Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, Heavy Angst, Getting Together, Self-Harm, more details on the self-harm in the notes, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst and Feels, [shakespeare critic voice] it ends with a marriage so therefore it can't be a tragedy, Insecure Ilya Rozanov, Non-Sexual Intimacy

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-11 Words: 19,851 Chapters: 1/1

your body as my mirror

Summary

The first thing that people notice when they look at Ilya is the way that the word disappointment carves itself in jagged, angry letters along his jawline. This is not the worst mark he bears—it’s just the most visible.

(In which the most hurtful things your soulmate has thought about themself appear as words cut into your body. Shane and Ilya find reasons to love each other anyway.)

Notes

additional notes:
- aside the soulmate stuff, this is 90% canon compliant; beware spoilers for s2/the long game.
- cw for mentions of vomiting and for brief allusions to racism.
- the premise for this soulmate au is inspired by the atla fic "the heartless and the gentle" by sokkaesque, so if you like atla, please go check out that fic, it's very well done and was an inspiration here!

notes on the self-harm tag: in this au, soulmarks are words that are magically cut into your physical body. the language regarding these cuts and scarring mimics language regarding intentional self-harm (specifically cutting); the aftermath of cuts (scarring and the emotional fallout) is described throughout the fic; there is also self-harm off-screen that is not done with suicidal intent but rather as a method of bodily mutilation; there are additionally scenes with deep scratching of previous cuts that is done as self-loathing related self-harm. please proceed with care.

1.

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya says, his voice low. Then, just loud enough for Hollander alone to hear, “Will you disappoint them?”

Hollander doesn’t meet his eyes. He says, “No,” and then wins the fucking faceoff.

And Ilya feels so bright, so full of energy, so fucking excited, feels like he could skate right off the edge of the rink and the edge of the Earth and he would just keep flying. He’s grinning as he chases after Hollander, absolutely thrilled by the rush of competition he’s never gotten from anyone else.

He’s lost his own share of faceoffs in his life, sure; it’s inevitable that everyone loses eventually. But he’s never been challenged like this before, not in the way that Hollander seems insistent upon challenging him. He’s always been the best, and now he’s the best but there’s a game to it, and Ilya can think of nothing more fucking exciting than that.

He gets so caught up in it, in the thrill and the rush and the speed and the competition of the game, that he doesn’t notice the mark until well after Montreal’s won, well after he’s made it to the hotel and has started getting ready for bed. It’s a single word carved into his jawline. Hidden by the helmet during the game, but the first thing he sees when he looks in the mirror later.

Tracing a finger along his jaw, he outlines each of the jagged, angry letters. It’s at a strange angle, and the mirror is doing him no favors, so it takes a moment to decipher it. The new soulmark must have appeared at some point during the game—he doesn’t know how he didn’t feel its cut. He remembers a vague itchiness at the left side of his face after the match, but nothing like the sharp, searing pain of when previous marks have come in.

He stretches the skin at his cheek, drawing it taut, to try and get a better read of the word. Soulmarks are manifestations of the most hurtful things your soulmate has heard said about themself, and at eighteen, Ilya is familiar enough with the process. There, in angry, all-caps lettering: disappointment.

Ilya drops his hands. Stares at the word in the mirror. Meets his own gaze.

And hours ago, hours and hours ago, words now echoing back at him: Shane Hollander, will you disappoint them?

Ilya just barely manages to throw himself to his knees in front of the toilet before he’s retching up watery spit and shame and guilt and complete, unadulterated fear.

It’s not for another two hours that Ilya feels okay enough—and sure enough that he’s not going to vomit again—to get up from where he had been lying on the bathroom floor. It’s not actually because he feels better, not really; rather, it’s because Connors starts banging on the bathroom door demanding to know if he’s dead in there or what.

Ilya flushes the toilet, brushes his teeth. Wonders if he can hide the mark somehow, then decides it’s probably pointless. When he leaves the bathroom, it’s with a cold washcloth pressed to his jaw in order to ease some of the pain of the cut. He doesn’t meet Connors’ eyes.

As two of the rookies on the Raiders this year, they bonded quickly. Connors was a late pick, but he’s good. He can keep up well enough—not as good as Hollander, but no one is as good as Hollander except Ilya, a thought that makes him feel mildly sick now—and he’s fun to be around. Chill, in a way that the rest of the team isn’t. Simple and easy, in a way no one else Ilya’s ever known is.

All in all, Ilya likes him, as much as he’s ever liked any of his teammates. They’re not close, but they’ve roomed together on more road trips than not, they’ve brought each other water and aspirin after too much underage drinking at whatever club of the week, they’ve competed plenty at practice, so they’re probably at least more than acquaintances by now.

But even with that being true, Ilya doesn’t want him to see this new soulmark. This is something more painful than the ones before, because Ilya himself was the one who cut too deep into Hollander’s heart.

It’s also different, Ilya thinks too, because now he knows these pains belong to Shane Hollander. No longer are they the insecurities of some faceless, nameless hypothetical. No longer are they just words on his skin.

Now it’s Shane Hollander that he’s carrying laid out so bare. Now it’s Shane Hollander carved into his body, into his soul. Now there’s a face to it, there’s a name, there’s a person, there’s a heart that Ilya never wants to break. Now, rather than a distant daydream, it’s real; and it’s Shane Hollander who is so vulnerable in Ilya’s hands.

“What happened to your face?” Connors asks, frowning at him. He’s under the blankets, his laptop open in front of him. He’s been getting really into some video game lately that Ilya couldn’t care less about. “I thought you actually managed not to get punched today.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “I don’t get punched every game.”

“Most of them.”

“Some of them,” Ilya concedes. “And I never start it.”

Connors snorts at that, looking back down at his computer. “Running your mouth for two periods straight counts as starting the fight that comes in the third.”

“Does not,” Ilya says, waving a hand dismissively.

He goes over to his suitcase to change into something to sleep in, but is forced to put down the washcloth in order to do so. He keeps his back carefully turned towards Connors when he sets the washcloth, carefully folded, onto the desk.

“Seriously, Roz. Did you fall and hit your head on the sink or something? You look like you’re in legit pain.”

Ilya shrugs stiffly. Before he turns around, he presses the washcloth back to his jaw. The cold pressure is only mildly soothing but Ilya can’t bring himself to feel he deserves more. He throws himself onto the other bed and stares up at the ceiling.

“Wasn’t the game,” he finally mutters. He closes his eyes. “New soulmark, is all. Hurts a bit. I will be fine.”

Connors sucks in a sharp breath. “Oh.”

“Is not a big deal,” Ilya tells him, words harsh and defensive. “Happens to everyone sometimes, yes?”

“Yeah,” Connors says slowly. “You just…don’t have a lot of them.”

Ilya shrugs, turning to glance at Connors briefly, before looking back to the ceiling. “No. This is four.”

“Four,” Connors echoes softly. His eyes are no longer on Ilya, instead turned onto his video game. As if he knows that Ilya would shut this conversation down instantly if he were being watched while they have it. But his hands aren’t moving—he’s listening only to this. “That’s…almost nothing, dude. I have fifteen.”

Ilya hums. “I knew a girl who had twenty-four. She got her twenty-fifth while we were fucking. Had to stop so she could freak out about it.”

He still remembers the word—prude, in vivid slashes of lowercase letters, cut deep into the skin just below her breast.

“Yikes,” is all that Connors says. Maybe there’s not really anything else to say. Ilya appreciates that he’s not filling the silence with meaningless sympathies. Then, “I know you like just toughing this stuff out or whatever, since you won’t even take Aspirin, but I have Neosporin if you need it. The pain relief version. It’s helped me before.”

Ilya swallows, quiet for a moment. It’s a nice gesture, even if they both know that Ilya isn’t going to take him up on it. He presses the cold washcloth closer to the cut, sinking into the slight sting of it. He’s not relishing in the pain, exactly, because he now knows that this is Hollander’s pain. But bearing it does also still feel a little like penance.

“Is not that bad now,” Ilya says quietly. “Mostly numb.”

Numb is an apt way to describe his general state at the moment. He doesn’t really know what to do with himself, what he’s supposed to be feeling.

Conversation with Connors fades away into the dark when they eventually turn off the lamps and declare themselves going to sleep for real. Ilya closes his eyes, lying flat on his back, having put the washcloth in a neatly folded square on the bedside table. Still, he can’t bring himself to actually fall asleep.

He wonders if Hollander is asleep right now. He wonders if Hollander knows that they’re possibly soulmates, that it’s the answer to a question Ilya’s been avoiding asking for a while now—why he’s so goddamn drawn to him; a moth to a flame every time they’re in the vicinity of each other. He wonders what Hollander thinks about his own soulmarks; he wonders what Hollander would say if he were to connect the dots between them and Ilya.

If Ilya remembers correctly, he had a lot of marks. More than anyone else Ilya has hooked up with, more than anyone else’s body he’s seen bare. Most people their age will have anywhere from a few to a dozen, all with varying degrees of visibility.

While he himself has fewer than most peers, most of his are in painfully visible places and painstakingly covered. Across his back, from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, long ago cut up into indecipherability with a pocket knife: cocksucker. Following the vein of his right forearm: a racial slur that’s been similarly permanently masked by shredding the skin there with a knife. Over his heart in careful, precise script: emotionless. Now, his jaw. Disappointment.

The number of marks could mean anything. Maybe his soulmate really only has so few flaws that they’re insecure about. Maybe his soulmate is just incredibly self-assured. Or maybe his soulmate is so repressed that they refuse to put any flaws on display, that they refuse to admit to any insecurities to the point of them being written onto Ilya’s skin. Maybe his soulmate doesn’t allow themself to think about insecurities as character flaws but as things to be stamped out and fixed before they can become permanent marks on Ilya’s body.

The visibility of the marks could mean anything too; Ilya doesn’t know what logic the universe puts into the placement or size of each mark, if there is any logic. No one has ever been able to explain that to him.

Though unable to see them, he traces the letters of disappointment again, his pointer finger barely a brush of pressure against the still tender spot. Soulmarks aren’t exactly real cuts—they don’t bleed, instead just splitting the skin open to reveal red blood and the layer under the skin; they don’t always scar, sometimes staying open and raw and other times stitching themselves up into neat white or pink lines—but they come with the same pain. There is always the pain.

Ilya wishes there were some kind of guidebook for this. Any kind of instruction manual that would tell him what the fuck he’s supposed to do now, with this realization and with the guilt that’s coming with it. Here is what he knows to be true: Shane Hollander is probably his soulmate, and is certainly his greatest rival, and Ilya said words so awful to him that they are now permanent scars.

And Ilya couldn’t have known he was going to hit a nerve like that. How the fuck was he supposed to know? But now he does know what he knows—and what the fuck comes next?

They can’t be soulmates. They can’t ever allow themselves to care about each other like that. Not in the world they’ve chosen to work and live and immerse themselves in. Besides, Ilya doesn’t actually know that he’s Hollander’s soulmate. He knows Hollander is his, now, or at least he thinks he knows, but—it might not go the other way around.

Which brings him back to Hollander’s soulmarks.

Ilya remembers them only vaguely. He hadn’t exactly been focusing on reading the most painful insecurities of Hollander’s soulmate while he was trying to suck his dick. It felt like an invasion of someone else’s privacy, someone who was written into Hollander’s soul but wasn’t in the room.

But he couldn’t help but notice some of the ones that stick out the most. The ones with the most clear lines, scratches of rose red cuts; the freshest one, which made Hollander wince when Ilya brushed too close to it; the biggest ones taking up a span of skin so great that Ilya couldn’t ignore the sight of them.

