Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

Multi

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov/Svetlana Vetrova, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau/Svetlana Vetrova

Characters:

Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov, Irina Rozanova, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Shane Hollander, Sergei Vetrov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Svetlana Vetrova Character Study, Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova Friendship, Trans Male Character, FTM Ilya Rozanov, Figure Skater Ilya Rozanov, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Transphobia, Misogyny, Mental Health Issues, Irina Rozanova Haunts the Narrative, Unreliable Narrator

Language:

English

Series:

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

Collections:

🏒Heated on Ice🏒

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-01 Completed: 2026-05-08 Words: 29,356 Chapters: 2/2

the people who have come and gone

Summary

Svetlana knew Liliya Rozanova like the other half of her soul, the back of her hand, the blood in her veins. She would know Ilya Rozanov just as well. When her best friend calls her to share the secret that he has kept tight to his chest their whole friendship, and the grief and the fear that he feels around it, Sveta knows that there is nothing that will stop her from trying to make at least some of it easier to carry.

or - Svetlana Vetrova, Ilya Rozanov, the constancy of change, and the spectre of Irina Rozanova

Notes

Soooo... this isn't the Shane Hollander POV that I promised next, which is partially written and should be here soon, but inspiration came knocking and I would have been a bad host if I hadn't let it do its thing. This fic has been planned for a while and so fits nicely in with the Shane Hollander POV - so I hope people aren't too disappointed! :)

This one is a bit heavier in tone - whilst I enjoyed writing the overall fluffier boys will be girls, my trade has always been angst in fandom, so I'm indulging a little.

Also, I cannot remember where it was that I read Sasha as a ballet dancer for the Bolshoi and then in Paris, but this was apparently a foundational stone in my understanding of his character because it was only upon rewatching Heated Rivalry the other day that I realised that this was not in fact canon. I've left in it because I love it and because it was an important part of his and Ilya's relationship in this, but please, if anyone knows what part of fandom/fanfic it is from, let me know! I genuinely felt like I was going around the bend a little when I realised it was never mentioned at all in the series.

warnings - mental health issues, character death, suicide, child abuse, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, implied underage, drug use, racism

Chapter 1: Liliya

2001

A long time ago, Svetlana Vetrova met her best friend in the stands of the hockey rink that her father had part owned, nestled in the middle of Moscow. It was an old, dilapidated sort of thing - nothing fancy at all, and the only hockey that got played there was an under fourteens team of bumbling idiot boys who checked with too much enthusiasm and not enough violent intent for her liking, and hadn’t yet learnt how best to handle their hockey sticks. Most of them would probably never make it anywhere at all, but they were growing boys learning to be men, and hockey was the medium through which they would learn the aggression that they needed to make it in a world that they were set to inherit.

Sveta’s father was a legend amongst them. He would go to shake their hands every week in the dressing rooms and watch the first half an hour of their practice, and they would fawn over him like eager puppies discovering the existence of the wolf. He let Sveta accompany him to the rink, because she was young enough that he could pretend that he had a son and not a daughter, but he drew the line at letting her be at his side in the changing room, probably because his hapless crew of puppy-ish boys were learning to look like wolves did long before they learned anything actually useful.

So, he would send her into the stands without him, to sit in the cold and watch the empty ice and wait for him, and he’d buy her a small cup of hot chocolate to sweeten the deal a little. Sveta would whine and complain and stomp her feet a little (she wanted to be where the hockey was - mostly, she wanted the ice, but if she could not have that, then she would take anything else that she could get her hands on) but she would go, and her father would smile indulgently at her, and the coach would say, “what a beautiful, obedient daughter you have - she will make someone very happy one day,” in the sort of way that turned Sveta’s stomach.

She was twelve and she thought that there was nothing that was worse than being lonely. The coach was a close second thing.

But there was nothing lonelier than the empty stretch of ice in front of her, because she knew that it would never be hers to have, and she wanted it with a desperation that was humiliating. She wanted the ice, and she did not want to be alone, and she was more scared of puppy-ish boys than she was of the wolf-men that they might grow up to be, because the wolf-men made her sick instead of scared, and they made her think of the fact that she would never get to have the surety of the ice underneath her feet, nor the gross camaraderie of the changing room that she was barred from, and the fact that one day (one day soon, because Sveta was on the cusp of growing up) her father would look at her and no longer be able to ignore the fact that he did not have a son. These were lonely thoughts.

And then, when Sveta was twelve years old and sat in a seat five rows back from the empty ice, she met her best friend, or rather saw her for the first time.

The ice was not empty that day. Sveta did not have any interest in figure skating (there was no violence, no spirit, no excitement - just one person and the lonely ice underneath them, the artificial hum of the music and a crowd that fell away into obscurity) but she watched as a lanky slip of a girl drifted onto the ice, and that did not matter anymore.

There was a sort of animal violence in the way that the girl skated - not at first, when she drifted onto the ice in a way that made it seem as though she wasn’t sure if she was meant to be there or not, but when the distant, tinny music from a little speaker left at the entrance began to lift up in volume, and when she began her routine in earnest, arms raised above her head as she reached a sharp stop at centre ice before launching into it - Yes, yes, there was violence in it that Sveta could appreciate. Every movement seemed to be honed to it. It was an instinctive thing, and the girl was lost in it, spinning, jumping, weaving, all skates and hands and lean stretches of muscle.

The girl was not pretty. She had not grown into herself at all, and it made her look a little strange, like she had not been deposited in her body wholly correctly. She was tall and coltish, all sharp angles and limbs, and her face was long and narrow and obstinate. It was the mirror of the expression that Sveta saw in her own mirror sometimes - the hunger, which made her mother scold her for scowling and not being ladylike enough. It was the look of someone who knew about puppy-ish boys and wolf-men. And everything about her was suited to the way that she skated across the ice. Sveta thought, absently, that she would have made a glorious hockey player.

The girl leapt - rotated once, twice, thrice… and then she struck the ground, knees flying out from under her as she spun out.

She was on her feet almost immediately, face set like nothing had happened at all, but the spell had been broken. Sveta leaned back in her chair (she didn’t realise she had leaned forward in the first place) and released the breath that she had been holding. From the side of the ice, so far hidden from her view, a woman came hurrying out. She was a dead-ringer for the girl on the ice, all golden ringlets and pale hands, graceful on her own skates as she made her way across the ice.

“Lilyukha!” she scolded. The rest of her words were too quiet for Sveta to make out, but she watched the look on the girl’s face, and she knew it familiarly and she could guess what was being said.

Careful. Slow down. Dangerous.

A week later, the girl was there again. Sveta sat in the front row and watched. The girl leapt and rotated thrice and landed it. There was no need for a scolding, and the girl set her chin obstinately: see, see, I can do it, I can land it, this is mine.

Sveta introduced herself that day. Formally, it was the first time that she ever met Liliya Rozanova and her mother, Irina, but if people asked her, she told them about the week before, and the way that Liliya had fallen - hard - and gotten back up again. She told them about the look on her face and said “look at it, truly, and know that we are the same.”

2003

Irina Rozanova died on a warm day in the middle of summer.

Sveta did not know Irina Rozanova well, but she knew Liliya and she knew that Liliya loved her mother in the kind of childish, naive way that people loved something when they didn’t understand that it wasn’t theirs to keep. Liliya spoke about her mother like she was the happiest, most beautiful, kindest woman in the whole world, but Sveta had never known Irina Rozanova to be anything but sad. Sure, she always had a smile to spare for Sveta, when she saw her, and it was always genuine - but it was always sad, as well, and the sadness was what people spoke about.

When Sveta’s mother heard about Irina Rozanova’s death, she said “well, we all knew that it would happen eventually,” like this was something that people thought of often. Sveta’s father had said nothing at all, which was worse, because it felt as though it didn’t matter to him at all. Irina Roxanova is dead, the weather is nice, I would like chicken for dinner.

Liliya had cried like her world was ending. But when Sveta, with all the insensitivity given by God to fourteen year-old teenagers who thought that they were all grown up, asked how Irina Rozanova had died, the tears had stopped. She had said, curtly, “accident” in the sort of way that her mother spoke about the sister they weren’t allowed to see anymore. For a whole week, Sveta had wondered if Irina Rozanova was actually dead or if she had simply run off or been exiled, or vanished into thin air like the faerie creature she resembled; these wonderings lasted right up until the funeral, which was open casket, maybe because Grigori Rozanov was worried about people thinking the same thing that Sveta was.

Irina Rozanova was the first dead body that Sveta had ever seen. She did not look very beautiful at all - too much red on her cheeks and colour on her lips to make her look alive again, which might have worked for anyone who wasn’t Irina Rozanova, who was always so pale that she looked like she was perpetually fading into the background of life.

The Rozanov family were just as pale as her as they stood beside her coffin - husband, and son, and daughter. None of them cried. Grigori looked mostly bored. Andrei looked angry, like he wanted to take his fists and demand an answer from the silent Irina. Why, Sveta imagined him yelling, spittle and tears clinging to his lips and face, why did you leave? Why did you go? but, in her mind, he spoke with Liliya’s voice. Liliya herself did not weep either, nor did she rage. She stood as silent and as stern as the grave, and half-looked like she belonged in their herself. Sveta had not seen her cry since she had told her that it had been an accident that killed Irina. Liliya lied about a lot of things (her favourite colour, who had eaten the last chocolate from the pantry, the bruises on her arms) but she had never lied about her mother before - but Sveta knew that she was. She always knew when Liliya was lying - which was most of time, which meant that Liliya was the least truthful but most honest person that Sveta had ever known.

She was not being honest anymore.

They watched as the coffin was closed and sealed tight. The darkness swallowed Irina before the lid was even fully closed and Sveta wondered how long it would be until she forgot Irina Rozanova’s face. Not long, she supposed. She’d remember the corpse-ly parody of her for longer - she knew that already.

Liliya got to cast a handful of dirt across the coffin, when it was lowered into the earth. It trickled, unwillingly, between her clenched fingers as she held her arm outstretched into the empty air, looking down into the hole as if she was debating the merits of casting herself in with it. Then she withdrew her hand, pressed her lips against the knuckles, and, at last, threw in the dirt. Some of it clung to her lips, speckled and black, and she wiped it away with the back of her other hand. Grigori frowned, disapprovingly, but said nothing as Liliya stepped back into line.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Liliya suggested, a hushed murmur during the wake afterwards. She and Sveta were sat at an overly formal table, their knees pressed together and their heads touching, like they might become one person between them, knit by bone and blood and loyalty. “Somewhere far away from here?”

“What about Grigori?” asked Sveta - decidedly not a no. She and Liliya did not disagree on enough for it to ever be a no. But Sveta was the thinker, the schemer, whilst Liliya flung herself headfirst and heedless into the thick of things.

The look on Liliya’s face was grim. “He won’t even know I’m gone for a while,” she said, and they excused themselves to the bathroom.

Liliya was right. Not one of the Rozanovs looked twice at them, though Sveta saw her own father watching them - a little fond, very exasperated, knowing entirely that he had let Sveta run too wild as a child and could never make her into the daughter that he was supposed to have. They went to the bathroom and found a tiny window, just large enough for them to shimmy out of. Liliya was tall enough to reach it on her own. Sveta was also tall, but Liliya would surpass her soon; she consented to being boosted up in the cradle of Liliya’s palms, whilst Liliya relied solely on the strength that her training granted her.

They were out, after that. Free. Just two friends on he streets of Moscow, nothing of note, nothing to see. Sveta could pretend to be a wolf, snarling and fierce and brave, prowling the streets and utterly untouchable, with no need for fear. Liliya could pretend to have a mother again. She could pretend that it would not be another lie that she could tell.

That year, Sveta learned, concretely, what suicide was. Liliya did not tell her, but Sveta’s mother heard it from a friend, who heard it from her husband, who was a colleague of Grigori’s that Grigori himself had called to arrange the removal of the body. Grigori’s colleague - a soft, easily set-aback fellow - said that they had to prise Liliya off Irina Rozanova before the body could be moved. He said that Liliya had been the one to find her, and that Andrei had been the one to find them. Liliya hadn’t realised at first, apparently, that her mother had been dead. It had taken her ten minutes lying beside the corpse of Irina Rozanova before she had, and then she had started screaming and simply hadn’t stopped.

“Poor kid,” the officer had said, shaking his head, recounting the story once more to Sveta’s mother. “That has to mess you up for life. And the strike that Grigori gave her to get her to stop wailing - I was surprised it didn’t bruise.”

“She has a precious face,” Sveta’s mother had said - meaning precious in the way of a commodity, instead of something to treasure, because Liliya was achieving more and more success in her figure skating.

Liliya and Sveta never spoke about it. As far as Liliya was aware, maybe Sveta did not know at all. But Sveta did. She could not forget it. She looked at Liliya’s precious face, precious commodity, and wondered if it bothered her, the way that she looked. She looked a lot like Irina Rozanova - when she smiled, but especially when she didn’t. Irina Rozanova had had the sort of face that would launch a thousand ships, Sveta heard someone say; Irina Rozanova had had the sort of looks to kill oneself over, someone replied, and they had all laughed at the unfortunate turn of phrase.

And Sveta looked at her best friend, at her face, at the way she smiled or didn’t, at the sheen of her golden hair and her pale hands, and thought, you have those looks as well.

2004

Eight months after Irina Rozanova died, Sergei Vetrov moved his family to Boston, and Sveta was enrolled in an American high school with American teenagers, and it felt like she had been an entire world away from everything that mattered to her. Liliya Rozanova was on the other side of that world, a distant figure on the banks of the Moskva or in the streets of Moscow or in between the walls of her childhood home, more familiar to Sveta than her current Boston residence.

There were phone calls, of course, but international bills were expensive and Sveta’s father did not like her making them often, and the time difference was a bitch to organise, and none of it was the same of being with Liliya in person, feeling the warmth of her under hand or seeing the energy thrumming through her or hearing the warm timber of her voice. Liliya was far, far away, and Sveta knew that she was miserable - just as miserable as Sveta, but in different ways as well. It was a terrible misery - an apathetic one that did not feel like sadness at all, did not feel like anything at all. Sveta called Liliya and came away thinking of Irina. Sveta called Liliya and came away thinking of what it would be like to feel the sliding of dirt in her clenched fingers and release it. She knew, without having to ask, that something was wrong - a bone deep wrongness that could not be corrected, that rotted and twisted and tainted.

But if there was anything, Liliya did not say. She spoke, mostly, about figure skating. Sveta had not thought much about Liliya’s figure skating - it had been something that Liliya had done with her mother, and Sveta had supposed that it would have gone into the grave with her. Grigori would not take Liliya, no matter how well she performed - he was too busy, he did not like her enough - and Liliya was not old enough to get herself to some of the competitions that were further away. Irina had done that once. And, surprisingly, Andrei did that now.

“He does not watch me,” Liliya said, her voice echoing strangely on the other end of the phone, because she was in a hotel bathroom, scrunched up in the porcelain basin, to steal back some vestige of privacy. She and Andrei were sharing a room; two twin beds, but the room was narrow and Andrei glowered every time that Liliya was louder than a whisper. “He waits outside the rink for me to be finished and then we leave. But he takes me, which is all I want.”

Sveta did not have any siblings to comment on Liliya and Andrei (her parents had tried for that son they had wanted) but she did not think that Andrei liked Liliya very much. Loved her, maybe, in the sort of way that was only love to people who thought that it was an entitlement, but he didn’t like her. She could not imagine anyone who would not want to watch Liliya skate - the power, the beauty, the talent, the way that she came alive on the ice in the sort of way that felt as though she never took a breath off of it.

“I do not know who I am if I am not skating,” Liliya told her. Her breathing shuddered down the phone line, seizing. “I think I maybe stop existing altogether, like Mama. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t have it.”

Often, Sveta thought about the first day that she had ever met Liliya. The way that she had spun through the air and the way that she had struck the ice and the way that she had clawed herself back to her feet. It had been brave, it had been powerful, it had been the sort of stubbornness that Sveta still thought about when she thought about Liliya Rozanova. It felt different now.

She thought of that girl on the ice, trying to fly and not quite making it, hauling herself to her feet with aching bones still reverberating from the shock of a rink far too hard for her discipline, prepared for the boys who would flood to the ice after she was gone, and she remembered the way that Liliya’s stubbornness sometimes looked like desperation. She thought about the way that Liliya had held herself beside Irina’s gravestone, held like every inch of her was bruised and sore, like she had fallen again on the ice and fought to pull herself standing again. She felt the dirt between her fingers, and she felt as it began falling away.

“You could,” she snapped, “because you are Liliya-fucking-Rozanova. My Lilyukha.”

