya can guess they are probably siblings. “Hey Matt,” Shane greets him easily, and then the girl. “Hi Jess.”

Jess links her arm through Shane’s elbow and tugs him against her side; his shoulders are the same wooden line they were when he first met Ilya, the blocky stance of someone who does not know where he fits into the space he’s been moved into, but he does not pull away. She begins chattering away at him about something that has happened over the week, just tall enough to rest her head against the curve of his shoulder, and Shane makes noncommittal noises in all of the pauses to show that he’s listening.

Ilya wants to scream. He wants to call Mrs. Yuna and have her turn around and come get him immediately. He wants to get inside and on the ice and play hockey, because then he can be the one to monopolize Shane’s attention like that.

They all skate up on the benches, even Matt and Jess, who join them on the ice with a series of circles and dizzying spins at one end – they’re better than Svetlana, the two of them, but the praise sticks to the inside of Ilya’s cheeks when he thinks to tell them. He hasn’t even begun to warm up but he already feels slightly out of breath, feels like he can’t get the right amount of air, and he knows it has nothing to do with his conditioning and everything to do with the fact that he’s never once in the past few years needed to share Shane with anybody, even Svetlana. There’s a distinct us versus them when it comes to the three hockey guys – Dan, Jared, and Chris, he learns on the ice. Dan and Matt are twins, it turns out. – in a way that feels like the exhibition games and the training camps. Feels comfortable, the way that he and Shane exist in a class all their own, at the top of their game where no one even tries to approach. But that gap doesn’t seem to exist between Shane and the skaters.

Or, rather, Shane and Jess.

She keeps coming over to talk to Shane, to put her hand or her head against his shoulder and once, which has Ilya strongly contemplating throwing himself against the walls with enough force to rattle loose whatever has taken hold of his ribs and made it so painful to inhale like this. His skin feels hot but the rest of him feels cold, feels a little bit hollow like when he first moved to Canada and a whole lot stony and silent like he does in his father’s home, and there’s a very small part of him that wants to ask her if she wants to play with them so he might have a chance to check her. A larger part that feels immediately terrible for even thinking that, because there’s a difference between Ilya being a mean player and him being a mean person – he plays mean and he chirps mean, but he tries to be the sort of person Sergei would be proud of. Sergei, who hates his father, and who would hate him for thinking like his father.

Dan and Jared and Chris meet him on the other side of the red line; they’re playing half-ice to let Matt and Jess skate the other end, and will share the net. It’s an informality that feels familiar, feels like the way Ilya plays with some of the guys back in Toronto before or after practice times when there’s still a buzz beneath his skin that needs to burn off before Sergei drives them home. Feels like the way Sergei and Ilya play sometimes, one on one with Svetlana in the goal. Feels a little bit like home. “Alright,” Chris says with laughter in his voice but his lips pulled into a scowl, “one game where you and Shaney make us look like dumbasses and then we’re splitting you up.”

“I will still make you look like dumbasses.” A little bit of the meanness in his voice feels like the person rather than the player. He’s been on edge since they got here, since the teens had crowded around like they owned some piece of Shane, and it makes him feel like he’s back in Russia where his family and his old coaches and the ones he’s supposed to consider his friends all act like they’re entitled to his existence. Makes him feel caged, like an animal snapping at the bars. “I don’t need Shane for that.”

Chris laughs at that, but the other two do not.

And then Dan – Dan is the younger twin, Ilya learns over the next few hours. He plays for the Junior 67’s and he’s hoping to earn a scholarship through hockey. Matt does pair skating, and Jess is his partner. – gets bored of waiting, or maybe of being insulted while waiting, and cups his hands to his mouth. “Shaney!” he hollers across the ice, and both Shane and Jess snap to attention; Jess looks annoyed and Shane looks the same sort of expressionless he does around strangers, but also a little bit relieved. “You gonna join us or are you just here to see your girlfriend?”

Ilya snorts, waits for the familiar she’s not my girlfriend that has become second nature to Ilya for the many occasions that someone questions his relationship to Svetlana, and tries to meet Shane’s glance across the rink as if to share the joke. But instead he watches, unable to look away, as Shane murmurs something to Jess and Jess leans up to press her sticky pink gloss lips to the corner of his mouth, and allows him to skate over to the guys with a cheerful “you got this babe!!” that steals the rest of the humor from him in an instant. He can’t even bring himself to feel shocked, or confused, or even jealous – he can’t bring himself to feel anything at all. There’s a clear-headed hollowness that settles over him, like he’s left his body entirely to stand beside it; he feels like he had in the hours at his mother’s bedside, sitting on the floor calmly with the Ilya that tried to chase after her left a few inches to the left, watching like it was happening to someone else.

Shane doesn’t meet his eyes when he joins them. He doesn’t meet his eyes for the rest of the day.

Chapter 9: July 2007

Ilya’s niece, Mariya, joins the world nearly two weeks later than expected, on the first morning in July.

He adores her immediately.

“Hello, beautiful,” he whispers when Alexei and Katya have declared themselves ready for visitors – they had come home from the hospital the day before, a whole five days after Masha had made her frenzied, dramatic arrival very nearly in her parents’ car, but had waited another day to settle in before allowing the extended family to descend. Polina and Katya’s mother had taken their time admiring the newest arrival before returning to the kitchen, where they had spent the better part of the afternoon preparing and storing a series of meals for the new parents. Grigori had sent his regards, and a reminder to Alexei that he would be expected to return to work the following Monday. And then, finally, Ilya had rapped his knuckles against the doorframe and entered the nursery.

Katya looks tired in a way that speaks to more than simply new motherhood. She is still gentle and kind when she smiles to see him, when she rocks the tiny pink bundle of blankets in her arms, but there’s a thinness about her now. A sort of wispy, photograph-like quality to her. The same way his mother had been throughout his childhood, like she was already haunting her home even when she still lived. “Isn’t she perfect?” she replies, eyes tired but smile proud. She is perhaps the one person he enjoys during his summers.

“I was talking to you,” he winks, if only to hear her giggle, and then his attention is stolen by the sudden yowling shift of the blankets that reveals a tiny baby fist and a tiny baby face, haloed in caramel colored hair. “Oh,” he says, voice suddenly thick in a way that he has not been familiar with since he was a child. He has grown more than used to the weight that sometimes settles in his chest, the cold stone of sadness that sits between his lungs, but he had forgotten that it could also be this: that sometimes the feeling in his chest so large he cannot breathe around it can be warm, can be his mother’s baking and the way that sometimes she would make him giggle so much that his stomach hurt.

He had forgotten, until that moment, how happiness sometimes could make you feel full.

“Do you want to hold her?” Katya offers easily. She has treated Ilya as a brother from that day they first met, when he was a grieving fourteen year old and she the seventeen year old abandoned to a world that was not her own, and he has tried to think of her as a sister in much the same way. It’s not always easy. It’s so different from having a brother, especially in how she seems to like him.

He wants to, desperately, but he’s terrified. Masha is impossibly small, and Ilya is large and wide in the way of hockey players; he has not wasted time on learning gentleness.

Katya makes the decision for him by crossing to his side and all but placing the baby into his arms – she shows him where to put his arm beneath her body, where to put his hand beneath her head, how to hold her against his chest so that she turns her head into the warmth. Masha makes a series of small, stubborn sounding noises as she settles into him, and then her face goes slack with sleep again, cheeks pressed wide and flat against him. “Oh,” he whispers, and is surprised to find that he feels very close to crying – he had forgotten, that sometimes there was no grief in tears. The baby in his arms is impossibly small and he feels by comparison impossibly large and clumsy and brutish, but also so impossibly filled with an emotion that feels exactly like his mother’s medovik used to taste. “Hello, kroshka.”

Masha sleeps on.

He barely notices when Katya leaves the room, instead noticing the many different places he can still see her in her daughter’s face – she has her mother’s chocolate brown hair. Has her lips, and will probably have her smile. Has her spirit too, the quiet that her loving mother has spared her needing to learn by passing along through the womb; Masha has not cried since Ilya has been over to visit. Has not cried, if Alexei is to be believed, since she was born. Katya has been shrinking herself since she came into her husband’s home but she has birthed a daughter that has merely learned how to hide. He wishes—

For the first time since leaving it he wishes that he had stayed in Russia, if only so that these two might find themselves with someone on their side.

“You’re good with her,” Katya surprises him with her return. Her hair is damp now from a shower and her eyes dark with makeup rather than with new motherhood, and she has exchanged her dress for one with more color but less comfort; she looks more like her mother now. Like Polina. She briefly touches the back of his arm when she steps around him, busying herself with tidying the small space of the nursery with practiced motions. A soiled outfit into the basket in the corner. Stray socks in the small drawer of the dresser. The blanket from the crib folded just so, draped over the rail. Tiny gestures that show him this room is her space and no one else’s.

He moves like he had seen her do, the gentle bouncing motion to rock the baby as she sleeps. “She’s easy like this,” he says, not taking his eyes off the way her tiny hands curl beneath her, fingers topped with impossibly small fingernails. “When she’s older she will repeat all of my bad words and you won’t think I’m good with her at all.”

Katya laughs. “I think she will have already learned them from your brother,” and then the laughter stops. Her face falls, just a little, and Ilya knows. Knows that just as he is their mother’s son, Alexei is their father’s – it had been so strange, when he first moved with Sergei, to hear the way he spoke to Lisa. There had been no insults, no accusations thrown like reckless fists. No blame burdened across her shoulders when something from his life had not gone exactly right. Instead there was genuine interest, and care, and concern; Sergei loved Lisa, loved her like he loved Svetlana. Loved Ilya. Loved her in a way that was quiet, but confident. Was safe. It was something altogether strange for Ilya, and he thought it was rare until he met Slava and Bobbi. Mr. David and Mrs. Yuna.

The longer he spent away from Russia, the more he forgot how Rozonovs loved – like their namesakes lived, brief flashes behind tangled walls of thorns. Ephemeral.

Ilya looks down at Masha, at her tiny baby face that is peaceful in sleep. “Are you happy?” He isn’t sure why he asks it; he likes Katya, likes her most of anybody in his loose idea of a family back in Russia, but they’re not the sort of close that can afford to be honest with each other. Not like this. But he thinks, knows, that Masha will be joining the slowly growing list of things that his fragile heart would not survive losing, and he needs to know that at least one person in her life will show her what softness is.

She glances at the open door, at the muted sounds of the older women in the kitchen. Spends a small eternity watching her infant daughter and the way she slumbers, peaceful in the cage of arms that have hurt those far larger than she could ever grow. And then, in the same shy way that she first waved to him across a crowded room, she reaches out to cup his cheeks in the way that Lisa does. Not even a week with the title and she has a mother’s touch; he leans into it in the way he has never been able to not, a sunflower turning his face to memory of his childhood sun. “Right now I am,” she tells him, and presses a sticky lipstick mark into his cheek. “Tomorrow? I will decide when I get there.”

He hopes that she will choose to find even a small bit of happiness in all of her tomorrows, especially the ones where it is hardest to do so. Mariya deserves the very best of life, better than Alexei will be able to give her. Better than Ilya was given.