There’s the one on his shoulder, such a dark shade of red that Ilya knows the pain of it must run bone deep for Hollander’s soulmate: soft. The slashes of angry writing, as bold and careless as if a knife had gone back over and cut each line multiple times, at the side of his neck: lazy. The large slanted lettering that crosses over his lower stomach, starting just below his belly button and ending at his waist: whore.

There’s a bright red weak in thin sticks of capital letters at Hollander’s right wrist. A red so dark it might as well have scabbed over as black ink reads second-best up and down his right calf. The inside of his left thigh, high enough up that no one would ever notice unless Hollander spread his legs for them: faggot.

Those are just the ones that Ilya remembers. He can’t decide if it’s better or worse that he knows them. He can’t decide if it hurts more that all those insecurities could apply to him, or if it’s more painful to force himself to hope they belong to someone else.

They have to be for someone else. They have to be. Neither Ilya nor Hollander can afford this to be true. There’s too much at stake. Too much relies on them hating each other. Too much relies on them competing with each other, on them challenging each other, on them never, ever disappointing anyone at all.

2.

They don’t acknowledge it for another few years. It’s after the first time that they fuck; when they’re lying in the afterglow, Ilya with his head against Hollander’s bare chest and Hollander with his hand in Ilya’s hair. Ilya looks up at him, and Hollander has the tiniest smile on his face, in a way that makes the word etched into the underside of his chin—slut, so tiny that it’s easy to miss—feel like it means nothing.

“Worth the wait?” Ilya asks, and there’s a gentleness to his voice that almost scares himself. He presses a kiss to Hollander’s shoulder, right over the scarred t in soft.

Instead of answering, Hollander kisses him slowly, sweetly. Then he kisses Ilya’s forehead. It’s the most terrifying thing he’s ever done.

The sex was amazing, was hot; it was the best Ilya’s had in a while, no matter Hollander’s inexperience. He doesn’t regret anything about what they did—not the lust and heat of it, not the chase, not the tenderness, not any touch or kiss or word.

But now—now Ilya needs to leave. He’s on the comedown, on the crash, and he can’t keep this up. He fucking adores the vaguely satiated lust in Hollander’s eyes and he adores the small smile on his lips, but God, Ilya needs to get out, now. Before this becomes something it can’t be.

He can’t pretend that Hollander means nothing to him, because he has all of Hollander’s greatest insecurities carved into his fucking body. He can’t pretend that he doesn’t know Hollander, because he knows Hollander in the most intimate way you can ever know a person. He has Hollander’s heart engraved on his skin and he had Hollander’s kiss burned into his sense memory, lingering on his lips for the rest of his life, probably. He can’t do this.

He opens his mouth to say that he needs to go, but before he can speak, Hollander is touching his jaw so gently that it hurts. His fingers are resting tenderly over disappointment and there’s something unsure in his eyes that Ilya doesn’t know what to do with. Hollander slowly swipes his thumb over the word, from start to end, and then does it again.

“Hollander,” Ilya whispers, voice cracking. “I’m—”

“When’d you get this one?” Hollander asks quietly, cutting in before Ilya can say something stupid like I’m sorry I made you believe this about yourself and expose the fact that Hollander is his soulmate.

But even if he doesn’t say that, he can’t lie to Hollander. Not about this. He says, quietly, “The day of our first professional game against each other.”

Hollander nods, seeming satisfied with the answer. “I thought so. ‘Will you disappoint them?’ you said. Then I remember some fans afterwards said something a little too similar.”

Ilya winces away from him, directing his gaze up at the ceiling instead of at Hollander. He feels fucked out and he’s tired and he wants to sleep in Hollander’s arms tonight, but he also kind of never wants to wake up from this dream again if it means he has to pretend forever that this night didn’t happen.

Then Hollander’s hands drift away from his jaw, reaching the underside of his chin, where lustful is cut into the soft, vulnerable skin along the angle of his chin. It matches slut on Hollander’s own face. It had come in that morning, the skin raw and painful all throughout the game earlier today. Ilya has already promised himself that he won’t ask about it.

Hollander’s hands roam further, following down the line of his neck, down his sternum. Then he moves to the side, running his pointer and middle fingers across his chest to underline the word there: emotionless scarred over his heart, an old pain.

“The first time someone called me an emotionless hockey robot,” Hollander says, tentative and slow and unsure but speaking anyway, “I was in high school. My girlfriend broke up with me, and someone called me that because I kind of just shrugged it off. Said well now I have more time to practice hockey. It hurt more than I thought it did at the time, I guess.”

Ilya closes his eyes, letting Hollander slowly trace out each letter of the word. “Was sixteen or so when I got this one. It was nighttime. I was almost asleep, and the pain woke me up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” Ilya opens his eyes only to find that Hollander is still looking down at him with that same soft unsureness. Ilya swallows hard. “You can’t help it.”

Hollander is the one to close his eyes this time, exhaling a soft breath over Ilya’s lips. At his side, Ilya shivers.

“You think those are mine, then?” Hollander asks, opening his eyes to stare at Ilya intently.

It would be so much safer to say no. It would be so much safer to pretend that they can’t be, that they surely must belong to someone else. The times don’t line up, the words don’t make sense. Any excuse at all, and Hollander would probably accept it. It might break Ilya’s heart, but if he said it, Hollander would probably accept it.

He says hoarsely, instead, “You tell me, Hollander. They are not my hurts.”

“Are my marks yours?” Hollander asks quietly.

Ilya looks him in the eye for a long moment, searching for some sign that Hollander is making fun of him, playing a joke, forcing him to answer this question in a strange bid for power. It would be easier, probably, if Hollander were to be cruel about this instead of—instead of caring.

But his eyes trail over Hollander’s body anyway. He had traced every bare spot of skin with kisses, had let his hands roam over every firm muscle and smooth stretch of skin. He had pretended not to notice when his fingers caught on the scars of his many soulmarks.

Now, he gives up on pretending. He rolls onto his side, and puts a hand lightly on the right side of Hollander’s neck—lazy glares back at him, a rough and raised scar under his fingers. It’s an old one, Ilya figures, but that makes more than enough sense. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t being called lazy.

He traces the lines of muscles down Hollander’s body, to one he hadn’t noticed before tonight—foreign, cut vertically onto the front of his right arm with angry, wretched lettering. This one is clearly fresh, and Ilya hesitates for a brief moment before running his fingers to the left of the word instead of over it.

Moving his hand to Hollander’s chest, Ilya keeps his eyes steady on the words instead of thinking about how Hollander’s gaze is heavy on him, how soft Hollander’s skin is under his touch, how Hollander is handing over so much of himself right now, handing over more trust than he had even while saying yes to Ilya asking if it’s still okay to fuck him. He can’t think about any of that right now—trust is a fragile, terrifying thing to have, and Ilya is so fucking scared of the answer to all these unasked questions, and to the asked ones just the same.

He pauses his hand over Hollander’s ribcage, carefully taking in the words cut, surely painfully, into the long since healed stretch of skin there: failed and alone and unwanted and useless. He presses his thumb against the middle syllable of alone and wonders.

“I was twelve,” Hollander says quietly, in answer to the question Ilya was too afraid to ask. “It was summer, uh—August, I think. It was the first one I got. I didn’t know it was possible, until then, for them to hurt so badly and to be so big.”

On the ninth of August in the year that they were both twelve—and Hollander does not know this, but he does not need to—Ilya’s mother died. Her funeral was not too long after that, after which he was left horribly, horribly alone. The house had felt too big for what was left of them; the world had felt too big in the same way. Where there had been life, there was now an absence that couldn’t be filled or fixed.

Ilya hums, not trusting himself with words. He blinks hard, then moves his hand. Taking a breath, he rolls onto his stomach, pressing his forehead against Hollander’s arm and closing his eyes. The movement exposes his back in a way that he knows Hollander won’t have seen before this, because Ilya does everything he can to hide this one.

“This was the first one I got,” Ilya murmurs, not sure how audible his words are. He feels like he’s choking on them. “I was fifteen.”

Hollander is quiet for a long, horrible moment. “What…happened?”

Ilya doesn’t say anything, at first. He remembers the pain of the mark coming in, stretching all the way across his back. He remembers going to the mirror and straining his head to figure out what the fuck it said. He remembers at first being fucking annoyed, more than anything else, that it was in English, which apparently would be their language in common.

It was Sasha who was able to tell him what it said. He was a year older, and his English was better than Ilya’s was. He would have asked Svetlana first, given her actual fluency, but—but he could make out half of the word, and he had a guess as to what it meant.

So Sasha, really, was the only person he could have ever asked. Besides that, Sasha is probably the only person he could trust with both this and the knife against his back. They had the same secret. They both knew the risks of having that secret and the cost of keeping it.

“A few hours after I saw it,” Ilya starts; slowly, mechanically. “I stole my brother’s pocket knife. Called my coach’s son over to my house. And told him to cut it up so badly that no one could ever read it.” A pause. Then, “He did it well.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Hollander breathes out. Ilya goes tense at his words, but doesn’t roll over. “Can I ask what it said?”

Mentally, Ilya rolls his eyes. He huffs a breath; says, “You are the only person who can ask what it said.”

“Oh.” Hollander sounds somewhat surprised by that, which almost makes Ilya want to laugh hysterically. But when he speaks, there’s a quiet assuredness to it that’s almost more unsettling than his surprise. “What did it say then?”

Ilya squeezes his eyes tighter shut. “Cocksucker.”

The word is met with silence. Hollander doesn’t say anything, and Ilya doesn’t either. He just lays there, waiting for the world to stop spinning, waiting for something to change, something to end. This is a terrible idea, this game that they’re playing. They should not be trading secrets like this, even if they both kind of already know what’s going to be said before it’s been spoken aloud.

The fact of the matter is that they cannot be with each other like this. They cannot treat each other with love. They have the same secrets, in so many ways; which means that they both know the risks, and the cost.

Hollander asks, anyway, throwing all caution to the wind in favor of an intimacy Ilya has never wanted more, “Can I touch?”

“Yes,” Ilya murmurs. “Is fine. If it’s you.”

Hollander doesn’t acknowledge that with anything more than a hum, which is probably for the best. Ilya already feels fragile enough. Instead of saying anything, Hollander touches a hand to Ilya’s back. He runs a single finger along a long, raised scar; the first of many. These are scars that still itch, still hurt sometimes. But Hollander smooths his finger over them and all of the hotwired itches seem to cease. All the pain seems to go still and quiet.

Then there’s a kiss—pressed softly to his back, just at his shoulder. It’s light and cold and soothing and Ilya wants to cry, maybe. Hollander trails kisses over the top of his back, lips not touching the scars but following the same line. Then, a kiss to the nape of his neck. Ilya shivers under his touch, finally rolling back over to look up at Hollander.

There is something impossibly sad in his eyes, but there’s no pity. No sense of rejection. He says only, “The answer is yes.”

Ilya frowns. “Answer to what?”

“Your marks,” Hollander says quietly. “It makes sense if they’re mine.”

And it should change everything. The world should stop spinning. The universe should go quiet. All blood should rush to his head and silence any thoughts. His vision should dim, darken and focus, tunneling in on Hollander alone. The birds should stop singing outside, because it became early morning at some point in the middle of this. The sun should pause in its cycle. Everything should be different, if not over.

But it’s not. The risks, and the cost, both seem to halt in their hurtling towards them. Everything is quiet, for a moment, and then Ilya’s heartbeat restarts, and everything is the same. Hollander is still warm next to him. The bed is just as soft. The window shades are still pulled shut, blocking any morning light.

Ilya sits up in the bed, looking down at Hollander where he lies so vulnerably below him. He doesn’t know if there are words for this feeling, whether in English or in Russian.