Quietly, Liliya confessed, “I’ve never really felt like her. I do not understand her.”

The words hung heavy between them. “You are mine though, regardless,” Sveta told her. “And I am yours. Understand that.”

2007

Aleksandr Volkov (Liliya called him Sasha) was a pasty-faced man, all narrow and sour and sharp. He was a year older than Sveta, and three years older than Liliya, but he did not look at Sveta the way that he looked at Liliya. She did not know exactly what the look was, but she knew that it was hungry at the very bones of it; he looked at Liliya like he wanted to swallow her whole and keep her in the cavernous space of his starved, wasted stomach.

“Sasha likes pretty things,” Liliya said, with a strange sort of smile, “but I am not the sort of pretty thing that he enjoys the most.”

Sveta knew Sasha by reputation. He was a dancer with the Bolshoi and he was supposed to be very good. They said he danced with a peculiar, poignant sort of emotion that brought audiences to tears. They said that he was beautiful. And set beside Liliya, Sveta could almost believe it. They made an odd couple, for Sveta was certain that her Lilyukha was far more beautiful than Aleksandr Volkov could ever dream of being, but when he stood beside her, caught in the golden light that Liliya seemed to exude, Sveta could pretend that he did not look like a cold thing all hollowed out. Both of them were terribly beautiful. Both of them were beautifully tragic, though Sasha wore his tragedy like a chip on his shoulder, which was an uglier sort of thing.

She knew his father as well, because he had been the coach at the rink had her father had owned. That had been how he and Liliya had met, a pantomime of how Sveta and Liliya had met all that time ago. Sasha’s father had wanted him to play hockey (he had been one of the puppy-ish boys that Sveta had envied all those years ago) but Sasha ha hated hockey almost as much as he hated this father, which Sveta - perhaps unfairly - resented him for.

Knowing Sasha’s father probably should have meant that Sveta liked Sasha more, or at least felt sorry for him, because Sasha’s father was the sort of father that Liliya was used to and Sveta had seen the toll of that - except, actually, Sveta had never claimed to be a nice person and she really fucking hated Sasha. He was not a nice person either, and she saw that in them both, and so she hated him for both of them. Sasha Volkov had been born a wolf - a mangy one, half-starved and prowling the outskirts of the village, warded away with fire and his own snivelling fear. He never be domesticated or even friendly, like the household dog he was pretending to be when he smiled at Liliya and laughed at her jokes and told her that she was not the sort of pretty thing he liked. Being a wolf-man, wolf-thing, was innate to him. He would never be anything else. Sveta hated him. Sveta envied him. Sveta wanted to brandish the flames that drove him away from her village.

“You should see him on the ice, Lana,” Liliya said, her voice lowering as she crooned out the diminutive. She knew that Sveta was Sveta or Svetlana or nothing at all, but she had started to call her Lana - as payment, probably, for the fact that Sveta called her Lilyukha and nothing else, not even Liliya.

Sveta had seen Aleksandr Volkov on the ice before. He was nothing special. Even his father had kept him on the bench for everything except warm-ups. Sasha skated like it was a chore, like he was bored. He skated like the ice was not there at all, or at least like he was trying to forget that it was. He was graceful, in a distant, lacklustre and emotionless sort of way. Sveta had watched him get checked, hard, into the boards once; it had been the only part of any game Sveta had ever seen him on the ice before, and he had looked delighted and brilliantly surprised right before his face had smashed off the clear dividers, distended and briefly malformed. Dancing suited him more. There were no dividers for him to be checked against. He was far enough from the audience that they could not see that his emotional performances were in fact a hollow veneer of nothing. Sveta told Liliya as much.

Liliya laughed, long and hard and until she was almost blue in the face. They were in Sveta’s room, sat cross-legged on Sveta’s bed, and the force of her laughter sent Liliya sprawling back, though maybe that was her design before.

“I do not care about the Bolshoi,” Liliya said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You have never seen him dance, and this is not seen on stage in front of many people who do not actually care about dancing at all. And I care about hockey but not about Sasha and hockey, because you are correct, he is the worst hockey player I have ever seen. But he dances sometimes, on the ice, and it is the most beautiful I have ever seen hum. Sometimes, he lets me dance with him.”

“You are thinking of changing discipline for Aleksandr Volkov?”

“Sasha,” Liliya corrected, firm. “And no, of course not. I am the best on the ice because I am me. Alone, I am myself. Have you ever watched the ice dancing? How close they come together? It is terrifying. One tangle of blades - and the blades are very close, you see - and everything falls apart. It is a lot about trust. You have to trust your partner more than anything. There is more communication than any other discipline it is very difficult. I do not think I trust anyone enough to do it.”

“I trust you that much,” said Sveta, and meant it, and then because she could tell - in the way that Liliya was laughing much too loudly, and the way her fingers tangled in the gold of her mother’s crucifix, and the way that Liliya’s brown-gold-hazel eyes were fixed unerringly on the space just beside Sveta’s nose - that Liliya was not telling her something, asked, “why are you saying these things?”

She was not used to not understanding what Liliya was trying to mean. Liliya slumped back against her headboard, and then sat back up straight again, crossed her legs and then her arms, then scowled like it was something Sveta had done to her and not same nameless thing that she would not speak aloud.

“It does not matter,” Liliya said, but Sveta was certain that it did matter. That Liliya had told her something and she had not understood it in the way that it was meant to be understood. “Ha, it does not matter,” she added, grinning impishly at Sveta once again, untruthful and dishonest, “except for the fact that you are jealous of Sasha.”

Sveta splattered. “I am not jealous of him.”

“You are! You think that he and I are here, together in Moscow and you are all the way in Boston, and that I will like him better than you because of that.” Liliya shifted closed, still grinning, lupine. “I like you the most, Lana.”

And then Liliya was kissing her.

Sveta had kissed many people before: pretty American boys with their floppy haircuts and too straight smiles, slobbering with their tongues in her mouth and their clumsy, too heavy hands roaming everywhere as if they didn’t know what it was to touch a woman; and pretty American girls with their long limbs and delicately spun hair and deft and dainty hands that knew where to touch Sveta best to make it feel good, or how to guide Sveta’s hands to make them feel good. Sveta had never kissed a Russian girl before, and certainly not in Russia, in the heart of Moscow itself. She pictured what would happen if her mother would open the door in that moment, or her father, and what they would say if they saw Sveta and Liliya entangled atop Sveta’s bed. She would be told not to see Liliya again, that was for certain. Maybe she would be cast away like yesterday’s newspaper or marched down the street like an example. Here! Here is how we are model Russians! Here is our daughter, evil and sinful, and here is her shame and our shame! We cast her away! We deny her!

It sent a sickness roiling through Sveta’s stomach, heavy and curdling. Logically, she knew that it was no different to kissing an American girl in her room back in Boston. Logically, she knew that her parents' reactions would be the same no matter what side of an ocean they were living on. But this felt different. It felt dangerous. And that sent a thrill through Sveta’s stomach, cold and bracing. There was a roaring in her ears and a shake in her hands, and she was going to smother it all in Liliya, choke it until there was nothing left at all.

Liliya was a good kisser. Probably, she was a good fuck. Liliya had told her that she was, though she was coy about her conquests, in the sort of way that was a poorly veiled brag more than anything else. She kissed like it - confident, assured, a little like she thought that she might die if she was not kissing Sveta in that moment.

Sveta didn't mind it. Sveta didn't mind it at all. Except -

Frowning, she pulled back a little. “You aren't going to tell me that you're in love with me, are you?”

Liliya snorted. “Of course not,” she scoffed. “Lana, do not be silly. We are very good friends, yes?”

That was all Sveta needed to hear.

They were kissing again, and Liliya was on top of her, pressing her back against the mattress, bracketing her hips with her legs. Her hands cradled Sveta’s face like it was something precious, something worth holding, and slid back into Sveta’s curls, tugging and pulling, little jolts of pain that sent pleasant tingles of electricity racing through Sveta’s whole entire body. Liliya kissed her, smiling against her mouth, and then kissed her, trailing burning lips along the column of her throat, nibbling at the lobe of her ear, then kissed her, mouth against the curve of her breast.

Sveta burned and she wanted and she burned.

She was not thinking about Aleksandr Volkov in this moment. Only that Liliya had clever hands and a clever mouth, and muscle from years of skating, and that she was kissing Sveta, on top of Sveta, her hands tugging away the clothes that Sveta was wearing.

“Sasha is meeting us in an hour,” Liliya murmured. “We’ll be quick.”

“Quick,” Sveta agreed breathless, heat already spooling in the pit of his stomach.

Her hands drifted to pull away Liliya’s shirt, to expose the lean expanse of her stomach, to feel the heat of her skin. Liliya slapped her hands away, pulling back to frown down at Sveta.

“The shirt stays on,” she said. “I just want to make you feel good, Lana. More efficient this way.”

Sveta accepted this. It was honest - just not entirely truthful.

“Okay,” she said, arching up her hips. Liliya had one hand idly resting between Sveta’s legs, stroking at her entrance with a casual, assured skill, and Sveta ground down against the touch, desperate for friction. “Okay,” she repeated, and her voice was breathless and wanton, “make me feel good, Lilyukha. Make me feel good.”

Sasha was waiting for them at the end of Sveta’s street. She did not want him to know where exactly she lived (it was a petty withholding of information, and Sveta did not particularly care - except she was petty, terribly petty) and so she had sent him the street and made sure that he was not able to see the door of the house they would exit from. When Liliya asked, Sveta told her that her father would not be pleased to see someone from his old rink in this house, with his daughter, and this was true, but Sveta did not entirely care what her father thought. America had made him softer than he had been before - this was not, of course, a high bar, but it was notable how he hurdled it nonetheless.

Dusk was gathering in closely, shadows lengthening, and Sasha was picked out in sterile shades of white from the streetlight that he was stood underneath, his back resing against the pole. He looked like the main character in some pretentious coming-of-age movie, the hero of some male bildungsroman, a film of American sentiment - and Sveta was not blind to the way that Liliya was looking at him, with a sort of interest that verged on the edge of hungry, as if the sight of him was whetting some unknowable appetite.

“Lilyukha,” he crooned, when he saw them approaching. “Lana. You are all looking splendid today.”

Something in his gaze made Sveta think that he knew about the way that she was aching still, pleasant and sated, and could still taste herself at the back of her throat, from where she had sucked the slick evidence of her pleasure from Liliya’s fingers. Something in his gaze made Sveta think that he knew this and was amused by it, like he was in on a secret that was shared now between the three of them (it was only her and Liliya that would suffer from this secret, if it got out, and so it was only Sasha who could be amused by it) and somehow knew more about it than Sveta herself.

“Svetlana,” she corrected. She knew that her tone was dripping with glacial politeness. Liliya nudged her with an elbow.

“Svetlana,” he repeated, and he said her name like he knew her already - like they were friends, like they understood each other. The way he said her name made her want to slough the flesh from her bones just to get rid of the feeling of contamination. He smiled, which enlivened his face a little - made him look human, made him look normal, made him look settled, and said, “I know a place that I think you guys will like.”

The worst thing about it all was that the bar that Sasha took them to was the sort of place that Sveta liked. Liliya liked any sort of establishment, because she was pretty and fun and sociable, and there were dozens of people who fell at the crook of her finger wherever she turned. She did not care about the music or the lighting or the stickiness of the floors, like Sveta did. She thrived anywhere so long as there were people and there were drinks - and the place that Sasha had picked had both. It also had good music, good lighting, good seats, and the floors and bar top were clean to the touch as Sveta dragged an inquisitive fingertip across the surface.

It was a hidden sort of place, tucked away down a narrow alley between two buildings and in the basement of one of them, American speakeasy style. Sasha rapped a strange pattern on the door and spoke, in a hushed whisper to the bouncer, who ushered them in with one critical look over of Liliya and Sveta both.

She knew the reason for the secrecy at the same time as she recognised the reason that Sasha had smiled at her and Liliya in that way. She realised it all as they descended into the bowels of the bar and watched a male couple grinding against each other on the dance floor before sharing a tender, sloppy kiss. Liliya paused, watching them intently with that strange expression of hunger rearing itself once more on her face, dizzying and sickening, and Sasha paused too, except that he was watching Liliya watch the couple and Sveta did not like the expression on his face at all. Then Sasha’s gaze slid over to her, too knowing and too sharp, and she flinched away.

“Dance with me?” Liliya asked, tugging at Sveta’s hand.

“I need a drink,” Sveta said. “After.”

“How about Svetlana and I get drinks?” Sasha suggested. “You go and dance. We’ll find you.”

Liliya eyed them both somewhat distrustfully, glancing between them, but Sasha smiled beatifically and there must have been something on his face that she could discern, for she nodded and murmured a quiet, pleased agreement. Sveta squeezed her hand once more and released her; Liliya bled into the crowd in a heartbeat, melting into the undulating mass of dancers like she belonged there. And probably she did. Liliya was so very alive - Sveta could think of no better place for her than in the midst of such a sweaty, writhing collection of humanity.

She and Sasha made their way to the bar, where Sveta leaned her forearms against it and dragged her finger along the surface, hating that it was clean and that she enjoyed this, and Sasha lounged against it, leaning like he had leaned his back against the lamppost with his head tilted back and the strands of his dark hair falling across his forehead like a delicate brush of the petals of a flower crown, wilting.

“So,” he drawled, “are we going to talk about why you don’t like me?”

“No,” said Sveta. She ordered a drink for her and Liliya; Sasha ordered his own.

“We don’t have to,” he said. “I already know you do. I already know why. You’re jealous of me, Svetlana Vetrova.”

“What do I have to be jealous of? You - I have you to be jealous of? Hah!”

Sasha was handed his drink first. He took a nonchalant sip of it. He looked at her like she amused him, peering over the rim of his glass. “You are jealous that I know Lilyukha.”

“You should not call her that,” said Sveta. She tucked her shaking hands under the pits of her arms, scowling. She felt like maybe she was about to shake apart from the force of it all.

“Why? Because you call her this? Or because it is what her mother called her and you cannot bear to think that maybe this is not what Lilyukha wants to hear anyone call her?”

“What the fuck do you know about her mother?”

“Only what she has told me. We talk about many things, you know. Out on the ice, when it is just the two of us. You are in Boston now - surely you cannot begrudge the fact Lilyukha has friends for her here, close by when you cannot be with her”

“I have known her for longer than you, you know, and I’m going to know her for much longer than you. Why would I be jealous? You will never know her the way that I know her - not as well as I do.”

“But I’ll know her differently. And you can’t stand the thought of that, can you, Svetlana Vetrova? Because I think that I know something you don’t - and I think you know that she is never going to tell you this. You know that she’ll lie about it to your face, as well, so there is no point in asking. But she told me. Maybe you should think about why that is.”

“I think you are no good for her,” said Sveta quietly. “I think you should stay away, before you get her hurt. Because you’re going to get her hurt one day, and it will be all your fault.”

“Liliya is going to be hurt by a lot of things in life,” Sasha countered. To his credit, he did not look pleased by it. It did not soothe Sveta entirely. “I think that this is just how it is for some people. They get hurt and they keep getting hurt.”

“Fuck you,” snapped Sveta. “Fuck you. You don’t know anything about her, actually, and you’re talking nonsense. Fuck you.”

“You’re just scared that’s she’s going to be just like her mother,” said Sasha, still pleasant, still calm, “and that it’s going to be because she’s realised you don’t actually like her.”

“Fuck you,” Sveta repeated. “I love her. Fuck you.”

“But you don’t like her,” said Sasha. “You look at her the same way you look at me - maybe you love her, but you can’t stand her sometimes and you make no secret of it. And why? Because you’re jealous of her? Because you look at her and you’re said because your papa never let you out on the ice and you think you would be better than anyone else if he had? Because you look at how beautiful and special and clever she is and you know that she will never love you the way that you love her?”

“I’m not in love with her,” said Sveta, which was true. “She’s my friend.”

“I never said that you were in love with her. Just that you love her differently, and she’s never going to love you like that. There are people that she’ll love other than you, probably more than you, and where will you be then, Svetlana Vetrova? Stuck on the streets of Moscow or Boston or both, looking in the windows at the great love story that Liliya Rozanova is inevitably going to have, knowing that if you were ever going to fall in love with anyone, it would be her?”

“Fuck you,” Sveta said, again. “What the fuck is your problem?”

“Same as yours probably,” Sasha admitted, with a shrug. “Except that I could have everything that you want and can never have - and I can choose to not have those things as well. Does that make you hate me, Svetlana Vetrova? That I could have everything you’re so desperate for and I’m never going to choose it? Those dreams are going spare for someone to pick up in my absence, but it’ll never be you who does that.”

