Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Gilbert Comeau, Patrice Drapeau, Connors (Heated Rivalry), Victor St. Simon, Brad Hammersmith, Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

WAG Ilya Rozanov, Figure Skater Ilya Rozanov, FTM Ilya Rozanov, Trans Male Character, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Coming Out, Gender Identity, Breaking Up & Making Up, Shane Hollander Needs a Hug, Good Friend Rose Landry, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Misogyny, Homophobic Language, Misgendering, Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Being Assholes (Game Changers)

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of the drugs are cursed (and boys will be girls)

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-25 Updated: 2026-10-23 Words: 13,366 Chapters: 5/10

i met a girl (who didn't know he was so beautiful)

Summary

Shane Hollander and Liliya Rozanova have had a good thing going: they’re in love, she gets on with his parents, and they both understand each other’s priorities on the ice. It’s almost perfect, except for the stuff that they’ve never quite been able to talk about. But now Liliya’s reaching the end of her career as a figure skater, and the issue of her work visa is looming over them. And with everything falling apart around her, she’s determined to be open with Shane at last. Except, for Shane, this means confronting the parts of himself that he’s never reckoned with before, and he has to decided what is more important to him: this love that he has found or his love of hockey.

or - Roz starts thinking about the parts of himself he’s never acknowledged before, and Shane starts to think about changing his long game.

Notes

Welcome! To the long-awaited Shane Hollander POV that I promised ages ago! It took a little while longer than expected but I have finally finished this bad boy in its entirety and will be updating it weekly. This takes place between chapters five and six of boys will be girls and just before chapter two of people who have come and gone. In other words, it's this universe's Tuna Meltdown in 2016 - and therefore angsty and full of miscommunication, because unfortunately, these guys are still the Shane and Ilya we know and love.

This work deals with a lot more explicitly with heavier themes than boys will be girls because it is from Shane's - and, surprise! Ilya's - POV, but I hope that I've dealt with them as kindly and considerately as possible. These guys are a mess but they're getting there - just as soon as they learn to talk to each other...

Without much further ado, I hope you all enjoy and that this was worth the wait!

warnings - internalised homophobia, internalised transphobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, misgendering, past child abuse, past suicide, dementia... Shane and Ilya are going through it in this one, guys...

Chapter 1: SHANE HOLLANDER

There was a drawer full of Shane’s socks at Liliya’s home in Boston. He didn’t know, really, when exactly the drawer had appeared; he knew only that it was there, having sprung up sometime over the many years that Liliya had invited him into her home, and that it was a small mark that Shane Hollander did occupy some sort of space in Liliya Rozanova’s life. It was the sort of evidence that Shane like to collect, because it was still strange to him sometimes, when he looked at Liliya in all her distant and glittering brilliance, that he got to be hers, and she his. Not many people believed it when they looked at them together. Sometimes, Shane himself could not believe it.

But he had a sock drawer in her house. And all the socks were folded in the way Shane insisted on, neat and compressed and stored away tidily. Some of them he might have folded himself - but not all of them. Which meant that, sometime over the years they had known each other, Liliya had looked at the way that Shane kept his socks and had started imitating it, so well that he had almost not noticed that someone other than himself was doing it, for no other reason than that it was important to him.

The socks were not the only physical presence that Shane had left in the house (there were pictures of them on the wall, and one of his Montréal jerseys on Liliya’s side of the wardrobe, and food in the cupboards that was there because it was the sort of shit that Shane would eat guilt-free) but they were, in that moment, the most important thing. It was a little thing - little enough that it shouldn’t have mattered, and little enough that it should have been the sort of thing that Liliya did not know about him - but Shane was there, stood barefoot in her bedroom in her house in Boston, and he was looking at a drawer full of socks and they were all folded in his particular way.

Shane didn’t often think about him and Liliya as something domestic. Because they weren’t. Both of them had busy schedules. The hockey season took up a large portion of the year, as did the multitude of figure skating competitions that Liliya competed in, and even in the summer, when they were supposed to have months off which they could spend together, training took up a large amount of their time. Especially Liliya, who was choreographing new routines for when the competitions began again in earnest. They were long distance as well, with Liliya mostly in Boston and sometimes - often when she had a moment permitting in the summer or over Christmas - back in Moscow, and Shane in Canada, split between the cottage in Ottawa and his place in Montréal. It had been so many years of them, and still many of their meetings were confined to stolen nights and scarce dates.

It wasn’t domestic. Shane often didn’t know what it was, because it wasn’t steady enough to be domestic. Sometimes, he felt like he was stood on the ice - except it was the ice of a frozen over lake, and it creaked and groaned under his weight, and he knew that it was about to buckle under him at any moment. He was just waiting for when. He was waiting for the moment that he would plunge into the iciness of the water and slowly, inevitably, drown under the weight of it.

The socks felt pretty domestic.

He reached out for a pair, unfolding them as he tugged them on. Liliya’s uncarpeted floors were cold underneath his feet, but they were familiar. He’d been here enough that he thought that he probably knew every inch of her home - could retrace his steps even in dreams, if it meant that he made it back to her side.

He could hear her moving around in the other room, the quiet, muffled noises of her feet on the floor and her hands picking things up and moving and her hip checking closed the cupboard doors. She was making tuna melts, because she was determined to find a dish that Shane would appreciate, even if her culinary skills were admittedly somewhat limited. Neither of them cooked much; both of them had dieticians to advise them on what best to eat for competition and prep them meals to keep in the freezer. Shane would eat pretty much anything she made, he thought, which was because he liked the fact that she was trying and also because he trusted her to take into account the several dietary stipulations that he had. It was nice - and there again was that word. Domestic.

Domestic, like they were something steady, something permanent. It was longest relationship Shane had ever had.

He’d had a girlfriend once, and he’d liked her a lot. She’d been fun to talk to and she’d put up with some of his Shane-ness and, when they cuddled on the sofa bed in her room, she’d sometimes let him run his hands through her hair, which was soft and nice to touch. He’d learned to sloppily braid it, because he enjoyed the feeling of it between his fingers and the repetitive motions of it had soothed him. They’d never had sex, because Shane was focused on hockey, and he couldn’t have his body under any other pressures, and no time had ever seemed like the right time to make that final step. But they’d made out, a bit, and once Shane had frisked his hand up under her shirt to land on her breast, but he hadn’t known what to do with it so he’d kept it still and felt the moment that she’d started to laugh by the way her breathing had hitched under his hand. They hadn’t gone any further than that.

When they’d broken up, she had said that it was so they could remain friends. Shane’s feelings had not changed much at that - at the time, he’d assumed that he was hung up on her, because she was his first serious girlfriend and his parents had liked him, and hers him. He’d sent her a text after - a friendly text - and she had not replied to him, and Shane had been disappointed, because she made him smile and they’d known each other throughout most of high school, but he’d had hockey and really, as harsh as it sounded, it was one less distraction between him and the NHL success that he was determined to achieve.

Shane Hollander had never felt about anyone the way that he felt about Liliya Rozanova. Which was, of course, a massive cliché because that was what everyone said, when they wanted to be romantic, and when the idea of a before that specific relationship was too complicated to ever peacefully talk through. He was aware, when he thought it, that it maybe made him sound like a pretentious dick - but he meant it honestly, because feelings before Liliya had been calm and steady and the sort of thing that settled over him comfortably.

Feelings with Liliya were something else entirely. Meeting her had been stoking a fire inside him that he hadn’t known existed into a blazing inferno. And he had waited for the fervour of it to consume him entirely, until he was nothing but ashes and dust and the shadow of a man laid into nothing, or for it to peter away in the sort of way that any feelings Shane had ever had before did. But they didn’t. He felt for her with the same intensity that he always had - he wanted to be touching her, and listening to the way that she said his name and the way that she laughed, and watching her lay out in conversation all the strange and clever nuances of her mind.