He settles on whispering only, “Okay.”

Hollander nods sharply, and Ilya thinks maybe he understands. They don’t talk about it again, not for years, but they both know.

3.

Summer, 2014: he sends Hollander away for the night because he needs to sleep, and he needs to be alone. He can feel the adrenaline of sex dropping out of his body and he knows he’s crashing in a way that he doesn’t want Hollander to see; or, he’s already fallen to pieces and he needs to stop letting Hollander try to pretend he hasn’t, or worse, try to pick them back up. He sends Hollander away because to let Hollander stay would be to indulge in a fantasy he cannot allow himself to have. Not with who they are and where they are.

Instead of sleeping, though, Ilya puts out his cigarette on the ash tray next to him and watches the smoke curl in the air for a long, long time. He’s not sure how much time passes, only that he keeps drinking in a way that he’s going to hate himself for tomorrow, and he keeps watching the space where smoke had been, and he fails at not thinking about Shane Hollander.

At some point in the night, the vodka starts going down a little too easily. He should stop, he knows he should stop. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t.

The feeling of Hollander’s skin still lingers on his palms. The sound of him still reverberates in the air around his head, the blood rushing past his ears not doing anything to silence it. He’s pretty sure that he’s sitting entirely still, but he’s also pretty sure that the ceiling is going to cave in on him. The room is spinning and the floor is curling up at the edges to envelop him in hardwood boards. He thinks maybe he collapses onto his side and that’s why everything is vertical, but he isn’t sure.

If he drinks himself to death, he wonders how long it will take someone to notice. When he doesn’t check out of the hotel, surely someone will come find him. When the plane lands in Moscow and he doesn’t get off of it, surely someone will go looking. By the time next season starts, he’ll be another tragic sob story, another player who died full of vodka and wasted potential.

He tries to roll onto his back but only succeeds in tangling himself among the sheets. He thinks maybe he groans, or maybe he’s crying. He closes his eyes, and it’s then that he registers the pain at his hip. He presses a hand to the spot that’s stinging like an open wound, but doesn’t really understand what he’s feeling. He’s still seeing multiple visions of the ceiling light, even with his eyes closed.

The pain intensifies and Ilya knows, now, that he’s crying. He knows he hurt Hollander tonight. He hurt himself, too. The guilt is fucking immeasurable. It always is.

He doesn’t dare look at the soulmark until the next morning. He wakes up hungover and hurting and naked and entirely alone in that bed, and thinking only of the dull throbbing pain at his hip.

It takes him a moment to figure out how to kick off the sheets and stand up. He nearly stumbles and falls over when he does, catching himself on the bedside table just before he crashes down. Going still for a moment, Ilya tries to catch his breath and calm his heartrate.

It doesn’t work, especially not when he looks down. The soulmark is cut into the hipbone just by the place that he likes to hold Hollander while they fuck. The place he held Hollander last night, keeping him steady where Ilya wanted him. Hollander could have moved at any moment, could always push him away without a fight, but he never tried. He let Ilya manhandle him into place and hold him in that position with both hands at his hips.

That’s where the soulmark is now. It’s upside down, so Ilya can read it perfectly when he looks down at himself.

Years ago, the first time that he made Hollander so miserable that he got himself a soulmark, Ilya had thrown up over the sickening guilt. This time, Ilya just sits back down. Stares at the wall and knows that he deserves the awful pounding in his head and the bile rising in his throat but not going anywhere.

He digs his fingernails into the soulmark and doesn’t let himself cry or scream over the pain. He digs deeper, sharp nails reopening the unhealed wound. It doesn’t bleed; his marks never do. It just hurts.

It takes a long time before he’s able to look down at it again. He carries the soulmark like a brand, like the greatest mistake of his life. Sometimes it feels like it is. Sometimes it feels like it marks him as awful, as the worst soulmate in the world, as the most undeserving. Why the fuck would the universe give him something so great as Shane Hollander, knowing that Ilya cannot ever be enough to earn him?

When Ilya finally looks at the soulmark again, it’s still raw and unhealed. The letters are thick lines of open cuts and he feels sick all over again, like the hangover is back and the consequences are still coming. He puts a cold cloth on it to try and numb the ache for only a few moments before he decides he doesn’t deserve it.

He hadn’t meant to make Hollander feel so awful, feel as if he was asking for too much or being too much just by wanting something. He hadn’t meant to make Hollander feel like Ilya didn’t—and fuck, it hurts to think, but it’s true—want everything he did. An intimacy, a closeness, a tenderness, a kiss. Something more than a fuck and a cigarette. 

He hadn’t meant to push him away entirely. He needed enough distance to pretend that he didn’t have feelings; he didn’t want so much distance as to make Hollander feel like this. 

But now, rather than texting Hollander and treating him with any kind of care or love or attention, he’s lying flat on his back on the carpet in his apartment in Moscow with the word used carved into his hip and feeling like the worst fucking person in the world.

He needs to do better. Try harder. It’s just—at the same time, Ilya is so goddamn afraid.

It takes another two years of gathering courage before he figures out how to try again and better. He’s still afraid, but—but this is his soulmate. Hollander is the other half of him. The person who carries his heart and his hurt and his soul and his pain directly on his skin. He’s so afraid, and still, the risk has to be worth it. It has to be, or else what was the fucking point of any of this?

4.

Once, Ilya had heard someone say that a panic attack can only last a maximum of fifteen minutes. He isn’t sure how true that is, or if it was something said just to make someone feel like an end would be in sight soon enough and that this feeling couldn’t last forever.

Maybe it was a lie, but either way, Ilya himself has found his own comfort in it every now and then. Eventually, the panic will end. Eventually, the body will tire itself out and this horrible feeling will pass. Eventually, the heart rate will slow and the breathing will go even and the trembling will steady. Eventually, it will be over.

But this, this moment right now, isn’t a panic attack. This isn’t a panic consuming him and fogging over all his thoughts until he’s blinded to anything but blank, faceless fear.

No, this is something awful in a much different way. This is a sickening dread and horror and humiliation. This is something that will not end, will not go away. This is something that will stick with him for the rest of his life, probably. This horrible sensation of something important ending. The sight of the best thing in his life walking away from him, because he wanted too much from someone who couldn’t give anything more to him.

This is, at the end of the day, what it was always going to come to. Ilya wants Shane so deeply that it is carved into his soul, and he can never, ever have him.

Here is the worse thing: Ilya has always known that he was asking for too much every time he asked for anything from Hollander. With every text and flirt and hookup and kiss, he was asking for more and more and more, and Shane—Hollander—was always going to reach his breaking point eventually. He was always going to reach a point at which he could not give any more of himself to Ilya Rozanov.

Ilya has Hollander’s every shame and fear and insecurity carved into his body. They are etched onto him in the form of open cuts and long-healed scars. The parts of Shane’s soul that Shane deems the worst and ugliest and most unlovable are literally cut into Ilya’s skin. They are a kind of wound that brands Ilya as his. As Hollander’s, as Shane’s.

The worst of him is all of Ilya’s body, plain for any eye to see but especially clear to Ilya himself, and still Ilya wants him. Still, despite all of those shames and fears and insecurities. Or, because of all those shames and fears and insecurities. He wants Shane. And the second that Hollander understood that, he fucking ran.

Fifteen minutes after Hollander left, Ilya is feeling no better. He’s still staring blankly at the TV in front of him, still set to the hockey game they hadn’t been watching. He isn’t processing any of the movement on the screen. All he can see is Shane—Hollander’s face when he left. How he had wrung the shirt—Ilya’s shirt—between his hands, and how he had stuttered through an explanation that made sense.

Fuck.

Ilya had said his fucking name, had asked for something he shouldn’t have ever dared to want. It’s just—Hollander said it back. Said Ilya. Like it meant something. Like, at that moment, he wanted to say it. At that moment, he wanted Ilya. Not a hookup, not a rival, not an adrenaline rush, not Rozanov, but Ilya.

And then he left. He said it, and he fucking ran, because it’s terrifying, isn’t it, wanting something you can’t have and feeling that having it and not having it will both kill you. It’s terrifying, wanting someone like Ilya when Rozanov is all he has ever been. It’s terrifying, but Ilya so selfishly and wrongly thought that they were in this together, because he wants Shane so badly.

They’re soulmates. They’ve established that much, even if they haven’t really discussed it. Ilya’s marks are all of Hollander’s biggest and most painful of shames, and Hollander’s marks are all of Ilya’s most disgusting parts of himself. Ilya thought maybe this would mean that they’re on the same side in all this; Hollander and Rozanov against the entire fucking world.

But they’re not. That’s the reality. They have each other’s shame written on their bodies not because they understand each other, not because they choose to love each other through it, but because the universe is cruel and they have never been lucky people. Maybe, even, this is the tradeoff—they are the best in the world at hockey, the only two people who can keep up with each other, the only two people capable of understanding each other; in return, they can never, ever hold onto each other.

Hollander has Ilya’s every terrible thought cut into his exposed skin; he has over twenty soulmarks, as of the last time Ilya asked. This, maybe, means that he can never, ever want him. Not like how Ilya wants Shane—Hollander—and these five fucking soulmarks.

Sitting there on the couch spiraling in his hurt and his embarrassment—in his pathetic fucking wanting—for fifteen straight minutes, Ilya wonders, somewhat masochistically, if any of these thoughts are carving themselves into Hollander’s body now that he’s run away. He closes his eyes, sinking back against the couch and trying not to cry.

This is when the pain starts. Ilya keeps his eyes squeezed shut for the entire process. Throughout it all, there is only one clear thought throughout the pain of the universe cutting a word into his skin: maybe, if Hollander is hurting this badly too, he’ll come back.

It’s a stupid fucking thought. Naive. Ridiculous. Ilya hates himself for how comforting it is, even if just for a moment. The hypothetical will never fucking come true, so he needs to stave off any hope before it can crest in his heart like a song.

The cutting sensation stops a minute or so later. There’s a deeper sting to the open wound than has come to him in a long time. Ilya takes a breath and it twists the skin in a way that hurts.

Opening his eyes, it takes barely a moment to register the word. Ilya takes one look at it, at the word cut unevenly near the pool of their dried cum still on his stomach, and feels sick. He swipes his hand through the cum to make it go away and stop reminding him of this, and it does nothing but smear it over the soulmark.

The mark is cut deep and in thin and precise letters. It feels so much more intentional and decisive than his other marks, which are mostly composed of cuts with the slashes of an angry, scared child writing on Ilya’s body. But this one feels like the cutting was done like a reminder or a mantra, rather than an insecurity which haunts Hollander.

The word is cut right into the base of the v-line of his hips where Shane—Hollander—had pressed a kiss immediately before throwing a leg over his lap and sitting there like he belonged with Ilya. Not caring about the pain, thinking only of how fucking hurt the entireties of his heart and soul are, Ilya scrapes his fingernails over the soulmark. He wants to make it go away, but all he gets is the sting of re-opening a wound.

He does it again. And again. And again.

Still, the soulmark does not disappear. It just burns there at his Adonis’ belt—the word coward reading like a punishment for them both.

5.

Hollander has a new soulmark. This is the fourth thing that Ilya notices when he sees the photos of him and Rose Landry. It’s after the half-laugh on Hollander’s lips in the photograph, after the fact that they’re holding hands, after the way he’s letting her cling to his arm.

After all that, the thing that Ilya sees is the soulmark: small, even writing cut vertically into the skin in front of his ear. It’s hard to tell what it says from the photos that Connors shows him, and once Ilya is alone and able to zoom in on the spot, he can’t read it any easier.