Sveta wanted to punch him. She wanted to launch herself at him and claw at his perfect skin and his stupid eyes and tear his sharp, witty tongue from his mouth. She wanted to grab him by the hair and slam his face against the bar again and again and again. She wanted to sink her teeth into his flesh and bite down until she tasted blood and could be sated. She was ravenous but the doors between her and the room in which Liliya and Sasha feasted had been locked firmly closed behind them and Sveta was stuck on the outside, pacing like a wounded thing, begging for scraps at their table.

She settled for chucking her drink over him instead.

The liquid seeped into the fabric of his shirt, turning it sheer against his skin. It clung to him, and she was aware of the fact that he was carrying serious muscle underneath it all, in all the same places that Liliya was and Sveta wasn’t. She exercised - she ran track at her American highschool and played netball, because she was tall and this was a palatable sport for girls who were tall - but she was not built in the way that they were. In another life, maybe she would have been - or maybe she would have been built like the female hockey players she watched sometimes, playing in a sport that would never reach the heights of its male counterpart, with strong arms and shoulders, and powerful legs.

Instead, she was this version of herself: Svetlana Vetrova, in a dress that made her feel sexy but showed the fact that she had flesh around her hips and thighs that touched when she walked and a curve to her stomach. She was not used to feeling self-conscious - her body was beautiful, she was beautiful - but Sasha made her feel small. His eyes were like the eyes of the boys at her father’s rink, who had been the reason that Sveta was made to wait in the stands instead of at her father’s side, as she would have if she had been the son that Sergei Vetrov had wanted.

“You should tell her,” Sasha said, dripping onto the floor, “before she finds out on her own. Then who will you be, if you can’t be her friend anymore?”

“I will be Svetlana-fucking-Vetrova,” she told him quietly, “and I will also be ten times the person that you will ever be, Aleksandr Volkov, because I will never be reduced to airing out my daddy issues and sob stories for anyone who I think might reflect my own insecurities back at me.”

For a moment, Sveta thought that he was going to hit in her, just as she had not been able to bring herself to. His hand twitched in his lap, nostrils flaring as he glowered at her. But then his face cleared, and his fist relaxed, and he laughed.

“I like you, Lana,” he told her, and flagged down the bartender. He ordered her a replacement for the drink that she had flung over him. “I think that we are going to be very good friends, you know. You might never like me, but we’ll be good friend in spite of this. We’ll have lots of fun, you and I.”

2009

Svetlana got her first steady boyfriend five months before Liliya moved to Boston. He had a nice car, bought for him by his daddy, who had a lot of money from stocks and investment or something as equally boring, and he would pick Svetlana up in it from outside her house, with the top down so that she could feel the wind tangling its fingers in her hair when he would nudge their speed just above the limit on every road they travelled down. He called her Svetlana, which she had never liked people calling her before, and it made her feel very grown up - which she was, because Svetlana was twenty years old and she had a job and was living the American dream and she had her first boyfriend who wanted to go steady instead of get her off behind the gym or in the bathroom of some seedy club.

Her boyfriend was called Harry, which was not very exciting, but he was Boston born and raised, though his parents were from upstate New York. She liked his accent, even if her name sounded clumsy in it. She liked his hair as well, and his hands, and the way that he always laughed when he saw her, a little, breathless sound of disbelief as if he didn’t think that she was real. Her parents liked him, but that was a given, because they were simply glad that Svetlana was not going steady with Maggie, who had been her lab partner back in high school and who her parents had caught with one hand up Svetlana’s skirt one day after school. Maggie hadn’t been allowed to come around to study after that. They didn’t talk about her, at all, but Svetlana’s parents had stopped insisting on her joining them at church and Svetlana’s mother always stuttered over Svetlana’s name in her recited blessings. Maggie had moved back to Wisconsin not long after. Svetlana did not miss her much - or did not let herself miss her.

Svetlana liked him too. Harry had been gearing up to say the other world, which Svetlana did not think that she was ready to say yet, but she liked him and he liked her. They always had something to talk about. He smiled at her even when she was not looking at him. He brought her flowers and held open her car door and always agreed with whatever she said, when his friends were being dicks and Svetlana was calling them out.

She broke up with him the day after Liliya moved to Boston.

It was not that he had done anything, or that she liked him any less - it was simply that Svetlana’s father had driven her to the airport to meet Liliya and the two cases and a carry on into which she had packed most of her entire life, and Svetlana had gotten out the car to meet Liliya, and Liliya had hugged her tightly, head tucked into the crook of Svetlana’s neck, and it had simply hit her that it was never going to be enough for her.

So, she’d broken up with him. It was the kind thing to do, even if Harry didn’t understand.

And he’d tried to be understanding at first, talking to her nicely with sweet and cajoling words, worried that he had done something to upset her or that there was something wrong, wanting to help her. Then, when Svetlana had given nothing away, his voice had lifted enough for people in the coffeeshop to start looking over at them, and he’d slammed his hand against the table top, rattling their cups. Svetlana had not flinched, but he had. He’d flinched, and his voice had lowered again, and he apologised. And the he’d left, because he was angry and he did not want to be angry at her, he said. Svetlana blocked him the moment he was out of the door; she knew that there would be another apology, another plea for another chance extended, and she did not want this. It was not enough. It was not what she wanted, though she didn’t know what this said about her.

She spent the time that she would have been spending with her boyfriend showing Liliya around Boston instead. Liliya was moving for her skating - there was an old Russian coach in Boston who wanted her, and she had a work visa for America - and she was looking for a place in Boston to call her own, even though Svetlana’s parents had told her that she was welcome to stay with them as long as she needed to. Svetlana liked having Liliya down the hall from her. She liked it even more when Liliya would creep down the hall and into Svetlana’s room, and wind up between her legs or pressed against her body or with Svetlana’s mouth on all the places that made her feel good.

She liked it as well because Liliya would let her tag along to the rink when she had practice, and when Svetlana’s work allowed it, and she could sit in the stands and watched as Liliya flew through the motions of her routine and feel the itch in her fingers and her legs and in the back of her mind, and she could almost pretend like she was the one on the ice, soaring so high and so fast that there would be no one who would ever make her come back down to earth.

Liliya was enjoying it as well - she did not talk much about it, though she certainly said a lot - but Svetlana could tell that she was enjoying it. She had taken to humming the music she performed to around the house, and she was twitchy before getting onto the ice, like the energy was curdling under her skin.

“This is ticket out!” she called to where Svetlana was sat in the stands, twisting into a serpentine spiral with both arms raised languorously above her head, her accent thick. They did not speak Russian between the two of them anymore, because Liliya was determined to improve her English, and the difference between them was startling. Svetlana was able to virtually drop her accent in its entirety now. “I see Papa and Dyusha at Christmas and be beautiful American rest of year.”

“The rest of the year,” Svetlana corrected.

Liliya pulled a face, but dutifully repeated it. She had one leg stretched up straight behind her now, her spins slowing lazily. She was not practicing seriously - just making the most of her ice time - but even that looked graceful and perfect. Everything she did on the ice was graceful and perfect. The sight of it struck Svetlana, again, like an open fist against her sternum, like an empty, aching hollowness in her stomach. There was talk of Liliya Rozanova as the best in the world, as an international superstar. She was going to the Olympics for Team Russia, confirmed, though Liliya insisted that she did not like the coach as much as she liked her regular coach in Boston. The entire path of her career was already spooled out before her - all Liliya had to do was seize the glory that was bound to be hers.

“Your father played for Boston Bears, yes?” Liliya asked, tilting her head curiously to one side like some sort of bird.

“Da. Yes. They are not as good as they were when he played for them. Old legacy, lots of potential - they have this rookie, Marlow, who is decent. But it is not going well for them at the moment.”

“They ask me for filming thing. They are looking to start expanding their social media presence. Is some new - new, er, what is word?”

“Initiative?” Svetlana offered. “A strategy or new approach.”

“Initiative. Is new initiative, to connect with fans. They have Twitter now. We do short documentary about how different hockey and figure skating are - we make me look very good and the men look very stupid. Your Marlow will probably be there. You come?"

Svetlana exhaled. Her breath fogged up the air in front of her, a plume of white. There were goosebumps raised on her arms but she didn’t feel the cold - she never felt the cold when she was near the ice.

She thought what it might be like, to stand on the side and watch as Liliya showed up a bunch of grown men, guiding them through salchows and axles and jumps that they would never land. She thought what it might be like, to see all the futures that she had wanted for herself (the hockey, the figure skating alternative that might have been more acceptable for her father if he had treated her like his daughter when she was younger) on the ice before her and know that they would never be hers. The thought made her hate Liliya Rozanova - just a little, a negligible amount.

Because it was not Liliya’s fault. It was Svetlana’s thing. And it was not a thing that she liked - it was simply the thing that had flourished in the absence of other things that she wanted to be hers. Liliya, on ice, pushed herself forward, gliding across towards where Svetlana was stood. Her hands were cold when they fastened onto Svetlana’s forearms, and fiercely strong, as if she expected Svetlana to be ripped from her at any moment.

“No,” said Svetlana. “I think I will leave you and the boys to have your dick measuring competition in private.”

For a moment, Liliya went very, very pale and very, very still. She seemed to be looking at Svetlana like she was thinking about something, wondering if she should verbalise. Then she scowled and she laughed and she said, “is no competition. I am best they will ever see on ice.”

2014

There was an opulence to Russia that still took Svetlana’s breath away after many years. It was an old grandeur - gilded paint and lush carpets and ceilings that soared to dizzying heights overhead in a way that aggravated Svetlana’s vertigo when she looked up. The lights, all crystal chandeliers and sconces that looked as though they had been plucked of historical dramas set in the rich halls of palaces and old stately homes, were dazzling, almost blinding. All of it was meant to distract. Svetlana was certain that if she ran her finger over the paint, dug a nail into the thin sheen of gold, it would easy to scratch away the veneer of elegance and expose the slow rot that was becoming her country underneath. It was a rot that was a twin to the rot living in her - the putrid ache of fear, the slow decomposition of everything in her that made her undesirable.

She spent most of her time in Russia fearful now - because she knew that, at the very least, even if they did not talk about it, her parents had not forgotten about Maggie-from-high-school. And maybe, one day, Svetlana’s father or her mother would get tired of keeping their shameful, deviant daughter around them, always guarding what they said or curbing the despair on their faces when they looked at her, and Svetlana would become another story quashed beneath the mechanics of a regime the repudiated her entire existence.

She wondered if it was something that Liliya thought about, with her policeman father and her policeman brother. She wondered if she ever stood in Russia and felt the way that the fear was almost as deep as the love that she held for her country, for their home. She wondered if she ever looked at Svetlana like Svetlana was the trigger of a gun that she had pointing firmly at the back of her throat.

They had not fucked for years, of course - not since Liliya had decided to go serious with her Canadian golden boy - but Svetlana was convinced that she must be carrying the indelible marks of Liliya’s touch on her skin, visible for anyone who had an inkling of suspicion to see and to judge.

Svetlana and Liliya would not face jail, maybe - but there were other things. Treatments and censure and prejudice. There were stones on the street and stones that were casts through windows and stones that were hurled against flesh. And Svetlana thought of all these things whenever she stood beneath the opulence of Russia, especially when Liliya was under that same, impassive sky.

“Maybe Liliya will be interested in an after party,” Sasha murmured to her. “This is dead. In Paris -”

“Shut up about Paris,” Svetlana said pleasantly, and trod a little on his foot as they were walking.

She was, of course, grateful that Sasha had agreed to come with her, because she never liked attending these events alone, but she knew that he had only said yes because he got off on doing lines of coke in the bathroom and showing all the people who were aware of his father what a disreputable disgrace Dmitri Volkov’s son could be. This did suit Svetlana’s purposes, because she liked the idea that people would talk about this shame when they brought up Sergei Vetrov’s Americanised daughter rather than some more dangerous shame, but Sasha was freer with this, seemed to flourish under the scrutinising eyes in a way which Svetlana could fake but never truly felt.

“Where is she, anyway?” asked Sasha. He smiled a hedonist’s smile, all lavicious intention and heavy-lidded intent.  “It has been many years since I have seen her, you know. I imagine we have a lot of reacquainting to do.”

Svetlana’s eyes scanned across the room. “The Colonel is not here,” she replied, referring to their name from Grigori Rozanov. “She’ll be with him. Probably he wants to talk about the Olympics.”

Sasha winced. He had decency enough, at least, to feel bad for that. “Team Russia needs a different fucking coach. I cannot imagine having our Lilyukha and not using her as she deserves.”

There was a clear double entendre in that. “You need to take a step back,” Svetlana said firmly. “She doesn’t want anything. She is seeing that Shane Hollander - he is a hockey player for Montreal. I think that it might be serious.”

“Just because she said no to you? My, Lana, your ego surprises me still!”

Svetlana rolled her eyes.

Sasha shot her a sly look. “Unless there is someone else?”

“You know that there is not.”

“Yes. I just wanted to see if you knew this.”

“You think that Montreal could be her Paris?” asked Sasha, a moment later.

For a moment, Svetlana thought about snapping at him again, certain that there was some joke buried deep at the heart of the statement. But then she looked at Sasha, and saw that he was not looking at her, and registered the slight undercurrent of vulnerability that lay underneath the words. Sasha was not a sentimental person but Svetlana was, and she was very good at reading sentiment into people. Maybe it was an invented sentiment - but she didn’t think it was. She recognised it in the same way as she recognised the reason why Sasha would always have to be Sasha, could never be Aleksandr.

Svetlana shrugged. Truly, she didn’t know. She had not met Shane Hollander, and she knew that Liliya was still in love with Boston with the desperation of the caged bird that had made its flight across the first clear patch of blue sky that had made itself available. But she also saw the way that Liliya looked at her phone. She heard the way that she talked about Shane Hollander. She saw them together in photographs. And she knew Liliya, like some other part of herself, no matter the distance she felt sometimes growing between them. She knew that Liliya was scared - and that meant that Liliya was happy, because Liliya was never scared except for when she felt she had something to lose.

“I’m going to find a bathroom,” Sasha said, nose twitching. “If you find Liliya, bring her to see me.”

“Keep your fucking coke away then,” she replied, scowling.

Sasha just rolled his eyes.

She watched as he moved through the crowd with the supernatural grace of a dancer, twirling past other guests, there and gone so quickly that she did not think there would be anyone who would look at him and think look! It is Aleksandr Volkov, the dancer! or look! It is Aleksandr Volkov, son of Dmitri Volkov, the old KHL player! Her eyes followed him, until he passed the stairs, and then her gaze went up and up and up.

There was Liliya, stood on the upper level, her back to Svetlana. But Svetlana would recognise her anyway, the curve of her back and the fall of her hair and the bruise that was purpling on her shoulder from where it had crashed into the ice during her short programme. She looked small in Russia. She looked even smaller stood between Grigori Rozanov and Svetlana’s own father and a man with dark hair that Svetlana could not recognise from the back.

Svetlana made an immediate beeline towards her. She did not have to think about it - subjecting herself to the scrutiny of her father and Grigori - because at Liliya’s side was her place, had always been her place. It was a foolproof system that they had developed: she could set herself between Grigori and Liliya, and Liliya, in Boston, staying with Svetlana and her parents, had been a God-granted buffer.

From the look on Liliya’s face (that distant, blank-eyed stare that she got when she was secluding herself somewhere deep inside herself) Svetlana was right on cue. It was an art, interceding in these things, because if she did not, then Liliya would tuck herself away, small and meek and invisible. One day, Svetlana was terrified that Liliya would hide herself so well that she would never be found again, and Svetlana would be left with a hollow thing that looked and sounded and felt like her best friend but was nothing like her at all.

But -

“Svetlana,” her father said, a smile puckering his lips. “Have you met Shane Hollander?”

She could see the face of the dark haired man now, and she recognised her face from the broadcasts of Montreal games and the billboards that were plastered all across the North American continent, whether it be for watch companies or drinks or whatever else Shane Hollander was determined to lucratively pimp himself out for that day. She recognised him as well from the selfie that Liliya had set as her homescreen (not lockscreen) background, the two of them lounging in the covers of a hotel bed, twisted in the covers. Shane had been wearing a plain hoodie, one string between his smiling teeth. Liliya had been wearing his jersey, the claim of his name hidden on her back but nevertheless implied.

He was more handsome in person, Svetlana had to admit, with intensely dark eyes that seemed to be analytically dissecting her in the way that she imagined he might dissect a hockey play on the ice and a face that looked worthy of being a carved statue, both because of the fact that he was beautiful and because he was very much impassive. She could not scrutinise any emotion from his expression, but she had the feeling of peering down into a dark, deep pool, certain that there was something beneath the surface just out of sight and understanding.

