Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Soulmate Goose of Enforcement, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, Crack Treated Seriously, Getting Together

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-17 Updated: 2026-03-30 Words: 22,947 Chapters: 4/5

Duck Duck Loon

Summary

At thirteen, Ilya Rozanov's heart-marked soulmate bird shows up.

It’s a woodpecker that has opinions about hockey practice.

Unfortunately, it also has opinions about Shane Hollander.

or;
A Soulmate Goose of Enforcement AU where Ilya’s marked bird is a woodpecker and Shane’s is a loon. It still takes them years to admit they belong to each other.

Notes

I was first introduced into the wonderful world of Soulmate Goose of Enforcement by idkmybffkes, and that resulted in my FirstPrince fic Compulsory Avian Pairing Phenomenon

I'm back to try this AU for the lovely first husbands of hockey (and possibly the entire Game Changes Cast eventually.)

If you aren't familiar with this AU, no worries. Everyone gets assigned a goose (or in this case a bird of different varieties) and it herds/pushes you toward your soulmate. The rest should be self-explanatory as you read this.

When Ilya is in Russia or talking to Svetlana, you can assume the entire conversation is in Russian. I've put this text in italics (though it's written in English). When he uses brief Russian phrases with english speakers, it will be written in the text using Russian. Hopefully this makes sense!

Chapter 1: ILYA

Chapter Notes

November 2004 - Moscow

Snow squeaks under thirteen year-old Ilya Rozanov’s boots like it’s ratting him out. He keeps his head down, shoulders hunched, and scarf pulled up to his nose. He’s supposed to be at practice.

Instead, he’s cutting across a courtyard toward the bus stop with a pack of older kids. He fits in easily, that’s never been a problem. He’s quick with a grin or a comment, and he knows exactly how to act like he belongs anywhere he decides to stand. He’s still the youngest, though, so he ends up a half-step behind because he doesn’t know where they’re going yet, and he isn’t going to sprint after them like a little kid. He lets them lead and pretends it’s a choice.

They’re talking about school gossip, some stupid dare, a party in an apartment where someone’s cousin has a stockpile of vodka. He likes this. He likes being a kid with somewhere to be that isn’t the rink or home.

He doesn’t care about missing practice. At least, that’s what he tells himself. He keeps his face smooth and keeps walking like he isn’t thinking about it at all.

A hard, dry tap-tap-tap-tap-tap cuts through the air.

The older boys glance around, annoyed, but they keep going. One of them flips up his hood and mutters something about stupid birds. The conversation rolls on without a pause.

Ilya stops.

The sound stops too.

He blinks once, slow.

He starts walking again, long strides to close the gap.

Tap-tap-tap.

He stops.

Silence.

His mouth tightens, irritated because something is trying to control him.

He steps forward again.

Tap-tap-tap.

He exhales through his nose, half-laughing because this is ridiculous. It’s not going to get to him.

Then a blur drops out of the pale sky and lands directly in his path.

Ilya stops so fast his heel slides on packed snow. “What the fuck.”

It’s a woodpecker. The size of the blade of his hockey stick. Close enough to make his skin prickle. Black feathers with a faint oil-slick sheen and dark eyes, hard and too aware.

Ilya stares.

The woodpecker stares back.

It takes one deliberate step forward, and that’s when Ilya sees it. A small patch of gray at the back of its neck. Just a smudge, the kind of marking you would miss if you weren’t looking for it.

But from the right angle, it forms a heart.

Ilya’s throat goes tight.

A marked bird.

His soulmate bird. Probably.

He looks around fast. The older kids are already halfway down the block, voices fading. A woman drags an arm-full of groceries without looking up. A man lights a cigarette and stares at the sky.

No one is paying attention.

The woodpecker, his woodpecker, steps closer. Not friendly or threatening, just certain.

Ilya clicks his tongue. “No.”

He tries to step around it.

The woodpecker hops sideways, perfectly blocking him.

Ilya stares down at it, unimpressed on purpose. “Move.”

The woodpecker tilts its head, as if listening to something Ilya can’t hear. Then it taps its beak once on the snow, crisp and final.

Ilya tries to move around it on the other side.

Blocked again. It's quick and precise, like it knows his angles.

Ilya lets out a loud breath. This is a stupid game and he’s already bored of it. “Idiot bird.”

The bird pecks the toe of his boot. It’s hard enough to sting through leather and make him jerk back despite himself.

The woodpecker flares its wings, wide and sudden, and Ilya’s body reacts before his brain does. He stumbles a step backward.

The bird advances.

A step.

Another step.

It doesn’t chase him exactly. It herds him, neat and relentless, forcing him back the way he came.

Ilya’s jaw tightens. He glances toward the street where his friends disappeared. He could run. He could sprint and be gone in seconds.

But he knows the second he does, it will follow. It will show up again, louder, more obvious, right when someone is looking. And he knows he can’t allow that.