It looks warped, somehow, and it takes a moment to figure out how exactly. Ilya swipes onto another paparazzi photo—Rose Landry’s level of fame is incomparable to anything in the NHL—and finds another angle. Squinting at it, he finally recognizes the distortion—he sees it every time he glances over his own shoulder, or at his outstretched forearm. Hollander had cut through it.

It’s something so awful, this word representative of Ilya’s worst parts, that Hollander had dragged a knife down the side of his face and cut through it.

Ilya feels fucking sick. Feels perverted, feels evil, feels irredeemable. There is something so wrong about him that Hollander could not bear to have it written on his body, despite all of the other pains he has carved into his skin.

So. Really, then, Ilya has finally found the breaking point.

He will not cry about it. He will not break down over this. He will not crack. If Hollander doesn’t want him, that’s his choice. Ilya can understand that. Hollander signed up for clandestine meetings in hotel rooms, not making lunch in his apartment; he had wanted nothing more than good sex, not cuddling on the goddamn couch.

Ilya had just been too much, had asked for too much, had been too blatant about who he is at his core and all of the things he wants. Hollander signed up for a shared secret with Rozanov, not feelings with Ilya. The two are entirely different.

So Ilya will not break down about this. It’s Hollander’s choice.

But fuck. Fuck, it hurts and he feels like he’s losing his mind. He feels like he’s going absolutely insane. Because they’re soulmates, they’re the only people who can ever understand each other this way, and that has to mean something, even if Hollander is parading around with Rose Landry now.

Ilya refuses to name this as heartbreak. That would put too much feeling to it, that would make it much too real. But he also doesn’t know what else it could possibly be.

He makes a month before something in him snaps.

They play Montreal again, and it’s a shitty fucking match with both Ilya and Hollander playing as if it hurts to move—which maybe it kind of does, because every time Ilya lifts his head to find Hollander looking at him, he feels a panging in his chest that might kill him—and with both captains visibly off their game, everyone else on the ice seems to be faltering. Ilya feels bad about it, but this is also unremarkable because he’s way too caught up in his head to be feeling anything except for bad about everything.

“Not visiting Jane tonight?” Connors asks, raising his eyebrows at Ilya when Ilya joins him in the elevator ride up to their room. “What, you scare her off or something? Is that what this whole mood has been about?”

“Fucking fuck off,” Ilya snaps, and there’s more of a growl in it than he wants to admit.

Connors just rolls his eyes, raising his hands in surrender and going quiet. He doesn’t seem like he’s taken much offense by it, but Ilya knows that he’s been fucking miserable to be around recently. He knows that all of his teammates are fed up with his shit, and that they’re worried about him.

They’ve not so subtly been keeping an eye on him and he’s well aware of it. They’re trying to make sure he doesn’t do something stupid, like drink himself to death or throw himself off a roof or text Shane Hollander. He wishes he were more confident that they’re in the wrong for thinking that he might.

But the reality is that he is fucking miserable, and everything hurts all of the time in a way that feels entirely hopeless, and he doesn’t know if anything’s ever going to change. He doesn’t think he’d ever let it get so bad that he throws himself off a roof, but—but he has definitely been drinking too much and he has definitely been thinking way too hard about texting Hollander, and his teammates definitely know about the former even if not the latter.

Knowing this, though, doesn’t stop Ilya from wanting to go out tonight, now that he has no hope of seeing Hollander in the way he wants to. Not that he ever should have had hope of that. It’s never been a guarantee before.

Knowing this also doesn’t stop his teammates from going out with him. Or maybe they’re mostly going out because Ilya asked, and because they think they’re going to have to pick him up passed out on the sidewalk if they don’t go to monitor him. It’s exhausting, being watched like this, but Ilya refuses to call them out on it. If he does, they might stop, they might leave him alone, and then who knows what the fuck he’ll do.

So he drags Connors and Marleau and a few others out to the first club that comes up when Carmichael looks up “clubs in Montreal,” and he doesn’t allow himself the time to feel bad about it.

Once in the club, Ilya doesn’t allow himself to feel anything at all. After getting drinks, they find spots on the dance floor and Ilya pretends not to notice the way that there’s always at least one pair of eyes on him. The music pounds in his chest like a heartbeat, and he pretends that that’s enough to sustain him. He pretends that the music really is the thing in his chest beating and keeping him alive. It’s much stronger than his actual heart.

He lets the alcohol flood through his body and loosen all the tension in his muscle, lets the strobing lights take over visions of Hollander as he left, Hollander on the ice, Hollander dragging a knife through the representation of Ilya’s darkest flaws, Hollander, Hollander, Hollander.

Fuck, Ilya can’t fucking stand this. It’s not enough, the dancing and the drinking and the woman grinding against him. None of it’s enough to replace the hurt.

“Need another drink,” Ilya tries to yell over the music, and Marleau nods, then motions to Sebbin to follow Ilya with him.

Ilya resists the urge to roll his eyes. They’re more likely to cause problems at the bar than he is, he thinks vaguely, and he knows that it’s probably a lie. If someone were to look at him the wrong way tonight, if one thing goes wrong, he might snap. He’s not sure if it would be a punishment for the other person or for himself.

Despite his annoyance at their close eye on him, he buys the two of them drinks anyway. Maybe that’s the actual reason why they’re keeping so close—the alcohol he isn’t going to ask them to repay him for. It’s while he’s waiting for the third drink, though, that he sees the face from every other X-Squad poster in every fucking country. He forgets the actor’s name, but he knows the smirk from where it’s always placed next to Rose fucking Landry.

Ilya swallows a hard sip of his drink, and turns around—searching.

It’s not hard to find him. Ilya has always been able to pick him out of a crowd. He has always been able to recognize him, whether at the distance of the ice rink to the stands or in the dark of a shady hotel room or in the noise of a crowd or in the silence of a secretly bought apartment building with two furnished rooms or—or under the strobing lights of a club.

He downs the rest of his drink in only minutes, then sets it down on the counter. The actor has disappeared from the bar. Ilya thinks briefly about finding him again and maybe trying to hook up with him just to fuck with Hollander’s head, and then decides he can’t actually stand his face because it makes him think too much of Rose Landry. Fucking him would hurt in a similar way that this does—in the same way that staring at Hollander and Rose Landry dancing, her hands up his shirt, his hands on his waist, both looking at each other, looking only at each other, hurts.

Then it changes. The lights shift. The music slows and speeds up and slows and speeds up at a different rhythm. The dancing around him feels so much more claustrophobic. The smell of sweat and alcohol is oppressive. And Hollander is staring at him.

Ilya looks back at him. He presses himself closer to the woman he’s dancing with, and he looks at Hollander and he hopes it aches.

See? I’m fine. I can pretend, too. I can pretend this was nothing. It was nothing, after all. You freaked out, and you left, and it’s all nothing to me.

It wasn’t nothing and he’s not fine, but—but that doesn’t matter. They just stare at each other from across the club, the lights pulsing over them like an awful dream, the music suddenly muted in Ilya’s ears. Hollander opens his mouth, lips parting as if to soundlessly say something, and then there’s a blinding pain on Ilya’s face. It’s under his eye, he’s pretty sure, but it feels like it’s cutting deep enough to hit his retina. It feels like it’s carving his eye out of its socket and leaving him half-empty.

He doubles over, pressing his fingertips to the spot where the cut is appearing. When he straightens back up again, Hollander is gone.

Ilya makes his excuses to leave not much longer after that. Marleau is looking at him all concerned, enough so that Connors volunteers to walk back to the hotel with him, but Ilya rejects the offer. He needs to be alone. Under the flashing lights, it feels like no one has noticed the new soulmark on his face, and Ilya needs to be the first one to see it. He needs to get out of here now.

The walk to the hotel happens in a blur. He’s stumbling over himself, and he’s not entirely sure that it’s just the alcohol. He thinks probably it has to do with how his world is constantly being thrown off-its axis whenever he sees Shane Hollander.

Back at the hotel, Ilya goes straight to the bathroom mirror. He isn’t sure what he’s expecting, but this feels like it matches. He touches two fingers gently to the open cut, to the word fake branding his skin like a broken promise, and wishes he could be anyone but himself and he could love anyone but Shane Hollander.

It doesn’t work. It never works. No matter how much he wishes, it’s never going to change the reality of the fact that Hollander broke Ilya’s fucking heart.

But—but it also doesn’t last. The heartbreak. It doesn’t last forever. Somehow, in some great undeserved fucking dream, the heartbreak doesn’t last forever.

Which is to say that, later, now, here, it is new and different and good. They’re just sitting on the beach, and it’s quiet. It’s so public, but it’s also quiet. There’s only the ocean in front of them and the wind above them and their thumbs hooked together in the sand between them. It’s quiet. They’re just watching the water against the shore, the red-orange-pink sunset, the bleeding sky. There are no words to be exchanged, not now.

Hollander has already asked for his room number, and Ilya has already given it. He’s reminded, in that moment, of another room number, another question. He’s reminded of how this all started, before it got complicated.

I might answer. I might knock.

He’s not sure where, exactly, it changed. Where everything got so twisted and mangled and hard to handle. In between the knock and the answer, maybe. Or in between the answer and the next room number. Or maybe it was outside of all that—maybe it’s not them that got complicated, but the world around them; maybe it wasn’t the knock or the answer but the fact that they kept leaving each other afterwards.

Ilya looks over at their hands, at where their thumbs are touching. His gaze follows up Hollander’s arm, up to where Hollander is looking at the sea. From where Ilya is sitting, he has the perfect view of the new soulmark at the side of Hollander’s face, in front of his ear like a fucked up sideburn.

“You’re staring,” Hollander says quietly. He doesn’t look.

Ilya swallows. “What does it say?”

Slowly, Hollander lets out a measured breath. His shoulders sink a little, all the tension falling out of him in one motion. He’s been waiting for Ilya to ask, probably. He says, “You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.” Ilya isn’t sure he does, but he has to ask.

Hollander swallows visibly. He looks down, eyes going to where their hands touch. And another memory: another lifetime, another night, both of them dressed to the nines but Ilya’s bowtie is crooked and Hollander is a little tipsy, and we’re both in tuxedos out in public, and—

Ilya has to tread carefully here. He cannot ruin this tentative truce. But he wants to kiss Hollander so badly. He wants so many things that he cannot ever allow himself to have.

“It says your name.”

Ilya’s expression falls slack, his whole body reeling with the sentence. Hollander looks up at him and he must see something terrible on Ilya’s face because he nods sharply, as if this has decided something, and then looks away again.

It allows Ilya to see the mark in the fading light, and oh—he can see it now.

Through the two thick lines of scar tissue are characters he wouldn’t have thought Hollander would have recognized. The letters of his name are there, underneath the distortion of the cuts Hollander had dragged through them. He marred the skin well enough that no one would ever know what they’re reading unless they knew what letters to look for, but Ilya knows now. He knows why it’s there, and he knows why Hollander had to cut it off of him.

Fuck. He shouldn’t have asked. Hollander was right: he didn’t want to know this. He didn’t want to know that the word most representative of the worst things Ilya has been thinking about himself recently is his own fucking name. He didn’t want to know that Hollander hated it so much, was so afraid of it, was so ashamed, that he fucking cut Ilya out of him.

Ilya had done something similar, once, but it’s different even in the ways that it is the same, and it is the same in the ways that it is different. Fuck. He didn’t want to know this. He should have never known this. This was not Hollander’s burden or brand to bear, and it was not Ilya’s choice or desire to give it to him.

Ilya’s voice is hoarse, a whisper as low as the tide, when he speaks. “I’m sorry, Hollander.”