“I haven’t had the pleasure yet,” she said, offering out her hand for Shane to shake, which he did. “But I have heard many wonderful things.” Then, to Shane directly, she added, “I am a very big fan, Shane Hollander. You are the best player this league has ever seen.”

Sergei Vetrov chuckled beside her. “My daughter,” he said, “with her claws out already.”

Shane’s eyes were not still - they shifted between her and her father and Grigori Rozanov and Liliya incessantly. “It’s very kind of you to say so,” he said. It was said with the polite distance of a stranger - not even an acquaintance - which Svetlana supposed that they were. It was not like Liliya had introduced them at all.

In Russian, she asked, “do you speak Russian?”

Shane winced, a little - barely noticeable, just a flick of the corner of his mouth, a flutter of his eyelids, and it was only because Svetlana had spent her life cataloguing the expressions of men taller and stronger than her that she caught it, even if she could not divine the root cause of it. “A little,” he said, also in Russian, with an accent that was not terrible but was very flat and monotone. She thought, having heard his interviews, that this was simply how he spoke, regardless of language.

But the sound of his voice in her mother tongue had Liliya looking across at him, and Svetlana could read her expression - which was novel, because Liliya did not often have any sort of expression in these kind of events were her father so close beside her. Her cheeks darkened, barely noticeable beneath the rouge that decorated the high arches of her face, and something in her eyes lit up. If it did not seem too tame a word for the raging inferno that was Liliya Rozanova, Svetlana would have said that she almost seemed fond, a little like she wanted to climb inside Shane Hollander’s skin and simply live there. Comfortable. Quiet. Still.

“Shane has been studying hard,” Liliya said - in English, the words slow and as clear as she could manage. Grigori’s English was not the best, especially not these days. “He will be speaking perfectly soon - no accent. He will speak better than me.”

“Nyet,” said Shane, flatly.

Grigori pulled a face like he had bitten into a lemon and Svetlana, sensing the shift, dove seamlessly into the conversation.

“I think Liliya needs a drink,” she said smoothly, her Russian rapid. She saw Shane pull a face of confusion at Liliya’s side. “And she needs to introduce me to her handsome partner properly.”

Her father smiled, as indulgent as he let himself be with her these days. “Like when they were children,” Sergei said. “My Svetlana was always leading your Liliya by the hand.”

Grigori did not look pleased by this assessment. He did not look pleased at all, especially when Svetlana grasped Liliya by the wrist and began to draw her away, Shane tugged along in the wake. But Svetlana did not think that he ever looked pleased about anything, and therefore could not bring herself to care.

“I will bring her back,” she promised, as they left, but this was a lie. They would get a drink, and maybe they would spill out onto the streets of Sochi, where they could pretend that they were young and carefree and not being torn apart at the seams with every breath of motherland air that they dragged into their lungs.

“Thank you,” Liliya murmured, glancing covertly over his shoulder. They were speaking English again; Shane Hollander had tucked himself beside Liliya, one arm wrapped around her waist.

“He seemed in fine form today,” said Svetlana.

Liliya grimaced. Svetlana would never say this, but sometimes, when Liliya pulled faces, Svetlana thought she looked an awful lot like her father.

“He does not like that I brought Shane,” she replied, with a roll of her eyes. “He is terrible. First he worries because Dyusha calls me faggot. Now I bring home respectable man and he is worried that Shane is Asian. He also does not like that he cannot tell me again how disappointed I have made Russia. I place below skater from Latvia. Fucking Lativa!”

“Fucking Latvia,” Svetlana agreed.

“You should not be disappointed at all,” said Shane. He was frowning when he looked at Liliya, like he could not understand at all what they were talking about. “Everybody knows how good you are. One poor showing should not change this.”

Liliya’s smile was dotingly fond, almost shy. It hid itself away only a moment after it unfurled. “Is nice of you to say, moy malinka, but is probably my last Olympics ever. My knee will not make it another four years, I think. So, was last chance to get Olympic medal and all I have is bronze from 2010 - and that should have been gold if I did not fuck up free skate.”

“My little raspberry?” asked Shane. And then, “still, I’m proud of you.”

Svetlana had never seen that look on Liliya’s face before, and she had certainly never seen it in Russia before.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. She looked at Svetlana. “You have questions, Lana?” she asked, in Russian. Shane withdrew a little - not far, but enough that it was clear he understood that this was something to be said between her and Liliya alone. “I can see on your face that you’re dying to ask.”

“Is he really learning Russian for you?” Svetlana asked, which was not what she meant.

Liliya smiled anyway. “He is. He says that - that he knows that it is hard, sometimes, for me to say everything I mean in English. He does not want me to have to translate myself for him. He loves me, I think.”

“You do not know this?”

“We have not said it, yet. I think that we will soon.”

“You love him?”

“Yes. I - It feels like everything. Loving him - it felt like dying, except I am not dying anymore.”

“And it helps? Him learning Russian, letting your be yourself?”

Liliya rolled her shoulders, shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, but did not quite sound as certain as she had before. “I don’t think I have the words for myself, ever, in English or Russian. But he helps, always, even when it doesn’t feel like it or he doesn’t realise it.”

Svetlana took Liliya’s hand, squeezed it. “I am glad,” she said, even though she felt a little like she was dying inside, inexplicable and inevitable. This moment was the end of something, even if that something had never really been anything at all. “I am glad that you have this. You deserve it. And he is right… we’re all proud of you. All of us.”

Silently, Liliya pressed her fingertips against the golden shine of Irina’s cross, resting over her clavicle. “I hope so,” she said. “I really am trying.”

2016

Sasha sent her a picture from Paris of himself in a tangle of limbs, under the strobing lights of some Parisian club. He was lounging in the midst of a crowd of beautiful Parisian men and beautiful Parisian women, resting atop their laps, tangling his arms around necks and shoulders, his legs interchanged with theirs. It was difficult to tell where Sasha ended and they began, especially in the shadows of the photograph. But Sasha, in the photo, looked very pleased to be there. There was a strung-out expression on his face that suggested he was high as a kite, and, if Svetlana squinted, she thought she could see the powder under his nose.

It was all the notice she got of the fact that Sasha would not be coming back to Moscow for Christmas, which was the first time that he had not. It meant that Svetlana was alone. This year, like she did sometimes, Liliya was going to Canada for the Christmas, to play house with the Hollanders. Moscow would not see her this year. Moscow would not see Sasha this year - probably never again, because Svetlana knew that once Sasha had a taste of freedom, he would never force himself to return. He did not have the same love for Moscow that Svetlana and Liliya did.

And now Svetlana had months of being alone, because it was only the start of December. She had come to Moscow early for a cousin’s wedding, and her parents had suggested that they all stay for a little while. After all, her mother had said, her grandmother was not long for this world.

So, Svetlana had stayed, and now they were all living under the same roof: her and Mama and Papa and her grandparents and Mama’s two brothers and Svetlana’s other cousin, a very quiet woman who talking to felt like pulling teeth, if she ever spoke at all. It was like some big, happy family that you might see on television, except that Svetlana was certain that none of them liked each other at all. If they did, they did a very good job of pretending otherwise. Dinners were a nightmare; Svetlana wore the weight of their watching like stones tied to her wrists and ankles and thought that - if she were to hurl herself into the Moskva during these dinners - she would, blessedly, drown.

If Liliya had been in Moscow, Svetlana would have secreted herself away with her. Sometimes, Liliya was allowed to join them as Svetlana’s guest for dinner, in which case, there was conversation and laughter and the sort of lightness that only Liliya could bring with her. Her family liked Liliya in the sort of way that they had never liked Svetlana, likely because Liliya was some distant ideal instead of someone who was as close as blood. And if Liliya was not joining them, then Svetlana would skip whatever after dinner festivities had been planned and she would find Liliya waiting for her outside, and they would go to somewhere they could make Moscow their own, because they were young and they were beautiful and they loved each other.

Svetlana took off by herself now. She couldn’t stomach any more time with her family, in studies or living rooms or dining rooms, waiting for her grandmother to die. After dinner, every night, she would take her coat and her phone and she would walk - just walk, with no end destination in mind, until her legs burned and everything seemed very distant to her. She did not go out, because she was alone and she did not want to drink alone and she did not want to meet new people, new bonds to tie her to Moscow. She passed by the bars and the clubs that she liked. She kept walking. Often, she ended up by the river, dangling her feet over the edge, resting her face against the railing. Sometimes, but not often, she thought about jumping. She was a good swimmer.

She sat there again tonight, content just to breath. It was cold but she had stopped feeling that a while ago. Now she was just comfortable.

In her pocket, her phone began to buzz. She had it on vibrate, no noise, and contemplated letting it ring out. Probably it was Sasha. Maybe it was her father and her grandmother was dead. Possibly it was someone ringing her for work reasons, though she didn’t know what time it was over in North America.

LILIYA the phone display read, when she fished it out of her pocket, the light slanting over her own face. Liliya’s contact photo - her and Svetlana pressed against each other in a Boston club, cheek to cheek, embracing - beamed up at her. Svetlana swiped to green button to accept.

“My Liliyukha,” Svetlana said - more a sigh than anything. There was a weight on her shoulder, sloughing away at the thought of speaking to Liliya. It was a reminder, more than anything, that Svetlana did have people who loved her - who found her worthy. “Privet. What time is it in Boston? Are you missing me?”

Liliya exhaled shakily down the line.

A frown wrinkled Svetlana’s face. She hunched closer around the phone, as if that gesture would bring her closer to Liliya in some way, and asked, “Are you okay? Lilyukha?”

“I need to talk to you,” said Liliya. Her voice was shaking. Her voice was quiet. Svetlana had to concentrate to hear her, because Liliya’s voice was so faint that she thought even a whisper of breath would carry it away. “I need to tell you… I have thing to say to you.”

“You can tell me anything.”

Svetlana meant this - she felt it keenly. Just as keenly as she felt the urge to yell down the line at Liliya to keep whatever this was to herself. She felt as though they were teetering on the edge of a precipice - one that had always existed, in all the moments that she had felt that Liliya was being dishonest as well as untruthful, but one that had been ignored in favour of long familiarity. Svetlana liked that familiarity - and she felt that it was now slipping away from her, like sand between her fingers, and that she would never get it back. They were about to topple over the edge into the unknown and Svetlana did not know what was at the bottom, or where her place would be down there.

But she meant what she had told Liliya. She meant it, and she hated herself for it, and she stayed silent regardless, even though Liliya wasn’t talking either.

Eventually, almost shamefacedly, Liliya admitted, “I don’t have words to say this. I don’t know how.”

“Would it help to say it in Russian?” asked Svetlana. She hoped that would be the case. She thought it would help her, at the very least.

But Liliya’s denial was immediate. “This is not something that belongs in Russia. I cannot say it in Russian. I do not have words for it anyway. Just - give me a minute?”

“You can tell me anything,” Svetlana repeated.

“I know.” 

Liliya took a deep breath. Then, another. Then, she said, “do you know Marly’s sister?”

“Cliff?” Svetlana paused, thinking. She was certain - “He has a brother, doesn’t he?”

“A sister now,” Liliya corrected. “Her name is Tasha.”

Cliff had never mentioned a sister to Svetlana. She tried not to let the omission sting. It was not like Cliff owed her anything at all. They spoke casually, had fucked once. He was Liliya’s friend mostly. But it still stung, lodging grasping fingers under her collarbone in the strange, dark place in her chest where she kept most of her thoughts about Cliff Marlow.

“I think that Tasha is woman in the same way that I am not.”

It was like a riddle, half-solved with all the clues laid out in front of her. Svetlana glanced surreptitiously over her shoulders, just in case, but the street behind her was empty. “A woman the same way you aren’t,” she repeated, sounding out the words. Puzzles pieces were clicking into place, one by one. “Like - transsexual?”

The term tasted clinical on Svetlana’s tongue. She flinched away from it a little and was glad that Liliya could not see her face.

“This is word, yes,” Liliya confirmed, “or transgender, maybe. I am not sure. Tasha says that it is complicated word.”

“What does Tasha use?” Svetlana asked.

“Trans.”

Svetlana nodded, rolling the words over in her mind. Transsexual, transgender, trans. She felt, startingly, unsure of them. She had not expected that. She felt even more unsure of them in regard to Liliya, who she had known for so long it felt like they had never lived without each other. Was it a bad unsure? Surely, it couldn’t be - Svetlana was not like that. Svetlana herself was considered a deviancy, and so surely that meant she was immune to the discomfort, the uncertainty.

“Are you angry with me?” Liliya asked quietly.

Svetlana took a breath. Catalogued her feelings. Unsure? Yes. Anger?

“No,” she said. “I’m not angry.”

“I really wanted to tell you,” Liliya said. “I wanted to tell you more than anything.”

“How long have you known?”

Liliya paused, considering. Svetlana could almost picture the face that she (he?) would be pulling, even if it was now a little blurred around the edges. “Forever, maybe. Or at least, I knew I was not right - not proper woman”

“But you are - a man?”

“Yes.”

“A - he?”

“Lana, I… Does it upset you?”

Unsure? Yes. Angry? No. Upset?

“Maybe,” she admitted, “but I’m not upset at you. How could I ever be upset at you?”

“Because I have lied to you - every day we have known each other, I am lying.”

“You’re the most honest person I know. So, you are a man? What does this matter to me? You are still you. I have not lost anything. I am talking to you now.”

“But you’re upset?”

“Maybe, but I think that’s just me. I don’t think it has anything to do with you.”

“We - we can pretend I did not say it, if you would like,” he offered. He sounded as though the words killed him to say.

“Don’t be stupid,” she scolded. And then, as tenderly and sincerely as she could manage, said, “I’m proud of you.”

“For what?”

“Living, Lilyukha. Finding what would make you happy and going for it. You are happy, yes?”

“I think I will be,” he said. “Soon. I think I will be very happy soon.”

“And your Shane Hollander knows?”

“He does.”

“And…” Svetlana hesitated to ask. Her fingers flexed around her phone, tightening. “What about skating? What does this mean for your career? I mean, will you do the… surgeries?”

Liliya hummed down the phone. “I think so,” he said, but sounded certain about it. “Tasha did not. She does not want them. She is a woman regardless, she says, but… My body has never been for me, Lana. If it was suitable, was not because it fit who I am. Is how many jumps it can do, how flexible, how good for skating. But I am at end of my career. My knee - is fucked, Lana. Very fucked. Probably I will replace it soon. So, is time for me to retire. And that gets me thinking, because if my body is not going to be for skating, what is it for? Not for me - it has never been for me. But I think I want this. So, yes, surgeries - later, probably. But hormones, yes.”

“Okay, wow, big change.”

“Yes. But I am feeling like is mine to make. My change. I get to have this.”

“I’m really happy for you,” she said, and embarrassingly felt the words clog up in her throat, like she was about to choke on them. Her eyes were burning. “Lilyukha - is this what you want to be called? Lilyukha, Liliya?”

“It has never felt like my name,” Liliya admitted, but at last he sounded unsure. “Liliya. Is not me. But… But I am scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“My mama gave me two things, Lana, that I still have now - her cross, and my name. She told me how proud she was to have given my name to me. Papa got to name Andrei, but she named me. She gave me this name and it was the first thing she ever gave me. And I am scared - I am scared, because if I give this name away…” Liliya’s voice shook, and then suddenly he was crying. Hitching breaths, sobbing, as Svetlana had not seen him do since they were children and Irina had been first dead. “When I die, how will she find me? How will she know who I am?”

“Oh, zolotse,” Svetlana breathed, some form of reassurance winged on her lips - and then she paused.

There were no words, really, that could make this better, because there were no words that would bring Irina Rozanova back to life. There were also no words that could guarantee that Irina would look at her daughter-who-wanted-to-be-her-son and love him as such, accept him, keep him close instead of casting him away as defective. Or, if there were, Svetlana did not know them.

“Your mother loved you,” Svetlana said, because she knew this, at least, was true. “And she loved you when you were in her womb and she had no idea whether or not she was going to have another son or a daughter. And she’ll love you still, I think.”

It was not a lie. Svetlana was certain that Irina Rozanova would always love Liliya, even if she could not bring herself to love the form that he wanted to exist in.

Liliya was still crying. Tearily, she asked, “will you stay on the phone with me for a little while?”

“I will stay as long as you need me to,” Svetlana said.

And she would. On the banks of the Moskva, with the looming shadow of Moscow pushing down around her, Svetlana sat and listened to the sound of Liliya breathing and felt the weight of everything pressing down around her. She was over the precipice, and she was falling, and yet, although she still couldn’t see the landing, she knew that it was there. And, instinctively, she felt that the landing would be fine. All of it would be fine.