Gently, he returns his niece to her mother’s arms; she melts into them like liquid, like recognizing that she has finally returned home. And then, when he has filled his heart with the sight of her squished cheeks and soft breathing, he returns the kiss with a press against the top of Katya’s head. “Ilyusha,” she pauses him gently before he can slip out of the room and back into the shadows and the doorways and the other places meant for leaving – he is one foot out of the country from the second he arrives now, always trying to return to a place that he is still in the process of finding. “Are you? Happy, I mean.”

“I—” Right now he is. Recently he has not been. Has not been particularly unhappy either – Ilya has not, perhaps since the end of school, felt much of anything at all. Not until today, in this small fortress that she has built for her child and welcomed him into; it’s a trust that he, in a moment of reckless bravery, chooses to return. “I will let you know when I decide.”

Chapter 10: August 2007

The flight lands in New York and Ilya can barely tear himself from the too-small porthole of a window long enough to deplane; the view, even now spoiled by the sights of the airport terminal, is almost unbelievable.

New York looks like the west that he grew up knowing from television. From the movies. Even the downtown of Toronto, the heart of the city, is nothing like this – this constant frenetic chaos, a riot of lights and sounds and people. He could see it even from the air, the movement, the lines of cars that shuffled like ants and then later the throngs of people who moved like flocks of birds, synchronized and sweeping. He can see the colors of the signs as they fly over, the cluster of lights that must be the famous Times Square. Things he has only seen in fiction, things that have always seemed too much to be real.

He blinks, and none of it vanishes.

The airport is almost a practice course for the city, nothing but motion and sound and the press of bodies that drag him along; he’s large for his age, strong even, but feels very young and very small against the currents like this. Somehow, he makes it to the baggage claim. There had been a steady stream of them setting the course, people from his plane and the gates along the way, joining ranks until it was all he could do to just keep his head down and his eyes on his feet, making sure he didn’t trip. He has never much cared for airports – they too often mean that he is leaving home – but finds there’s something different when it’s like this, when it’s a vacation. It almost feels exciting.

New York feels exciting in a way that Russia never could, and in a way that home hasn’t. Not recently.

“Ilyusha!” He hears a voice call over the din of the announcements, of the chatter of those surrounding him, of the mechanical sounds of the baggage carousel whirring and clanking to life. The voice is familiar only in the way that the pronunciation is too good, too accurate to be anyone other than—

He’s never met Richard, Bobbi’s brother, in person before, but has spoken to him on the phone countless times. It had been some holiday or the other, some cause for him to be with family when the two households had exchanged their calls, and Rich had been accepted into the madness immediately; he had obviously known Lisa and Sergei for some time, had even met Svetlana when she was younger and the family had still been based out of Boston. In the year or two since he had become a familiar fixture in the background of Ilya and Svetlana’s relationship with their surrogate aunt and uncle, had even earned the title for himself once Ilya had warmed to the idea of an additional adult caring for him with no expectation in return. So when the voice calls out with an easy diminutive of his name, he’s not surprised to find the man standing a few meters away.

Rich is about the same height as his sister and shares her slender build; his hair is darker than hers, a deep auburn brown that looks nearly purple under the fluorescent lights of the airport, but he has her same golden-brown eyes. It’s just a little after six in the evening but he’s still dressed for the office, a three-piece suit that looks far more expensive than practical, and he’s got the jacket slung across one shoulder and a briefcase in the other, like maybe he’s come directly here, and Ilya smiles at him bashfully because he had expected to find Bobbi waiting for him and not her brother. “Hey, kiddo!” He tugs Ilya into an easy hug, the same way Bobbi and Lisa do – he doesn’t treat Ilya like he’s used to, the way that hockey has taught him to behave. From their very first conversation Rich had made it clear that he didn’t give a fuck about the sport, was only vaguely aware of the major goings-on through listening to Slava and Sergei.

He leans into it. He and Rich are just about the same height, Ilya perhaps some fraction of an inch taller – for now. Lisa has warned him that she thinks he might have another round or two of growing ahead of him, usually with a wag of her finger and a plate of something shoved into his hands – but Ilya is much broader. It was strange. Rich always seemed so much larger over the phone, over a computer screen, loud and animated and absolutely dominating any space he was in. It was strange to find that he was nearly the opposite in person. “I thought Bobbi was picking me up?” he asks. He’s exhausted from the flight, and hopes his confusion doesn’t come across as unwelcoming.

It doesn’t seem to, not from the way Rich switches his briefcase to the other hand and makes a grabbing gesture for Ilya’s duffel bag; it goes ignored. Ilya slings the bag easily over his shoulder and smiles when Rich only rolls his eyes with a muttered ‘okay Mr. Hockey Star’ that sounds far too routine to not have been argued with Slava in the past. “She got caught up at the office,” he shrugs, like he’s not even sure what she’s doing; Bobbi works in finance, but not in the way that Mr. David does. Hers is more theoretical, things like stocks and bonds and investments and other words that Ilya only pretended to understand. “It was easy for me to come get you.”

He doesn’t realize how very much not easy it actually was until they’re off the AirTrain and transferring onto the E Line.

“Your office is in Manhattan?” Ilya asks around the unfamiliar terms – it was easier to think of the city as a country all its own, with provinces like Canada had. Manhattan, the one he saw from the plane and the television and the movies, was one province. Queens, where the airport was, was another. And Rich nods, because it’s easier than giving a more specific location; Rich’s office is in Manhattan and his apartment is in Manhattan and the arena where the Admirals play is in Manhattan. Bobbi and Slava live in Staten Island. “And you live in Manhattan?”

He points to the subway map on the wall behind them – the E Line is blue, and Ilya watches as Rich traces their path. “I live a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, which is right here,” and he taps the white circle to show the subway station that is closest to their destination, just along the same blue line they’re traveling, “and I work in Midtown, just about here.” He taps another spot on the map, this one between a series of colored lines, none of which are blue; it’s perhaps six blocks to the east and twenty blocks to the north of Madison Square Garden, which is the closest landmark to where he lives.

Neither of those points, his home or his office, are near the airport. They aren’t even in the same province as the airport.

The part of him that has only just left his father’s country wants to shrink to the floor, wants to fold himself away and hide beneath the seat, tuck himself into his bags and wait to be returned to Canada. The part of him that has slowly been learned how to be loved only looks at the man who is simultaneously a stranger and his second uncle, and nudges him with an elbow. “Easy to pick me up?” he asks, voice thick. From what he can gather from the map on the wall it’s been multiple train lines, a few blocks of walking, and an AirTrain to pick him up – perhaps an hour of travel, all away from his usual routines.

Rich laughs, and it makes him seem larger; he laughs like he does over the phone calls and over Skype, like he’s filling the space he’s not already occupying, and he shrugs helplessly. “Well,” and the hand that had been rubbing at the side of his neck at having been caught out instead loops around Ilya’s shoulders. “Easy in the sense that I don’t mind doing it.”

Rich’s apartment, or condo as he calls it, is on the fifteenth floor of a sixteen-story building, and is nearly as large as the first floor of the Vetrov house. The entire exterior wall is glass, giving him a perfect view of the heart of the city, and he laughs when Ilya immediately moves to stand in front of the windows, transfixed. The main room has a small kitchen along one wall and a small table to dine at beside there, but otherwise appears to be where the majority of the living happens – there’s a large, comfortable looking couch set up with a large television, a standing desk in the corner beside a series of shelves that appear to hold the necessities for Rich to work from home as well, and a shelf of the awards he’s won. He’s an architect, and a rather well-known one from the way the shelf is cluttered.

“Yara!” he calls out as he locks the door, settles his keys and briefcase in what must be their usual spots. Ilya glances around, surprised; he had not expected Slava to be here yet. They had discussed meeting for dinner at some place near here, and then he would return with them to their house. “Ты дома?” And then, noticing that Ilya’s attention has left the city view, he gestures down the hallway; he had mentioned two guest bedrooms. “It’s hard, sometimes,” and here is where the words get awkward, where his voice lowers in volume. Like Sergei, Rich has known Slava since before the accident. “For him to get around. That’s why I bought a place so close to the rink, so he had somewhere to crash when it was too much to get back home.”

Ilya nods. He’s seen how difficult it becomes when Slava is tired, or when the weather is too cold.

“One of the guest rooms is just his and Bobbi’s. They’re here about half of the season. And then sometimes Yara convinces me to let one of the rookies stay in the other until they find a place, or a vet takes them in.” For someone who doesn’t care for hockey, Rich rattles off the words and the culture like it’s second nature. It reminds him of Lisa, who has never loved the sport but has learned it through loving her players – she knows what these various words mean through exposure, but never through actually learning them. And then he looks, really looks at Ilya, and seems to recall that he’s picked him up from an international flight. “First door on the right, bathroom’s across the hall. Get some rest, kid.” He waves him in the direction of the guest bedrooms, hands flapping and face set against argument.

Ilya leaves his duffel bag by the entrance, where he also left his shoes by habit, and opens the door to a comfortably bland room with a dresser, a bedside table, and a bed – all of them are the same impersonal shades of dark wood and light fabrics, matching the parquet floors and the white walls. It looks sleek and modern and largely unlived in; he assumes this is the room reserved for the rookies that use it as a short-term hotel sometimes. He hadn’t been tired, not really, until now. He’d been exhausted from the flight, from the month and half spent trying to keep himself out of the path of his father and brother. He’s been exhausted since the start of the summer, since Ottawa. Exhausted, but not tired – he can keep going, can push himself, through exhaustion. Exhaustion feels like iron in his veins and weights on his chest, but it’s familiar exercise.

He sits on the bed and immediately feels tired. In the main living area he can just hear the sounds of Rich clattering in the kitchen, can hear one-side of his phone conversation with his sister – he tells her that he’s got Ilya back to his place, that he’s resting, that he seems fine after the flight. Laughs at something she says. Sounds large again, like he always does when Ilya talks to him. It isn’t home, but it feels homey.

He’s asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

He wakes up to Bobbi’s fingers brushing through his hair, and to the soon to be familiar sounds of Slava and Rich bickering.

“There’s food if you’re hungry,” she tells him after they’ve exchanged their usual greetings; he’s taller than her now, and it feels easier to return the casual affection she’s always shown him. She doesn’t feel temporary anymore, not in her brother’s home like this. She feels like family. “I sent the boys to pick up an order so we didn’t need to go out this late.” The boys, her boys, are loudly arguing in the kitchen about what sounds to be the proper way to reheat their food; it’s the most he’s heard Slava say at one time, and also the most annoyed he’s ever heard him before. If he hadn’t already known that the two had been friends for years now – last summer Bobbi had told him how they met. How her brother had introduced her to a friend of his, how apparently Slava and Rich had been friends for longer than Bobbi even knew her husband existed. – he would assume they hated each other.

His stomach answers for him. She laughs at the audible grumbling, and swats at him until he’s standing. “Come eat something, and then you can go back to sleep. We’ve already talked to Rich about the three of us staying here tonight, or longer if you want. It’s easier to get to the sights from here.”

He can guess. Most of the sights can be seen from the living room windows – he imagines that a condo like this, in a location like this, is probably a luxury that few could even imagine. “I,” and he thinks of the times Slava and Bobbi come to visit them in Canada, how he usually sleeps in with Svetlana so they can stay in his room, and how the house never feels more like home than where there’s just this side of too many people in it. “I think I would like that,” he tells her, and she smiles at him. Like Lisa, she’s always pleasantly surprised when he asks for things.