That wasn’t domestic. It was desperate, mostly, and primal in a way that Shane didn’t understand. It wasn’t controlled, or balanced, or centred. Everything he prided himself on - Liliya shirked it, challenged it, challenged him.

It wasn’t domestic, but Shane was looking at a drawer full of socks folded exactly the way he liked them to be and he was wondering what a life with Liliya Rozanova might look like.

It wasn’t something they had spoken about, much. They’d been dating for almost all of Shane’s NHL career. They’d met the night that Hayden had met Jackie - and Hayden and Jackie were married now, and four kids strong. But they’d never said marriage in any meaningful way; Liliya had said probably I will have husband and two-and-a-half-children and I will be a very attractive housewife, and Shane had said I mean, yeah, I’ll get married, have a wife, have kids - what else is there? They hadn’t been dating seriously then. He’d looked at Liliya as he’d said it and he knew that he liked her, but when he had spoken about some anonymous wife many years in the future (after hockey, he had clarified, to which Liliya, with all the elegant poise of a figure skater, had said obviously), the wife had not shared Liliya’s face.

He thought sometimes about marrying her. It was the done thing, when they had been dating this long. Hayden was shooting him pointed looks and making comments that weren’t supposed to be obvious, but were because Hayden did not have a single subtle bone in his body. There were TMZ articles, which was insane because Shane just wanted to play hockey.

And the thing was, he liked the idea of marrying Liliya. He liked to wake up and see her in the morning, and go to sleep looking at her face, and to hear her in the other room and know that she was there. He liked to read the texts that she sent him when he was playing hockey, mostly critical and always insightful, even though she knew he would not read them until the game was over. He still lost his ability to breathe when he pulled up the livestreams of her performances and watched her glide across the ice, the powerful, skillful shifting of her muscle and sinew, the way that she moved with a purposefulness that made her the most enchanting thing that Shane had ever seen. She was just as enchanting when she was in the clothes she wore for lounging around the house, or for when she wanted to dress pretty for going out, or when she wore a Boston jersey because she knew that it pissed him off. He liked pretty much everything about her, in a forever kind of way. Increasingly, he felt that he liked her in a domestic sort of way - a little steadier, a little surer.

Except, when he looked at her, he could never see Liliya Rozanova as his wife. And he knew that the problem was with him. And he knew that Liliya knew as well - they’d never talked about it, much, but he knew that she knew. She’d indicated as much to him, even if she didn’t let it show that she was disappointed that Shane couldn’t be the sort of boyfriend that people wanted. He didn’t know what to do with that - the certainty that it must bother her, because it should, and his inability to tell that it bothered her. He should know her well enough to tell.

Shane did not think that he was a very good boyfriend. Five years, and he thought that he was still lacking.

No one had said this to him - or maybe they had. Maybe, they’d been saying it to him when his mom, a year after she had met Liliya, had off hand mentioned that she and his dad had considered the possibility that he might be gay - it doesn’t matter to us, she had assured him, we just want you to be happy. Maybe, they’d been saying it to him when the guys in the locker room had been joking about celibate Saint Hollander; Comeau had said that he was glad that Shane had someone, which had felt genuine right up until he had followed it with “now we don’t have to worry about you being celibate ‘cause you’re too busy jacking off to us in the shower, Hollzy.” Maybe they’d been saying it to him all along, when he introduced people to Liliya as his partner and they looked at him as if they couldn’t quite believe him. Maybe there had been something off about Shane all along, and he just hadn’t realised.

There probably, he thought, had to be a reason that he couldn’t picture Liliya as his wife. And there was nothing wrong with Liliya, and so Shane supposed that meant there was something wrong with him.

Because he couldn’t bring himself to consider them domestic.

Because he couldn’t see Liliya as his wife.

Because he had never looked at women the way that he looked at her - never looked at women at all, really, which was not a thing, except for Shane sometimes thought that he looked at men a little like he looked at her.

It was not a notable thing, really. There was Scott Hunter on television, and watching Viggo Mortensen in the Lord of the Rings with his parents, and a guy who had slipped him his number in a coffeeshop in Los Angeles that had twisted Shane’s stomach into ugly knots.

But now he was stood in his girlfriend’s -

No. His partner’s, because Liliya preferred that, said it felt more like her and had looked at Shane very significantly as she had, all those years ago, like she was expecting him to understand what she was trying to convey - and he had, to an extent, because he saw the way that she flinched sometimes when people called her his girlfriend, and he never wanted to make her feel uncomfortable. Sometimes, a worse, more self-centred part of himself wondered if she actually did prefer it, or if it was simply something that she told Shane to make him feel better about himself, and that they could both play pretend a little while longer. This, however, was a mean thought and easily (easily-ish) banished.

So, he was stood in his partner’s bedroom, and there was a drawer of socks in front of him that was making him think about marrying her, except he was pretty sure that there was something wrong with him, like he was - was something for everyone but her.

And he was pretty sure that he was going to be find out - by her at the very least. And then all of this would end, and Shane would not have to probe too deeply into why he could not picture her as his wife.

But that would mean it was over, because being found out would mean Liliya realising that she deserved a lot more than him, and he was pretty sure that was the exact opposite of what he wanted.

Because he loved her - loved her more than he could understand - and it was killing him, a little bit more everyday that passed, to linger on the edge of a cliff with no end but losing her in sight. One day, Shane Hollander was going to fall over that edge - and maybe he was paranoid. Maybe he was making shit up and overthinking… but he was pretty sure that day was today.

He was still cold, even with the socks on; it was a bone deep coldness and it had sunk to the very centre of him, into his bones and his blood. He didn’t think that this was about the socks anymore.

Chapter 2: ROZ

Liliya Rozanova was certain of many things in life: that dogs were the superior animal, that Russian curse words were better than curses in any other language, that the Boston Bears were the superior NHL team, that tuna melts were the tastiest and easiest sandwiches to prepare, that the sky was blue and the grass was green, the cross around his neck and where it rested on his chest, Shane Hollander.

It was not an exhaustive list. He changed it, a lot. Added things, took other things away, swapped the order that he recited them in. But Shane Hollander was always on that list. He was always a certain thing, a steady thing. He had been since the time they had first met in that Montreal nightclub, and every time that they had chosen to meet after - even if, for Roz, it did not feel like much of a choice at all. It had felt inevitable - always inevitable. Like there was a string tied around his rib, strung between him and Shane so that wherever he strayed in the world, he was always pulled back to these moments, this home, that steadiness and certainty.

Shane did not seem very steady today.

Maybe, Roz could have written it off as pre-game nerves. Shane got tense and jittery, sometimes, when he was expected to perform on the ice. Roz didn’t know anyone who didn’t get like that before competition, but other people had outlets to disperse that stress. Shane didn’t. Shane vented his stress on the ice, best when he was alone, and all the optional practice skates with his team would not scratch the anxious itch that kept him constantly on edge.

So, maybe it was this. It was the most likely explanation.

Except, for the fact, that Roz was certain of Shane because he knew Shane - knew Shane like the back of his hand or an extension of himself, because it had been the only way that Roz had known how to trust Shane, for better or for worse. And he knew that Shane was anxious, yes, but not because of the approaching game against Boston - or at least not entirely because of the approaching game against Boston - but because of something else, something deeper. He had not said anything to Roz about it, yet, and Roz was pretty sure that was what scared him the most about it all.

Because he didn’t know. And all the certainty that he had in Shane, all the steadiness that he felt when they were together and Roz got to luxuriate in the brief times that they managed to share in the same city, was evaporating like writing on the sandy banks of a beach, swept away by the rising tide.