Chapter 2: Ilya

Chapter Notes

I'm including the link to a basic article that I used when starting to research into what it might be like growing up queer in Russia (with a focus on trans issues) and the name of an article I read about transgender issues in the Soviet Union (including the development of gender reassignment treatments, and the rhetoric around them). I did access the second through my university log in, so it might be harder to get a hold of - however I've begun reading 'Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other' by Laurie Essig, which is available in full on JSTOR for anyone interested in reading around this topic - although be aware that some of the content is very heavy.

However, I am a very casual historian and so this is probably not very accurate at all, and there is certainly not enough space in this to give the subject all the depth that it requires. I can only apologise for any mistakes I have made in representing anything.

https://russiapost.info/society/lgbt

Using the Past to Save the Present: Soviet Transgender History and Its Implications for Present-Day Trans Rights in Russia, by Yana Kirey-Sitnikova

'Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other' by Laurie Essig (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1220mxt)

Svetlana Vetrova had spent much of her life defining herself in regards to who Liliya Rozanova was to her: a friend, a fuck buddy, a person so intrinsically woven into herself that she did not think that they could be separated. Svetlana’s mama had called them sisters and this had not been the right word for it (not, of course, that Svetlana’s mother could ever know anything about why it was not the right word for it), but Svetlana’s father and everyone who knew them agreed. Except for Sasha, of course, who treated Svetlana like the wounded party in some unrequited romance, which was also not correct - but Svetlana sometimes felt like it was, in the sense that what she felt for Liliya was not what most would consider normal and measured. It was the all encompassing passion of an enduring love story, just without the romance.

And now, Svetlana did not know what to do with that anymore, because Liliya both was the same person that she had always known (fundamentally, at his core, in the depths of his soul and everything that Svetlana knew about him instinctively) and not at all (the confession was a revelation of a whole cornerstone of his identity that Svetlana had never known and been utterly blind to).

If Svetlana was anyone else in Russia, what Liliya had just told her could have been a death sentence. It still could be, if Svetlana were to let it slip to the wrong person - which she wouldn’t. She thought that she would probably rather die than risk Liliya in that way. But she knew what it meant - it meant that Liliya trusted her, completely. And it meant that Liliya, soon, would be planning on never returning to Moscow at all. Surgeries and treatments, an erosion of Russia’s golden daughter into the unfamiliar face of a man that Russia could never love; what Liliya was telling Svetlana was the equivalent of a goodbye.

Svetlana knew, of course, that Grigori Rozanov was ill. Everyone could see it. She’d see him at a dinner the other week and he had been talking about Irina Rozanova like she was still alive, waiting for him at home, out of sight simply because she was in another room rather than being in the ground. But Liliya was tight lipped about whether there was a timeline with that illness now. Andrei would not even acknowledge that their father was ill at all. He was a recalcitrant shadow always at Grigori’s side now, hissing corrections into his ear when Grigori forget names or stumbled over little forgotten things. Part of Svetlana thought that he might have enjoyed it; it was the same anger she had seen from Dyusha in the wake of Irina’s death, this time untainted by the love both of Irina’s children had had for her.

Mostly, Svetlana was sad. Sad for Liliya, who would become an orphan in all senses of the word - no parents, no country, no family at all. Sad for Irina Rozanova, who probably would have outlived her husband and would never know her children now that she hadn’t. Sad for Andrei, a little, who was losing all the family he had - some to death, some because he would cast them away in a heartbeat if he knew who they were at the heart of themselves - and would probably never grow to be a better person.

She was sad for herself as well. She had never lived in a Moscow that had not welcomed Liliya home. They had been strangers to their government together, that dangerous, fatal flaw nestled at the heart of the state. If it was dangerous for them to exist, which it was, it was dangerous for both of them, together. It didn’t make it better nor did it make it bearable, but it made it less lonely, and Svetlana thought that there was nothing in the world worse than being lonely. The fear of what her home would do to her if they knew her truly was a close second.

In her hand, her phone was heavy. Liliya had hung up. The screen was dark. If she looked at the log of her recent calls, there’d be a record of the one that she and Liliya had shared, timed and time stamped. But there was no evidence of anything that they had spoken about. Liliya’s confession existed only in Svetlana’s brain, no physical evidence to prove that she had not invented it entirely. If she wanted to, she could have pretend that it had never happened.

She did not want to pretend that it had never happened.

Selfishly, childishly, what she wanted was to be able to run to her papa and tell him everything. About Liliya, about herself. She wanted to tell him and be assured that it would change nothing, that he would still love her, even if he was no longer able to pretend that his daughter was normal - would settle down with a respectable husband and have ordinary, respectable children, and never feel any sort of deviant, strange desires for pretty women or women-who-were-actually-men. She wanted her papa to look at her and love her - love her, Svetlana Vetrova, and not the substitute son that he loved more than her and had missed everyday since it had been apparent that there were no more children in his and her mama’s future.

It was stupid. It was childish in a way Svetlana had not let herself be in so many years. It was selfish, because Svetlana should not make Liliya’s coming out about her - but she couldn’t help it. Couldn’t help it, because Svetlana had always defined herself through Liliya.

Couldn’t help it, because Svetlana missed Maggie from highschool with a sudden fierceness that she had never let herself feel before.

Maggie had been funny. She remembered this, very well. Maggie had been so funny that Svetlana had cried whenever she laughed at her jokes, most of which were dry and sharp and bitchy. She’d been so clever that Svetlana had wished that she could have the ability to climb inside her brain and divine the inner workings of her mind, her thoughts moving so quickly and deftly, like gleaming fish darting across the surface of a river. She’d been pretty, with silky red hair and creamy skin and green eyes that had shifted hue depending on the light. And she had liked Svetlana - liked her genuinely, as she was, not for who she was going to be.

It had been seven years, versus the six months that they had spent as lab partners, versus the two months where they had fucked and fingered and made out behind school and in abandoned storage closets and in toilet cubicles and, that one memorable occasion, on Svetlana’s bed.

Svetlana had fucked other women in the time since. She’d been fucked as well. There’d been men, and serious relationships, and years in which she could get over it all. And she hadn’t. She hadn’t even wanted to think about it. Maggie had not even been the first, but she had been the tipping point that had confirmed that Svetlana might have the love of her parents but that love was conditional. And now Maggie was in Wisconsin, and Svetlana was on the banks of the Moskva, and she was thinking about how good a swimmer she was and how strong the currents might be, and Liliya was in Boston, an ocean away, and nothing was ever going to be the same.

Cliff (21:47)

you spoke to roz recently?

Cliff (22:09)

is roz in russia with you, is what i mean

i know you were stressed abt home is all

i don’t like to think abt you all alone there

Cliff (00:28)

sorry feel free to ignore me

Irina Rozanova was not buried anywhere her husband’s family, which was where he was intended on being buried. She was also not buried with her parents, and though Liliya had spoken about an aunt and an uncle (both older than Irina) Svetlana was not sure what had happened to them. They hadn’t gotten along with Grigori Rozanov, and then they’d fallen out of contact with Irina, and when she had died, there had been no reason for them to talk to their sister’s children. Andrei was going to buried with his father, probably, and Liliya had always said that he would be buried with Irina, so that she was not alone. But now Liliya’s body would not be welcome on or in Russian soil, and so Irina’s afterlife would be much like her life had been.

Lonely.

Svetlana brought a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley with her to Irina’s grave and knew, the moment that she arrived, that no one had been to visit since the last time that Liliya had been in Moscow. There was a bouquet of irises still in a vase beside the marble headstone, though they had wilted and rotted almost entirely. A layer of detritus had built up around the stone, and Svetlana brushed it away as best she could with her hands. She took the remnants of the irises and replaced them with the flowers she had brought, dumping the other bouquet amongst the roots of a nearby yew tree. There, they could rot into the soil; she thought that Liliya and Irina both would like the idea of whatever nutrients were still left in the plant being of some use to the environment.

With a water bottle from her bag, she topped up the vase, hoping that the lily-of-the-valley would last just a little bit longer with something to drink and the little sachet of plant food she tipped in with it. The rest of the water she sluiced over the stone, cleaning away the muck and clung to the crevasses of Irina’s name.

Beloved wife and mother, the abandoned gravestone read. Never forgotten.

Svetlana had never visited her before - not since the day that the coffin had been lowered into the earth itself. Liliya went often, but it was private thing, not for Svetlana to intrude upon. It was her fault that she had not visited herself. She didn’t know why. She had liked Irina - she had liked her a lot, even when she had been distant and desperately sad. She thought that Irina had liked her. She hoped that Irina would like the fact that Svetlana had taken the time to visit her.

Probably not. Probably, even in Irina’s ideal world, she wouldn’t have killed herself, or felt like there was no other option than killing herself.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Svetlana said, conversationally, to the stone. She sat cross-legged in front of it. It was cold, and the grass was damp because it had rained the other night, but the earth was soft. “I’m sorry that I haven’t made much of an effort to visit before, but you know how life is. Or, well, you knew how it was. It got busy. I’ve actually been living in Boston - though Liliya has probably told you about that.”

Maybe. Or maybe Liliya did not bother to talk to his mother’s grave. Maybe it was just Svetlana, a little strange and cracked in the head, talking at a stone like she expected a dead woman to answer.

“If you didn’t know,” Svetlana said, just in case, “Liliya lives in Boston - but I think that will be Canada soon. Nothing has been said to me, but I have a feeling. Not a good feeling - for me. I don’t like the idea of being so far apart again. You can maybe remember how attached we were as kids. I’m not any better. I’d still surgically tie us together if I could.”

Irina did not say anything. Svetlana laughed anyway.

“Da, I know. I am dramatic and pathetic and lonely, but I am very good at pretending to be aloof.” She shifted her weight from side to side, and frowned. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but… I mean, you’re dead. You aren’t listening to anything I say. Still, I don’t know if there’s a code or something. I just need to say it to someone who I think will understand.

“I’m really fucking proud of your son. Not Dyusha, of course. But Liliya - that’s what he is now - I am so proud of Liliya. And I am really scared as well. I more scared than I think I have ever been, and I don’t know what to do with any of these things that I am feeling. I’m scared that I’m losing him. I’m scared that everything is going to change. I’m scared that I’m going to be alone. I’m scared that I can’t protect him, or myself, or even fucking Sasha.

“I think you understand this. Because I know you loved him too, and I know that you were scared and that you were sad and that you were so very alone. I know that love wasn’t enough for you - and that’s… that’s fine. I’m not judging you. I don’t know why you made the choices you did. But I don’t want to make those choices. I want love to be enough. I want to not be lonely. I want to be brave. I want a happy ending for all of us, no matter how unrealistic it is.

“I don’t know if Liliya’s ever believed in happy endings. You did that, probably, and you didn’t mean to, which makes it worse. It would be so easy to hate you if you had done hurt him on purpose. But you didn’t. You were just scared. You thought you were doing the right thing. Or maybe you knew it was wrong and you just wanted to choose yourself for once. I can’t blame you.

“But I want a happy ending. And I want to give Liliya a happy ending, but I don’t know how to do that if you aren’t here. Because he’s scared that fighting for his happiness means losing you, and I can’t even tell him that he’s being ridiculous because I don’t know what your opinions on queer people or trans people even are. He doesn’t either. But I think you love him - all of him, not just the palatable bits. And… and I wish I could prove that to him. I hope that, when you see him again one day, very far in the future, you’re happy to see him. I hope you have it in your heart to embrace him, as he is, and to be happy for his happiness.”

Svetlana sniffled. She realised that her cheeks were wet and that she was crying; she didn’t know when she had started. Irina had comforted her once, when she had been little and trying to disguise the fact that she was crying over a skinned knee (thirteen year olds were not supposed to weep over such things), but the stone in front of her was silent and emotionless, cold to the touch.

“You know,” said Svetlana. “Liliya doesn’t know what happened to any of your things. He has your cross and the name you gave him. Would Grigori keep them? I think Dyusha would, if he had gotten to them first. Do you think he would tell me where they were? Probably not. Or maybe. I don’t understand his relationship with Liliya. I’m sorry that your children don’t like each other very much. I know you probably wished that they would have each other’s backs. Life just isn’t like that, I guess.”

Andrei had taught Svetlana how to play football (or soccer, as she was supposed to call it in America) when she had been younger, waiting for Liliya to finish her chores before she could come out and play. He’d had a tough leather play, a little deflated, which meant that it often veered off course, and they had spent half an hour kicking it off the wall and between them. Andrei had been good - she remembered this. He had taught her how to do a rainbow flick and high fived her when she got it.

That Andrei seemed like a totally different person to the Andrei that Svetlana was most familiar with.

“He’s a dad,” Svetlana told Irina. “No less of an asshole though. His wife is lovely. Quiet. His daughter is a whirlwind. I think she will be a plague on the world.”

In her pocket, her phone began to vibrate. Svetlana checked the caller ID.

“It’s Cliff,” she said. “Liliya calls him Marly. He calls him Roz. Maybe I should be calling him Roz. It’s… genderless? Gender neutral, I think. Probably I could say it and people think I’m calling him Rose with my evil Russian accent. Marly’s his closest friend, after me. Or maybe over me. I think he told Marly about everything before he told me.”

She let the call ring out and stashed it back in her pocket.

“I think Cliff is upset with me. I haven’t replied to any of his messages in a while. Maybe he thinks I am a bigot who is going to hate crime Roz. Maybe he thinks I am just a bitch. He is probably right. I’ve been a bitch.”

A chime; a text message.

“Sasha thinks that he is in love with me,” Svetlana said, determinedly not looking at her phone. She knew that it was Cliff again. “I think Sasha is full of shit. He also thinks that I am in love with him, which is also bullshit. Cliff Marlow… I think he would probably break my heart. He wants me to be a better person than I am. Probably he wants me to fix all of this” - she rotated a lazy hand about herself to encompass the graveyard, Moscow and all of Russia - “for Roz. I would do this, if I could. I just don’t think he understands how hard it is.”

She sighed. “I think it would have been easier if I had fallen in love with your son - Roz, that is. Even if he didn’t love me back, at least he doesn’t expect things from me. I’d have made a wonderful daughter-in-law you know.” She snorted, patted the tombstone gently. “I’m going to fix it for him,” she said, at last, “but I want everyone to know that I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. And also that I am very scared. And also that this does not make me a good person, no matter what Cliff Marlow has to say on the matter.”

Cliff (10:51)

i’m pretty sure that you’re reading these

you can respond anytime you want

Cliff (13:12)

that was rude

sorry

again

what it meant was that i’m worried abt you

and i’m here

if you need to talk

Cliff (13:26)

or whatever

Svetlana was honestly when Sasha made the time to return her call. She had supposed that he would be too busy burying himself in all the debauchery that Paris had to offer for a pretty thing like him to pay any attention to someone trying to reach out from the frigid stillness of Moscow. Really, she had expected that Sasha would go out of his way to avoid any calls from Moscow, because Sasha’s father had been a guest of her father at dinner one night earlier in the week and Dmitri Volkov had been less than happy at the absence and disgrace of his eldest son. It was safer, she thought, for Sasha to avoid anything to do with Moscow, and he was lucky that he had the freedom to do so. His mother was a native Parisian, and Svetlana supposed that he would be staying near her this Christmas.

But Svetlana, a few streets away from the Rozanov family house, glanced down at the ringing phone in her pocket, half expecting and half hoping that it would be Cliff Marlow trying to get in touch with her again, which he had been incessant about, saw that it was Sasha’s name that lit up her caller ID. She was pleasantly - and apprehensively - surprised.

“Lanaaaaa,” Sasha crooned, when she answered, drawing her name out into something long and sultry.

She rolled her eyes and, terse and succinct, said, “Sasha.”

“You are no fun,” he said, with a put upon sigh. She could almost picture the pout that he would be wearing, with all the haughty, imperious boredom of some wicked faerie king straight out of old bedtime stories designed to terrify and chill. “I like you because you keep me entertained, Lana. Entertain me.”

Sasha would enchant her to dance until her feet bled and her legs shook and her body gave away beneath itself if he could. In the background of the phone call, Svetlana can hear the steady reverberations of music, a heavy thumping bass that hums through her blood and bones. It was nowhere near late enough for any nightclubs to be open in Paris but it never seemed to stop Sasha; he occupied his own nebulous pocket of time, always with enough people drawn in by his irreverent air to attend him. Entertain him. Svetlana was simply another diversion. Sasha liked to have options.

“How is Paris?” she asked, keeping her voice steady.