“Richie!” she yells down the hallway, and the noises in the kitchen stop.

“What?” he yells back, and Ilya bites his lips to keep from grinning – even as adults, and successful ones from what he has put together from his simple understandings of what they do, they’re still siblings. He and Alexei used to be the same way.

She looks at Ilya in the way he has often seen her look at Slava, a sideways glance of shared humor, and she covers his ears to muffle the volume her voice gains. “WHAT?” she almost screams back like she hadn’t heard him, and there’s a frustrated sound and the clatter of things being set down onto the counter before footsteps approach the room. Ilya knows without being told that Bobbi is the younger of the two, if only for this. When Rich appears in the doorway, he takes in the scene before rolling his eyes at his sister.

“Oh fuck off,” he says, grinning. “Come eat dinner and then get out.”

She tugs Ilya along with her as she stands, and uses his size to shove Rich out of the way as they pass; Ilya wants to apologize until he sees the way the siblings are both smiling as though they are enjoying themselves, and the way they seem equally pleased to have included him. “The kid decided we’re staying, actually,” she informs him, and Slava when they emerge into the main living area. Dinner seems to be an extensive spread of Chinese take-out, and there are already four plates set out on the kitchen island for them amidst the many white boxes; the smell reminds Ilya that he hasn’t eaten more than a handful of snacks since breakfast some time zones ago, and his stomach releases another, louder, sound of complaint.

Instead of a hello, Slava presses a container of noodles into his hand. “Good to see you,” he says when he passes over a fork. “Now eat. Tell me about your season tomorrow.”

Bobbi and Rich take Ilya to see the sights of the city beginning the following morning – all of the sights, it feels like. Slava begged off joining them the first day to allow some rest time for his leg, but dragged promises from both the adults that they would not go to The Met until he joined them on a later date. Somehow this single destination felt insignificant with the way they begin their first day at one end of Central Park and walk the entire way to the other, with stops along the middle for various notable locations that Rich, as both an architect and a New Yorker, seems to know everything about. He keeps up a near constant explanation of where they are and where they are going, and Ilya finds himself more fascinated by Rich’s fascination than the city itself.

They go to museums – The Met ends up being the third day, a good day for Slava, and they split up at the entrance when Bobbi admits that she hates the sort of exhibits that Slava and Rich always drag her to. The two men disappear toward the Modern and Contemporary Art wing while Ilya trails happily after Bobbi toward the Medieval Art section. The four reunite for lunch at one of the cafes before splitting again, and this time Bobbi is the one following Ilya through the Egyptian Art and watching the way he peers into each case, eyes crossing at the signs marking pieces as some five-thousand years old. It’s something unfathomable to him, who had thought Moscow to be some deep-rooted old guard of human history; the city is not even a thousand years old yet, and here are the markers of civilizations already long lost by then. His problems seem so much smaller in comparison.

Another day sees them partaking in the true tourism of the city: the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. Times Square at night. Rich buys him a cheap polyester I<3NY shirt that he refuses to wear, but also carefully packs into his bag at the end of the week. At every stop he takes a photo for Sergei and Lisa, usually of the view from the top of where they have climbed, and texts it to them with the knowledge that they have been here before. That he is sharing with them only that they have these shared memories now, family trips staggered across years. He usually takes another photo, some selfie or an image of a pigeon or a rat or, on one occasion, a man walking down the street with absolutely nothing on his body below the waist, that he sends to Svetlana without comment. He hesitates over the chat that has been mostly single word answers and vague pleasantries since his visit, but sends them to Shane as well.

They spend nearly the entire week leaving the condo after breakfast and returning far after dinner, and he feels as though they have managed to see perhaps a fraction of a percent of the city. He’s tired in a way he normally only is after the training camps, muscles loose and sore, and he falls into bed each night feeling as though eight hours of sleep could not possibly be enough, and wakes up at his alarm feeling excited for more. The hollow tundra in his chest has been forgotten by the third day as he realizes that he’s become too distracted to remember that he’s been feeling sad, and too soon comes the promised morning where Slava has managed to get permission for Ilya to skate the Admirals ice, to join in with anyone who might be there at the same time.

It’s a short walk to Madison Square Garden, but a longer taxi ride; they take a car because Slava complained about his leg exactly once the night before, and because both Rich and Bobbi glared at him when he said he was fine to walk that morning.

“I’m not sure who will be looking for ice time today,” Slava tells him as the cab drives past the arena in order to make a series of turns to bring them back to a different side of it; New York traffic seems, at least to Ilya, to be almost confusing on purpose. He has enjoyed the subway and has more than enjoyed walking through the crowded heart of downtown with Rich’s narration a constant stream of facts, but so far has not been impressed with anything regarding the street traffic. “But please. Do not embarrass them too badly.”

Ilya blinks. “You mean—”

“I mean,” and Slava is a kind man with a gruff voice. He reminds Ilya of a bear, all bristle and bark – and yes, the capability to bite, but mostly he’s more of a grumbler. He has never once raised his voice where Ilya could hear, and he does not seem like the sort to get angry. Bobbi, at least, does not seem the sort to suffer angry men. And yet here he is firm, ferocious even. He cuts off what is all too obviously Ilya’s question about whether he is meant instead to not embarrass Slava. “That I would like to see the Cup in New York before I die. Please do not beat these boys too badly or they will be too sad this season.” And then he winks.

Words sit in Ilya’s throat like fresh bread, thick and warm, and he feels far too full to speak; it’s one thing for Sergei to believe in him so strongly. Sergei is his coach, the reflection of his ability, as well as the closest thing he has to a male parent these days. His belief is biased. Is warped from the many years now where Ilya has slid through the cracks of his career and into his home. And Slava is like an uncle, is fond of Ilya, but he has nothing to gain from sharing anything but the truth.

Yaroslav Vasilyev thinks that Ilya, who is only sixteen and only just set to begin his stint in the juniors, could rival professional players.

His face feels as warm as the feelings in his chest and he ducks his head to hide it, reaching down as if to fix the laces of his shoe; his skates are tucked between him and the door, ready for wearing. Originally he had not planned to bring them, but Slava had insisted – perhaps exactly for this. When they arrive he fidgets nervously with the hem of his shirt – it is Slava’s old sweater, the one from Russia. It looks the most like Admirals gear, might even get him home without anyone pressing anything in support of the team into his hands while he tries to find a polite way to refuse. He likes Slava, but that is his only tie to the entire Metropolitan Division by very insistent choice. – while he waits to see where he will be led first. He had assumed Slava would first show him where he worked, explain his role in the Admirals.

He was wrong.

“Okay Племяш,” he grins, and gestures toward the ice; there are two skaters on it, though they do not appear to be doing much more than a few half-hearted warm-ups. “Show them what they will be facing in two years.”

The previous season’s Rookie of the Year Scott Hunter tells Ilya that he sincerely hopes he shatters all the bones in his legs before he ever has a chance to be drafted, and he looks at Slava like he has personally betrayed him by bringing him to their arena.

Chapter 11: February 2008

Chapter Notes

quick note: this chapter discusses (briefly) teenage characters having consensual sex with other teenage characters. since i am not a teenager nor do i want to spend too much time thinking about teenagers having sex, we're just sort of going to gloss over the entire thing. just know that the teenagers??? they're fucking.

if you want to skip the discussion entirely, it's the section after the third period faceoff, just go to the next line break. there's a two sentence summary at the end notes.

Ilya finds out that Shane has been selected as the center for the first All-Rookie team at the All-Star Classic from the internet and not from one of their weekly phone calls, which might have landed somewhere hurtful if he had not also neglected to mention his own selection to the second team at any point.

There’s six or so months of text conversations that have gradually decreased in frequency or in format, simple pleasantries and vague updates as opposed to their previous constant stream of dialogue – at this time last year he had known more about what Shane was up to on any given day than he had Svetlana, despite living in the same house and attending the same school. For all that she was his first best friend they ran in different social circles, him sticking either to himself or to the few other student athletes on a similar track as his while she tended to spend her time with as many people as possible. In some way he understands; this first season with the Generals has left him exhausted in a way he hadn’t previously known possible. Shane texts as though he is distracted, as though he lacks the energy to be a person in the few precious hours a day where neither of them has to be a hockey player.

He’s normal in their phone conversations, at least – it’s just that those, like their slowing stream of text exchanges, have decreased from daily to weekly.

Or, normal enough. He hadn’t mentioned his selection to the All-Rookie team in any of the weekly calls they have shared since he might have found out. Ilya had found out halfway through the month of January, nearly two days before the names were announced to the internet; his coach, a man who had played a handful of unremarkable seasons with the Guardians back in the ‘70s and who had stepped down the same week as the announcement, had pulled him aside after practice to inform him before the official time. He was leaving, and there could hardly be any repercussions for him sharing what would otherwise be controlled information at this point. He had congratulated Ilya as well, and shaken his hand the same way he had at the draft, and that had been one of his final acts with the team he had led for the last decade.

Ilya had immediately called Sergei to let him know, had let the man’s pride leak through the phone until he had arrived at the arena to do the same in person; when he hugged Ilya in the parking lot he had lifted him from the ground, and it was the first time Ilya had felt that small since he was a child.

His second thought had been to call Shane, except that ever since the summer he and Shane only tended to call on Mondays and this was a Tuesday afternoon, and he still wasn’t quite sure what he had done that led to their calls requiring scheduling anyway. And so he thought about calling Shane but he didn’t, and the following Monday he had seen the announcement and had known that Shane had as well, but neither of them ever seemed to bring it up – not even in congratulations. And then the following Monday was the same, and now it was a few weeks of Monday phone calls later and they had both arrived in Sault Ste. Marie and neither had mentioned to the other that they would be pitted against the other on a stage like this.

“Oh shit,” Cameron, the rookie left wing from the Steelheads that he knows from school, nudges aggressively at his arm to get his attention and direct it across the ice toward the player who’s had it since they both left the bench. “They got Hollander? Fuck, man.”

Ilya makes a noncommittal sound in his throat, which suddenly feels too tight to allow any actual words. “Yeah,” he doesn’t quite agree, “I guess they do.”

Cameron sighs and drapes himself against Ilya’s side; he’s a good deal shorter but nearly as fast, and he’s got a wicked snap shot. He’s also, according to Svetlana, a very wet kisser. “I hate playing that guy,” he sounds as though he actually does. During the season he’s said the same to Ilya whenever he sees him, but usually with an accompanied high five or some gentle ribbing to show that he doesn’t quite mean the words – he even greets Ilya the days after the Generals have won. “You know?”

He doesn’t. Shane is perhaps the only player Ilya looks forward to playing against, because he’s the only one who might beat him. Because lately hockey has felt like a chore and not like anything he might have one day loved, except for those six or so times a season that he’s not the best player on the ice anymore – he can admit to himself that Shane is better, but only to himself. Because trying to beat Shane feels like the same full-body exhaustion of trekking one hundred and two blocks with Rich’s comments on one side and Bobbi’s gentle humming on the other, the kind that doesn’t hurt or feel heavy but instead feels a little bit more alive than he felt the day before. “We’ve been best friends since we were thirteen,” he says instead, because it’s starting to feel like something that is in danger of being forgotten.