Mechanically, he began to lather the tuna mix that he had prepared onto his bread. He could hear Shane puttering around in the bedroom that he had begun to think of as theirs, even though that house was only his, and took some comfort in the small sign of the fact that he was in fact there and not something that Roz had made up because he was sad and lonely and a little pathetic. Shane had wanted to get changed into something more comfortable before eating - though he had certainly spent longer than he usually would in the bedroom - because Roz had gotten him off so enthusiastically that he had come all over the fabric of his pants.

Enough to work up an appetite.

But he was taking a while.

And not for the first time, Roz wondered if Shane knew - knew, somehow, that Roz had interrupted Shane’s superstitiously ritualistic pre-game routine for a reason other than the fact he had missed him (though he had) and was horny (though he was). And that, because he knew, the elaborate house of cards was now trembling at its foundations, and Roz was simply existing in the moment of before, experiencing the last few moments where the house would still be standing and before it all came tumbling down.

“Smells nice,” said Shane, and Roz looked over his shoulder to see that Shane had appeared in the entrance to the kitchen.

Quietly, he padded across to Roz, wrapping his arms around Roz’s waist and hooking his chin over his shoulder. It was a small gesture - not really anything at all - but Roz felt himself softening, tension he had not known he was carrying in his shoulders melting away, and sinking back into the contact, feeling the hard, muscled expanse of Shane’s chest supporting him and the warmth of his body and the quiet strength hid in his deceptively lean limbs.

“You should go sit, solnyshko,” Roz murmured, tilting his head back to feather a light kiss to Shane’s jawline. He lowered his voice somewhat suggestively. “I will bring sustenance to you - maybe in bed, see how many things you can eat lying with me.”

Shane’s brown wrinkled in distaste. “We’re not eating food in bed,” he said firmly. “Crumbs would get everywhere and you won’t ever get them out.”

“I do laundry,” Roz objected. He pouted, hoping that he looked suitably woebegone and offended.

“Not very well,” groused Shane, but did lean forward to kiss the pout off Roz’s lips, which was really all that Roz wanted. “I’ll go sit down, stick on the Buffalo game?”

“Ugh,” said Roz. “Buffalo is terrible.”

Shane said, “yeah, their team isn’t very good either.”

Laughing, Roz kissed Shane back and let him go. From the other room, there was the sound of the television turning on and being switched to a sporting channel, one showing the game against Buffalo. Roz could hear the tell-tale signs of Shane settling himself in, the almost unconscious way that he seemed to relax into his surroundings. He hoped that Shane being relaxed would help the conversation - make it easier, or at least give Roz the words that he’d been struggling to find to tell Shane. He wanted to do it in a way that wouldn’t upset Shane… but maybe that was impossible. Roz, after all, had been lying to Shane every day of their lives together, even if he hadn’t yet known it himself.

His phone buzzed on the counter. A text from Natasha Marlow (Cliff’s sister, and maybe Roz’s friend if the way that she insisted on him calling her simply Tasha was anything to go by) that read have u told him yet?

No, and Roz felt that he’d put it off for as along as possible because, at the heart of it, he was a coward and a liar and selfish. If he didn’t do now, he would never do it. And if he never did it, then he’d lose Shane forever, and that was the one thing that he could not bear to think about. Everything else, he had endured before - maybe he had not enjoyed it, but it survived it, could force himself to survive it again if he needed to. He wouldn’t be able to survive losing Shane.

Steeling himself, he carried two plates into the living room, passing one over to Shane, who took it gratefully, setting it on the coffee table in front of him whilst he picked up one half of the sandwich. Roz tucked himself up beside him, feet underneath him, and tried to count his breathing - to slow it to a speed where he could force himself to speak. He’d rehearsed it all in the mirror, but even then it hadn’t made much sense to him. Just fallen out as a stuttering, stammering mess.

Shane put his sandwich down, looking oddly at Roz. His brows furrowed, as though he was trying to work out the answer to some particularly difficult equation. Roz had the strange feeling of being stripped bare and vulnerable, unable to escape any of it. Shane knew him too well to let him wiggle out of it again, and Roz watched as Shane pressed the mute button on the television remote, the game on screen falling into silence.

“What’s wrong?” Shane asked, and maybe Roz was projecting, but he thought that Shane’s voice seemed unusually tight and tense.

Roz set his sandwiches down on the table, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “I think we need to talk,” he said, but his voice stalled and the words wouldn’t come. He took Shane’s hand in his, twining their fingers together and pressing it against his thigh, trying to let the weight steady and ground him. “I do not know how to say…”

“We don’t need to talk about it,” Shane offered, “if you aren’t ready, that is.”

Roz exhaled a trembling breath. “No. No. We need to talk about it. I can’t keep pretending. I…”

“You know I love you,” Shane broke in, and he seemed almost desperate.

His eyes seemed to search Roz’s face for something - something that Roz didn’t know. Could it be that… he knew? That knew, and he knew what Roz was going to tell him, and he was trying to say that it was fine? That they could keep this - could keep them - in spite of it? Or maybe he was trying to remind Roz that he’d fallen in love with Liliya Rozanova, glittering and beautiful and perfect, the sort of woman who he might marry one day and not be ashamed to be seen with.

 “I love you,” he repeated. “We can get past it. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”

Roz snorted, feeling almost amused. “Is going to be a thing no matter what we say. I think that is… the word, when you cannot stop something from happening?”

“Unpreventable,” Shane whispered.

“Da, unpreventable.”

“But why?”

“I will be retiring,” Roz said, the words all in one rush. It was almost a relief to have said them, but that only made it worse.

Shane looked bewildered. Roz had thought that they had somehow been understanding each other - on the same page, it might be said - but he suddenly wondered if they both actually having the same conversation. It no longer felt that way.

“Retiring?” he asked. “Why?”

That was the million dollar question. The sting. There were million other turns of phrases that Roz had accumulated over his years in North America, dozens of ways to say things without ever saying them at all. But, it all boiled down to this: Liliya Rozanova had built her career, her life, around the ice and her career on it. Take it away, and what was she? She was not useful nor wanted nor desirable. She was a body, with her other’s hair and eyes and her father’s mouth. In a couple of years, the strength of her limbs would ebb away, and the utility of her body - its existence so far justified by him through its use as a tool of Liliya Rozanova’s craft - would be gone forever. Liliya Rozanova would be soft, feminine, and Roz thought that an existence like that would kill him, slowly, little by little, and day by day. The longer he drew it out, the higher the fall, the bigger the hurt. He thought that it would kill him to be Liliya Rozanova. He thought that maybe it was already killing him, and he’d just gotten good at ignoring it all.

“A lot of reasons,” he demurred. He couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Shane as he struggled; he looked at the rug at his feet, finding the texture of the fibres to be more interesting, more important.

“Liliya,” said Shane - and no, Roz was realising, they really hadn’t been having the same conversation at all. “You love it. How… You’re going to give it up?”

“It’s not like hockey,” said Roz, tamping down on the irrational curdling of irritation in his chest. “I can’t do this for as long as you. I’ve been competing for years now, and practicing for longer. My knee… Blyat, is painful all the time now. I ice it. I treat it. But one day, it will not get better. Maybe even now I will have to do surgery. If I keep going, it gets worse. Is just the life cycle of a figure skater. Start young, retire young, spend the rest of your life missing it.”

“God. I can’t imagine having to do that.”

“Well, no one is asking you to, Hollander. You do not have to give up anything.”

Shane had the gall to look hurt, and taken aback by Roz’s words. It made Roz feel bad - because what had Shane said that was wrong? - and that made Roz angrier, because why should Shane be making him feel worse? This was already difficult enough. He didn’t want Shane’s pity. He just wanted to know that Shane would still be there in the morning, and that nothing would have changed at all.

“That’s not fair,” said Shane. “I just… I meant that - Well, I don’t know what you need me to say. You’re retiring, and I just thought that it wasn’t something that you wanted to do, that you were being pushed by your knee or whatever age thing figure skating has going on. And I’m sorry, if that’s the case.”