Sasha paused for long enough that she wondered whether or not he had heard her other the raucous noise in the background. Then, he laughed, and said, “Lana, you should come visit! Paris is much more fun than Moscow. I am surrounded by many beautiful women and many beautiful men, and the only reason that anyone is looking twice at us is because they are envious and wish to join. You would be very popular here.”

“I’m hardly in Russia for pleasure.”

“Oh. Your grandmother hasn’t died yet then?”

“No.”

“Well, if you think you have some time to spare before the end comes for her…”

Svetlana snorted. It wasn’t particularly funny, except for the fact that it was, but Sasha had some sort of skill at making her laugh at all the wrong things. “No, no. I imagine it will be soon.”

“Family weddings,” Sasha remarked, sympathy dripping from his voice. “They’re known for being terribly lethal events. The last one I went to made me want to die as well.”

There was not much Svetlana could say to that. She didn’t have much to say to Sasha - hadn’t when she had called - except for all things that she didn’t know how to bring up, or even how to start bringing up. And even then, if Sasha had somehow been able to read her mind across a whole continent of distance, she didn’t think that she would have the words to contribute to a conversation. Not ones that made sense, at least. But she thought that if she didn’t talk about it then it would all probably die with her, like it had never existed at all, and the selfish bitterness of it all would corrode away her insides until she was nothing but a terrible and empty husk of a person. It reminder her somewhat of the medieval practice of bloodletting - except the poison was all Svetlana’s own.

“You knew, didn’t you?” she asked, voice dropped low.

She was thinking about the first time she had met Sasha, and then the time not very long after that when they had been stood at a bar together - a nice bar, which Svetlana had liked, but a hidden bar, because it had been for people like Svetlana who wanted to go unnoticed - and she was thinking about the way that he had looked at her in that bar. She hadn’t understood the look then. She thought that she was beginning to understand it now.

“Ah,” said Sasha, “our Lilyukha has spoken to you about his little… thing, I take it.”

Svetlana’s eyes drifted closed. She took herself down a little side alley between two blocks of house, resting her back against the cold stone wall, far enough into the alley that she could not be heard from the street and had an illusion of privacy. “You did know.”

“Not in so many words. He never told me about it, as such. But he knew that he was… different, to you, to his mama, to the other girls that he shared the ice or the classroom with. And I saw him sometimes - when he hung around to watch hockey practice, or we went to bars and clubs, or sometimes even when he saw me. I saw him watching - watching, like he was seeing something that he wanted more than anything but knew he would never have. And so it was not lust… something else, then.

“I had friends I thought were like him - people who did not fit so well with society’s perceptions of them. Men who liked pretty dress and make-up. Women who cross-dressed so convincingly that they could walk down the street in the skin of a masculine version of themselves. Friends who straddled the line between the two, and blurred it, and had fun with it. They did not use names - it is not safe, of course, to name this thing. But it was a common language between them all.

“I introduced Lilyukha to them.” Sasha huffed a laugh - more an exhalation than anything. “You should have seen the way that he watched them, Lana! It was like he was looking at himself in the mirror and seeing who he was and who he could be. So, yes, I knew. But he didn’t tell me. I just saw.”

Svetlana could imagine it in her head. The Roz that she had known as a childhood, not as practiced at being as  hard and as cold as he was now. She pictured him under the strobe lights of a club, or maybe in the shadowed wings of the stage Sasha sometimes did his rehearsals, or seeing someone across the street and feeling the recognition in his bones, some soul-deep tie that he had in common with a complete stranger. She saw the look on his face, and thought that it would maybe be a similar exultation to the one that he felt on the ice, landing a jump that he was told he couldn’t or reaching the sort of state when he could give himself entirely to the music -

But Svetlana did not know what that joy felt like. She would never be able to say what either of these types of joy were. They were not hers to feel. And Roz’s feelings were not hers to name.

Maybe he had been scared, seeing these refraction of himself in the real world, outside of the secret places that he kept them looked away in his mind. Maybe he had been angry, as Svetlana often was when confronted with the existence of the things that she wanted but was denied. Maybe he had been sick with envy, or a noxious mix of all the bitterest and ugliest emotions.

Maybe Svetlana would never know how he had really felt. Maybe he would never tell her, and she would be left with all the loose thoughts of what he might have been thinking clutched in her desperate, aching hands, trying to weave them into a tapestry, but without the skill and foresight to do so.

“He didn’t tell me,” Svetlana said.

This was not an important thing, really. Roz didn’t owe her anything - especially not this. And it wasn’t like they told each other everything, the way that the warriors of girlhood did in the movies. She had not told him about Maggie, or even Harry, and he had not told her about Shane Hollander immediately.

This felt different though. Svetlana could not vocalise why this felt different to her - maybe it was simply that she was a worse person than she had already thought she was, narrow-minded and prejudiced and unable to be happy for her, even though she was, she swore it.

“Lana,” Sasha started, and then hesitated. His voice was unnaturally soft, like she was some hapless bird struck head first out of its nest, like he pitied her. Sasha had never spoken to her like this before.

“I know that he owes me nothing. I’m not - I just don’t understand why this feels like a big thing to me.”

“Lilyukha not telling you has nothing to do with you. Lana, how could he ever be scared of how you treat him? He knows you - and, you told me once, that you would always know him. I know he trusts that. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing - how you see him, how you interact with him. Of course, it changes - it’s called growing up. And I think that you and him have thought for so long that you were all grown up, that you never let yourself change. And now it is some massive and terrifying thing in your minds that seems impossible to overcome.”

Svetlana asked, “when did you get so wise?”

“I think it is the drugs. I am very high right now.”

“I don’t want him to feel like he can’t tell me things,” said Svetlana. “I want - God, I’ve fucked him more regularly than I have fucked anyone in my life. I don’t want something more than casual sex, but I thought we did have more - that we were friends, too, and that we could talk about the things that bothered us.”

“Why would he have told you?” Sasha asked. “Think about it. He was always, before his Canadian lover, destined to come back to Russia. What could would to be for him to confess to the thing he wanted most in the world when it was impossible to keep? He’s tells you, and then - listens to you talk about him like you had before? Waits for the moment something slips out and everybody knows? Waits until he dies and has the name of someone he is not immortalised on his tombstone?”

Sasha waited a moment, and then he asked, “what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to help him,” she said, “in anyway I can. Look, I don’t want to say anything it case it doesn’t work, but… Maybe I bring him a souvenir from Russia this time. I will go see him when I am back and we can talk about this whole thing. Maybe I cannot help with everything, but… Well, I sat with his mama today and she gave me a very good idea for at least one thing I can help with.”

“Okay. But that’s not what I meant,” said Sasha. “What are you going to do?”

Damningly, the words got caught in her throat. Svetlana struggled to breathe around them, feeling like she had been grabbed around the throat, an invisible hand tightening and tightening until her throat was compressed and there was no room for air to make it through.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, voice small and miserable. “I think that I might not be a very good person after all. I shouldn’t be struggling with this as much as I am, making all my feelings about me. Does it make me a bad person?”

The words unleashed the dam that had been blocking everything else from being said. They escaped her now it a flood.

“We’re supposed to be a team, Sasha - it was me and it was Roz, and then it was me and Roz and you. And we were making this city ours. But you are in Paris and you won’t come back, and Roz is in Boston and he won’t be able to come back, and I will be alone. I, alone, will be here, and I will never escape this city. I have made nothing of myself. I will not dance in any ballets, nor play in any hockey matches, nor ever be anything all all on the ice. Everything I want from my life I only get through existing in Roz’s orbit, attaching myself to him like it make me any more accomplished than I actually am. I wanted to skate, Sasha, to skate. And I couldn’t, so the next best thing was him. And now I sell cars to rich people I fucking hate - and I fucking hate it. I’ve ended every relationship I’ve ever been in because I that I’ll never be able to pretend as prettily that I have everything I want with them as I can with Roz. And I’m selfish. I’m scared. I’m really, really scared, Sasha.”

“Lana, you are the best at playing pretend. I have never met someone who is so good at trying to act like we aren’t all selfish. You, me, Lilyukha - of course we are selfish! Have you met us? But at least Lilyukha and I have chosen ourselves. Maybe, Lana, it is time to stop playing pretend and choose yourself after all. Quit your job! Fall in love! Learn how to skate! Or maybe you can get another hobby. But choose you. Be selfish.

“I don’t think you’re upset over whatever is going on between Lilyukha’s legs and in his head. I think that you are upset that he is letting himself openly choose himself, that he is not pretending that he is not selfish. I think you are jealous because you have never let yourself do this. And you should. Sveta, fuck all the beautiful men and women you want. Eat the rich. Burn down your life. But, blyat, choose something for yourself.”

“Maybe I get out of Russia first,” she said, but it was not a no. It was the opposite of a no - and she knew that Sasha knew this as well.

A new, sly tone in his voice, Sasha asked, “and then you will call Cliff Marlow?”

“Fuck off,” she laughed, and was still laughing when the call ended and she was alone, again, in Moscow - this time, with an arrow towards the exit she needed.

Cliff (14:40)

ok i’ve spoken to roz and he says he’s not in russia which means you’re on your own

he also says that you know about

the thing

going to be completely honest with you but i thought you knew already

call me back?

Andrei Rozanov had his own apartment somewhere amongst the dodgier neighbourhoods of Moscow. Svetlana had never been there, but Sasha had, because Sasha and Andrei had a drug dealer in common or something like that. It was not the sort of apartment that Svetlana thought someone should be raising a kid in, but it was the apartment that Andrei had - and so the crackhouse became the family home of Andrei Rozanov, and Milena and Ulyana.

Svetlana had no intention of going there.

And with Grigori’s illness, she did not have to; Roz was sending her brother an allowance every in exchange for him living with Grigori and watching over him, making sure that he was not lost on the streets of Moscow or prone at the bottom of the stairs. Andrei had moved his family in with him, which Svetlana honestly felt was payment enough, but she could not begrudge him like little Ulyana live somewhere less rough. Svetlana had met Ulyana often, when Roz was in Moscow, and the girl was wonderful. If Svetlana was not so certain that she did not want children, spending time with Ulyana would be enough to convince her to take the plunge into motherhood.

The Rozanov family home was very familiar to Svetlana. Sometimes, she forgot how much time she had spent there. But there had been sleepovers and dinners and days spent with Roz underneath its ceiling and exploring the narrow paths of its hallways, and Svetlana thought that she would probably miss it, when it came time to say goodbye. Because she would certainly not be coming back once Roz was banished from its halls, even though much of her own childhood had unravelled there as well.

The home itself was an ostentatious townhouse, packed in a narrow gap between its two neighbours. A set of stone stairs led up to the front door with its golden knocker, the ring gripped in the snarling mouth of a bear head. From the street, she could see the windows that peered into the kitchen where they sat level with the pavement. Being so narrow, the house had to stretch both backwards and up and down to make the most of space: four storeys and a basement, and a very long profile. Svetlana was mostly hoping that there would be an attic hidden in its tiled roof; the tiny windows in the roof certainly seemed to suggest that her hope would be well founded.

She took a deep breath, steadied herself and her nerves, and rang the doorbell. She felt as though she had to wait an eternity for a reply. But she heard the clunk of a lock being unfastened, the rattle of a chain, and then she was taking a step back just as the door swung open. Andrei Rozanov was stood there, and he looked surprised to see Svetlana on his doorstep.

“Dyusha,” she said, and tried to smile in a way that was more sincere than sour. She did not think that she was very successful, but she never had any idea what to do with what she felt about Andrei.

It was a complicated thing, trying to sort through all the different formations of Andrei she knew and the different emotions that each evoked.

There was Andrei the brother of the friend she loved. Andrei the son of the mother her friend had loved. Andrei the son of the father her friend feared. Andrei the father himself. Andrei the fiancé. Andrei the boy who had taught Svetlana football tricks. Andrei the man who snorted the same cocaine as Sasha. Andrei the scrounge. Andrei who had once called Roz a faggot with his whole chest - probably more than once. Andrei the chaperone who had taken Roz to all of her figure skating competitions. Andrei the lost. Andrei the angry. Andrei the sad.

She didn’t know what version of Andrei was stood in front of her now. Andrei the helpful, she hoped.

“Sveta,” he said, and the surprise was tangible in his voice. It was a fight not to startle at the sound of the childhood nickname on his tongue. “I hadn’t expected you.”

“I didn’t call ahead,” she said, still smiling, still cold. “Spontaneous.”

“Business, then. Liliya send you?”

She didn’t like the bitterness in his voice when he said Roz’s name, didn’t like the way that it sounded like a dirty word, like a slur. She didn’t like the look on his face either - something that verged a little bit on the side of anger and very much on the side of grief, as if Liliya was a pathetic dead thing to be scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Her one consolation was that he was not high. His hands, on the door were shaking, and his cheeks were flushed, and she thought, in that moment, that he looked like Sasha did, when Sasha said that he was getting clean and went cold turkey and got so ill and irritable that no one could stand to be around him, especially when everyone knew that Sasha - in a week, in two - would be doing lines in dingy bathrooms again. In all the time Svetlana had known him, he had never deleted any of the numbers of any of his drug dealers. Neither had Andrei.

But he was not high now. And he still hated his sister. And Svetlana felt the familiar stir of anger in her chest.

“No,” she said. “She doesn’t know that I’m here. Will you invite me in for a drink, Dyusha?”

“Are you going to give me a choice?”

“No.”

A half-smile canted the corner of Andrei’s mouth briefly upwards, like he was amused by her. “Come in for a drink, Svetlana Vetrova, and tell me what business brings you to my door.”

He led her in like she was a stranger, like he thought that she would not know her way around the house. It was a condescending thing, like she was a child who could not look after herself. He wanted to make her feel small and weak beside him, as if she was not - and was not always - aware of the fact that he was very much taller and stockier than her, muscular and strong, even if she doubted that he was as fit as Roz was. But this was Andrei’s favourite act - to be imposing, to make people feel nervous, like they were lesser.

She couldn’t blame him - at least, she couldn’t blame him anymore than she already did - because it was how he had been raised. Even Andrei Rozanov looked small beside Grigori.

And in the staid surroundings of the Rozanov house, it was difficult to look anything but small. The high ceilings, the ornate decoration, the history that seeped from every pore of the house. It was all designed to make a statement, to wow the hapless people who wandered into its hallowed halls. It was so cold, though, and so still - everything was hollow and false. There were no family photographs except for the portrait above the fireplace in the living room.

This was the room into which Andrei led them, moving to a wooden drinks cabinet, fastened like a globe, whilst Svetlana moved towards the two high back chairs in front of the fireplace. The blank eyes of the portrait stared down at her - Grigori with his frowning face, and the simmering anger of a younger Andrei, the blankness of Roz… and the despair of Irina, palpable even through distance and time.

She turned her back to it, watching Andrei instead as he poured them both a generous helping of vodka.

“Where are your family, Dyusha?” she asked. “Milena, Ulyana, Grigori?”

“Milena is visiting her parents with Ulyana. Father is sleeping. And your family?”

He handed her the glass and she took a sip of it, sinking into the familiar burn as it slipped down her throat. “Gathering around my grandmother’s deathbed, I imagine,” she said.

Andrei sat opposite her. “I am sorry to hear that.”

“You and half of Moscow,” said Svetlana.

“She’s a reminder to many of a greater time for our country. “

“I am sorry for your father also.”

Andrei glared at her. “He is not ill,” he replied stiffly. “He is simply tired. His work is not easy on him.”

“Yes,” said Svetlana. “I am sure it is only that.”

“Are you going to tell me why you’re here?” he asked. She heard the tense undercurrent in his voice - a promise that, if there was no reason or if he didn’t like her reason, he would take great pleasure in throwing her out like the trash. Childhood nostalgia was not a thing that meant anything to either of them, really - not in the same way that it meant something to Roz.

“I want to have a look through Irina’s things,” she told him, keeping her voice as steady as she could manage. “For Lilyukha, for Christmas.”

Andrei’s face had gone very cold and very still. “Not that it is any of your business, Svetlana, but I do not have any of her things. My father was - pained in the wake of her passing. He did not keep anything that could remind him of that pain.”

“See,” said Svetlana, leaning forward, “I don’t believe you. I know you kept at least some of her things. I know you have them.”

“Why would I keep anything of hers? We’re all moving on. Maybe Liliya should try to do the same, instead of being needlessly sentimental.”

“You loved her too.” Svetlana clasped her hands tightly together, peering intently at Andrei’s impassive face. “And Ulyana… I saw that she was wearing one of Irina’s bracelets last summer. You kept Irina’s things because you could not bear to see them destroyed. Now you can’t bear to see them forgotten.”