They’ve actually only been second-best friends since they were thirteen, but Svetlana is not here to argue the distinction. Svetlana is somewhere in downtown Sault Ste. Marie with Sergei, wasting a few hours before the All-Rookie game is scheduled to begin.

“Damn that actually explains a lot,” is all Cameron says. And then, with another of those nudges and those shared jokes that he always offers Ilya in the hallways, “thank god they don’t let you guys play on the same team, right?” It’s only happened twice – once at a training camp and once with the three boys from Ottawa – but Ilya thinks that he would actually very much like it to happen more. He also knows that he might be the only person to wish that, knows that he is allowed to want things now but not things like this.

“I think we have a chance at beating him,” he lies to Cameron because Shane looks like he is considering skating over, and he leads the other player back toward the huddle of their teammates around the goal.

He manages to avoid Shane until the rookie match is starting, when he has no choice but to meet him at center ice for the faceoff; Shane smiles at him, something soft and a bit wobbly and nothing at all like the knife-like grin when he’s sure of himself, and Ilya responds with a similar one. He can’t not, not after all this time. But then Shane tilts his head toward the stands with a quiet “my mom is waving at you” that has Ilya searching her out, catching the flash of a hand and a familiar grin from her place next to—

Jess has come from Ottawa as well. Nearly five hundred miles and she’s been invited to join the Hollander family for it. Ilya bites the inside of his cheek to keep from letting Shane hear exactly how badly this knowledge has hit him.

Mrs. Yuna waves again when she catches Ilya’s glance, and points him out to Jess; Ilya turns away before he sees whether or not the girl has acknowledged him. Instead he allows his eyes to move like magnets, to find Sergei in the crowd of nearly four thousand that have come to watch – it does not take long. Ilya thinks he might be able to find Sergei in a crowd of millions. He’s sitting on the opposite side of the arena just a few rows closer to the glass, with Svetlana on one side of him and—

Ilya sees Mr. David and can’t help but laugh; it seems that near five hundred mile trip is all that he has granted Jess, or maybe his wife. He sits next to Sergei with a Kingston hoodie and an easy smile, and he waves at Ilya and says something that he cannot hear across the distance. He leans over to repeat it to Sergei, who nods an agreement, and further passes along to Svetlana; she meets Ilya’s stare directly and nods her head once, crisp and decisive, and he knows that she is not wishing him luck but rather ordering him to win. “Oh,” Shane says, which is a reminder that he is still here. “They’re not sitting together.” He doesn’t sound as though he means his parents.

“We’re playing against each other,” Ilya reminds him, though they usually are. Something about it feels different this time, and he thinks it has everything to do with the way no one on the ice, the two of them included, seems to be aware of their friendship. “We’re—”

They are on opposing sides, but they are not opponents. Regardless of today’s outcome, that is still his friend.

Shane grins his sharp, lethal smile as the ref raises the puck, and makes direct eye contact; his eyes are bright, reflective as the ice, and Ilya realizes he has not seen them like this since that last day in Ottawa. “Соперники?” he offers easily, proving that whatever strangeness might have found a way to build a speed bump between them has not existed between him and Svetlana.

Ilya’s moment of surprise loses the faceoff.

In the second period Shane steals the puck from Cameron right across the blue line and breaks along the half-wall, and Ilya catches up to him at the crease and manages to knock him toward the end boards. Then there’s a hit from Greggs, the d-man from Sudbury, that has Ilya slamming into Shane and Shane slamming into the boards hard enough to buy both of them a second or two to recalibrate. “Ow,” Ilya’s managed to collide his helmet against Shane’s so forcefully that his teeth hurt.

“I miss you,” Shane tells him in response.

Greggs has managed to recover the puck enough to get it to Cameron, who is fast enough to get it to the opposing goal but likely not good enough to score from it; Ilya really needs to be elsewhere on the ice right now. But Shane has gone wooden and mulishly silent in the way he does when he wants to be elsewhere at all, and his face is the sort of stone that means he didn’t mean to say any of that, and—

“Maybe,” Ilya offers like an olive branch, offers like he offers the hand to haul Shane out of his head and back into the game. “Maybe we talk about this after?” He knows they’re staying in the same hotel because all of the players are, in the Holiday Inn Express across the street. There’s an entire swath of rooms set aside for events like this, for the players and the support staff that descend on an Ontario city once a year; families are usually left to find their own accommodations, but Ilya and Sergei and Svetlana had managed their room by virtue of Sergei also being his coach, or his trainer now that he had a team. “Room 410.”

Shane nods, and takes his hand, and shoves at him to be the first to get across the ice.

At the start of the third period, before placement for the faceoff, Shane extends a fist and knocks it against the back of Ilya’s glove. It’s instinctive to return the gesture against his knuckles, and then to clack the end of his stick against Shane’s.

They’ve done it every time they’ve shared ice since they became friends.

Somewhere in the time between returning from New York and their weekend in Sault Ste. Marie, Svetlana had let herself into Ilya’s room in the middle of the night and informed him that they needed to sleep together.

“Okay?” he had asked, because they slept together at least one night a week – had been doing so since they were children, since those days in Russia where she had held him beneath the blankets and pinched the seams of his bloodless wounds together. They had never seemed to grow out of the intimacy even as they grew into their more adult bodies, and while Lisa or Sergei had never directly addressed it they were clearly aware of it, and must have at least been willing to allow it. Even on this trip they were sharing one of the two queen-sized beds in the hotel room, though last night Ilya had been the only one sleeping. Svetlana had been curled behind him watching the television on low volume, because her schedule was not nearly as rigid as his.

She tucked herself beneath his blankets and against his side like she always did. “I mean like fucking,” she elaborated, and punched him in the arm in just about the same motion as she went for his dick.

If Svetlana had been expecting him to be some unsuspecting virgin then she was about six months and about twice as many girls (and, once, a boy) too late for that; Ilya had finally taken the numerous offers up ever since the summer, and knew for a fact that she had been doing so for at least a year now. “Oh?” he said instead of saying yes, because Svetlana was already so much a part of him that it made a great deal of sense that they also share this type of intimacy. She had already touched his heart and the darkest parts of himself, the parts that were cruel and cold and angry – if anything, touching his dick felt somehow less personal.  “We have to?”

“I had sex with Kevin from math yesterday,” she informed him, and her tone had been as flat as his expression; Kevin from math had clearly not lived up to expectations. It was hardly an appropriate time to say it but Ilya had thought a nasty little I could have told you that, because Kevin from math was also Kevin from U15 who had once famously said that a clitoris was a type of dinosaur. “It was over in a minute and all he did was sweat and moan on me, and it wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had.”

He couldn’t help it – he had barked out a startled laugh at the admission, even though it had led to Svetlana punching his arm a second time.

“I refuse to let you be a disappointment to the women,” and she paused. This was something they so rarely acknowledged aloud, because it was something so tangled up in the messy emotions that he spent so much time ignoring – Shane. His father. Russia. “And men in your future.”

He had already slipped a hand beneath the shirt she had worn to bed; it was one of his, some faded relic of a Guardians shirt he had likely outgrown a year before, but he recognized it from where he had cut the sleeves. Had already shifted a thigh in between hers. “You want us to fuck so I can be good at it?” From the lack of complaints, and the frequency of repeat propositions, he had already assumed that he was – unlike Kevin from math he knew what a clitoris was, as well as where to find it.

One foot slid up his calf to help where her hands had begun shuffling his sweatpants off and away; she rucked up his shirt to bite at his stomach but otherwise ignored the top half of him. “I want us to fuck so that you can be the best at it,” she told him in the same condescending tones that she told him he would never be the best on the ice, not with whatever perceived error she had just pointed out, the way that made him want to prove her wrong. “Because I deserve the best.”

Shane knocks on the door of room 410 about thirty minutes after Sergei had left to meet Mr. David at the hotel bar for drinks and catching up; he had easily agreed to letting the teenagers have the room for a few hours, especially since they had not been able to spend much time together since the season began. Games between Kingston and Oshawa were usually not the sort that required either team to stay over a night, and therefore meant that they had perhaps an hour or so total around the matches to try and talk.

He’s brought Jess with him.

Svetlana, who had opened the door expecting her second best friend, visibly freezes. She’s wearing an oversized Oshawa hoodie that she stole from Ilya and underwear, but nothing else. “Hi,” she says in the same voice she uses to talk about the girls at school who hiss words at her for her skin color or her accent or the unearned reputation she’s got for sleeping with anybody at all – it’s the voice that has Ilya immediately on his feet from where he had been sprawled across the bed on his phone and standing to his full nearly six-foot height. And then, in a voice that has the usual affection she allows for the very few she genuinely cares for, “hey Shane.”

He’s never before looked uncomfortable in any space he’s shared with either of them. The Shane that has come to visit them is somehow smaller than the one they know, limbs pulled tight against his body and shoulders pulled tight against his ears, and he keeps his distance; he sits on the corner of Sergei’s perfectly made bed like a wooden statue, and he moves a fraction of an inch away when Jess sits next to him. “It’s nice to meet Shane’s friends!” Jess punctures the silence that has overtaken the room with a chirping, needle-like exclamation.

Ilya tries to share a glance with Svetlana, who is staring at Jess like she’s never seen another human before. “We’ve met,” he says finally, and his voice feels as flat as he feels inside, the same ground down stone that he feels when he is in Russia. The same heavy, leaden feeling that he feels when he wants to go home.

“Ilya spent a week in Ottawa with me last summer,” Shane tells Jess, gesturing like maybe she might recognize him on a second glance. “He was at the rink for the pick-up game with the guys.”

Svetlana finally drags her eyes from Jess to immediately find Ilya’s, and her expression is as bland as he knows his own to be. “Что за хуйня?” and he wishes he has an answer that would satisfy her in any way.

“Shane’s girlfriend,” he shrugs like it doesn’t kill him a little to admit.

Her eyes narrow like she thinks he’s lying, and then return to Jess to examine her under this new light. Somehow, instead, she ends up looking right at Shane. “Oh,” she agrees. Acknowledges. Allows. “Okay.”

So far Jess has avoided glancing at Svetlana’s state of underdress; she had noticed when she first entered, eyes widening momentarily before flicking to Shane as though she thought he might be somehow concerned, but it was nothing new. Svetlana was like Shane and Ilya were, unburdened by modesty in the way of those who spent a good deal of time in communal dressing areas – nevermind it that those dressing areas were usually Ilya’s or Shane’s. She had stripped down to shower with Ilya perched on the sink to continue a conversation, had changed out of her damp, chilly clothes with Shane in the room only hours after meeting him. But finally, when the silence grows far too great to ignore, she settles as close to the subject as Canadian politeness might allow. “How long have you two been dating?” she asks Ilya, who seems like a safer place to stare.

He laughs. Svetlana wretches. Shane just looks mildly disinterested in the answer.

“We’re not,” Ilya says smoothly. Easily. It’s second nature to their friendship, denying it to be anything further; very few have been willing to accept that they can be only friends, best friends, without any romantic undertones.

“You’re not?”