Hollander shakes his head. “Rozanov,” he starts. Then, “Ilya. Don’t. You can’t help it.” 

The reflection of Ilya’s words from so long ago makes every soulmark on Ilya’s body ache. So he goes quiet again, not letting himself apologize for who he is, the word coward burning like a hot brand on his stomach. For now, he lets the ocean do the rest of the talking for them.

6.

Ilya went into the NHL with three soulmarks total: a racial slur, cocksucker, and emotionless; given to him in that order. By the time that Ilya is seven years into his career, he has gotten five more.

He still has fewer than most people he knows—Marleau, by now, is at nineteen; Connors, who started with fifteen, now has seventeen; Shane has more than Ilya wants to count—but Ilya is also getting them at an exponential rate that he’s never experienced before. He gained two more in the past season alone.

There’s nothing he can really do with that information, because Shane would probably kill him if he even so much as suggested that hockey and the Metros and the media and this life might be hurting Shane in any way at all. So Ilya stays quiet.

They haven’t truly had a conversation about their soulmarks since the first time that they talked about it, when they established that they’re probably soulmates. That was years ago, so they’re probably overdue for the conversation anyway. Still, Ilya wishes that the circumstances were different.

The mark had come in during their first meeting with Shane’s parents. Ilya is pretty sure that he hid the pain alright, but he isn’t entirely certain. There was something about the way that Yuna had been looking at him that made Ilya think she was seeing something other than Ilya. Which is to say that Yuna looked at Ilya like she was seeing the worst of Shane, instead of seeing the only person whose love for Shane rivals that of hers. 

Ilya didn’t really know what to do with that, so he said nothing. He can understand why it might feel strange or invasive to look at him. He can understand why looking might hurt.

His marks are, after all, so visible: disappointment is so glaring, still angry and red after all these years, never having quite closed up with scar tissue; the word fake underneath his eye is impossible to ignore, especially in this moment when all of Shane’s lies are coming to light; the actual cuts dragged through the slur on his forearm say enough on their own even without being able to read the actual mark. That’s not even to begin with the soulmarks they can’t see.

And looking at Shane, too, must hurt in a different way. They’re surely used to Shane’s marks by now—the ones they can see, at least—but they’ve never had a real person to connect them to before. But Shane had introduced him as his soulmate, as the person he loves, so now they know. Now they can put a face to lazy and foreign and all the others.

So it must hurt to look at both of them. To look at Shane and know that the man their son loves is so fucked in the head. To look at Ilya and know that their son has a host of issues that they’ve likely never acknowledged, for any number of reasons.

All in all, it was a strange afternoon. It was a good one, too, because Shane’s parents are good people who welcomed Ilya into their home despite everything. It made all of this—him and Shane—suddenly feel so real in such a pleasant, warm way. Ilya had met his parents, and it had gone as well as it could have, really, and what they have is no longer a painstakingly and totally hidden, secret thing. It’s something real.

It’s once they’re back at the cottage, though, that Shane takes one look at him and says, “What does it say?”

Ilya knows what he’s talking about instantly. He takes a breath, rubbing at the spot on the heel of his palm that had started stinging around the time Shane and Yuna had talked outside. Ilya hadn’t actually looked at it yet, instead choosing to avoid using his left hand at all costs. He curls his fingers up so that Shane can’t see, and then looks down at it.

He stares for a long moment, and then exhales heavily. “Shane—”

“What does it say?” Shane asks, eyes narrowing. Then his voice softens. “Please. I deserve to know.”

And Ilya gives in, because of course he does. Because this is Shane, and Ilya would give him anything he asked for. This has always been the problem, ultimately. He admits, voice low, “It says ashamed.”

Shane swallows, then nods tightly. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya murmurs. He reaches for Shane with the hand that’s unmarred by the soulmark and pulls him closer. He presses a kiss to his shoulder, at the place where soft is covered by his t-shirt. “I love you, okay?”

Shane exhales softly, lightly, tilting his head so that Ilya can kiss his jaw, at the same place where disappointment lines Ilya’s own face. “I love you too.”

Ilya hums, pressing a kiss to the place by his ear that used to say his name, making Shane’s breath catch. “And today was good.”

“Today was good,” Shane echoes. “It’s not you I’m ashamed of, you know that, right? And it’s not really even being gay.”

“Then what?”

He takes both of Shane’s hands in his, trying not to wince when Shane’s fingers scrape against the fresh soulmark. He tugs Shane even closer, pressing against him. The painful sting isn’t important; he has spent so much time wanting to be closer to Shane than human bodies allow, and now that he is finally allowed to hold on, he’s never going to let go.

Shane closes his eyes, pitching his head forward to rest on Ilya’s shoulder. His breathing is slow and even, but the anxiety is riddled through the tension in his shoulders. “I think it’s just…it’s about the guilt of it more than anything else. Guilty that I disappointed my mom, that everything she’s worked so hard for is going to fall apart one day. Guilty that I doubted she would love me anyway. Guilty that I still kind of think I’m right.”

“Ah.” Ilya doesn’t really know what to say to any of that, so he just presses a kiss to Shane’s temple. He guides Shane’s hands to his own waist, and then moves his own arms to cling to him.

Shane sighs contentedly. Then, “I’m sorry you have to carry that one around on your hand.”

“No,” Ilya says immediately. “Don’t be sorry. I would carry the whole sky for you if you asked.”

“You’re ridiculous.” But Ilya can feel Shane smiling against the spot where he’s buried his face in Ilya’s collarbone.

Ilya laughs breathily. “Yes. You make me like this.” Then, with another kiss to Shane’s temple, his tone sobers slightly. “I don’t mind carrying your words.”

“Why not?” Shane sounds incredulous. “Some of them are awful.”

“I want to know every part of you, even the parts you don’t like.” Ilya pulls back slightly so that he can actually look at Shane. “I want to get to know all of the things no one else gets to understand. Like I am special to you.”

“You are special to me,” Shane murmurs. He tilts his head, inviting Ilya to kiss him; Ilya, who has never truly wanted to deny him such a request.

When he pulls away from the kiss, putting off Shane deepening it for just a moment, Shane looks at him questioningly. Ilya shrugs a little, and says, “Okay. So I will carry the things you cannot carry alone, yes?”

A hum, and a small laugh. “Sure. If you let me carry your things.”

“Deal,” Ilya tells him, and then kisses him again. This time, he lets Shane deepen the kiss until they’re stumbling towards the bedroom.

7.

It’s the last game that Boston will play against Montreal during the regular season this year, which also means that it’s one of the last games that Ilya will play with Boston. He is working very, very hard to be okay about this.

He doesn’t regret his decision to move to Ottawa—a trade that’s been kept so fucking top secret that even he barely knows what’s happening with it; his agent, the two coaches, and a legal representative from each team are the only people who have the full picture as to what’s going to happen. He doesn’t regret putting the request in, and he doesn’t regret committing to not signing the contract extension Boston offered him for the next few years.

He doesn’t.

But fuck—it’s hard, too. These people have been his family since the day he stepped onto American ice. These are the people he’s become an adult alongside.

The older players have watched him grow from the eighteen year old who put up an act of bravado to mask how fucking scared he was, and the younger players treat him with a reverence that he knows means they were all wearing Rozanov jerseys when they were kids. He knows the players from his own rookie class have his back in a way no one else in the world ever had, until he became brothers with them.

And the fans, too—the fans who embraced him when they didn’t have to, who followed his career from the time it was a glimmer of gold dust in a pan to the year they won the Cup and every moment afterwards. These are people who have supported him unconditionally, through every fight and every loss and every win.

It’s a stupid cliché, but Ilya doesn’t know where to even begin with thanking them for what these people—players, coaches, staff, trainers, fans—have given him. He brought them a Stanley Cup, and in return, they gave him a home and a career and a life. He has played the best hockey anyone has ever played for these people, but they were embracing him even before he was hitting the heights of his career.

How the fuck is he supposed to repay any of this? A home, brotherhood, a life—those aren’t gifts that Ilya can ever repay. He will owe the city of Boston and the team of the Raiders an impossible debt for the rest of his life.

And despite that: he’s leaving.

Ilya doesn’t know how to explain why. He doesn’t know where to begin when the reasons start and end with Shane Hollander. The middle, too, is all about Shane. These are reasons that no one from Boston will ever understand. So Ilya just has to leave in silence, in quiet, with carefully prepared statements, with a press junket that answers no questions at all.

The further onwards that the season gets, the harder this all seems. It will be worth it, because this is Shane that Ilya is doing it for, and probably he would burn down the world if Shane said it’d make him happy. Sending his career up into flame and ash is nothing, really.

But it’s hard, too.

When Montreal arrives in the city, Ilya is fucking determined to win this game. He wants to give this city one last show. One last game for the ages, before he throws away everything he has in favor of the rival he’s facing on the ice tomorrow. He’ll give them a game to remember, to talk about when his career and legacy both falter and stumble and inevitably fall to pieces.

It’s not until Shane shows up at his house outside the city two hours earlier than Ilya was expecting him that he realizes maybe he’s been thinking about this a little too much. Shane is pounding on the door instead of knocking, and something on his face is stormy when Ilya lets him in.

Shane is stepping past Ilya into the front hall and dropping his bag at his feet before Ilya can greet him. He hasn’t managed to even close the door yet when Shane’s hands are cupping his jaw and dragging him into a messy kiss. Ilya laughs breathily into the kiss, falling back against the door to close it. Shane follows him, peppering kisses against the right side of his jaw and then his neck and his collarbone and then back up again, just below his ear, at his temple, underneath his left eye.

“Hi to you too,” Ilya starts, breathless already. “What’s gotten into you?”

Shane finally pulls back, and his shoulders are heaving for breath but he somehow also feels tense in a way that’s putting Ilya on edge. Shane stares at him for a long moment, searching his face in a question that Ilya doesn’t know how to answer.

Finally, Shane’s breath seems to steady. “Who called you it?”

Ilya blinks, genuinely confused. “Called me what?”

Without answering the question, Shane shakes his head and steps back, as if to shake away a thought he doesn’t want to be having. Ilya watches him with a frown as Shane toys with the hem of his shirt, not meeting his eyes.

“Shane,” Ilya says slowly, “you’re scaring me.”

With that, Shane heaves a sigh, and then drops his jacket to the floor with an uncharacteristic sloppiness and then pulls his shirt over his head. It takes a moment for Ilya to find it, but then it clicks. For as long as Ilya has known him, Shane has had soulmarks covering his ribcage and his lower stomach. They cross over stretches of his body in the light pink of scars or the dark red of freshly cut marks. They mar the smooth expanse of skin with the worst things Ilya has ever thought about himself.

Shane has, in all of this time, never had one on his chest. But now, over the left side of his chest, cut deep into the skin just under the place where the C of a captain’s hockey jersey rests, there’s a new soulmark. It’s fresh, the wound still open and aching. The dark slit of each cut glares an awful, almost glowing red in the sunlight.

Ilya carefully schools his face into a blank neutral. Shane should not have to see this. Shane should not know this about him. Shane should not be carrying this word marring some of the only blank stretches of skin that he has left. Fuck.

“Can I touch?” Ilya asks. He sounds fragile, even to his own ears.

Shane swallows, then nods once. Slowly, trying to keep himself from trembling, Ilya steps closer and then reaches out. One hand goes to Shane’s waist, as if afraid that he might run, while the other goes to lightly touch his chest. He strokes a finger under the word, his eyes never leaving Shane’s chest. He’s as gentle as he can be, his touch barely ghosting over skin. Shane visibly shivers anyway.

“Deserter,” Ilya murmurs. He doesn’t look at Shane. “No, no one called me that.”