With a furtive look to the empty doorway into the room, Andrei said, “so what? I am a family man now. I want to give my daughter a pretty bracelet. There is nothing more to it than that. And what sort of things would interest my sister anyway? Hah, my mama’s makeup? Her pretty clothes? I did not keep these things.”

Svetlana toyed idly with the sleeve of her jumper, thinking. It was important, she thought, to tread carefully here, because Andrei was capricious. He loved Roz, for what that was worse, but liked him less - was jealous of him, in a very real and ugly and all-consuming sense of the word. For Andrei, this would be the first time that he would have something that Roz did not have, and the first tangible thing that he could deny him. Svetlana did not trust him enough to belief that he would not do this, for simple, spiteful joy it would give him. But she also knew that she could not get what she wanted from Andrei without the truth - just a little bit of it, diluted and made palatable for his consumption.

“I don’t suppose,” she began, like it was an idle thing, of no real importance, “that Irina kept anything around her pregnancy with Liliya? Keepsakes for the baby, outfits, journals, pre-natal records?”

The look on Andrei’s face was inscrutable. His fingers tapped a terse rhythm onto his knee as he watched Svetlana. “It is that serious then,” he said, voice low and grim. “Lilechka’s relationship with her hockey player.”

For a moment, Svetlana was utterly blank on what Andrei was thinking. Then, the penny dropped, and she forced herself to smile, small and secretive, like she was sharing something true and private with him, like they were conspirators.

“It’s very serious,” she confirmed. “I think that Liliya would… appreciate her mama’s input on these matters though. It is a very scary thing for a woman to think about alone.”

“Lilechka does not want children,” said Andrei. He sounded like all the air had been punched from his lungs. Disbelieving. “She would have to give up her skating. She loves her skating.”

Svetlana shrugged. “She is near the end of her career. I think she is beginning to think about other things.”

“What?” His laugh was mean - not much of a laugh at all. “So, she retires to live off the money of her hockey player husband - marries him, begins his gold digging slut? And you tell me this is what Lilechka wants?”

“I would watch you tone and what you say about your sister,” Svetlana advised lowly, “if I were you, Dyusha. Especially when we all know where the money for your little habit is coming from.”

“Please,” said Andrei. “You cannot tell me that this is what she wants. That she is happy to give all of this up for - for what? He is not even Russian!”

“Careful,” she warned.

“I am just saying,” he pressed, like a dog with a bloody hunk of meat that he was unwilling to surrender, “that she cannot want to be reduced to a housewife and a mother. You know her just as I do! Svetik, when has she ever said that this is what she wants?”

“That’s not my name,” she reminded him, and was gratified to see the slow flush of embarrassment (or was it anger?) steal over his face at the reminder that he had overstepped. “And she loves him. He loves her. And they’re are talking about the future together. And I wonder, Dyusha, how long has been since Liliya told you last what she wanted”

“Mama loved my father as well,” said Andrei.

Svetlana paused. “Liliya is not Irina,” she said, gently.

“She looks like her an awful lot sometimes. Last summer, the summer before - you cannot tell me that you do not see it as well.”

“I think both of you look like her sometimes,” Svetlana told him. “You are not just your father’s son, Dyusha. But I think that Liliya does not need to look like Irina - I think she just wants her near, to have the support of her mama - of her family.”

Andrei looked at Svetlana - and he looked at her like she was a stranger who was seeing for the very first time, and also like she was the little girl that he had taught how to play football, and like she was Svetlana Vetrova, but also like she was Sveta and Svetik, and he was both Andrei Rozanov and Dyusha, Grigori’s son and Irina’s son and someone caught in between.

Svetlana knew that if she were tell Andrei the truth now - about Roz, as himself - that all this sentiment would be cast to one side entirely. Roz would not be welcome back, and family would mean nothing. Andrei would be the first to cast him aside, and probably the most vocal as well, so that there would be no one who could mistake his anger for grief. But in this moment, in this most palatable form of the truth, easier to swallow and easy to believe, Andrei was a brother - chose to be a brother.

She hated him for it. Hated that he made it a choice. Hated that he made it so cheap. Hated that he could never really love Roz because he would never know Roz.

“I keep the things upstairs,” said Andrei. “But I don’t know if it will have what you want. I haven’t looked through the boxes since she died.”

Svetlana expected him to lead her to the attic, or some other storage closet. He didn’t. Instead he led her to his bedroom, and - as Svetlana hesitated on the threshold - crouched beside his bed to withdraw several cardboard boxes out from under it. They were each labelled in neat Cyrllic - miscellaneous, one said, and another, schoolwork.

“Close the door,” Andrei said, glancing up to see that Svetlana still had not came in. “If Father sees…”

He trailed off. He did not need to finish. Svetlana stepped inside and closed the door.

“You take that box,” he said, pointing at one a few feet away from him. He was already breaking the tape that sealed his own shut with a fingernail.

Svetlana sat cross-legged in front of hers, and copied him. Where Andrei hesitated, his hands resting on the flaps of the box, as if he was unable to bear the thought of opening it, Svetlana did not. She almost wished that she had, staring down at the contents. She had liked Irina Rozanova, but it had never been her loss to grief - and it was only now, looking down at the contents of her life, packed so neatly away, reduced to such an easily consumable form, that Svetlana wondered if she had ever really registered that Irina was gone at all. Gone, as in permanently, rather than in the other room or just out of sight.

From the top of the box, she withdrew a framed photograph. It was Irina, maybe sixteen. She looked a lot like Liliya had at that age, all golden hair and pale skin - but she had Andrei’s facial features, his nose and the set of his eyes. In the picture, she was smiling, and Svetlana realised that she had never seen Irina smile like that, even when she had been at her happiness. But this Irina was young and unburdened. She was not a mother and she was not a wife. She was stood on the ice, in a figure skating costume that drew attention to the willowy curves of her teenage body, between two people - an older boy and an older girl - who looked like her, smiled like her.

Svetlana took a deep breath, and set it to one side.

She found a lot of things like that - photographs from Irina’s childhood, with her parents and the two figures that Svetlana assumed were her siblings, and from her career on the ice. There were medals tucked away underneath these, and newspaper clippings glued into a leather bound journal that spoke of the artistic genius of Irina Medvedeva, spoke of her as something special to look out for in the future.

There were journals too, though Svetlana did not read them beyond glancing at the dates. They were all from the years of Irina’s adolescence, and a part of Svetlana thought about taking them for Roz - but she was thinking about taking all of this for Roz, because she knew that he would want nothing more than to see this, evidence of Irina beyond the name he bore and the cross he wore. But she knew that Andrei would not let her, and that she was already pushing the limits of what she could get away with. She aside a photo of Irina on the ice to one side. That, at the least, she would give to Roz.

It took her a while to realise that Andrei had stopped searching through his box, enraptured as she was with the contents of her own. But she glanced up and he was sat there, another leatherbound journal balanced in his hands. This journal was thicker than the ones that Svetlana had been handling before, and clearly well-thumbed through.

Silently, when he saw her looking, Andrei proffered it out to her. Svetlana took it, flicking to the first page. The name in this one was not Irina Medvedeva, but Irina Rozanova, and the dates covered the period that she would have been pregnant with Roz. Svetlana flicked another page; tucked away was a little sonogram scan - Roz.

She closed the book. She didn’t need to read anymore. Andrei passed her another one - same date range - and she added it to her pile.

“There’s a lot of stuff in here,” Andrei said, clearing his throat, and pushed the box towards Svetlana.

She peered in. The next item was a baby book - pastel yellow, with Vinni Pukh on the cover. Svetlana added that, and the journals to her pile. Then a photo album, with pictures mainly of baby Roz and Irina. They looked happy, contented, peaceful. They looked like the sort of family that were about to start their happily ever after. She removed only one picture: Andrei, cradling his newborn sibling in his arms, peering down with a strange, protective intensity. There was another one in the album; she thought that he would like to keep at least one of them, and watched as he slipped it into his pocket.

“She’s going to stay in America, isn’t she?” he asked.

Svetlana watched him carefully. “Canada, probably.”

She did not have names for the myriad of emotions that crossed his face. She was an only child. But there was envy, and there was anger - a lot of anger - and there was grief. A bitter and small sort of grief, yes, but grief nonetheless.

“Typical,” he snorted. “Of course, Liliya is abandoning her family as soon as the next, more lucrative thing comes along. You would think that we had given her nothing our entire lives. No loyalty to us, to her country - what do they teach you over in America?”

Svetlana stood, slipping her goods into her bag. “I think that it is time for me to leave,” she said.

Andrei’s nose twitched. He scowled. “I think that’s wise,” he said. He made no move to lead her out.

Svetlana did not need him to. She knew her way around very well by this point; she knew her way to the exit. So, she left, closing the bedroom door behind her, because Andrei was still stood in the wreckage of his mother’s life, boxes with their guts spilled across the floor piled at his feet. Grigori was still sleeping, but Svetlana knew that even that was not to be trusted. There was nothing in that whole entire house that could be trusted at all.

Cliff (18:23)

roz is texting me to tell me that you aren’t transphobic

which is nice

i kind of assumed you weren’t anyway

Cliff (19:01)

i don’t know why you aren’t replying

maybe you’re just busy and you actually haven’t read any of these

but if it’s because you think i’m judging you or something abt how i thought you’d deal with roz it isn’t

Cliff (19:18)

if i’m coming on too strong i think you should tell me

i really like you sveta

i don’t want to fuck this up but i think i am

i just

know that i’m here if you need to talk?

Svetlana returned Cliff Marlow’s calls.

She’d missed several from him, and hadn’t responded to many more texts, and felt this like a pain in her chest, a tightening. She didn’t understand, really, why Cliff was so desperate to reach her - why he seemed so worried in every text that he had sent her, more and more every time that she didn’t reply.

She’d been a bitch, ghosting him and screening his calls and refusing to talk to him. Did she owe him anything? They fucked, once or twice. There were friends, as much as Svetlana let them be friends. He was daft and a little clueless, but a better man than many that Svetlana had met before. He made her feel something that she did not want to admit to - a warmth when he smiled at her, the sensation of the ground vanishing from beneath her feet when she saw his texts on her phonescreen. She was convinced, a lot of the time, that Cliff Marlow was one of the people she disliked the most - disliked, or at least couldn’t stand, because he made her feel shaky and small and stupid, and not in the way that she was familiar with. He did not scare her, but it did.

But maybe she did owe him something. Or maybe she wanted to owe him something, just so she could pretend that there was some invisible tether strung between the two of them, some deeper connection that ran both ways instead of just the panic that lay deep underneath her skin.

And, if she did owe him something, she thought that a could place to start was ringing him back.

She lay on her childhood bed, hair loose and fanning out beneath her, legs crossed at the ankles, staring up at the old ceiling she had used to fall asleep beneath, and listened as the phone rang and rang and rang. For a moment, she thought that he would not pick up, and there would be the revenge - an exchange of absence, this time at her expense, and she would spend the rest of her time in Moscow thinking about it and thinking about him, and it would maybe kill her a little bit inside, because this would not be something that Svetlana could blame on anyone but herself.

There was a click as the call connected.

“Svetlana? Is that really you?” asked Cliff. He chuckled down the line, a little disbelieving and more a sound of relief than anything. “Hey, there. I’m not gonna take it personally but I thought you were avoiding me.”

Svetlana felt a little insane - maybe she was, with out keenly she felt the impact of hearing his voice again, like someone had sunk their fist into her stomach.

“I was,” she admitted. There was no way she could have played it off; she knew that Cliff was very much aware of the fact that the silence had been intentional. “Sorry.”

Consideringly, Cliff paused a moment. “It’s okay. You’re forgiven, or whatever. But I was worried. Roz said that you were alone and… I didn’t want you to have to be alone.” Another pause, like he was considering his next words, like he had something he wanted to say and was wondering if he should, if he was allowed to. “Why didn’t you return my calls?”

Svetlana thought about lying. She could. She knew that she would lie well, and that - if wanted to - it was likely that Cliff would never know that she was lying, or would at least accept the fact that she didn’t want to tell the truth. They could move on. Keep it casual. Keep it fun. Svetlana could be as mysterious and detached as she wanted to be. The ground would remain steady under her feet.

But Svetlana had lied about a lot of things - constantly, about almost everything. Sometimes, she wondered if she had ever told Cliff anything true at all. She couldn’t remember most of the things that they spoke about, because they were the casual things that meant nothing to her and were cheap to hand away.

She didn’t want to lie.

She inhaled, glancing at the closed bedroom door and wondered if it would make the same noise the one in Boston had when her father had flung it against the wall, long enough that Maggie had nearly leapt out of her skin. This thing with Cliff - whatever it was, it was hers. She didn’t want her family to see it, ever.

“Sometimes,” she said, the words as still and steady as she could make them, because she did not want Cliff to hear the way that saying them was tearing her to pieces inside, “I don’t like who I am in Moscow. I’m not the Svetlana that you know. I don’t get to be her - she lives in Boston, and she can… She has a freedom that she doesn’t have here. So, she changes herself. And I don’t her, and she’s probably not a Svetlana that you would want to know.”

“Did you read my texts?” he asked.

“Yes”

“What did you think?”

The things Cliff had said to her over text - that he missed her, that he didn’t like to think of her being alone, that he was there if she needed him - were the sort of things that Svetlana didn’t think that people would ever say to her. It was the sort of thing that people said when they were planning on staying, and Svetlana did not plan on letting anyone do that.

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “I’m still thinking, really, and I don’t know what to do with it all. But I… I like you too. It makes me hate you a little bit though. You’re a good man, Cliff Marlow, and too good for me.”

“Bullshit. Honestly, I’ve never heard such bullshit in my life. Too good for me?” He clicked his tongue. “Svetlana, you are - I mean, I haven’t ever met a woman like you before. You’re wickedly smart and you know enough hockey to pull me on my shit - pull me on my shit, in general, actually. You’re funny, buy in, like, a dry and sharp way that doesn’t sound funny unless you’re really listening, and then it’s hysterical. And I do like listening to you, so I find you funny all the time. You’re really fucking sexy, and beautiful too. And you’re thoughtful - like, you’re always thinking, but you’re also thinking about other people, even if you want to pretend that you’re not. You’re just brilliant. Too good! Hah! Fucking bullshit!”

Svetlana blinked. “I don't think I’ve ever known this woman you’re talking about. I haven’t met her.”

“I wish you could,” he said. “I think you’d like her.” Then, maybe because he knew that he was pushing her towards some emotional leap that she wasn’t ready to make yet, the conversation shifted and he asked, “do you know when you’re coming back?”

“Soon, probably. I don’t know. My grandmother is still alive - so, not yet but it won’t be long. We’re all just waiting now. What about you? Do you have any plans?”

“I’m going to go home for Christmas this year,” he offered. “Tasha is bring her boyfriend, so I gotta give the shovel talk, you know.”

“Tasha’s your sister, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, older. She’s really cool though. You’d both get on, I think. But she has this boyfriend - I don’t know, his name is like… fucking Chad or something stupid - and she’s feeling pretty serious about him so she’s bringing him over. Mom thinks he’s gonna ask dad to propose to her, so we gotta work out his intentions, you know?”

Svetlana did not know how long Cliff spoke for, but he spoke about everything: about Tasha and her boyfriend maybe-Chad (or was it Jared?), about the hockey games that she had missed, about the wild hangouts that he had had with his team (mostly because he knew that she liked stories of men being stupid, and those were not in short supply if you were a Boston hockey player), about the upcoming All Stars game in Tampa that he was going to, about a dog that he had met on his morning run the other day…

Svetlana also did not know when - or why - she started crying. She sniffled a little, back of her hand pressed against her mouth to try and muffle the noise.

Cliff heard her anyway. He paused. He sounded a little bewildered and very concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“I don't want to be here anymore,” Svetlana gasped, the words feeling as though they had been wrenched out of her. She sat up, curling in on herself, on hand pressed to her chest, and the tears would not stop. She repeated, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to go home.”

“Baby, babe,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that she started to cry more, sob in earnest. She felt wrung out and rotten. She felt like she had done nothing but cry and she didn’t know what was wrong with her. “Babe, come home then. First flight, book it, come home.”

“I don’t know where that’s supposed to be.”

“Just - Just - You don’t have to stay there, if you don’t want to. Get on a flight, come here. We’ll work it out together. You don’t owe anyone there anything.”

“I owe you something,” she said, and her voice was a small and wretched thing.

“No. No -”

“Cliff,” she interrupted, “please. I like you - I do, a lot, and you’ve been… you’ve been wonderful,  and I've been lying about everything, and I at least owe you the truth -”

“I don’t think either of us are in a place for that talk right now,” he said firmly. Svetlana’s mouth snapped shut. “Look, this isn’t a no, okay? We’ll talk when you get back. This isn’t a no.”