Disbelief comes from the least expected source – Shane has lost whatever woodenness had him planted in their room like a tree, stiff and serious, and traded it for the same loud-mouthed honesty he hides behind being known as the nicest boy in hockey. His hands are tangled in the blanket of the bed, perhaps to prevent them from reaching up to stuff the words back into his mouth like he looks as though he wishes to, and when Svetlana and Ilya both turn to look at him with matching expressions of disdain his cheeks go pink under his freckles. “Sorry,” he says quietly, shrinking back into himself, and then leans forward again. “Sorry, I thought—” He looks at Svetlana, not Ilya, like he has chosen a side. “You broke up?”

She only blinks at him. “Broke up?”

“We have never—” Ilya pauses, because they have, but not in any way that means anything to anyone but them. It’s so hard to explain what they are to each other – Svetlana is as much a part of him as his own limbs are, giving him pieces of herself over the years to fill his hollowness and taking the parts of him that were too fragile into her safekeeping until he could not find the edges of where they were meant to be separated. She reminded him of the times in his life when happiness had not been something he had needed to look for, reminded him of the warmth and security of innocence. “Sveta is my best friend,” he explains to Jess, and perhaps also to Shane, though he was sure that he had already known this. “We’ve known each other since we were toddlers.”

He thinks, in that moment, of his mother. Of the boy she had met when she was very young, had carried in her heart even as he crossed an ocean, had allowed into her home with her young son and the shadows she had fought to hold at bay. He thinks that maybe, hopefully, she and Sergei had been this too.

Jess watches the way that Shane and Svetlana are watching each other, the ease in which they have communicated without words, and some of the bubblegum brightness that she has kept up seems to fade. “Do you guys want to go get something to eat?” Her hands pick at her nails, at the edges of her sleeves. There’s a good six inches or so between her and Shane now, where there had barely been any space at all to begin with. It's all too clear that she's trying to find some excuse to leave. “Or something?”

Ilya and Svetlana have already eaten. And so, it seems, have Shane and Jess. “I’m not hungry,” he says apologetically, says nicely. Ilya hates when Shane is nice, because it means that he is not being honest. “Maybe we can meet for lunch tomorrow?”

They make tentative, awkward plans before saying a tentative, awkward goodnight.

The door closes and Svetlana hesitates at the safety lock as though she wants to click it shut; she can’t. Sergei is set to return at any time, whenever he and Mr. David finish their beers and their bantering, and he’ll worry if he can’t get in. Instead she leans against it, hands tugging at the ends of the sleeves that hang so far over her hands, and then she sighs. “He didn’t tell me,” she whispers, and she doesn’t sound like herself. If anything she sounds like Ilya, quiet and questioning, like she’s unsure if she’s allowed to feel hurt by this. “That he had a girlfriend.”

“He didn’t tell me either.” He hadn’t once mentioned it to Ilya, even when Jess was literally standing in front of them with a fond smile and a too-familiar lack of distance between them. Had mentioned even less since. In some ways Ilya cannot find himself to be surprised – everyone gets tired of him eventually. It was just that he hadn’t expected it to happen this soon. “She was there when I was in Ottawa, one of the guys from the rink told me.”

Svetlana moves toward him and cups his face in her hands. “Last summer?” And when all he can do is nod she tugs at him until he lowers his head, until she can reach to press a kiss to his forehead without standing on her tiptoes. He leaves his face pressed into her collarbone where everything narrows down only to the familiar scent of the oil she uses in her hair, the familiar scent of the detergent Lisa washes their clothes in, the familiar smell of his own deodorant that clings to the sweatshirt. It smells like home. “You didn’t tell me either.”

He shrugs, his arms a heavy weight that he can barely lift; Svetlana is all that seems to be holding him up now. Earlier today, on the ice, he had felt hollowed out. Discarded. Now he feels as though the blood in his body has turned to lead. “I didn’t want to think about it.”

“And you still—” She has never, in the twenty or so months since he first mentioned the possibility to her, spoken of the feelings he might hold like a secret for their friend; she has hinted at them, has laughed around them, but has never once spoken of them directly like she seems to do now. “This whole time?”

The thing about his feelings, as Svetlana has had a front row in the audience of observing, is that they never seem to last. He enjoys his time with each partner, which is usually a handful of days, and he enjoys the time between when he is on display for the next. Ilya has told Svetlana since he was twelve years old that he does not believe in permanence, nor in his tendency to love; he loves her, tells her frequently, and loves Lisa and Sergei and Masha. But the rest of his heart is a labyrinth of locked doors and barred windows, a ghost town of empty spaces of all the people he won’t allow in. And yet— “I do not think I could stop if I tried.”

“Oh Lyulya,” she croons, and scratches nails painted in the same red as his team’s through his curls.

Chapter End Notes

Svetlana has bad sex with a teenage boy and refuses to let Ilya be a similar disappointment. they begin sleeping together (as best friends only) so that they can be good at sex.

Chapter 12: March-November 2008

After returning from Sault Ste. Marie, from the All-Star Classic, Shane called Ilya’s cell phone at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday night to complain about his winning the Emms.

Two days later, on Thursday, he called between morning skate and the evening games to lament that his team wasn’t going to make the playoffs due to their weak defensive line.

By Friday night Ilya had all but given up on trying to figure out the strangely mercurial communications.

“Hollander,” he stops the monologue on whether the Otters are a bad team or simply filled with bad players – Shane is Hollander when they are on the ice usually, or when Ilya is trying to keep his distance. He has not been Hollander for years. The change in address ends the stream of speech far better than anything else could have, and for a moment he thinks that Shane has hung up on him; there’s a difference between quiet and silence. And then, sighing, he gives in. “It’s both. The only person pulling their weight in that entire organization is the mascot.”

“Jess and I broke up.”

For a single blink of time Ilya feels the same beside himself blankness that he felt when he first learned they were dating, the scooped out emptiness that is his safest way to meet any strong feeling. It’s like looking at the sun in reflection on a blank canvas – some things are too dangerous for him to examine in full. He feels the hollow disappointment not for his friend, who does not sound sad but has also managed to sound very much not anything regarding his relationship, but for the fact that he is apparently only a stand-in for her loss. Shane had all but stopped talking to him when he started dating Jess and started again immediately after, like their friendship was nothing more than a distraction. “Okay,” he says in acknowledgement, the same flat sort of sound that Svetlana had offered when she was faced with a similar realization. And then, just as withdrawn, “sorry.”

He’s not. He might feel bad about it except that Shane doesn’t sound particularly sorry as well.

“I just didn’t have any time,” Shane says like it’s all one word, like he hasn’t got the time now to explain either; sometimes it’s like this, talking to him, when the cycle of overthinking stalls long enough for a thought to two to slip out unchecked. “By the time I got home.” His commute is at least twice that of Ilya’s, perhaps three times as long, a total of four hours or so every day just for the chance to play the sport he loves. Four hours in a car for perhaps four hours of hockey a day between practice and games, probably closer to five given Shane’s drive to be perfect. Another hour or two of conditioning at home, and the nine or ten hours that all trainers recommend for optimal sleep and recovery. Ilya suddenly feels terribly selfish for wanting those remaining three hours to be his alone.

They have been talking on the phone every Monday for about an hour, which has left Shane with barely two for himself. The gift he has taken for granted sits heavy in the back of his mind, something he has soured with his insatiable desire for more. “No, of course.”

“And I didn’t even like her that much? Like, as a person.” Now that he’s started talking Shane seems unable to stop, like everything he hasn’t told Ilya in the nearly nine months is going to be told to him now, whether either of them intends it or not. “She was always touching my arm and wanting to talk to me about things I didn’t care about, like all the time. I don’t even know why we started dating. The guys said something about how she was into me and she asked if I wanted to get coffee and I felt bad saying no. I don’t know.” His words have slowed and his voice has taken that biting edge that it does when he’s finally being truthful, and for the first time since the previous summer Ilya recognizes his best friend.

He laughs – only Shane, now four time recipient of various sportsmanship certificates and most recent winner of the William Hanley, would find himself cornered into a relationship by virtue of being too nice to leave. He wonders what has changed. “You don’t drink coffee,” is all he can think to say, because Shane doesn’t. He doesn’t like the way it makes him feel when he has to be in a car for so long each day, and only drinks it during the off-seasons.

“She kept wanting to know where she fit in my five-year plan.” Shane sounds almost petulant, like a child who is told they have to share a toy. Like someone used to getting their way.

Shane’s five-year plan is only the first step in a longer twenty-year plan, and all of it involves his first round draft to Montreal and the captaincy by twenty-one, to retirement and five Cups at forty. No where in the plan that has been explained to both Ilya and Svetlana (and to Mr. David and Mrs. Yuna, over the years) is there room allotted to travel that is not related to hockey, or to a family beyond the one he already has. “She doesn’t,” Ilya says with the assurance of somebody who also does not.

“She absolutely doesn’t,” Shane agrees like they are sharing a joke and not cementing that soon enough they will not even share this.

That summer, for the first time since he stopped calling it home, Svetlana returns with him to Russia; only for two weeks, though he is required to stay longer, and only because his strange, gnawing emptiness has not abated by the time arrangements are to be made.

Ilya knows that Svetlana worries about him, knows it because it is the same way that Sergei worried about his mother – he is not an idiot, he knows that the periods of time where he lives his life like he is watching it from the outside are not normal. Knows that the days, sometimes weeks, wherein he is fighting a gravity far greater than that of the earth’s are not days or weeks that happen for others. Knows that the way he smiles and laughs and plays hockey and fucks casually without ever once feeling anything beyond an exhaustion that is either good because it reminds him he can sleep or bad because it reminds him he must also wake up is a dangerous game with a too-familiar ending.

Ilya knows that Svetlana worries about him because he has begun to worry about himself.

And so she accompanies him to the first half of his month in Russia, hand clasped around his from the moment they arrive at Toronto Pearson until the moment the hired taxi deposits her outside Sheremetyevo – she does not leave his side once, not even to sleep in the room that Polina has prepared for her. She stays in the familiar bed of Ilya’s childhood, the one that has not grown though the two of them have, and she holds him the way that she did when his mother died.

Katya and Masha adore her. By the end of their first meeting she is ‘Тётушка Sveta,’ has accepted the title and Katya’s contact information so that she might watch her distant niece grow up via emails and video calls the way Ilya does.

By the time Ilya returns to Canada some twelve days later he cannot even bring himself to care enough to continue to be worried.

It’s strange, the way that even now Ilya is nervous around men who are a father’s age – it takes him some time to remember that Mr. David is safe, when he first sees him after a period apart, and it took weeks for him to stop flinching when the Generals coach called out ‘Rozanov’ during practices. He has avoided being left alone in rooms with male teachers at school, with anyone from management who is taller or broader or bald.

It’s stranger still the way that it has never been like that with Sergei.

On the same day he returns from Russia, the day where usually he would sleep through to the following mid-morning and reset his body’s timezone, the same day he usually eats a thousand calories when he walks through the door like he hasn’t had anything in hours, because he usually hasn’t, Ilya instead follows Sergei into the living room. Follows him when he sits on the couch. And then, when Sergei looks at him in that particular way he has – it’s the same way that he looks at Lisa. At Svetlana. The same way he has looked at Ilya for years now. The way that says I love you with his eyes because there are times he cannot say it with his voice, all of the times he was on the ice and catching their glances through the glass, positions reversed now. – he finally addresses the winter in his bloodline that he had tried to bury in a grave in an aspen grove all those years before.