“Okay,” he mutters. “Okay, I understand.”

He takes a careful step backward.

The woodpecker advances.

He tries to slide sideways.

The woodpecker mirrors him again, herding him backward with small corrections. One hop. One wing flare. One sharp peck if he tests the boundary. At one point it darts forward and hops to clip his knee with its beak.

Ilya sucks in a breath, sharp. “Enough.”

The woodpecker taps once. Tap.

School is behind him. The rink is behind him. The only path it allows is the one he’s been walking his whole life.

Ilya’s mouth twists. “Fine.”

He turns sharply and starts walking toward practice like it was his idea.

For a moment, the bird follows on foot right behind him, a small black shadow on the snow. Then it lifts off with a dry snap of wings and flits up into the bare trees, keeping pace above him, just out of reach.

Watching.

By the time Ilya reaches the rink, his cheeks burn from cold and irritation. His hands shake inside his gloves, even though he’s been moving the whole way.

He pauses on the sidewalk and looks up, half-expecting the bird to swoop down again.

But the woodpecker is already gone. Vanished into the bleak winter sky like it was never there at all.

Like it didn’t just decide his afternoon for him.

Ilya stands there for one beat too long, staring at empty branches, hearing the echo of tap-tap-tap in his head.

Then he yanks open the rink door and steps inside.

The smell hits him. Wet wool. Cool sweat. Burning ice. The familiar bite of it.

He tells himself it’s fine—he chose this.

And still, as he laces his skates later, fingers clumsy and cold, he can’t stop thinking one thought.

If he has a marked bird, then somewhere there is a person.

A soulmate.

January 2007 - Moscow

Fifteen-year-old Ilya Rozanov wants one thing.

Sleep.

He rolls onto his side and pulls the pillow over his head, trying to smother the sound outside his window. It doesn’t help. The noise pierces through the fabric anyway, sharp and rhythmic, like someone is banging on the inside of his skull.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

He doesn’t even bother checking the clock. He knows what time it is because the bird always knows.

He didn’t set his alarm last night. He never does on weekends anymore, why waste the effort when he has a personal nightmare with feathers.

Tap-tap-tap.

Ilya groans into the pillow. “Go away.”

The tapping gets louder.

He sits up, blanket sliding off his chest, cold air bites his skin. His room is still dim, the kind of dim that tricks you into thinking you have more time than you do.

Tap.

Ilya swings his feet to the floor and stands there for a second, breathing hard like he’s already run drills. Then he yanks the curtain aside.

The woodpecker is on the window ledge, perfectly balanced, head cocked. Black feathers, faint sheen. It taps once more, deliberate, like it’s taking credit.

On the back of its neck, the small gray patch catches the weak light and resolves into a heart if you look at it the right way.

Ilya stares at it.

The woodpecker stares back, unblinking.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Ilya mutters, voice low so he doesn’t wake his father or brother.

The woodpecker taps the glass again. Tap-tap.

Ilya bares his teeth and hisses as if trying to scare it off. The bird doesn’t move.

He turns away from the window and starts getting dressed with fast, efficient movements. Sweatpants, socks, hoodie. He shoves his feet into boots without sitting down. He doesn’t look back at the window again, because if he does he might start thinking too much.

He has decided, firmly, that the whole soulmate thing is bullshit.

People talk about a soulmate like it’s a prize. Like it’s safety. Like it’s getting handed the one thing you are allowed to want without earning it.

Ilya has spent his whole life earning things. Earning attention, earning approval, earning the right to take up space. He does not get gifts. He gets bargains and conditions.

So the idea that there is someone out there meant for him feels like a trick. The kind of hope that makes you stupid.

And in Russia, hope like that comes with a price.

Marked birds are not cute here. They are not something you show off. They are a spectacle and a weakness. Proof you are sentimental and easy to control. Some people call it illness, a lot of people just look at you differently.

Either way, it makes you a target.

And Ilya is already enough of a target at home. He doesn’t need his country putting a label on his back too.

Ilya believes in soulmates.

He just doesn’t believe he is allowed to have one.

Tap.

He shoulders his bag and slips out into the stairwell, quiet as he can manage. Downstairs, the front door sticks like always. He shoves it open and steps into the morning.

The cold hits him clean and brutal.

The woodpecker flits from a nearby tree to a streetlight ahead of him, keeping pace without getting too close. Like it’s escorting him.

Ilya flips it off without looking.

- - - 

The rink breathes out warmth when he walks in, damp and sharp with the smell of effort. He shoves open the heavy door and slips inside.

His coach spots him immediately. The man’s gaze is trained and predatory, like he’s always looking for something to tear out of someone.

“You’re late, Rozanov,” he barks, even though Ilya is right on time.

Ilya shrugs out of his coat like he doesn’t care. “I’m here.”

His coach stalks closer. The air around him smells like stale coffee and authority. “You think showing up is enough? You think talent is enough?”