She nodded, even though she knew that he couldn’t see her. “Yeah, okay.”

“Okay,” he repeated. “I wanted to ask as well - you’ve spoken to Roz?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve spoken to him.”

“He said you were cool with it.”

Svetlana swallowed. “Did you know,” she said, “that they used to perform gender reassignment in the Soviet Union? It was a medical procedure for ‘hermaphrodites’. But some people also said that it was caused by latent homosexual tendencies. If you were queer - or, at least, a queer woman - and they caught you, they’d try to cure you. There were therapies, medicines, the pressure of your family and society. Sometimes, if it reoccurred, they’d propose gender reassignment.”

“What? You think Roz is trans just ‘cause he’s fucked a lot of women?”

“No! No. I’m just saying… I spend every moment I am in Moscow worried about what will happen if everyone realises I am trying to hide this thing from them, or if my parents will decide that they are tired of keeping my secret. But it did not feel like such a terrible thing to be scared because I thought Roz was also scared - and it was terrible, but I wasn’t alone.

“And now, Roz isn’t scared anymore. He’s not going to be thinking about what people in Moscow are thinking when they look at him and worrying whether there will be consequences for it. Whatever fear I thought we shared that made us less alone… it wasn’t real. I was always alone and I just didn’t realise it. He’s going to change every part of himself, and he is never going to return to Russia again, and he is going to be happy. And I’m happy for him - that he gets to do this. I just… there is not any change like the one that Roz can make, no secret like that I can confess to, that will let me reinvent myself into a version of me that I am happy with. There’s no curing me. I’m just like this.”

“You don’t need curing,” he said, “so don't even think that. However people see you - that’s on them. But I think that you’re really hard on yourself. You gotta let go of all these expectations you have for yourself. Stop expecting all of this shit to work out ‘cause that’s not how human people function. Real life doesn’t work like this.”

“You really think so think?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I really do think so. Sveta, baby, you don’t have to pretend to be all grown up and well-adjusted with me. Just - be messy. You don’t have to reinvent yourself to be a better person, you just gotta grow.”

“Since when were you this wise?” she asked. She had a joke about CTEs on the tip of her tongue.

“You make me want to grow,” he said, too earnest to be anything but utterly serious.

She swallowed. “You really want to see me when I get back?”

“More than anything.”

Cliff (02:04)

safe flight x

Sveta’s grandmother died on the sixth of January. Christmas, which had always been a pantomime of a warm family affair, was even more of a performance. Sveta’s mother had spent much of it sat in different armchairs around the house in floods of tears, which Sveta might have found touching if it was not for the fact that Svetlana had seen her mother touching up her mascara and smudging her eyeliner tactfully in the bathroom. Her father was already in talks with other members of the family about which lawyers would be best to settle the estate.

She thought, like a normal family, that they had loved her grandmother - probably more than Sveta had, because they at least did not have the separation of some fundamental part of identity to keep them apart. But, in the grand scheme of things, whatever love they felt was not as important to them as the status of their family. That was the trade-off for existing in Moscow’s high society, and Sveta existed in it as well - but it was like a film had enveloped her, or a second skin, that kept her wholly separate from the rest of them.

She was going to be selfish. She was going to choose herself.

Unlike Roz and Sasha, she thought that she probably would return to Moscow. She loved the city still. But it would be different. And when she came back, she thought that it would be on her own terms. Her childhood city would remain hers - but she didn’t think that she would ever set foot in her childhood room again.

Her grandmother was buried in a grand Orthodox ceremony. There were people Sveta had never met who spoke about how close they had been with her, almost like family, and there were people that Sveta never wanted to see again - a cousin who had pulled her hair and called her a slur for the colour of her skin, an uncle whose hands had wandered sometimes if you let your guard down around him, a whole host of relatives who were judgemental of everything but their own flaws.

Sveta stayed long enough to see her lowered into the earth, to feel the slide of dirt between her fingers, and to rest the hard heel of rye bread atop her glass. She’d booked the first flight out of Moscow that night and had gone straight to the airport. No one saw her leave, except for Andrei Rozanov (there in lieu of his father), who watched her with eyes that claimed to know too much but comprehended very little, actually, and Sveta did not bother to say goodbye.

She was at the airport two hours later, and on a flight another two hours after that. Underneath her, Moscow looked very small, shrouded in the dark of light. Its people had never been more visible to her, with all the individual light illuminating the cityscape, the streetlights still shining even as the rest of the world was shrouded in the heavy darkness of the very early morning. She stared out of the window until the sky swallowed the city below and then pulled down the shutter and left it all behind.

Roz had volunteered to collect her from the airport in Boston. He did not offer his condolences over the passing of her grandmother, because he knew or assumed that Sveta would not accept them, but the fact that he was waiting for her was something in itself, his own way of expressing what he could not or would not say. This was the language that they had always spoken - actions, deeds, where clumsy words were inadequate. Sveta had been fluent in it once; she was learning to speak it again.

It was midmorning when she landed, and midmorning when she emerged from its bowels, blinking at the sudden deluge of watery, winter sun, which her eyes took a while to adjust to because of the difference between the natural light and the sterile hell of the windowless underbelly of baggage claim.

Roz was leaning against his car (a very, very sexy Porsche) in the drop off area, arms folded over his chest. He was wearing a leather jacket, soft and distressed with wear, and under that, she saw the distinctive colours of a Voyageurs jersey, which she knew was not his for the simple fact that he would rather die than support Montreal. He looked as he had always known him - except, no, that was not true. He looked happy - and she had known him happy before, but not quite like this. Not as totally and completely happy; not happy, with every part of him feeling it.

“You cut your hair,” she said, reaching up with wondering figures to much shorter crop of curls that framed his face.

Roz batted them away. “Yes, yes, hello, Lana. I am very well, thank you for asking. Yes, is good to see you also.”

“Hello,” she said primly. “How are you? Glad you’re well. I’m well. Good to see you. You cut your hair.” She paused, and added, “it suits you.”

Roz’s expression softened into something a little more honest and a little more vulnerable. He nodded, and cleared his throat, fluffing up the curls compulsively with his hand. “I am thinking mullet, maybe. Play around with it a little.”

Svetlana snorted. “You’re going to look like every homophobic, frat gym bro to ever appear in an American college party. You’re going to look like such an asshole.”

“I am asshole,” he said, smiling in such a way that bared all of his teeth. “Is good to represent who I am on the inside.”

His words were somewhat undercut by the fact that he was helping her load her bags into the back of his car (not the trunk, because it was a luxury sports car and therefore had an impractical and virtually unusable trunk, because of whatever unwritten law governed the world of luxury cars) like a proper gentleman. He compounded this by opening the passenger side door for her, and she pretended to swoon into it, just to hear him laugh.

“Take me back to yours?” she requested, as he slid into the driver’s side.

The look he shot her reminded her a little of the stray cats that she saw sometimes on the streets of Moscow, all puffed up and wary, liable to flinch away even as they came up to beg for attention and scraps of food.

“Am taken - man now, Lana,” he said. “People might get incorrect ideas about your intentions.”

She rolled her eyes. “I have had better fucks than you, Lilyukha. Just because you are one of a handful of men who can find the clitoris does not mean that you are special.” Roz, despite it, looked pleased at that, with a proud little grin that she usually would have kissed off his face. Now, she settled for rolling her eyes at him. “I have gifts for you from Moscow. And also, is it now a crime to want to spend time with you? I has been… hm, a strange time. I want to eat shitty food on your sofa and watch shitty hockey and talk about shitty hockey.”

“Would you like my condolences?” Roz said, keeping his eyes firmly on the road.

Sveta shook her head almost immediately. “Nyet. I do not want to think about” - she wafted a hand around her to encompass everything, unable to find the words - “for a while, I think.”

“Okay,” said Roz. “Then we go to my house, we eat shit food and wear pyjamas and talk shit about shit hockey. You give me presents. You pledge undying love for me. Simple.”

“Simple,” she repeated.

The guest room in Roz’s house in Boston had, at some point, unofficially become Sveta’s own room. She kept a change of clothes and a set of pyjamas in the drawers at all times, and her toothbrush was on the counter of the ensuite. On the bed, there was the exact number of pillows that Sveta liked, and a photo of her and Roz when Roz had first come to Boston framed on the wall. The only other person who Sveta knew used it was Cliff, because he and Roz would go out clubbing sometimes and man often ended up passed out on Roz’s shoulder in the Uber. Sveta found that she did not mind the idea of sharing a bed with Cliff Marlow - she had before, which was probably immaterial, since Cliff and Roz treated such stays like they were kids at a sleepover, and - for them - there was nothing more to it.

Men. She didn’t understand them.

Sveta made a beeline to dump her things in her room, not bothering to ask if she was allowed to stay the night. She knew that Roz knew this was a given. She took his suggestion, though, stripping down and replacing her clothes with the clean set of cotton pyjamas folded up and waiting for her. With each article of clothing that she shed, she felt like she was shedding the staleness of the airport and - more importantly - the staleness of Moscow, and all the stagnant ceremony that had suffocated her for so long. When she was finished, she was Sveta again - Moscow-Sveta-living-in-Boston, Russian-Sveta-living-in-America, Sveta who loved her country but also loved the version of herself she allowed herself to be away from the prying eyes of all her family’s expectation back in the motherland.

Roz was making pasta when she padded back through into the living area, staking out her perch on one of the kitchen stools at the kitchen island so that she could survey him as he worked. On the countertop beside her, she set the wrapped parcel for Roz beside her; his eyes landed on it and lingered, clearly curious and clearly waiting for Sveta to bring it up herself.

“What are you making?” she asked, idly twirling a curl around her finger. She swung her feet back and forth, counting the rhythm of the movement.

“Pasta,” he said. “Bolognaise. David gave me recipes for Christmas, so that I can have nice home cooked meals outside of Canada. Celebration for no more diet plan.

“So, you’re really hanging up your skates?”

Roz nodded. “It… I do not know how to feel about it yet. I am excited, I think, but not about that. Just about things. I will know how I feel later. Maybe after last exhibitions in April - ask me then.”

“If you’re happy, that’s what counts.”

“I think I’m happy,” he said, decisive. Then, he nodded at the parcel on the countertop, curiosity clearly winning out. “This is present for me?”

Sveta hesitated. She wondered, suddenly, too late, whether this would actually be helpful. She thought that it would - but she didn’t know what Irina had written in the journals. She was sure that it could not be terrible. But if it was? Would it still be helpful, simply because any words from Irina might fill the void that Roz was desperate to cover up, or would it make things worse? She didn’t know. She didn’t know a lot of things these days, it felt like, but she was going to have to trust in it, nonetheless.

She slid the parcel over the island. She thought about recommending that Roz sit down but then thought better of it. Roz was a constant of motion. She didn’t think it would help to make him sit for the news.

Carefully, as if he somehow sensed the worth of the enclosed items, Roz began to peel away the wrapping. Then, his hands paused. Irina’s blank cover, leather bound journals were on top. He did not touch them, but hovered just above, looking over at Sveta.

“What…?”

She cleared her throat. “I thought about what you were saying,” she said, “about worrying what your mama would have thought about all of this. I went to see her and I was thinking that there is nothing that I can do to bring her back for you. And then I was thinking about what the next best thing might be - if there was some way that you could have a part of her, at least, to remind you that she loved you more than anything.

“So, I went to see Dyusha, who was surprisingly helpful. He has kept many of her things. I wish I could have brought more for you. But he gave me these - they are your mama’s journals from when she was pregnant with you. And, under there should be a baby book and a photo album. I haven’t read them - not before you - but I don’t think any mother who did not love her child as much as Irina loved you - unconditionally, Lilyukha - would have put as much effort in these things as she has. She loves you - no matter what, no matter what name you have, or face you wear.”

“прежде нежели Я образовал тебя во чреве, Я познал тебя,” Roz said, with a wry twist of his mouth.

“And loved you too,” she added gently.

He sat down on the stool beside her. He set the journals aside and withdrew the baby book, smiling a little at the illustration of Vinni Pukh on the cover. He began, slowly, to flick through it. There was the sonogram on the first page, and when Roz flipped it over, they found that it was meticulously labelled and dated. On the second page was all the information that Irina would have gotten when she was told she could bring Roz back from the hospital - the name she had chosen, the time he had been born, how heavy he had been (quite heavy, Sveta amusedly noted, for a newborn), with two print of a tiny hand and foot in paint underneath. Roz flipped another page to find a glossy photo of a tiny newborn him swaddled in a hospital crib. Then another, where Irina had dutifully and neatly filled in her answers to questions like what was your favourite part of being pregnant with me? or what is the first thing that we’re going to do together when you take me home? It was all phrased like a conversation between mother and baby, and Irina had played into it - all these words for Roz and Roz alone, written with such care and intent so that he would be able to read how wanted he was in every stroke of her pen.

Sveta touched her cheek and found that she was crying, silently. Beside her, there were tears glittering on Roz’s face as well, and she leaned over to rest her head against his shoulder.

Another page. A table this time -

What I will be called if I am a girl, read one of the columns. The other read what I will be called if I am a boy.

Roz made a startled sound in the back of his throat. “Look!” he said, pointing. “I could have been a Svetlana too!”

Sveta started to laugh. “You look nothing like a Svetlana. You could have been a Yeva. Or look, Anatoly,” she added, and tapped her finger at the third name on the list of boy names.

Roz swallowed. He was looking at a block of text that had been written under the table and read them slowly aloud in Russian that stumbled under the weight of his emotions.

“Solnyshko,” he said, “it is more difficult than I expected to choose the perfect name for you. Your papa chose your brother’s name, but he is letting me choose yours. I am very excited for this, but it is hitting me now what a lot of pressure it is! No one knows you as well as I do - you are my baby, in my womb, and I am carrying you with me always. I think that this should mean I know you well enough to know what name will suit you best, but I don’t. If anything, I think that it has made it more difficult. Because how can anything I choose encapsulate everything that you mean to me? It cannot. There is no perfect name.

“We do not even know if you are going to be a little boy or a little girl, and we will not know until you are born. Your papa would like a son, I think, but he is not so bothered because we have your brother already - who, by the way, has said that he would like a little brother he can play with! I think, no matter if you are a son or daughter, I would like you to be happy. Probably you will be reading this when you are much older, and so you will know what I mean when I say that I have let your brother down in many ways. I do not want to let you down as well. I want to do better. So, I think that you will be happy, and I know that you will be loved.

“What name can tell you all of this? I don’t know.

“I’m fond of Liliya, for a girl. It means innocence and purity - but also renewal, which I like the thought of. For a boy, I like Nikolai (after my brother, who I hope that you will one day have the chance to know, because he is very dear to me, even if we do not talk as often) or Ilya, meaning great or glorious, and the Lord is my God. I know that you will be great, and that you are meant for many glorious things, and I like to think that there will be someone, always, who will look out for you if I cannot.

“Or maybe I will simply call you жизнь счастья and I pray it will be true for you.”

“See,” said Sveta, as softly, as she could manage. “Roz, my Lilyukha, she wanted you to be happy. More than anything, she wanted you to be happy. She would not begrudge you anything that made you happy - change your name, your life, anything you want. She knows you. She loves you. Nothing is going to change that.”

Roz tilted his head back, as if he could will the tears back inside. “I just don’t know how to do this without her,” he confessed, the words a whisper, as if he didn’t know whether or not he was allowed to say this.

Sveta flung her arms around him, holding him tight against her. She could feel him shaking and thought of the day that he had told her that Irina was dead. He had been shaking then as well, shaking as he wept, until he had made himself stop. And they had both been so young, and neither of them had known what they were doing, and they had maybe not done it right. She was determined to do it right now. She pulled him closer, running her hands over his back.

“Roz,” she said, “you are never doing this without her. And you are certainly never doing this alone. Not now, and not ever. You’re mine, remember? And I am yours, always.”

Roz began to sob, and she thought that, maybe, for the first time ever, he was beginning to believe that completely - no more maybes, no more hiding, no more fear and grief and anger. Just this, as simple as it should have been if the world was a little kinder; just this, and Sveta thought that, for the first time, she would let this be enough by itself - would let herself be enough. Choose herself, choose happiness, choose this.

It did not feel like a selfish choice. It just felt right.

Chapter End Notes

I have a plan for this series in whole now! Future (long) fics that can be expected are: the already promised Shane POV of Ilya's coming out, a work set between the Skip kiss on the ice and chapter six of boys will be girls, The Long Game remix, and a Luca Haas centric work as a homage to his scrapped book, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous shorter works that I will write as the fancy takes me.

Thanks again for tuning in! I hope that you all enjoyed!