“Seryozha,” he begins, and ends. This is not a time where he needs his old coach, even one who has been far more than that to him for nearly five years now. This is a time where he wishes he were still a child, or at the very least somebody’s. “Батя.”

Sergei has him in his arms before he’s even noticed the man begin to move, holding him the way his mother used to. Holding him the way a father should.

“I think,” it’s been so hard for him to talk about, all of these years, because the words are like thorn bushes – sharp, and tangled. Their roots run deep. He can feel their reluctance from the way they tear at his throat, gouge furrows in his chest. “I think I am like my mother,” he admits, eyes wide and voice wet. He has his mother’s eyes, his mother’s curls, his mother’s fading edges. He has the reminder of her loss stitched beneath his skin, and the reminder of her love in the calloused hands that hold his face without hesitation.

All his life he has been punished for wanting – first from a father who sees his desires only by dollar signs, weighing his sons at their cost versus their potential return. Later by a mother who indulged him as long as she could, until the rising tide of her misery became too strong to fight. He of course had wanted her to stay. Later, he had wanted to join her. He has fought between a covetous nature and a knack for losing long enough now, fought the way his mother could not: he does not do it alone.

“I think I need help.”

Sergei does not question, does not criticize. Instead, he takes the burden of Ilya’s exhaustion in his shaking hands, and he holds him like he’s something precious. “My brave Ilyusha,” he says, and the shine in his gaze is partly from tears but largely from pride. “Oh, my brave boy.”

The next six weeks are terrible. 

Ilya moves through a fog, through a dreamlike haze that leaves him sweaty and stinking beneath unwashed blankets for days at a time, and cutting and cruel when he manages to escape them. There’s a poison in him, in his blood, in his tongue, and the doctors tell him it must be purged – like all cornered animals, he bites. He says things to his family that leave him small and ashamed in the aftermath, mean like Grigori, and he hangs up on Shane whenever he asks how he is doing. Sometimes he puts voice to the thoughts that he has turned on himself like a razorblade over the years, lashes them out at the people who deserve them even less than he did. Impossibly, unbelievably, they merely love him through it.

He misses his mother so strongly he thinks that he might die from it; the doctors tell him it’s likely he is mourning her for the first time. On nights where his body is trapped in the cycle of grieving child he climbs into bed between Lisa and Sergei and he lets them parent him the way they have been trying to for years.

Sometimes his heart pounds at his ribs like his father’s anger at the door, a knocking that always catches him by surprise and leaves him checking the shadows; he feels nervous for no reason most of the time now, paranoia buzzing like mosquitos as he tries to sleep. Sometimes his stomach turns and folds like a discarded paper, a heaving that leaves him wrung out and empty and spitting over the sink; there’s a constant sourness in his mouth now, even on the days he doesn’t vomit, that makes the food he tries to choke down taste spoiled and barely palatable. In the first few weeks he loses weight. In the next few he gains it.

And then, finally, the fog lifts.

“How are you feeling?” Shane asks him when their teams meet for the first time in September. He doesn’t know everything of the previous months – like Russia, like Ilya’s parents, like the darkness that haunts his mind and has only just been beaten back, he does not know everything. But he knows enough.

For the first time in months Ilya does not feel the need to lie in his answer. “I feel good today,” he says, bumping the back of his glove and then his stick against Shane’s in the way that has become something of a habit when they meet. By now the officials don’t whistle and wave off the contact as an attempt to interfere with the face off and instead seem to tolerate it with the same fondness they do any of the young players they wrangle. It had been a bit of an uphill battle for Ilya to get himself back into his conditioning, to claw back his stamina, before the start of the season, but for once he had found himself with enough energy to feel more than exhausted. “It’s been good recently.”

Shane responds with a lopsided smile that is not sharp or mean at all, is nearly as careless as the returning knocks of glove and stick, and he ducks his head. “Good,” he says to the ice, “that’s good.” Both of them wear the C newly stitched into the chest of their sweaters this season, a largely expected response to their winning Eddie Powers (Ilya) and the Emms Family (Shane) the previous year.

“We still on for tonight?” Another new addition to this season is the freedom they’ve been offered on days where they play the other in Toronto – both of them have their G2 licenses now, and both of them are trustworthy enough that Sergei and Mrs. Yuna had discussed with them the possibility that Shane be allowed to stay later rather than returning with his team. With, both adults had stressed, the stipulation that he spend the night at the Vetrov house rather than attempt the two hour drive after dark. For this first matchup they had planned to get dinner with Svetlana; it was the first time they would be together in person since February.

The grin sharpens as the official readies himself for the drop. “Loser buys,” Shane promises.

Winter hits and with it comes the notification that Ilya will not qualify for the Canadian National team for the upcoming Prospect Cup. He has a pending application for his permanent residency but not yet his citizenship, a process stalled largely by Grigori’s continued insistence that he return to Russia each summer and refusal to consider signing the documents to expedite – Lisa and Sergei, neither of them Canadian citizens as well, could not sign as his guardians either. The plan had been to secure at least the first before the NHL draft, since there was no guarantee which country he would end up playing for.

It’s a surprise then when Sergei receives a call from Igor Volkov, a coach with the MHL back in Russia and an old friend of Ilya’s father’s, asking if he would instead be interested in playing for them.

“He maintains Russian address,” Volkov explains once Sergei has put the call on speaker and invited Ilya into the room. “Russian citizenship. Plays with Russian team in summer.” Although a series of technicalities that could likely be argued it does meet the IIHF eligibility requirements. Ilya knows this because it was the Russian address that had been the deciding factor against him playing for Canada – he has long suspected that Grigori claims Ilya spends far more time a year in the family home than he actually does, either for purposes of defrauding his reputation or merely his taxes, and had managed to produce documentation proving this. – as well as his inclusion on rosters of Russian teams to which he has never heard of.

It’s not what Ilya wants, except that it gives him the chance to play. “Your team doesn’t know me,” he admits, because they don’t – he hasn’t truly been part of a team there since he was a child, and the instances over the summer are usually more an exercise in humiliation than actual training. He’s beaten players now too old to qualify on the ice and been beaten by them off of it, but the current roster is largely a mystery in the way of anything else that occurs a world away. “You don’t know me.”

Volkov makes a noise like he disagrees. “Rookie season top scorer,” he recites like he’s reading; even if he were someone within his father’s inner circle he would not know Ilya without reading his accomplishments on paper. It’s been five years now since Ilya left his father’s house, and whoever had returned for those yearly punishments was not the same boy who lived in Canada. “Second in draft, exemption status. Best Russian in Canadian junior hockey.”

He’s likely the best player in Canadian junior hockey regardless of nationality, at the very least tied for it. Shane continues to have a higher point count to Ilya’s higher goal count by virtue of their playing styles, but they’re largely tied otherwise. Shane is a better player but Ilya plays for a better team, which averages out across the season, and Ilya is better liked off the ice while Shane better liked on it. Gesturing for Sergei to mute the microphone for a moment, he grimaces. “This feels under-handed,” he admits, ignoring how much he wants this – not with Russia, but he wants the chance to prove himself on a larger stage.

Sergei shrugs. “You’re not wrong. But you can’t play here because they’ve lied that you’re more Russian than you are. Maybe,” he shrugs again, “maybe you deserve to benefit from that in any way you can.”

He wants this. “World Junior’s,” he says, and watches the way that Sergei’s lips tug upwards at the corners with the beginnings of a smile. Since the therapy and medications have dragged Ilya from the grave of his own making he’s found that he’s looking to the future in a way he never before has – while the NHL was always the plan he now finds that he’s no longer content with merely getting there. He wants to fight to the top. “It would definitely get the scouts’ attention.”

“You’ve had it for years already,” Sergei tells him with a pride that is not that of a coach’s involvement, but rather that of a parent for a son. “But yes, I agree.”

Ilya also agrees, and tells Volkov that before leaving Sergei to negotiate the rest of things for him. Instead, he retreats to his bedroom to call Shane. “Well,” he says instead of saying hello, or instead of allowing Shane to ask how he is feeling – he’s not sure how he’s feeling. He doesn’t feel bad, but he doesn’t feel good either. Mostly he feels as though the universe is playing a very unamusing joke on their conversation only recently that at least this time they would be allowed on the same team for the first time. “Russia wants me to play for them.”

Shane curses in French, and then in English, and then a third time in Russian. “Well,” he says finally, sounding completely resigned to the fact that some higher power is keeping them from the same line, “there’s always All-Stars.”

Chapter 13: December 2008

Chapter Notes

Somehow, by the time they arrive in Saskatchewan on the twelfth of December, there’s a widespread rumor that Ilya has chosen to play for Russia instead of Canada specifically to avoid playing on the same team as Shane.

A fair number of the internet sites reporting this as factual news mention that it was an argument over the captaincy, that Shane was awarded the C to Ilya’s A and he instead left the team entirely at the promise that Russia would give him the title if he did – and they had, as it turned out, but not because Canada had not. Instead it was because he punched the first player to suggest that his father had bought his place on the team and had then scored a hat-trick in practice against a goalie who had won best in the MHL two seasons in a row, and had earned their respect. But instead the letter that he wore seemed to lend credibility to the story, which only led to it growing.

There was also the fact that they had traded between being the first and second ranked players in the league since they were thirteen years old, that they had gone first and second in the draft, that the accomplishment of Shane leading the league in points two seasons in a row could not be mentioned without the echoing reminder that Ilya had scored more goals, that Ilya’s playoff MVP could not be acknowledged without Shane’s subsequent Rookie MVP. Somehow, after all these years – years which included the two spending time in Ottawa together. The two appearing in Guardians press together. Their largely public Facebook and MySpace profiles that heavily featured the other in photos and posts. The number of times at the training camps or even the latest All-Star games where they had displayed more than even a passing familiarity in front of the players or coaches. – it seemed that the hockey world at large had not noticed that their careers were not pitted against the other so much as progressing side by side.

“Apparently we’re enemies,” Ilya greets Shane in the hall outside the locker room with a one-armed hug; Canada and Russia aren’t set to play the other until day three of the preliminaries four days from now, but both have games in the days preceding. Canada is up against Latvia first thing tomorrow afternoon, and Russia will face Germany after.

Shane presses his face against Ilya’s neck and makes a frustrated sort of noise that Ilya knows by now means that he’s reached his limits on the subject – as Canada’s native-born golden boy and hockey darling, he’s likely been asked already by every single media outlet allowed at the arena. “Vinny asked me if it was true.”

“Vinny?” Ilya glances into the locker room like the man might be in it, like he might emerge at any moment now; though it’s possible that ‘Vinny’ could be anyone on the Canadian team it’s most likely Adrian Langevin, a defenseman from Gatineau who, most importantly, is in his third season with the Generals and his second with Ilya. “Vinny from my team Vinny?” He glances down the hallway again. “Vinny, what the fuck?”