I was thinking it on my own, he does not say. He knows Shane hears it anyway, though, because his next breath is sharp, pained. Ilya looks up at him just in time to see Shane’s face crumple in guilt.

This is, he figures, around the time that Ilya’s newest soulmark cuts itself into his body. This one is small, so small that Ilya barely even notices the pain as more than a pestering scratch. He finds it later, perfect tiny papercuts on the inside of his left ring finger: unworthy.

8.

It’s standard practice not to mention other people’s soulmarks.

If someone wants to talk about the ones on their own body, or if their soulmate wants to talk about the ones on their partner’s body, that’s one thing. It’s not necessarily inappropriate, even if it isn’t common. People don’t tend to want to talk with just anyone about their greatest insecurities and worst things they’ve ever thought about themselves. The words being carved into skin visible for the world to see doesn’t make them any easier to deal with.

In Russia, it’s considered an act of complete disrespect to mention someone’s soulmarks, or to ask about them in any way. Gossipping about them, too, is a line that people tend not to cross no matter how cruel or embarrassing a word on someone’s skin is.

Ilya has discovered that this is not entirely true in Canada or the United States. It doesn’t happen often and it’s generally speaking a bad practice—if you don’t want people gossiping about your own soulmate’s greatest pains, then don’t talk about other people’s words—but it’s not the complete disrespect or cruel-mannered act that Ilya personally had been taught it is. It’s more of an unspoken rule of thumb; a guidance to follow but ultimately breakable without being shunned from your social circles.

Even after all these years living in North America, this lax attitude towards soulmarks is something he still hasn’t gotten used to. It doesn’t make sense to him.

Soulmarks, however common and however impossible to hide, are so vulnerable. Not just to the person wearing them, but to their soulmate too. The lengths he has gone to keep Shane’s privacy make him feel insane compared to how blatantly some of his North American friends carry theirs. To hide his marks—for the sake of their own safety—he found it worthwhile to fucking cut two of them off.

But it’s not like you can hide all of them forever. Most of Ilya’s, for instance, are in extremely visible and difficult to cover places; and given this career, it’s practically impossible for anyone to hide all of them forever. Most hockey players aren’t willing to go as far as Ilya did when he was fifteen and living in Russia and absolutely bone-deep terrified his soulmate would be a man. Besides, he does know other people with even worse placements—Marleau’s broken, written across his forehead, comes to mind.

In Boston, soulmarks had never been the subject of speculation or gossip. The team was close with each other, but after Marleau had punched someone bloody for asking if he knew yet how exactly his soulmate was broken, any issue of conversation regarding soulmarks vanished overnight. The other player had gotten traded not too long after that, a mid-season trade that sent the press into a frenzy about the Raiders team environment. None of them offered an explanation.

Later, privately, Marleau confessed to Ilya that he did already know his soulmate. She’s beautiful and she’s kind and she’s funny and she’s the world to me. She’s also too depressed to take care of herself without help, and too agoraphobic to leave the house more often than not, and I’m constantly terrified I’m going to lose her inside her own head.

Not broken, Marleau had said, angry and frustrated and still itching to punch someone. She’s not, no matter what she thinks. She’s not, and I’ll kill anyone who calls her that, no matter how good a player they are.

In Ottawa, meanwhile, some of Ilya’s teammates talk about soulmarks freely. Only ever their own, never pushing anyone to talk about theirs, but still. Soulmarks come up more often in the Centaurs locker room than they’ve ever come up anywhere else Ilya’s spent time in. It’s strange, and Ilya isn’t sure he likes it.

He likes almost everything else about the Centaurs team environment. He likes the people, he likes their locker room banter, he likes the general dynamic on the ice between most of them. Every now and then, rarely but still occasionally, he even finds ways to enjoy losing, just because he’s doing it with good people.

Ilya is, above all else, determined to make this into a safe place to fall. A safe place for if he’s ever able to come out to them without risking Shane in the process. A safe place if something were to happen and they both got outed. A safe place if Shane ever allows him to tell anyone about their relationship.

It’s going to take work, but he’s determined.

He’s just also—and he’s reminded of his mother, and of Marleau’s soulmate, more often than ever before, these days—tired. He’s so fucking tired.

He needs this team to be good enough to hold up in his most private, most desperate, most ugly and impossible of dreams: he needs this team to be good enough to make Shane happy, if Shane were the one to need a safe place to land. He needs this, and it feels so fucking hopeless.

Everything feels so far away and so depressingly impossible. Ten years until retirement is suddenly an impossible length of time, because the reality that Ilya is slowly understanding is that it doesn’t stop with retirement.

It doesn’t stop with the ending of their careers, because the career of a Hall of Famer doesn’t truly end until they ruin themselves or they die. It won’t be over until their legacies are solidified in ways that can’t be taken away. It won’t be over until they have faded away into obscurity, but Shane fucking Hollander is a generational talent. Hockey isn’t ever going to let go of him.

There is a weight on Ilya’s shoulders in the shape of a secret, in the shape of loneliness, and in the shape of failure that will not go away, and sometimes Ilya thinks that it’s going to crush him.

He can do everything possible to make the Centaurs a soft landing, and he can do everything to bring this team back from the ground up, just like he had done in Boston, and he can love and be loved by Shane Hollander—and none of it is ever going to be enough to take that weight away. None of it is going to be enough to save him from this.

It’s not Shane’s fault, because Ilya finally has the thing he’s always wanted and never been allowed to even dream of having and, still, it hasn’t fixed him. It hasn’t fixed this bone deep exhaustion, this inability to push through the losses and see the best of himself or the world or hockey.

He’s just so tired. Worn down.

He wonders, some days, if any of this has carved itself into Shane’s skin. Tired. Weak. Depressed. Any or all of the above. They haven’t seen each other in three months, so he doesn’t know and he doesn’t ask. He isn’t sure Shane would tell him until he was forced to.

It happens after practice—he had texted Shane that morning before practice, something about how he misses him, and hadn’t heard back yet.

Shane is probably with his teammates—they had a midweek game against the Carolina Earthquakes. Ilya glanced at the score when practice let out; Montreal absolutely destroyed the equally-ranked team.

Shane loves his team for reasons unfathomable to Ilya, who knows how unfair the Metros are to him, and so he’s probably celebrating with them in one way or another. Somehow, Shane always finds something good about the Metros, something worth staying for, no matter how hard they’ve been on him ever since his coming out. Somehow, Shane keeps finding reasons to stay, and to hide.

The answer to Ilya’s text, finally, comes in the form of pain. A cutting sensation deep into his neck; the skin around his throat splitting open and stinging. He lets out a strangled noise, his hands going to his throat as if to close the skin back up, as if to stop the cut, as if to stitch himself together before anyone can see how he is being flayed open.

The pain is blinding, and he’s sinking onto the bench and hunched over himself before he can process what he’s doing. This is the worst he thinks it’s ever felt, worse than disappointment and worse than cocksucker and worse than coward and—

He lets out a choked off cry and then someone is kneeling at his side; Boodram or Hayes, maybe. One of them puts their hand on his knee and he flinches away, curled over himself with his hands wrapped around his own throat like he’s trying to choke himself. The cutting of the soulmark feels like it lasts forever, like it will never end.

In reality, it probably lasts only minutes. When he finally can breathe in a steady pattern again, instead of the panicked heaving of silent, tearless sobs and breathless pain, he drops his hands. He rests his elbows on his knees, hands and head hanging between his legs. He doesn’t want to look up.

“Better now, Roz?” someone asks quietly.

Ilya nods sharply, just once, his eyes still squeezed shut and his face turned to the ground. His voice is hoarse when he speaks, like he really had been choked. “Can you get me a wet washcloth? Cold water.”

“Course. Be right back.”

Bood, Ilya thinks distantly. Good alternate captain. Should’ve been made captain instead of him, probably.

When Boodram comes back to hand him the cloth, Ilya hesitates only a moment before pressing it against the new soulmark. It stings and his breath is a tight hiss when he presses the cool cloth against his skin harder. It’s not soothing at all, but it’s what he’s done for most of the rest of them and they all healed fine.

He’s heard horror stories about people letting soulmarks get infected—though he’s pretty sure that most of them are urban myths—and he has no plans on letting one of Shane’s marks infect or kill him. Shane would probably never forgive himself, and then where would they be?

With the washcloth still pressed to his throat, he finally lifts his head. He probably looks like shit, but neither Boodram nor Hayes flinches away.

“New soulmark?” Bood asks quietly. He usually has a loud, commanding kind of voice, but they all seem to realize that Ilya can’t handle that right now. The rest of the locker room has cleared out already.

Ilya shrugs. It’s obvious enough without him having to confirm it.

“Painful one,” Hayes says, a similarly unnecessary observation.

Ilya shrugs again. Presses the cloth harder into his throat and winces, holding back another pained cry. His cheeks are wet, he realizes; he must have been crying at some point.

“Do you want us to turn around? So we don’t see it while you finish getting changed?”

It’s a kind offer from Hayes. After a moment’s thought, though, Ilya shakes his head a little. “Can you—” can you do what I cannot, what I am too afraid to do, what will hurt too much to bear alone? “—um. Can you tell me what it says?”

“You sure?” Boodram asks uncertainly.

Ilya swallows, and it fucking hurts. God, the throat. If he weren’t so fucking in love with Shane Hollander, he might hate him. “Yes.”

He takes a shuddering breath, and the pain lingers with the unavoidable movement. Then he sits up again, leaning against the wall, and lifts his chin just enough for them to read the word without stretching the skin so much that it hurts more than it already does.

He knows it’s bad when Boodram’s breath goes sharp and Hayes’ face goes carefully, purposefully blank. Ilya looks between them, trying to harden his expression into something that doesn’t look so fucking weak and pathetic.

“What does it say?” Ilya demands. His voice trembles even as he tries to be objective, emotionless about this.

Neither of them can meet his eyes. Still, Hayes answers, quietly but bravely and with his eyes still on Ilya’s throat. “It says ‘happier.’”

Ilya breathes out slowly. Breathes in. Breathes out. Another tear slips from his closed eyes, and he knows his entire expression has crumpled in a way that neither of them know what to do with.

“Okay,” he says, and they all pretend his voice doesn’t break straight down the middle. “Okay.”

9.

Ilya had never actively watched a soulmark etch itself into someone’s body before. There was the girl with twenty-five marks—prude writing itself on her chest while he was knuckles deep in her—but he wasn’t watching when it happened. He only noticed after she started crying with pain instead of pleasure and he gently guided his fingers out of her to check in.

So he’s never seen it happen like this. He watches in strange, morbid fascination as the mark cuts itself deep into Shane’s cheek. The letters are small, but they bleed. None of Ilya’s marks have ever bled like this before; the cuts always scab over almost immediately. But this mark cuts deep, and the blood is dripping down his face, across his jaw, then falling to the floor before the cut can smooth over.

Ilya is so caught up in watching the way Shane’s expression goes slack while the word cuts into his face that he almost doesn’t notice the pain in his own body. It’s over his ribs, he can feel the cut scarring over even as the word slices into skin. He puts a hand over the spot and presses down with his palm as if to stop it, as if to soothe the skin before the mark can solidify, as if to keep the cut from coming.

But the pain doesn’t stop. Physical pain has never made him cry easily; he’s a professional hockey player. This pain, though, makes tears swell at the waterlines of his eyes before he can stop them.

Shane touches his fingers to his cheekbone slowly, tenderly, as if terrified of what he’ll find there. His fingers come away bloody. Shane doesn’t seem surprised by this—maybe all of his soulmarks come in bleeding.