Roz sighed. “No. Do not be sorry. I am just taking it out on you. Is shitty. I am stressed. I think maybe I am scared that I will lose everything when I make this choice.”

“This changes nothing about who you are,” Shane said firmly. “You retire, fine. But, you know, you’re still you.”

“Shane,” Roz breathed, hands spasming as if he could hold Shane tighter, make sure that he never went anywhere. “You can’t know that. You cannot -”

“I can,” said Shane. “Liliya -”

Roz held up a forestalling hand. “Stop,” he said. He could feel his face caving in, expression crumpling like a wet napkin, and he knew he would not be able to hold it together for much longer. This was so much harder to say that he had thought it would be, and he much more scared. “Shanya, my Shanya, I’m sorry.”

Shane looked terrified. “What’s going on?”

“Have you heard… transgender?” Roz asked, fighting not to stumble over the word that Tasha had given him, that he had hardly dared say aloud, as if the word itself was the thing that had made him who he was.

Shane’s shoulder tensed. Something - and Roz could not name what that something was - passed over his face, and Roz had the sickening feeling that Shane did know what being transgender was. Worse, Roz had the sickening feeling that transgender meant something very different to both of them.

Chapter 3: SHANE HOLLANDER

Chapter Notes

Posting fanfic so I can ignore the devastating let downs of life? 🤪 More likely than you think. I've been looking forward to this chapter so I hope you enjoy!

Shane knew what transgender was. Vaguely. Sort of. Chris Mosier, who had been on the Team USA sprint duathlon men's team, was transgender. Harrison Browne, who’d been playing for the Buffalo Beauts in the PWHL, was transgender. The point was that Shane knew of people who were transgender. He just didn’t know what it had to do with Liliya - but, looking at her face, pale and drawn and looking a little frightened (of Shane? Surely not of Shane), he was beginning to think that it had a lot to do with her.

“Say something,” she begged. “Please.”

Shane didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He wondered if there was something - something that everyone knew they were supposed to say in this situation and he was just the only one who hadn’t received the memo. He felt that way a lot of the time, but it had been easier with Liliya. Easier to know what to say, because she understood what he meant without him needing to say anything at all. Except, now she was begging him to speak and Shane was dried up and wordless, not knowing what she needed and unable to give it to her.

“I… transgender?”

It was possibly the worst thing that Shane could have said. Liliya’s shoulders curled in almost defensively on themselves; her hands, where they were still holding his, trembled and shook like leaves in the wind.

“Da,” she said, and Shane was startled to see tears glittering in her eyes.

He didn’t know if he had ever really seen her cry before; mostly, she hid her face - but she was not doing that now. He saw the way that tears clumped her eyelashes together, gathering on her waterline, and wondered how it was he had never seen her like this before. He was beginning to wonder if he had ever really seen her at all.

“Yes,” she repeated. “I am. Transgender. I… It has always been true. I did not have the words for it, but I feel it always. And I tell myself I can live with it, live with this stupid fucking body that is not really mine, because it is useful. It serves purpose. Is good for my skating. But now… now I think is not true. Because I do not get to keep skating forever, and all that is left is this body. So, I cannot live with it. I have been trying, but is impossible. I wanted - I just wanted -”

Her (her?) face scrunched up with frustration, with the anger that Shane recognised from every time Liliya had tried to find a word in English and found that her vocabulary wasn’t as extensive as it needed to be to say what she was trying to say. A lot of time, Shane was able to give her the words. Not this time. This time, he was still trying to fumble for explanation himself.

“So,” he said. “You’re, like, a guy, or?”

“A guy,” said Liliya, and this time, his (his) voice was clear and firm, more assured about this than he had been with the rest of it.

But Shane’s head was spinning, reeling in circles, and his thoughts chased themselves just as fast, catching up to each other, swallowing themselves down, regurgitating themselves, until Shane’s brain was a chewed up mess of mushed, half-discarded half-thought ideas.

A guy, he thought.

And then, selfishly, did he know?

Had Liliya been able to tell, when he had met Shane, that Shane was -? Or at least that he struggled to feel the way about women that he should? Surely not. Surely Liliya had not spent all the years of their relationship (six now - six whole years) knowing this thing about Shane, keeping it like a card to play at a later date when convenient, even as Shane had tried to his best to set it to one side, forgotten. Surely, Shane had been good enough at loving Liliya that he had not known. Because Shane tried. He’d really, really tried - and it had worked. He’d loved Liliya. Loved him still, though he didn’t know what that meant for him.

Shane sat forward, carefully disentangling himself from Liliya’s side. He just needed a moment to think, and everything touching him - the cushion of the couch, the seams of his clothes, the weight of Liliya’s hands around his - was too much to think past. Liliya made a soft, stifled noise, and shuffled away from him, just enough that Shane noticed.

Come back, he wanted to say. Because he always wanted Liliya near him. But he couldn’t bring the words to come. He couldn’t make anything work. He counted his breathing - in and out, held, always in sets of four - and focused on the pressure of his elbows where they dug into his knees. Spine curved forward, he buried his head in his hands, kept small and contained. Too much. It was too much. He just needed to make it less.

“What does this mean?” he asked.

Sometimes, Shane felt like he was playing catch up with things that other people understood instinctively. He knew that he was not stupid, because he understood strategy, things like hockey plays and statistics, with a rapid surety that others couldn’t. But things like this - like the shake of Liliya’s hands, the glistening of his eyes, the warble of his voice - didn’t come as easily to him. They couldn’t be explained away, dressed in clear-cut analysis that would help everything make sense. Shane could see it all from the outside, look at it from different angles as though it might help to file it away somewhere in his brain that would make everything digestible, but it never helped.

Somewhere here, Shane was making a misstep. Here was a careful, foundational truth that Liliya was presenting to him, and Shane couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t wrap his head around what would make this situation better and easier, or even whether or not he could.

He knew very little about trans-ness. He’d read some interviews with athletes and found it interesting, in the same sort of way he had found sporting community outreach programmes interesting. It was good, yes, and a part of the sport that he vaguely considered would be could for the continued growth of it - but what immediate impact did it have on Shane’s game? Did it improve his powerplays? His shot accuracy?

Shane had been the face of several community outreach programmes - look at our Japanese player! He doesn’t speak a word of the language! He doesn’t understand the culture! But he doesn’t look like everyone else and that’s what we’ll focus on instead! -and every time, he had thought it more meaningful to push his own game to newer heights. An example, instead of an activist. Shane would be responsible for himself and no one else; that had been the only face of his ambition when he’d been ten and fitting in practice around his homework.

But this wasn’t about sports. If it was, Shane could have looked a research, taken notes, assembled his thoughts into some ordered dossier about cause and effect and impact. He could have forced it to make some sense in the narrow confines of what he was comfortable with understanding.

But it wasn’t about sports. Which left only the very knotty question of them.

“What are you asking?” Liliya asked. “What do I mean? What do you want me to answer?”

Shane hunted fruitlessly for the words, some way to vocalise the racing thoughts that he couldn’t quite lay hands on.

“What does it mean for us?” he said, and willed Liliya to understand him.

Yet Liliya sounded frustrated when he replied, “I do not know. I do not know what it means for us. I have never done this before, and you will not tell me how you feel!”

“How I feel?”

Shane found that he was almost startled by the question, and by the way that Liliya’s voice rose almost to a yell at the end of it. He knew, of course, that he entered into this equation - selfishly, it had been his first thought - but he hadn’t realised that Liliya would also be thinking about his part in it. Hadn’t realised that he would be almost as frustrated as Shane was at his inability to fit Shane neatly into the maths of it all. But he was, staring Shane down, almost daring him to ask again, to reveal his inability to work it out for himself.