Shane shrugs as they separate. “It’s going to be a weird fuckin’ time,” he complains, and he knocks a shoulder against Ilya’s to steer him down the hall. They’re staying in a hotel just about a ten minute walk from the Brandt Centre, the Hollanders in one room and Ilya and Sergei just across the hall, which gives a small period of time each day to decompress.

“Latvia’s defense is better than yours,” Ilya tells him during the walk. They’ve gone over the other teams’ strengths and weaknesses over the last few weeks with the polite exception of their own, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t aware of them. The Canadian team has Shane as well as the winger from the Rangers who had sniped the goal in overtime that knocked the Generals out of the playoffs last season – they’ve got some of the strongest scorers in the league on the same team, but Latvia’s d-line is rock solid. It will likely come down to a win for Canada, but not with a very high score.

Shane hmms his agreement. “Goalie’s weak on the blocker if you can catch him at the shelf.” It’s something that Ilya hadn’t noticed, which means it’s probably something the goalie himself isn’t even yet aware of – he trusts Shane though, trusts his word and his eye for cataloguing even the smallest way to take an opponent down. “Germany’s team sucks this year, so you better deliver on that puck line. They’ve got you guys at a minus-three-point-five.”

Germany’s team is lucky their odds weren’t any worse. Ilya knows his team will win tomorrow in the same way he knows that Shane’s will, because they are led by the best – and also because the German team is perhaps the weakest in the championship in both offense and defense. The three teams that will be placing at the end of these ten days are Canada, Russia, and Sweden. All that is to be determined in the time between is which order.

“Whichever of us scores more goals against Germany in the preliminaries?” Ilya offers with a wolfish grin. They so rarely get the chance to make such stupid teenage wagers regarding their play like this; usually it’s only whoever wins and whoever scores more, but this championship gives them the chance to bet against more than just the other’s team.

Shane agrees with a mean little smile. “What do I get when I win?” he asks, laughing as Ilya hip checks him into the road.

Back at the hotel, a few guys from Team Canada catch them in the lobby to ask if they want to join them for dinner – all of them know both Shane and Ilya from juniors, and they seem mostly amused by the idea that Ilya has somehow defected back to Canada for a captaincy. “It’s bullshit you couldn’t play for us,” the Rangers winger, who Ilya has never bothered to learn the name of since losing to him back in May, says like he actually means it. “But why the fuck did you go for Russia?”

Ilya blinks. “I’m Russian?” he says, meeting Shane’s glance from the side of his vision; even if he had not thought it was common knowledge he was sure at least the name – Ilya Rozanov – might have given it away.

“Wait,” the Rangers player stops to look at him, “like actually?”

If he wasn’t proven to be such a good scorer Ilya might worry for the Canadian team’s chances against Latvia, since it seems at least two of their players act as though they’ve had just one too many concussions – first Vinny, and now this. “Yes?” he still sounds unsure, mostly of why this seems to be so surprising. He knows that his accent is largely sanded smooth now, sounding more like those he had learned to speak English from – it’s about eighty percent Canada and twenty percent Boston due to his years spent with Svetlana and Lisa – but there are certain sounds that he can hear as only Russian. “I moved to Toronto from Moscow five years ago.”

Vinny, perhaps finally remembering that he’s spent a good two-thirds of the last few years of his life with Ilya, pipes up with a helpful “his uncle is a defensive coach for the Guardians.”

The Rangers guy considers this like he might be impressed, and then shrugs – the Guardians aren’t the worst team in the NHL but they’re still pretty far from the best, so an association with them doesn’t carry the same weight it might if Ilya was throwing another team around. “Still bullshit,” he concludes. “You guys coming with?”

They’re still in the lobby with their gear bags, and Ilya’s not entirely sure he wants to have dinner with part of Team Canada’s first line anyway. It’s not like he’s loyal to the Russian team in any way – he doesn’t even know what hotel they’re staying at. It might even be the same one as they are, only he wouldn’t know the floor or room number to find them if he wanted to. Volkov had texted him when the team arrived in Regina and again what time they would be meeting at the rink each day, and that had been the extent of it; Ilya has learned that, at least for Russians, there’s no requirement to be friendly with a team to win with them. It’s more that these aren’t his teammates either, not really.

Shane nudges him toward the elevators, and smiles his blandly pleasant photography smile at Vinny and the Rangers guy. “Sorry, we already have plans.” He nudges Ilya again, and shrugs. “My mom set something up, I don’t know,” and the guys are all nodding and agreeing because they know his mother is also his manager, and Ilya is nodding and agreeing because he would rather have dinner with Mrs. Yuna than any member of any country’s hockey leagues.

In the elevators, Ilya raises his eyebrow like a question mark and Shane’s smile goes from media trained to something much more honest. “We don’t have any plans,” he admits. “I just don’t want to spend time with them.”

The door to the Hollander’s hotel room is open when they reach it, with Sergei chatting with Mr. David and Mrs. Yuna in the small entryway. They all smile when they see the boys. 

“Ilyusha,” Sergei ruffles his hair the way he is no longer hesitant to do in front of certain crowds, the way he stopped doing outside of their home around the time Ilya’s name became something of a well-known commodity around the hockey world. At this point there is no concern of embarrassment, not with the Hollanders. “We were talking, and wondered if maybe you and Shane would like a room to yourself. Give you time to catch up.” Ilya can’t help but notice that Sergei’s travel bag, the old one that is still branded with Boston’s 1996 Cup win, is already on the second bed in the Hollander’s room; the one furthest from the bathroom, the one that would normally be Shane’s.

He glances at Shane to already see one side of his mouth tugging up into sharp satisfaction – they don’t get nearly enough time together just the two of them. “Well,” he says, his own grin falling easily into place, “I guess that would be okay.”

That night, he and Shane order room service and Shane doesn’t complain that there’s not enough protein in the pasta or too much useless sugar in the cake. They fight over the remote like children much younger than they are now before watching some horror movie that feels more camp than horror, and stay up to watch the sequel when it comes on after. They end up finally succumbing to their beds, Shane in the one furthest from the bathroom because that’s where he always sleeps, sometime close to two in the morning. “This was such a bad idea,” he whispers into the silence instead of asking if Ilya is still awake.

“Staying up?” Ilya asks, voice gone thick and rough with the scratch of sleeplessness – he does not sound nearly as Canadian in the darkness like this, in the quietly vulnerable too early hours of the day. He sounds very much like he did during their disastrous first meeting when they barely spoke the same language, let alone each other’s. “Or sharing room?”

Shane snorts a small sound of amusement as though he is also remembering the boy who once told him that he was only okay at hockey. “Both.”

“I could beat Germany asleep,” Ilya does not brag. Does not need to. The simple fact of the matter is that Germany is not playing in a class nearly at the level of the other teams, and especially not at that of Ilya and Shane. His team could likely beat Germany easily playing only its weakest line players without ever needing to risk him on the ice.

In fact, they very nearly do.

Every player who would not otherwise see much beyond the bench gets at least ten minutes of ice time in the matchup, with Ilya scoring an impressive four of his team’s seven goals himself and assisting on two more. With the final score an anticlimactic 7-1 Russian victory, they’re done in time to head to the showers and find seats for the more anticipated Canada-Latvia game; Ilya drops to the open space between Mrs. Yuna and Sergei with a quick lean of a half-hug for both only moments before the puck drops to start the game.

Shane is his usual sharp precision despite the lack of sleep; if you didn’t know him there would be no way of telling he was even slightly off his game. It’s only the way that Latvia fights tooth and nail through the very end of the third period before Canada manages to claw out a desperate 2-1 victory that reveals anything.

The morning of their first game against Canada, Volkov catches Ilya by the elbow right at the start of the team’s warm-up. “You know most of the team,” his voice is smoother in Russian, not the same growl of an engine refusing to catch; he doesn’t trip over the sounds like he does when he spoke to them in English over the phone. A subtle nod of his head in the direction of the Canadian bench elaborates, and Ilya suddenly feels a tightness in his stomach that he has not felt since he was a child. The uneasiness of his childhood home being too quiet, the trepidation of his father’s moods being too high. “What do we need to know about them?”

It takes a moment for the true meaning to sink in. Volkov wants Ilya to dissect the players like he would if they were his opponents – they are his opponents, he recalls, forces himself to remember, in this alone. They still feel like his teammates. Like, in Shane’s case, his friends. “17 aims for the holes,” he does not feel the same spark of loyalty in him for the Rangers player, or the goalie from University of Michigan. “And their goalkeeper plays left-handed.”

Volkov nods, but does not smile. “Yes, I have seen the tapes. Tell me what I don’t already know.”

He opens his mouth and the words catch, reluctance covering them like tar. Vinny will likely be his teammate for another season, and Shane will be his friend long after – he knows exactly how he could beat them, knows their plays as well as he knows his own, but admitting such feels like far more of a betrayal than he is willing to commit. He has no loyalty left to Russia, nor to her team; he hardly has any to the Canadian team as well. “I don’t—”

“Do you think that they aren’t doing the same right now?” Volkov does not sound cruel; he does not sound kind, either. Since the very first time they’ve spoken Volkov has remained detached in the way of those who have no personal involvement – Volkov cares for his players only for their performance, cares for his team only for their victory. He is not the sort of coach to coddle his players, or even inquire into their lives outside of the arena. In times like this it is almost a comfort, knowing that his words come only from a place of bland observational truth. “Do you think Hollander is not dissecting your every tell with his coaching staff before the game?”

He doesn’t know for sure, but he’d like to think that Shane isn’t. That he wouldn’t.

“Langevin is a good player, but he’s cautious due to his size.” Vinny is by no means short, but he is for a hockey player – he’s about five-foot-nine and maybe one-hundred-ninety pounds, solid in the way of most defensive players but a good four inches shorter than the majority he faces. He’s also got a real brick wall of a check that has more than once rattled Ilya’s skull like he’s been hit by a car, but he doesn’t share that with Volkov. His players can learn for themselves the same way that Ilya’s had to. “And Hollander is—”

Hollander is likely the reason Russia will have to work harder than it ever has for a victory this week.

“Hollander is as good a player as I am,” he does not say that Shane is better, mostly because Volkov would consider it an exaggeration if he admitted it, even though he accepted it years before. It’s never been a slight – being constantly compared to the best is better for Ilya’s ego than anything else, better than being told he’s the best on his team or the best scorer in the league. “Maybe his backhand. He does not have weaknesses on the ice.”

Only off of them, but Ilya will guard those with his life. Nobody needs to know that the future NHL Hall of Famer can be defeated before he’s begun simply by switching out his stick tape with a different brand or by switching his laces to an under cross. That he can be taken down by bright lights that hum too loudly and disrupt his ability to sleep hours later.

Volkov nods, satisfied. “Can his team survive without him?”

It takes a moment for the meaning to sink in – the Russian team is large, is rough, plays a little bit dirty. It’s not a reflection of them as men, but rather of the men who raised them. Trained them. The last relics of an old regime, slowly growing into their own. Volkov is asking if victory might be found in removing Shane early in the game. “His point lead is from assists,” he says slowly, “not goals. The whole offensive line is strong.”

Shane could easily carry his line, his entire team even, but it would not cripple them to lose him – it might cripple Ilya, though.