Shane looks down at his bloody fingers and something awful passes over his face. Ilya isn’t sure where he recognizes the expression from, but—but he knows this is what Shane Hollander’s face looks like when his heart is breaking.

“Okay,” Shane murmurs. As he agrees to Ilya’s request for space, he sounds, and looks, and feels, for the first time, small.

Ilya swallows. He nods sharply, and watches as Shane turns away. He waits until Shane is out of the room and downstairs before he stumbles to the bathroom and tears off his shirt. He doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to know, but he has to. He has to know exactly how he has broken Shane into pieces. He has to know what he said, what he did, except—except, really, he knows before he takes off his shirt.

Shane loves him. Ilya knows this.

Just, when no one else knows, it's hard to remember sometimes.

Staring at himself in the mirror, though, he thinks this is maybe the most horrifying mark yet. In the mirror, he watches numbly as he moves a finger over the first letter of the word secretkeeper carved onto his ribcage.

Ilya thinks of Shane’s matching mark on his cheekbone—secret, secret, secret—and of the blood dripping down his face like tears, and he looks at the careless slashes of lettering on his ribs and at the deep ruby engraving of the word in his pale skin, and he feels sick. This is what their relationship has come to. This is who they believe they are now.

He manages to get himself to the toilet and retches, waiting to vomit, but the bile doesn’t come. The sick feeling just rolls around in his chest and broils there until he collapses back against the wall and finally, finally, starts crying.

10.

The bus back to Ottawa after the seventh game in the playoff series against Montreal is loud. Rowdy. Bursting with energy and excitement. They’re in the fucking playoffs, and they won this round, and they’re moving on. In the span of maybe only half a season, they’ve gone from digging their own graves with every next game to becoming real contenders for the Cup. Fuck, they’re beat Montreal and they won and they’re flying high.

He hasn’t looked at social media at all, had just done his post-game press and then gotten on the bus, so he doesn’t register what’s happening until it’s too late to stop it himself. Their schedule is tight—but God, it feels good to be playing playoff games again, ones as intense and high stakes as these—and he doesn’t usually bother to look at the social media commentary anyway.

And look, okay, of course Ilya has already reached out to Shane, of course he’s checked in, of course he’s tried to support him as best as he can from the team bus he’s contractually obligated to be on; but Shane hasn’t answered. Even as excited as he is for his own team, Ilya is fucking worried.

Shane would kill him if he didn’t give these games his all and so Ilya did, in every second of every match, but there was always going to be a cost to it. As the best two players of their generation, as people on two rival teams, today, only one of them could win. But as soulmates, there is a price they both must pay.

This, he supposes, is that cost.

He always sits in the same seat in the second row of the bus so that his teammates can find him easily. This is where he is sitting when the pain starts.

It starts everywhere, all at once. His entire body just starts burning, skin everywhere starting to split open and sting at the touch of cold recycled air. Briefly, he thinks his heart is going to swell and burst out of his body, tearing him open in the way a blunt object pierces through a piece of paper. He can’t breathe; thinks maybe his lungs are going to give out, the organ slit open by the sheer pain of what’s happening on his skin.

He doubles over, hands grasping at his arms, at his neck, at his face, at a spot over his heart. He thinks he makes a pathetic and pained noise—he must make some noise—because suddenly the rows of seats around him go quiet. He hears his name distantly but all he can think about is Shane; all other words are muted and drowned out by the stinging of the fresh wounds.

Someone—it must be Barrett, who has started sitting on the row across from him recently—puts his hand on his back, gently rubbing as if it will make the pain better. He murmurs something soft, something that’s supposed to be reassuring. Ilya lets out another weak noise, his whole body aching amidst the haze of pain.

It feels like it lasts forever. The slitting of skin, the breaking open of his heart, the pain spilling out of the wound and flooding the bus. It hurts, and he will not break over it, he will not let himself shatter, he will not cry. He will not fucking cry—he will not allow the goddamn Montreal Metros the satisfaction. Because he knows where these soulmarks must be coming from, he knows what’s making Shane hurt so badly, and Ilya will not fucking let them make him cry.

Barrett murmurs something else, and this time all Ilya catches is, “…Hollander?”

Ilya nods shakily, not sure what exactly the question is, but recognizing the sound of his soulmate’s name. He would recognize it anywhere, in any haze of panic, in any blinding of pain.

When it finally stops, they’re just about in Ottawa. Ilya stays hunched over himself, struggling to take in breaths in that position, but unwilling to sit up and face anyone. He presses a palm over his cheek, eyes squeezed shut as he tries to gather himself.

The pain had come from everywhere in a way that has never happened before. It wasn’t concentrated onto one spot where the soulmark was coming in. Ilya feels raw and broken, exhausted after an hour or so of the goddamn universe cutting him up. He’s been flayed open and exposed, and it’s so fucking unfair.

The chatter on the bus has dimmed slightly, gone quieter in the time that Ilya was falling apart. Like they want to simultaneously give him the privacy of not looking but they also don’t know what they could possibly say right now that isn’t about him.

“It over?” Next to him, Barrett keeps his hand on Ilya’s back, an uncharacteristically soft touch.

Ilya shrugs a little from where he’s bent with his head between his knees. His voice is more of a groan than anything when he says, “Probably.”

“Have some water,” Barrett tells him. “Sit up, c’mon.”

Ilya thinks about it. Thinks about how he’ll have to sit up eventually and expose whatever the fuck is on his face. Thinks about how he doesn’t want to, how he never wants these people to see all of the horrible things Shane thinks about himself written out in so many words.

He thinks about how fucking awful it is, to have a soulmate. How awful it is to wear someone else’s biggest fears and worst thoughts as if they are tattoos, decorations, choices. How awful it is to expose someone else’s raw insecurities to just anyone who simply looks at you.

“Rozanov,” Barrett says again, quietly. “Drink some water.”

Ilya swallows. The word happier is nothing more than a distortion on his throat. A lie, now, probably. He says, voice hoarse, “You can’t say anything. You can’t look at me.”

A beat. Then Barrett exhales slowly. “I won’t look. Just drink some water, please.”

Another moment, a moment in which Ilya has to decide just how much exactly he trusts Troy Barrett. Then he sits up, blinking hard as his head spins a little. Barrett clumsily hands him a water bottle without looking over, his eyes instead trained on the floor of the aisle next to them.

Ilya takes it silently, gratefully, downing a few swallows quickly.

“Do you want to call him?” Barrett asks quietly. “Hollander?”

Ilya leans back against the seat, still taking heaving breaths. “No. I’ll…I will call him when I get home. I don’t want him to see yet.”

“Okay,” Barrett murmurs. Ilya takes one more sip and then tries to hand the water bottle back to him. “You sure that’s all you want?”

Ilya shrugs uncomfortably, and that’s going to have to be answer enough.

Unfortunately, Barrett still seems interested in talking about this. “Fuck, Rozanov, you scared me. Drink some more water, Jesus Christ. Your marks are fucking painful.”

“Yours are not?” Ilya asks dryly, accepting the water bottle back in his hands but not taking a drink.

“Not like that.” Barrett doesn’t look over, but his shoulder tense as if he wants to. “They’re like papercuts, if anything. You looked like you were going to die.”

Ilya shrugs, and reluctantly drinks some more water. It does help, but only slightly. He still feels like he’s bleeding out. “Mine are always like this.”

“Fuck.”

Ilya snorts. “Yes. That sums it up.”

He doesn’t look at the soulmarks until much later, when he’s finally at home. He doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to see. But he needs to know them before he calls Shane, and he needs to call Shane as soon as possible.

So he’s the first off the bus, and he doesn’t give a post-game speech beyond what he already did in the Metros’ visiting team locker room, and he gets himself the fuck home. Once there, he greets Anya and makes his way to the nearest mirror.

Every part of his body still feels tender, and the way his clothes scrape against his skin simultaneously itches and stings. He’s figured out, by now, that he must have gotten more than one mark. It wouldn’t make sense for everything to hurt just to only have the mark he can feel his cheekbone. His arms also feel too raw and his chest burns and the back of his neck screams every time he moves his head—all in ways that let him know, almost certainly, that he’s gotten a mark in those places.

He takes a deep breath before looking in the mirror, before starting to carefully catalog all of the new soulmarks that have written themselves into his skin. He doesn’t want Shane to know how he had reacted when he saw them. Shane doesn’t need to bear that burden on top of whatever pain he’s already feeling.

The first one he sees is the one on his cheek: traitor. It arches along the bone in careful, precise cuts. Like the slits of papercuts Barrett spoke of, but so much deeper and so much darker than a real papercut. Little letters, but they’re so deep that Ilya thinks they’ll never stitch themselves together into scars. It’s opposite of the word disappointment on his jaw, like the two are a fucked up compliment of each other.

He doesn’t touch it, doesn’t yet want to believe that it’s there. Carefully, wincing at every movement and every scrape of his shirt against skin, he pulls his shirt over his head and discards it onto the tiled floor. It falls silently, like snowfall or sleep. Ilya doesn’t look at it hit the ground, just stares at his own body.

The next one he sees is the one over his heart. Or—it’s slightly to the side and above of that. He’s reminded, vividly, of the word deserter sliced into Shane’s chest. This word, too, sits just underneath the C on his jersey. Fuck, he’s never going to be able to dress for a game without thinking of this: the terrible things the Metros must have said to Shane, the worse things they left unsaid; the betrayal and hatred and bigotry and anger as they threw their friend to the wolves.

All for Ilya. For him. How the fuck is he ever supposed to repay this awful sacrifice Shane has made?

The next thought comes to him lurchingly, wrenching through his chest and bursting out the other side, right underneath the C on his jersey, and he somehow knows it to be entirely true: Shane has lost everything. He’s out of the Metros; even if he were to be offered a contract again, he won’t take it. He can’t ever go back to that locker room. Not with the things those people have made him think and feel about himself. There’s no returning to them.

Ilya presses his palm over this one, just above the scar of emotionless, and the letters peak out between his splayed fingers. The pressure hurts, and he presses down harder. The word captain, a wound marking Shane’s perceived failure, does nothing but ache underneath his touch.

When he moves his arm, he sees the next one. It’s on his left forearm—following the vein in thick cuts that should, if they were not soulmarks, have left him bleeding out. The lines are sharp and angled, not carrying a trace of the dark slices of curves in captain. These letters are boxy and angry, bright red, the skin around each cut irritated and hot to the touch. Ilya runs his thumb over the letters of disloyal and refuses to wince at the sting.

The movement of his right arm makes the mark on his bicep flash in the mirror. Taking another shaky breath, he opens his arm up to the mirror, holding it out straight so that he can see the word in full.

The cutting stretches from the crease of his elbow almost to his shoulder, and the letters are large even if the cuts are thin. The e of embarrassing takes up an inch of space alone; each letter afterwards is squeezed into the space unevenly and violently.

Ilya needs to get to Shane immediately. He needs to hold Shane in his arms, needs to kiss him, needs to touch him everywhere that might bring comfort. He needs to tell him that he’s loved, that he’s wanted, that he’s not terrible or a traitor or a bad captain, that Ilya could never be ashamed or embarrassed of him, that Ilya loves him and is choosing him again and again, that Ilya will always choose him.

But there’s one more mark. He touches his left hand to the back of his neck tenderly; the briefest glimpse of ashamed scarred into his palm burns. Sure enough, he can feel the raised edges of the cuts open at the skin there. He fumbles for his phone, opening the camera.

He turns around, then holds the camera up so that he can get a view of the mirror. He traces a line underneath the cuts, his heart clenched in his throat as he reads the word liar, bright red and clear. He drops the phone onto the counter, his hands gripping tightly at the edge of the marble as he hunches over the sink.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Shane isn’t okay. Shane probably isn’t going to be okay for a long, long time.