“Yes. I am telling you that your girlfriend does not exist. I am telling you that I am a man. That I have been one all along. And now I am going to tell you that I have not changed, and what I want - at least, from you - hasn’t changed. You know where I am standing, Shane Hollander, but I do not know where you are. I need you to tell me what you want.”

Shane looked at Liliya, tried to look at him like he was a stranger and Shane was meeting him for the very first time, to see him in the sort of way that would force Shane to feel that first rush of something deeper for the first time. This was so very different to how they had met in the club, under pulsating lights and pounding bass of a music that split its nails over Shane’s temples. Shane tried to remember how he had felt then, palms slick with nervous sweat and stomach tangled with desire. He tried to remember if he had felt that desire because of the swell of Liliya’s breasts or vivid, infectious energy of his smirk. Surely, he figured, there had been a moment where he had been attracted to the appearance of her. Surely, there would be some sense of loss in this moment, the feeling of something being taken away from him.

There wasn’t.

Liliya was sat on the couch with him, still tucked up with his feet underneath himself, hair tied back and face bare of make-up. Shane was sat down as well, his feet (wearing the socks that he kept in Liliya’s drawer, folded the way that he liked them) on the cold floor. It was a far cry to the club. But neither of them had changed. Not really. Shane had lost nothing, and he didn’t feel the loss, which surely meant that -

“I’m not gay,” said Shane, embarrassed to hear the desperation that leaked into his voice.

By this, he meant… he didn’t know what he meant. Not entirely, at least.

He supposed that what he was trying to say was that he had never thought about anyone the way that he thought about Liliya - man nor woman. He supposed that was he was trying to say was that for all he had noticed himself noticing other men the way that he should have been noticing other women, it had been Liliya had he had wanted. He supposed that what he was trying to say was that he had loved Liliya before this - in spite of himself, falling and not quite sure how he was supposed to stop himself from hitting off the rocks at the bottom of the cliff - and that it had never felt like something that he could just switch off. He supposed that what h was trying to say was that he was sat beside Liliya on the couch and he knew him still, as he had always known him, except maybe a little more honestly. He supposed that what he was trying to say was -

Well, simply put, what he was trying to say was that being in love with Liliya, once he had figured out that was what he was feeling, had never confused him. It didn’t confuse him now either.

“I didn’t say you were,” Liliya said crossly, and unfolded himself from the sofa, standing to pace back and forth, back and forth, in front of the television. On the screen, Ryan Price’s fist planted itself in the face of some mouthy winger; the fight, Shane noted distantly, was over before it had ever really begun.

“I’m not gay,” he repeated.

“I did not fucking say you were!” Liliya shouted. “Fuck’s sake, Hollander. Is always fucking about you, huh? I tell you this thing about me and you are all I am not gay! I am not gay! Well, maybe you are a little gay. I fuck you and you like it. That is a little bit gay.”

“Look,” said Shane. “I’m not - I’m not good at this shit, okay? I don’t find it easy. I don’t think I look at women the way that my teammates do. So, if this -”

Liliya’s voice was dangerously low. Shane fell quiet. “So, if this what? You are going to ask if I am only transgender because I think you might like me more if I have a cock.”

“What the fuck, no,” said Shane. “I mean -”

“Fuck. You,” Liliya enunciated.

“No,” said Shane. Startled, at first. And, smouldering underneath, a little angry. “No. Stop fucking putting words in my mouth. I never said that. You said that.”

“Maybe I don’t know what else you could possibly mean.”

“I don’t look at other people that way! That’s what I mean! I mean that the only person I’ve ever looked at that way is you. No one else. No one ever. Just you - always, always you. Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that the answer you want?”

Combing his fingers through his hair, Liliya made a low, guttural noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t know, Shane. I don’t know what I want you to say. I just - I am thinking that am feeling very sorry for myself. I am scared. Do you know what they do to people like me in Russia?”

“Are you in danger?” asked Shane.

“Always,” replied Liliya. “You know this. Am in danger because I fuck women, in danger because I am woman who does not want to be woman, in danger because I do not like -” - Liliya wafted an airy hand around, as if to encapsulate all of it, a gesture of forced casualness - “Shane, you know that I love my country, even when I do not like her, but my country will never love me back, will never like me at all.”

It was as if, in that moment, all the fight drained from Liliya; he slumped back down onto the couch, head cradled in his hands. A shuddering exhalation wracked his shoulders. Shane settled closer to him, wrapping an arm around him, pulling him closer. He hoped that it gave Liliya some sort of comfort - he hoped that Liliya would understand that it was the only way that Shane could assure him that his feelings hadn’t changed at all without tripping and stumbling over his words.

“It will be better soon,” said Liliya, weakly, as if trying to convince himself. “I will make it all better. I transition, I come out -”

“What?” said Shane.

“I said I am going to make it better -”

“No. No, sorry, the last part? Coming out?”

“I think people will notice if I start walking around with bound tits and short hair, looking like a man,” said Liliya wryly.

“Yeah, but that’s a long way off, surely. You still need to retire. You don’t need to think about this yet.”

“Have you listened to nothing that I just said?” Liliya shook his arm off, turning a disbelieving glower on Shane. “I cannot live like this anymore. It’s killing me to live like this, and I will not be able to pretend that it is not when I no longer have skating. I am not - not being dramatic or over the top. Shane, I mean it. I can feel it. I -”

Liliya choked off into silence, but there was a strange sort of desperation in his eyes that Shane had never seen before. The terror of it quailed somewhere in the marrow of Shane’s bones. His mind raced a million miles ahead of itself.

“I just mean that we need time to work this out ourselves first,” explained Shane, as patiently as he could manage. “You know, what this means for us before we involve the whole entire world. I understand -”

“You don’t understand anything. It is like I don’t even exist. People look at me and I am Liliya Rozanova, pretty and perfect, a woman, and they do not understand how much it hurts. I want to look in the mirror and not feel the need to peel away my skin. I want people to look at me and see - me. Me, just Roz. I want to be known, Shane, and I cannot do that here. I cannot keep pretending. I am trying to tell you that I… I do not know. Shane, I do not know what I am doing, and I am trying to tell you this, but you do not understand.”

“But think of what this will mean. Li- Roz, Roz, we need a plan, first. We need -”

“It’s my life, not problem to be dealt with! Me! Me! A person!”

“I’m trying to help you!” yelled Shane. He was on his feet, and Roz was too, and they stood to glower at opposite sides of the room from each other; the distance between them had never felt so vast and uncrossable.

“You just don’t want people thinking that perfect golden boy Shane Hollander is a queer,” Roz said, low and venomous.

Shane’s face blanched. He felt the instinctive, knee-jerk reaction before he could quash it, and knew that Roz had seen it as well, something blank and distant shuttering over his face at the sight of it. Shane stepped forward, half thinking of some way that he could fix it, could make everything go back to the way that it had been before. Things had been fine, he thought. He didn’t understand how everything could have gone wrong so quickly. If he could just… But Roz took another step back, pressed against the far wall.

“I think you should go,” he said firmly. “I think that we need space.”

Shane opened his mouth -

“Hollander, go,” Roz said, and left no room for Shane argue against him.

Chapter End Notes

Harrison Browne (born 1993) was assigned female at birth and played in women's competitions during his ice hockey career; he came out publicly as a transgender man in 2016 and was the first openly transgender athlete in a professional team sport during his career.

Chris Mosier (born 1980) is an American advocate for transgender rights and competitive triathlete, duathlete, and racewalker. He started his athletic career before transitioning, started his transition in 2010, and in 2015 earned a spot on the Team USA sprint duathlon men's team for the 2016 World Championship in the men's 35-39 age group division, making him the first known out trans athlete to join a U.S. national team different from his sex at birth.

These two summarised biographies are taken from Wikipedia for the athletes that Shane mentions at the beginning of the chapter, but I highly recommend reading queer sporting history in full - it's one of my favourite topics to talk about, although I'm mostly a motorsports kind of person.