“Well,” Volkov sounds reluctantly impressed. He, like many others on the team that Ilya has casually begun to know, the sort of surface understanding that form on team like these – national teams that are one or two friends and the rest who are only fringe aware of the others, reputations alone – had the misconception that Canadian players were soft simply because they were also known for being nice. “Koslov is a better goalie than Canada’s university boy. We will have to trust him to do his job.” And then, when a small smile, “but I think I will need you to give him your best in practice this morning. Show him what he will be facing.”

Canada wins, 3-2.

The winning goal comes from Vinny, of all people, who Russia had largely ignored due to his size, using a slap shot he learned from Ilya the previous season.

Over the next week, earlier predictions hold firm: the teams sure to advance to the finals are Sweden, Canada, and Russia, with Finland securing the surprising fourth slot over the favored American team.

On the day of the semifinal matches Shane and Ilya wake up early; both of them are the sort to hit the ice before team practice begins, and being in the same location has allowed them to do so together. Sergei, after an hour or so – he doesn’t wake up early to practice with Ilya anymore, not like he used to. Just as Ilya has gotten older so has Sergei, and just as he is no longer his coach he has enjoyed the role of proud parent alone. A role that allows him to sleep until seven in the morning, even on a day like this. – appears with a set of pads and a determined grin. It’s been quite some time since Ilya went up against him as a goalie, and Shane never has.

“What the fuck, Sergei,” Shane says after another shot of his gets deflected. Ilya knows he’s feeling the pressure because he’s never before heard Shane curse in front of any parental figure, let alone Sergei – the first time Ilya heard him curse in front of an adult had been a coach in the heat of the moment as he argued a call made regarding the lineup, and he had looked immediately embarrassed by it. Now he looks only curious, and sweaty, and satisfied. “How did you guys ever lose a game?”

Sergei grins at him. “You do remember that I coach NHL players to do this for a job, right?” Over the years, Shane has lost his starstruck awe of Boston’s Sergei Vetrov the more he has gotten to know him as Ilya’s uncle-slash-father; he has never once thought of him in terms of being the man Toronto lured across the border to work with their defensive line. Ilya so rarely has either.

“Sure, Mr. Hockey Coach,” he grins, and flicks a glance at Shane in unspoken signal; Shane clacks his stick against the ice in response, and skates back to the blue line where they’ve left a bag of pucks. He collects one and, without any form of physical tell, takes off directly toward Sergei – at the last second he dekes to the glove side, and then shoots the puck to where Ilya waits just outside the crease. Ilya also dekes his shot, but to the opposite side – and then, knowing that Sergei’s knee sometimes bothers him, especially when he’s spent too much time sitting, as if in the stands of a hockey tournament, fires off a shot to the low glove side.

It goes in.

“Holy shit,” Ilya says, celebration giving way to immediate shock – he’s never managed to score a goal on Sergei before, but has been trying since he was a child.

Shane slams into him, arms around his neck. “Holy shit!” He knows as well as any of the three of them might exactly how big of a deal this is – he also knows, perhaps even better than Ilya, exactly how good of a goalie Sergei truly was.

And Sergei surges out of the goal as fast as his pads allow him, throwing his stick and his glove to the ice as he scoops Ilya up into a celebratory hug that lifts him a good few inches from the ground. “Ilyusha!” he crows, voice cracking with happiness. With pride. He lifts Ilya a second time and tries to spin, but mostly nearly sends them both down.

“Put me down!” Ilya laughs. Sergei has not lifted him, or even tried to, since he was maybe thirteen years old; he definitely hasn’t tried to manhandle him like this since Ilya hit just about six-feet, since he was more of size with Sergei than he was any other member of the family. “You’re going to throw your back out, old man,” but he’s beaming through his protests, clutching at Sergei as much as Sergei is gripping him back. Shane’s momentum had carried him a few feet beyond, to the net, and he ducks down to fish the puck out with his stick – it’s not quite the same as a first goal like what might be presented to him after a professional game, but it’s still a milestone that both of them will want to remember.

He skates back over, holding the puck in his hand; his glove is resting on top of the net. “I’ll get some tape after this, mark it up. First Sergei Goal.”

Ilya’s hand is shaking when he takes the puck, and he holds it like it’s something precious. Like a gold medal, or the Stanley Cup – this is a victory years in the making. “Holy shit,” he says again, and then presses the puck against Sergei’s chest, right over his heart. “You owe me a tattoo!”

He groans – he hadn’t expected Ilya to remember a deal made in a single conversation years before, especially one that had never come up since; the tattoo had been the motivator of the broken boy that had only recently begun to want things, a measure of control over a situation largely out of his hands. The real challenge had been reaching the level of play to allow Ilya to score a goal against one of the best professionals, and hopefully before reaching that level himself. “We’ll talk after we get home,” he says, voice stern, but then smiles. “But I suppose I do.” He cups the back of Ilya’s helmet, shaking him like we would ruffle his hair if he wasn’t wearing it, and taps the puck in his hand. “Don’t get anything stupid.”

Russia beats Finland in the first game of the day, securing their advancement to the medal podium to be determined the following day; one of the Americans had checked Finland’s star center in the first period the day and done something to his knee, and the team didn’t manage to rally after that. Two hours later, Canada beats Sweden in the closest match of the championship so far; it comes down to Canada getting the puck to Shane and Shane skating like he’s the only player left on the team, exacting and exhausting and he plays like something of a god only to collapse like a boy who has kept nothing back for himself as soon as they reach the hotel.

They’re set to face each other for the gold medal the following evening.

That night, in the vulnerable darkness of their hotel room lit only with the soft glow of the vanity lights in the bathroom, the ones that don’t hum and are easily tempered with a door partly closed, Ilya tosses one of the pillows from his bed across the gap between them to make sure Shane is awake. “Volkov tried to ask me about you,” he admits as though to a crime. “To give him your weakness so we could beat you.” He’s not ashamed that he’s been asked, or even that he’s refused to answer; he only feels the sort of unsteady jolt of airplane turbulence at the thought that maybe, just maybe, Shane had not.

Instead, he makes the sort of exhaling puff that means he is amused, or perhaps annoyed. More likely, one in the same. “Hughes did the same thing,” he admits more easily, the offhand sort of offended that soothes the insecurities burning at the back of Ilya’s throat. He says it in the same way he would say he didn’t tell them anything, if he felt it were something that needed to be said. And then, with the soft cotton noises of Shane sliding from his bed to perch on Ilya's, he grins his victorious, knife-like smile. “Like I would need to do that to beat you.”

The burning he feels now has nothing to do with worry. With the potentials of betrayal. It swoops lower in his gut, hot coals pressing against him from the inside – it’s the sudden declaration of a challenge. The anticipation. It feels a bit like arousal but sharper somehow, stronger, something right at the edge of pleasure and pain. “Oh?” he asks, and feels the way the warmth has spread to his voice now, thickened it like a simmering pot on the stove; he wants to kick off the blankets to try and escape the too-warm, too-caught feelings except that Shane is practically sitting on top of him now. “You think you’re beating me tomorrow?”

“I think I’m beating Russia tomorrow,” Shane is all too quick to draw lines between Ilya and the country that still has hooks in his skin, anchors in his bones. He flops to lay beside Ilya, sprawled across the top of the hotel comforter, and rolls onto his side to squint at his face through the low lighting. “Wanna make a bet?” he asks, shyly now, like beneath all the cockiness and the confidence of their usual wagering this is what remains: the two of them, and the certainty of it all.

His throat is dry. His skin is flushed. He feels a little bit like he did the last time he had a fever, except instead it feels like he’s got more energy rather than less, like he’s bursting at the seams with it. Like he could climb right out of his skin right now. Like he wants to climb into Shane’s. It hits him the same as the heat had, the sudden realization that he wants—

“What do I get when I win?” Ilya asks with a voice that cracks like the fragile space between them.

Shane kisses him like it’s another of their competitions, familiar and biting. He presses Ilya down into his pillows with a hand against his chest and another in his curls, and he licks the surprise out from behind Ilya’s teeth until he realizes this is for real; there’s a single whine of desperation that escapes before he gets with the program and grabs Shane back, one hand fisting in the back of his shirt and the other sliding beneath it. Ilya has kissed before but it’s never been like this – he shouldn’t be surprised. It’s always been him and Shane in a class all their own.

“Fuck,” Shane finally pulls away long enough to explore down Ilya’s neck, to breathe tiny sounds of his own against the column of his throat. To bite at the tendon there, sharp and claiming. The hand against his chest is slowly moving a similar path downward, dangerously close to the waistband of his sweatpants and his dick that throbs from painful arousal; he whines again, but only when it stops. “Fuck,” Shane says again, and lets Ilya kick himself free of the blankets finally and over the top, rolling Shane beneath him.

It doesn’t seem particularly surprising, that they’ve ended up here. If asked only an hour ago Ilya would have sworn that Shane was straight, and yet the clear signs that he’s not entirely are less of a revelation and more a recognition. A comfortable sort of of course that is the same as when they play; their bodies have always found the other’s like magnets. “I really want to suck your dick right now,” he says instead of saying any of the words that have stuck to his tongue since the day they met, since Ilya hadn’t known the right way to say that Shane was beautiful.

Shane makes a noise like he’s been hit and kisses him again, steals the rest of the words from him like the air from his lungs, and presses his face against his shoulder the same as he does when he hugs him. “Whatever you want,” he says weakly, though the way he presses against Ilya like maybe he also wants to slide beneath his skin gives away exactly how much he also wants it. “Don’t let me stop you,” and Ilya swallows him down; he’s only done this once or twice before but it’s so much more now that it’s Shane, sharp and heavy in the way it’s always been between them. Like it means something.

The startled, desperate noises that Shane makes mean everything, as does the way his hands tangle in Ilya’s hair like he never plans on letting him go. The way his back arches, lean and fluid, like the way he only ever moves when he’s skating – like he’s finally comfortable in his own skin. Even the words that fall from his mouth in between hitching breaths, the scatter of his name amongst a litany of fuck and oh shit and yes god yes that increase in frequency and decrease in coherence the closer he gets.

The first thing he does after finding his breath, and perhaps himself, after his orgasm is to let out an incredulous little laugh, a bright sound that Ilya’s never heard him make before. After that, Shane bullies him onto his back like this is just another instance he refuses to take second place in; he proves himself a quick study, and marks his victory with a trail of bruises sucked into Ilya’s inner thighs. By the time they both fall off of each other and into the mattress, sleepy and sated, it’s only an hour or so before their alarms are set to go off. “Not sleeping was a bad idea,” Ilya admits, already feeling the cottony mouth and sandy eyes of too-little sleep and the early morning pounding like his pulse in his head. Every single limb feels as though it would take a herculean effort to lift, and he’s meant to play the most important game of his career so far in the afternoon.

Beside him, tucked against his side, Shane shrugs his shoulder against Ilya’s ribs. He already sounds mostly asleep, and nearly content. “I don’t need sleep to beat you.”

Russia beats Canada 4-3 in overtime to secure the gold medal.

At the handshake line after the game, Shane doesn’t knock his glove into Ilya’s like he’s done so many times before.

In fact, he doesn’t even look at him.

Chapter End Notes

end of part two

part two of like five or six

i promise this isn't THE END the end