Ilya allows himself two more deep breaths. Shane isn’t okay, and nothing could make Ilya walk away from him now. Nothing could make Ilya stop wanting him. 

They’re going to get married soon, and Shane is fucking crazy if he thinks Ilya’s leaving now. Coward couldn’t make him do it, fake couldn’t, neither unworthy nor happier could even try—seventeen marks now, five new ones in the past hour, and none of them could ever make him stop wanting and loving Shane Hollander.

He closes his eyes to the mirror. Steadying himself, he opens them again; fake and disappointment and traitor are all that stares back at him. Then he turns away from the reflections of a pain that's unbearable alone, and he picks up the phone to call Shane. 

+1.

Ottawa gets knocked out by the Admirals in the next round, and this defeat does not stop Shane Hollander from wanting and loving Ilya.

Despite everything, despite their flaws and their fears and their mistakes and their insecurities, he still wants Ilya and Ilya still wants him. Despite everything the world has thrown at them, it’s still Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Their names have been tied together since this whole thing began, and they’ll be tied together until the end, too.

They turn their focus from hockey to wedding planning. Well, the playoffs are technically still ongoing, so really only a little of their attention is turned to wedding planning. They send out email invites to everyone they want there, and only expect about half of them to show up. They make sure they both have nice suits. They don’t really think about things like food or chairs or tables.

They field calls from Yuna, trying to get across the point that they really don’t care about the logistics; they just want to be able to celebrate the fact that they love each other instead of shying away from it like they have for so long. They ignore about a million texts from Ilya’s remaining friends on the Raiders either asking if this is a legit email or a scam, and then congratulating him on “the pull of the century,” whatever that means. They very carefully do not think about the Metros.

The day and night immediately prior to the wedding, Ilya will be staying at the cottage with Anya and Svetlana while Shane will be at his parents’ cottage. They don’t care too much about having a traditional wedding, but they are hockey players, and engaging in superstition is muscle memory to them in the same way skating is. So they won’t see each other until they meet in their backyard for the rather makeshift ceremony.

So it’s two nights before they get married that they’re lying in their shared bed—because they live together now, and Ilya hopes desperately that he never loses sight of the novelty and privilege of that—and saying nothing even as they say everything with just a touch.

Shane lifts his hand, moving it to Ilya’s face. He traces the line of his jaw carefully with his pointer finger, his touch soothing over the ache of disappointment.

“I know we’re not doing vows,” he murmurs, his voice velvet in the night, “but I feel like I should say something, just for you.”

Ilya tries to hold back a smile and he knows he fails. He twists his head to kiss Shane’s palm, distracting him from where he’s pressing his thumb against lustful. “Oh?”

Shane hums, clearly still gathering his thoughts. He lets his hand drift again, down Ilya’s jaw to his neck, to his collarbone. They’ve never spoken about the scarring of happier over his throat, but Ilya kind of figures that neither of them really wants to unpack that one. Maybe someday—just not today. And that’s okay, he thinks vaguely, because they have the rest of their lives.

When Shane finally speaks again, it’s with the softness of sleep, his voice low and quiet in the dark even at the same time as it is confident and secure in its truth. Ilya adores him so much.

He says, slowly, “I love you. And there are—there are so many reasons why, okay? You’re hardworking and dedicated and strong and loyal. You care so much. You fight for what you love, and I mean, fuck, you fought for me, and I—I promise to fight for you, too.

“But also, you’re so gentle, in such a beautiful way. It’s in the way you care for Anya, and play with the Pike kids, and teach the younger kids at camp. I love that about you, your gentleness, and I’ll try to be someone you can be that way around without ever being afraid you’ll get hurt.”

“Careful, Hollander, you’ll ruin my reputation as an asshole,” Ilya tries to say, but it comes out choked and emotional in a way that takes away all threat.

Shane only laughs lightly. “You are an asshole, and I love you so much for it. Ilya, I’ve loved every version of you that’s existed since we were eighteen. The version of you that’s an asshole, the one that’s too charming for his own good, the one that wins, the one that loses, the one that fucks like a god and knows it but never fails to check in on me anyway.”

“Oh so you think I fuck like a god?”

“Shut up, I’m trying to give a nice, moving speech here before we get married.” Shane smiles at him though, and he doesn’t seem all that offended by the interruption, too giddy on the high of what’s coming so soon. “Let me finish, you can be a dick about it afterwards.”

Ilya bites back another smile. He motions for Shane to continue, just the slightest of movements in the shadows. Shane’s hand has drifted to Ilya’s side; his hand paused on the word secretkeeper cut over his ribcage.

“I promise not to keep any secrets from you,” Shane says softly. “And I promise to never keep you a secret again either. I want to love you in the light for the rest of our lives, and I can’t wait for everyone to know how much I want you. How devoted I am to you, how ready I am to build a home with you. 

“Ilya, you make us both the best versions of who we can be, and you let me be myself in a way I never thought was possible. I promise I’ll try to do the same for you. To let you be you, and to love you for it. I don’t, um. I don’t think I have enough words to tell you how much I love you. So I’m gonna say it in Russian now and you’re not going to laugh at my accent this time because I’ve been practicing so fucking hard.” 

There is a very, very real chance that Ilya is going to cry here, with Shane’s hand at his waistline and his eyes so intently looking at Ilya in the dark, the Russian words for I love you stumbling off of his tongue. His accent is still questionable, but Ilya can’t laugh at it now, not when Shane is so determinedly speaking with the dedication and care that he does everything with—that he loves Ilya with. 

It’s somehow all more intimate than anything else they’ve ever done. All this time, and still, Ilya finds himself surprised by how well Shane understands him. How easily Shane can pick apart his heart and then how he chooses to love every piece of it that he sees.

“Okay,” Shane whispers. “I’m done. That’s all I have right now.”

Ilya swallows, feeling horribly choked up and vulnerable. All of his shields and walls and self-loathings have over the years been exposed to reveal the barest, rawest parts of him, and here is Shane Hollander, saying he loves every one.

“Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya whispers, voice cracking.

He surges forward, throwing a leg over Shane’s thighs and moving to lean over him instead of lying next to him. He feels, all over again, all at once, like they’re at the cottage and he’s telling Shane he loves him for the first time; like he’s in a hotel room in Tampa and saying they can’t be anything but, God, maybe one day, maybe they’ll escape from this league and be alone together somewhere no one knows them; like he’s in a hidden away apartment in Montreal and making sure that Shane’s okay every step along their first time. He feels so in love that he’s dizzy with it, and he kisses Shane with the truth of all that feeling spilling out between them.

“I love you.” Ilya’s voice is low, choked up and overwhelmed. Shane kisses him again, and he feels so much for this man that there is no one word that can contain all of it. “Fuck. Okay. Um. My turn, yes?”

Shane laughs breathily. “You don’t have to.”

“No, I want to. Just—just, give me a minute.”

Shane nods, then starts pressing light kisses along all the exposed skin of Ilya’s body, his touch both cold and warm at the same time, both comforting and electric, both firm and dreamlike. Ilya thinks his heart, at least, is trembling, if not his whole body.

“Shane,” Ilya starts, and stops.

He takes another slow breath, gathering himself again, then he presses his lips to the word slut on the underside of Shane’s chin and trails kisses down his neck to his shoulder. Shane arches underneath his touch, baring his neck to Ilya as if it is second nature to trust him like this. Maybe it is, by now. God, Ilya loves him.

“Shane, you introduced yourself to me when we were practically kids,” Ilya says, pulling back to look Shane in the eye. “But I knew who you were before that. I didn’t tell you then, but I knew your name already. You were supposedly the only person who might be better than me. I knew that competing against you would be hard—”

“Do not fucking make a sex joke right now,” Shane cuts in.

His eyes are glimmering a little, and Ilya laughs lightly. He kisses Shane again, just below the word deserter on his heart. “Then don’t interrupt me.”

“Sorry.”

Ilya kisses his lips again; all forgiven. “What I was saying. I expected it to be hard to compete against you. But I didn’t expect it to be so much fucking fun. And I didn’t expect you to make me a stronger player. And I definitely didn’t expect you to make me a better man.

“But you do. Every day. It’s your strength and your leadership and your teamwork, yes, but also the plain joy you get out of this game, and how you inspire everyone who steps on the same ice as you. Competing with you is the most fun I’ve ever had, and playing with you is going to be even better.” 

“Starting to sound like you just love me because I can beat you at hockey.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “Such a fucking asshole, Hollander. I didn’t interrupt you this much.”

“Sorry,” Shane says again, but he doesn’t sound particularly sorry at all. It’s just one more moment in a collection of evidence that Shane has practicaly fucking domesticated him, because even this teasing placation makes Ilya laugh, breathy and real.

“I’m trying to tell you how proud I am,” Ilya finally continues. “Proud of everything you are and everything you’ve done, and proud also that you want me to be yours. Proud that you want me. No one else is ever going to be able to say they’re loved and wanted like this.”

“Oh,” Shane whispers. “Ilya—”

Ilya shakes his head, not finished yet, and Shane goes quiet again. “I promise to try every day to make you proud of me, too. Because no one will ever be able to say they’re loved as deeply and honestly as you make me feel, but also no one else will ever be able to say they’re wanted as much as I will always want to be with you—through life and sickness and health and on the ice and in bed and when we’re entirely a secret and when everyone knows too much.”

He shifts slightly where he’s lying over Shane so that he can kiss Shane’s cheekbone. Shane shivers under his touch, but it’s a good shiver. Not turned on necessarily, but open and vulnerable and trusting. Letting Ilya feel all of him: the overwhelmed part, the loving part, the happy part, the parts that are being bared naked under the sound of Ilya’s words.

“You once made me promise to be honest with you,” Ilya says. “And you were honest too, in a way that made us both braver. That still is making us both braver. We have gotten much better at talking about our feelings, yes? Since the first time we shared a bed?”

Shane huffs a laugh, but it’s overwhelmingly emotional rather than teasing. “Yeah. We have.”

“I have loved you since before I understood you,” Ilya murmurs. A kiss to his throat, to his jaw, to the spot just under his eye where fake is written on his own face. “And getting to learn all of you is my greatest achievement. I promise I will love you for as long as I know you, and then longer after that.”

Shane exhales shakily, kissing him before Ilya can consider teasing him about the tears gathering at the waterlines of his eyes. “I promise I’ll try to make it worth it. Loving me.”

“No,” Ilya says, pulling back slightly, his hand going to Shane’s chin to guide him into looking Ilya in the eye. “No, you do not have to try at this. You are worth it because you are my Shane. You could never disappoint me, and you have always been worth it all. Okay?”

Shane swallows visibly. Voice small and watery, he says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Ilya murmurs.

He gathers Shane’s left hand in his, lifting it to his own lips. He kisses the knuckle of his ring finger, where his wedding ring sits comfortably, and then intertwines their fingers. He rests their hands on the pillow by Shane’s hand, supporting his own weight with the opposite elbow. Shane smiles up at him, small and honest and real and Ilya loves him.

This moment alone, he thinks, maybe makes it worth it all. This moment is what it was all for. Getting lost along the way here, finding the path back despite being lost, finding each other in scattered moments of bravery, building up a lifetime of loving each other out of those scattered moments—all of it, for this.

There are things Ilya wishes hadn’t hurt him and hadn’t hurt Shane; there are words cut into his body that he can never take back. There are scars that Shane carries that neither of them can ever heal in full.

But even with the beginning and the middle—whore, used, alone, coward, unworthy, secret—Ilya can’t at all bring himself to feel hurt in this, in the real start to the rest of their lives, in love, love, love.