Chapter 4: ROZ

Chapter Notes

Posting a little early as a birthday present to myself. I wish it was a happier chapter but we'll get there soon :)

The silence that rung out after Shane closed the door behind him was made all the worse by the fact that Shane had not even bothered to slam it. If he had slammed the door, Roz could have clung to his righteous anger with both hands, could have told himself that was an asshole and emotionally constipated - which he was really, both an asshole and emotionally constipated, but not in a way that made Roz feel any better about this. Because Shane was - well, he was Shane, with all his quirks and flaws and strange eccentricities that both infuriated Roz and made him love him more. And Roz would rather have Shane there, with him, with all these little things, than have Shane gone.

But it had been Roz who had sent Shane away, and it had been Shane that had closed the door after him, without a slam, jimmying up the handle from the other side to make sure that the door was shut properly. Because fuck Shane Hollander, and fuck his inability to take accountability, and fuck the fact he couldn’t deal with his emotions without running away, and fuck the fact that he was still able to think about Roz in the midst of it all. And fuck, if Roz was still not head over heels in love with asshole, unable to properly feel his anger underneath the crushing sting of his disappointment and his fear, and the slow growing numbness that had seized his chest in a vice grip.

This did not feel as easy to fix as their other arguments had been. And those had not also been easy issues - problems that came from pressure they were both familiar with, and the expectations of family, and all the little things that motivated them to become who they were that they still couldn’t bear to name. But at least for those compromise had been possible, or at least a moment of armistice.

Roz knew that to compromise on this would kill him.

He felt it more every day - the way that his skin stretched over his bones, and settled wrong over him. The way that his shirts did not sit right. And the frustration over how his body did not suit him worsened the more it failed him - the first time he’d hit the ice trying a triple axle after months of having perfecting it, how his knee twinged and complained with every step that he took some days, the way that his turns were just a little looser and not as impressive, weighed down by exhaustion. For so long, he’d pushed it to one side, locked away in a tiny box at the back of his mind where he did not have to think about it. And now - now, he felt like a wound re-opened, spilling blood and pus across everything that was clean and pure, good and simple. He was infecting everything that came near him - and now Shane had left too, because of the poison that was steadily leaking from Roz no matter how much he thought to stop it, no matter how much pressure he tried to staunch the wound with.

The thing was -

The thing was that Shane was terrified. Roz had seen it, in his eyes, when he had heard that Roz wanted to be open, to live openly. Terrified, because people would see Roz, and Shane Hollander - automatically by association - would have so many assumptions made about him. About his private life, his sexuality, and about the way that he did his job, his professionalism, his skill. Everything that Shane had worked for, under the microscope. So, yeah, Roz understood why Shane was scared. Had he not felt that same fear, waiting for someone to look at him and understand that he had been made wrong? Had he not stood in the shadows of underground queer events in Moscow with Sasha, watching how the people had moved, whole and confident and happy in themselves, and felt so sick with jealousy that he’d been certain that he’d carry the taint of it home, where Papa and Andrei would see it and understand him? Had he not been scared?

He understood Shane, and he thought that was what made him angriest.

Because he’d been where Shane had been, with the question of whether it was right to take the leap - to be happy, both of them - or to force things to remain how they had always been, and he’d chosen them. He’d chosen himself, and he’d chosen Shane, and he’d chosen to be happy.

And he’d wanted Shane to choose him too - to choose him over hockey and brand deals and reputation. He’d wanted Shane to choose him.

He hadn’t realised how much he’d wanted it until he hadn’t gotten it. Had told himself, still, even after years of being proved wrong time and time again, that he didn’t need Shane. He’d moved away from Moscow to escape dependency. He kept people around because he wanted to. He’d flirted with Shane, taken him to the hotel room, and kept seeing him after, because he wanted to. He’d told himself that he could stop at any time. He’d told himself that if it got too much, or not enough, he’d be abl to choose himself and it wouldn’t hurt at all. Five years, and a part of himself had still be trying to convince itself that Shane was just a bit of fun, just some company, something that Roz could leave at any point.

And Shane was gone. Roz had made him leave, just like he had promised himself he’d be able to go, and he felt a little like he was dying. Chest tight, hands shaking, breathing shallow. Fuck. Fuck.

Shane’s shadow had long since moved away from the panel of frosted glass in Roz’s front door. The sound of his car and the gravel kicked up underneath its wheel had faded away to silence. Roz was alone, in his living room, feeling million miles away from home and also as if he had never been there at all.

Where did he go from now?

He’d not planned for this. Hadn’t really planned anything at all. He’d just known that he needed to get it off his chest, that he’d needed Shane to know about it before the secret had strangled him silent forever.

Shane would come back, he told himself. Of course, Shane would come back. Shane always came back. He was fucking annoying like that - annoyingly perfect, annoyingly considerate, like he’d been fed all the right lines to be a gentleman. He was a little less polished in the smaller moments, which went unscripted by society at large - but this, surely, was a large gesture sort of moment, the kind that Shane would be rehearsing over and over again until he could come back and make it all right.

Shane would be back, Roz repeated to himself. He’d be back. This wasn’t over - they weren’t over.

In the quiet of Roz’s living room, the ringing of his phone cut through it all like a knife. His heart, trembling in his chest, leapt itself, twisting into a knot of hopeful anticipation. But it wasn’t Shane’s name, on the screen.

“Papa?” he said, pressing it up against his ear.

“Liliya,” his Papa said. He sounded relieved to hear Roz’s voice - relieved enough that something prickles, uncomfortable, at the back of Roz’s neck, and it wasn’t just the use of that name. “Liliya, you must bring bread when you come home. We’re out.”

“What?”

When I come home? he nearly blurted. It was only years of talking to his father that curbed his tone, the instinctive lashing out of disbelief.

“Bread,” his papa repeated, as if that was what had confused Roz.

“Papa, I am not coming home. I am in Boston. I cannot bring you bread.”

“Boston? What are you doing in Boston?”

“I live there. Papa.”

“No. No, you live here,” Grigori replied, but there was an uncertain waver in his voice, a thinness that made him sound so much smaller than Roz had ever known him, so much less like the imposing man that dominated all of his childhood memories.

Roz sat down heavily, then slid from the couch to the floor. The distance between himself and Moscow had never felt further, a whole ocean between him and his father, that he could not cross in an instant. Meanwhile, his papa was alone and scared, his mind running itself down into nothing, asking for his daughter. He’d never done that before the dementia - asked for Roz, for his help or even his company. But now…

“Where is Andrei, Papa?”

“Andrei?”

“My brother. Your son, Andrei. Where is he?”

But Roz’s papa did not respond. Whether it was because he was trying to think of where Andrei was or simply because his mind had wandered itself down another meandering path of thought, Roz didn’t know. It was easier, he thought, to tell himself that the signal had gotten lost somewhere across the Atlantic. But it wouldn’t make it true. It wouldn’t make it better.

“Papa, I will call Andrei,” Roz said, clutching the phone tighter in his hands. “I will call Andrei and he will help you.”

From the other side of the phoneline, it sounded almost as though Grigori was going to say something else - yet Roz didn’t stick around to hear what he could possibly say. He hung up, feeling terrible about it and even more terrible at the relief that he felt no longer have the sound of his father’s breathing rattling in his ears. Then he was scrolling through his contacts, fingers trembling even as he pressed the green call button, a sick sense of dread choking him like bile.

It took long enough for Andrei to pick up that Roz almost thought that the call would ring straight through to voicemail

Andrei sounded irritated before Roz had even had the chance to say anything to him. Probably, the thought of Roz and all their past conversations was enough. “What?” he said, snippily.

It was a struggle to tamp down on the instinct to lash out at him, the pulsating thickness of his fury that seemed to be more and more familiar every time that he and Andrei spoke. That, and the much worse feeling of disappointment, which Roz never wanted to feel when speaking to Andrei, because it felt a little bit like admitting to his own weaknesses, the fact that he once could have had expectations of his brother.

“Where are you?” he asked, pushing through all of it.

Andrei’s tone was immediately defensive. “It’s none of your business where I am.”

“Papa called me,” Roz stressed. He paced back and forth, back and forth, keeping his turns tight and imagining himself on the ice. “He asked me to pick up bread on my way home.”

The silence that echoed afterwards was deafening. Roz heard Andrei audibly swallow from the other side of the call, making a few aborted motions to speak.

“He’s just tired,” he said, eventually. “Working a lot. This means nothing.”

“Nothing?” Roz hissed. “Nothing? Dyusha, he’s sick. You know that he is sick. And I am paying you to look after him - to make sure that he is safe, that he is not thinking about having to buy fucking bread. So, where the fuck are you?”

“Where am I? Where am I? Where are you?” Andrei’s laughter, humourless and mean, crackled down the line. “Where the fuck are you, Liliya? In America, with your perfect fucking life and your fucking foreign boyfriend -”

“Shut the fuck up about Shane,” Roz warned coldly.

“- and I’m here! In Russia! Where you should be! You forget the meaning of family, of responsibility, of duty, over in America. It is your duty to care for Papa, but I’m the one who’s here, day after day, reminding him how wipe his own fucking ass when he doesn’t even remember my name!”

Roz inhaled a sharp breath. “Dyusha -”

“He remembers you,” Andrei said, tone silky and deadly, precise in where he wanted to hurt him with all the finesse of an older brother. “He remembers you, even when you aren’t here, but he never remembers me.”

“What do you want me to do?” Roz yelled, unable to suppress the tremor of his voice.

“You know what I want you to do,” Andrei said coldly. “What you’re fucking supposed to be doing.”

He hung up, leaving his words to cut off into a sudden, abrupt silence.

Roz hurled the phone down onto the couch. It bounced off the soft cushioning and brought none of the satisfaction that he wanted. He wanted to smash it. It dash it off the floor and watch the screen shatter. To know that, now, in his anger, he would be unreachable. He wanted to be alone, and for nothing more than to melt into the floor so that his loneliness could last forever.

It was all falling apart. Everything he’d built, and everything he’d run from too - soon, he’d be stuck in the middle of both of them, with nowhere to go and no floor underneath him to catch him when he fell. Moscow, his papa, Andrei… it all loomed over him with a sick sort of inevitability. It was where he’d come from, where he’d run from, and, if he could not fight it, it would be where he was forced to return from. Roz was painfully aware of the fact that his life in America had been one that he had grabbed for himself - he’d not been born into it, nor inherited it in the same way that Svetlana had. And his visa was contingent on his career, so when that went away…

Roz had other options. He could apply for other visas. He thought that he’d lived long enough in the States to qualify for something, and he surely had enough money to hire the one of the best immigration lawyers that money could buy. And if he came out… Well, that opened up a whole new array of options for him. Or, at least, one: asylum. He’d thought of this aspect of his future, sometimes, but always found some reason to delay actually looking into it. After all, he’d never lived a life without figure skating, and all the benefits that it brought to his life. Why should he have to imagine one?

And -

Well, if Roz was honest - completely honest - he’d had other hopes for his life after skating. There was a cottage in Ottawa that he had helped design (chose some colours, vetoed some particular pretentious and impersonal interior design) and there was - what a cliché! - a guy. But all of those hopes that just walked out of his front door.

He was beginning to feel a little like a sheep in the fields, knowing that the wolves were out there and letting his fear herd him further and further into a corner that he couldn’t get out of, despite knowing that it was the worst possible thing that he could do. But the shadows were heavy and thick and meant that he couldn’t see the wolves, not until the very moment that they would lunge for his neck. And so it was becoming a choice between letting the wolves kill him or the anticipation kill him, rather than a choice between whether he died or fought to survive.

It was at times like these that he missed his mama more than anything. He thought that maybe she would understand how he felt better than anyone - if she could bear to look at him and everything that he had become, that was. An affront to her religion, a shame to her name, a disrespect to everything that she had sacrificed for him.

And still he wanted to run to her, bury his face in her skirts like he had when he was just a child and weep. Weep and weep and weep until he was wrung out and empty, so that she could comfort him in the way that she always had, with gentle hands and soothing words. His mama had understood him like no one else had, in the dark house that dominated his whole childhood, but he thought that he would likely be a stranger to her now.

He thought - stood in his house in Boston, thousands of miles where he had grown up, alone and in borrowed skin - that he would likely be a stranger to anyone who had ever loved him, if they were to look at him now.

Chapter 5: SHANE HOLLANDER

“Wasn’t expecting you back,” said Hayden, when Shane clattered into the Boston hotel room that - on paper - they had been sharing for their away game. “I was looking forward to jerking off, man.”

Hayden was, of course, joking. He was always joking with Shane - because he liked Shane, and thought that Shane was funny and nice and the kind of person who deserved friends. Shane wondered if Hayden would still share that opinion if he knew what Shane had just done, if he would still look at Shane the same when confronted with the evidence of just how much of a cowardly fuck up Shane actually was. Not many people joked with Shane; he wasn’t sure that he could bear to lose one of the only people who actually did, no matter how much he deserved to.

He kept thinking of Roz - of the mingled look of anger and heartbreak that had twisted his face into the face of a stranger, the desperation for Shane to just take the leap, to be just a little braver than he was. He kept thinking of how it had been to leave Roz behind, and how utterly and completely wrong it had felt.

There must have been something in the way that Shane let the silence continue to trail - or maybe Hayden just knew him that well - but Hayden sat up on the bed, where he’d been sprawled across it, already frowning.

“Shane, buddy, is something wrong?”

In the car ride back from Roz’s, Shane had been going over any excuse that he could feed to Hayden. He wouldn’t be able to tell him the truth, of course - mostly because he didn’t understand what had happened still, never mind how he could explain it for someone else - but he’d known that he would need something to explain why he’d returned when he’d told Hayden that he was planning on spending as much time as he could with Roz. He’d managed to think of dozens of excuses, from needing his concentration for the game the next day to Roz being ill, but they all scattered from his brain, inadequate.

And Shane… Fuck. Fuck, Shane didn’t understand how he was supposed to do this.

With every second that passed, Hayden looked more and more alarmed. “Shit. Are you okay? Is Lily okay?”

“We broke up,” Shane managed to force out. “I think.”

And then he started to cry.

Hayden made a wordless noise of surprise and worry as Shane dissolved into tears, shoulders shaking and face buried in his hands, as if that could hide the embarrassing truth of it from him. Hayden and Shane weren’t the sort of friends who talked about feelings - it had just never been something they’d done, except for Hayden making jokes about fatherhood or their shared pressure at the expectations of hockey. Sometimes when Hayden was a little drunk, maybe, like at his wedding. But for the most part - No, they didn’t talk about feelings. And Shane had never cried in front of Hayden before. Had never intended to. But Shane had never intended for a lot of things, as much as he hated to admit to a lapse in the finely tuned control that he liked to maintain in his personal life.

“Oh, shit,” said Hayden, and then he was at Shane’s side a moment later, settling gentle hands on Shane’s arm to guide him towards the bed.

Shane let himself be led, let his feet stumble over themselves, let Hayden make the choices for him as he was moved to sit down and shuffle back against the headboard of his single bed, Hayden wriggling to tuck himself against Shane’s side. Hayden pulled him closer, letting Shane tuck his damp, snotty face into his chest so that he didn’t have to look at whatever expression of pity Hayden was making, and he did it all without complaint that Shane was getting his shirt dirty or ruining his mood.

When he felt that Shane had calmed down enough, Hayden asked, gently and more tactfully than Shane had previously considered him capable of being, “what did she say?”

“That we needed space,” Shane mumbled, breathing raggedy through the painful spike of his throat, each word feeling a little like he was regurgitating a handful of glass, “and that I should leave.”

“That’s not a break up,” Hayden pointed out, and exhaled as if he was relieved. Shane could almost hear a smile in his voice, and wondered if it was genuine or if Hayden thought, as well as Shane, that it was pointless gesture to try and placate him. “Buddy, whatever it is, she just wants time to work through it - which is good! It gives you time to screw your head on as well. As a married guy, I feel qualified to tell you that she should always take the space when you need it. It’s easier to work through everything when you’ve had a moment to get your head screwed on right.”

“But I don’t think we can work through this,” said Shane.

The panic was a living thing in his chest, writhing and biting and clawing at him until he felt like a raw, bloody hunk of meat. When he felt like this, he went to Roz or he went to the ice. When he felt like this, it always felt like the end of the world, even when he reminded himself that this was just something that his fucked up brain was trying to convince him of. But this time, Shane was pretty sure that it was the end of the world. The end of something, at least.

Hayden squeezed his shoulder affirmatively, jostling him a little. “Don’t be stupid,” he chided. “If you both want it, you’ll work through it. Five years, Shane - and you’re not the sort of guy who gives up at the first hurdle. Lily Rozanova doesn’t strike me as the sort either. She -”

“I’m gay,” Shane blurted.

“What?”

Shane choked on another sob. “I’m gay,” he repeated, and felt how Hayden rocked a little at the surprise of the admission. “That’s what we can’t work through. I’m gay and -”

- and what? And it would ruin everything if it ever got out? If people knew that Shane was gay, he'd become the gay player. The gay, Asian hockey player. No one would give a fuck about how Shane played or the Stanley Cups that he had won. All they’d think about and talk about would be whatever political agenda they thought Shane was trying to ram down their throats. All they’d think about was all the ways in which Shane fell short, which could be used as ammunition against whole communities of players. He’d spent his career trying to defend his right to play from prejudices about his heritage; he hadn’t signed up to be judged on who he wanted to fuck as well.

“But you love her,” Hayden said, sounding bewildered.

“Of course I do,” Shane snapped.

“You aren’t like - I don’t know. Some people say this shit is, like, fluid? You love her. Maybe that’s enough.”

“You don’t think I’ve tried?” Shane said miserably, bitingly. “You don’t think that I’ve tried every single day to make this - this whole thing something unimportant? I’ve been trying all my life, Hayd, and I’m just - whatever I do isn’t good enough to stop this, to stop feeling like this or wanting like this. I thought I could ignore it and be happy - and I was happy, but… But it didn’t go away. I can’t make it go away. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now, Hayd, so don’t fucking tell me that this is going to be easy to work through.”

“Well, fuck,” said Hayden, quite succinctly, because there was nothing else really to say.

They both knew the price of Shane coming out. They both shared the same locker room, the same career, the same league. And Hayden had been there, through the highs and the lows and all the frustrations that he had carried around him like a tonne weight. Maybe, out of everyone, it was Hayden who was most familiar with the pressure that Shane carried every day of his career, and so it was Hayden who understood better than anyone what this would cost him.

Eventually, Shane had gathered himself enough to extricate himself from Hayden’s half-hug. Hayden, who had nothing to say since Shane had blurted out his confession, had let Shane go without another word, except to assure Shane that his secret would be safe with him. Because that was all it could ever be - a secret. No matter what it cost him.

Hayden had watched him, brow furrowed in worry, from where he had sprawled back across his own bed, but Shane had ignored him, brushing over every bit of concern, trying to follow his hotel routines as best he could. But when the restlessness had not improved, Shane had given it up as a lost cause.

“I’m going to shower,” he told Hayden brusquely, snatching up his phone and towel, toiletries bag under his arm.

He locked the door behind him, feeling better for it, and set his things down on the counter. Then, he switched on the shower and sunk gratefully to sit on the toilet lid, hunching forward.

Checking his phone, there were no missed calls or texts. He hadn’t expected any, but he was disappointed nonetheless. Brining up Roz’s contact, and the last message sent had been Roz sending a thumbs up in reply to the ETA Shane had sent him from the airport. Nothing personal or mushy like Hayden would send Jackie, and it was maybe the last message Shane would ever get from Roz, if they didn’t find some way to fix this. He wished, then, that they had been one of those couples who were ridiculously sickly over messages. He wished, then, that they were one of those couples for who everything was easy and simple, and the worst arguments were just bickering over who’s turn it was to do the dishes.

Would it fix anything? Mean anything? Would it be them at all?

Phone unlocked on his knee, Shane found himself typing transgender partner into his search engine, and then amending his search to how to support a transgender partner. There were hyperlinks to magazine articles, which he skim read and found many to be impersonal and vague, or just basic and nothing that he felt was helpful to his own situation. Other hyperlinks led to YouTube videos, which were better - told by people with transgender partners, or people who were transgender themselves, and Shane drunk in the sight of the smiles that they sent to the cameras, telling himself that he could almost pretend that the couples in the stories were him and Roz.

My best friend came out as trans! Does this mean anything for me? read the title of one video. The description said that the video was going to talk about navigating periods of transition from the outside, as supportively and authentically as possible. Shane lingered on this video for no particular reason except that the guy in the video (LuckyPuck81, who was a blond, angelic faced teenager with a European accent of some description, though his English was rapid and confident) had hockey memorabilia up in the background.

“When my best friend came out as a trans guy,” said LuckyPuck81, eyes flickering briefly off-screen as if he was looking for the right words, “we were maybe eleven? And it came at a time when I was also thinking that I might be queer, but I was not really ready to accept this about myself. I maybe did not react as well as I should have. He told me this incredibly important and monumental thing about himself, in what is possibly the biggest - biggest example of trust that I could ever ask for from a friend, and I made it about me, because I was confused.

“This I think is the most important part of affirming someone’s transition - remembering that it is not about you at all. Yes, it is okay to feel things about yourself, but that has no bearing on the trans person in your life. I was lucky that my best friend did not resent me for what a prick I made of myself. I was scared that people would look at me with him and assume that I was, you know, gay by association. And I was - but that wasn’t the point in the moment. I did not have to do anything with my sexuality that I was not comfortable with, but I acted as though my friend’s transition was forcing me to do something I did not want to in regards to it. Which is stupid. My sexuality - anyone’s sexuality - is not the responsibility of the person transitioning.

“I think, if I could do anything again, it would be to remember that I was not the only person who was scared - both of us were. And I would want to help my friend in the way that I would hope someone would help me if I was scared. Because it is a scary thing, coming out - any queer person knows this. And so I think we do not need to make it worse for each other. We need to remember yes, our own fears exist, but we cannot use them to justify us putting down someone else’s identity to make our own anxieties more comfortable.”

Shane rewound, letting the episode - ten minutes in total - play again. He drunk in every word. He thought of how Roz had looked when Shane had put his foot in the mouth, and wondered if it could have been as easy as LuckyPuck81 made it sound, or if he - unlike the teenager smiling up from his phone screen - was destined to regret this, regret his own anxieties and identity, and -

“Fear is a fundamental part of the queer experience,” LuckyPuck81 said, “as much as we wish that it would be otherwise. Fear, so long as there is hate and so long as there are differences, will always be part of the queer experience. But this doesn’t mean that our stories have to be defined by fear. It is easier to say it than to do it, and it is so very cheesy but - but love, really, it makes all the difference. Finding someone to be brave for - especially even if that person is just yourself. This is an equal part of the queer experience: fear and love. Something to be brave in spite of, and something to be brave for. And I do not know about you guys, dear listeners, but I know which I would prefer to focus on.”