Ilya’s wants to say yes.

He knows he’s better than half the boys on this ice, and he knows it with the flat certainty of physics. Some kids are born with hands like stones. Others panic under the pressure of the puck touching their stick. Some kids skate like they’re apologizing for taking up space.

Ilya is not one of those kids.

He was born for this, he can feel it in his bones. He can feel it every time he accelerates and the world narrows to speed and the clean clarity of winning.

He's going to get out of here on sharp blades and momentum. He's going to leave this city and this life behind.

But he also thinks of the woodpecker’s eyes on the window. The way it doesn’t care what he wants. How it wakes him up every weekend and used to block his path when he tried to skip practice, until he stopped trying.

So he says nothing. He just walks past his coach and goes to the locker room. He dresses fast. He doesn’t waste energy on frustration because he learned early that frustration doesn’t change anything.

On the ice, he skates harder than everyone else. He always does.

Not because he loves it, though he does in the sick way you love something that makes you feel alive.

He skates hard because the idea of being average makes his skin crawl. Average is a death sentence to him. Average is staying here and becoming his father.

He pushes until his lungs burn and the world edges blur. He pushes until the coach stops yelling at him, which is never, but the yelling changes. It becomes more focused, more interested. Like the coach is sharpening with him.

When practice finally ends, some of the boys peel off, eager to escape.

Ilya doesn’t.

He stays after, taking extra shots until his arms ache, until the puck leaves his stick exactly the way he wants it to. Anything to avoid heading home. He watches a pair of figure skaters take the ice after, graceful and soft in a way that looks impossible. Two girls, both pretty. One of them is the kind of pretty that makes boys stupid.

Ilya made out with her once behind the vending machines last month. It was fine. She tasted like strawberry gum and boredom. Her parents are strict, and she always whispers about sneaking out like it’s romantic.

Ilya doesn’t care enough about her to wait around for romance.

When he finally collects his stuff, he expects the rink to be empty.

Instead, he hears laughter from the stands. A teen boy’s laugh, warm and careless, the kind of sound you don’t make in front of adults who expect you to be made of discipline.

Ilya pauses, bag in hand, and looks up.

At first he doesn’t see anyone.

Then he spots a lone backpack a few rows up, slumped against a seat like it got thrown there.

He climbs the steps and stops by the backpack.

His coach’s son is stretched out across the seats behind it, on his back, legs tangled. He’s got headphones in. Eyes closed. He looks comfortable in a way that seems illegal in this building.

Sasha.

He's a year older. Thin in that long, elegant way that makes adults call you “delicate” like it’s an insult. He has sharp cheekbones and soft lips and hair that falls into his eyes on purpose.

If Sasha were on the ice, he’d get knocked over and no one would bother helping him up.

Ilya stares down at him.

Sasha must feel it, because his eyes snap open. His whole body tenses, immediate fear flickering across his face like he expects to be caught and punished.

Then he sees Ilya.

Sasha rolls his eyes, the fear evaporating into irritation. He drops his arm over his face as if Ilya is nothing but a mild inconvenience. Like being found by Ilya is nothing more than an annoyance.

He leans against the railing—casual and confident. He’s good at confidence, it’s armor he can put on in one smooth movement.

“You’re going to get your ass beat,” Ilya says, conversational, like he’s commenting on the weather.

Sasha lifts his arm enough to look at him. “Excuse me?”

“Coach,” Ilya says. “He’s yelling with Petrov’s parents. But should be done soon.”

Sasha’s expression shifts instantly. Less bored, more alert. “He is yelling or Petrov’s parents?”

“Petrov’s parents are angry.” Ilya tilts his head. “They think their son deserves World Juniors. Your father is explaining reality to them.”

Sasha groans. He sits up, yanking one headphone off. “He’s going to be in a mood.”

“Yes.” Ilya says. “If he comes up here and sees you lying on the floor like a dead fish it will be worse.”

Sasha glares at him like that’s somehow Ilya’s fault.

“Okay, next time I won’t warn your ass,” Ilya says.

Sasha snorts, though his ears are red. He shoves his headphones into his pocket and starts stuffing things into his backpack with quick, practiced movements. He doesn’t say thank you. Of course he doesn’t.

While he’s getting up, there’s a second when they’re close enough that Ilya can see the faint flush on Sasha’s cheekbones, the tiny mark near the corner of his mouth. Sasha looks up through his lashes, calculating.

Ilya holds his gaze without blinking, because he’s not going to be the first one to look away.

Sasha’s mouth tightens like he’s annoyed at himself. He steps back, slinging his backpack over his shoulder.

“You’re an asshole,” Sasha says.

Ilya smiles, bright and lazy. “A generous asshole.”

Sasha huffs, but there’s a flicker of something amused in it. He heads down the steps, quick and light.

Ilya watches him go, feeling that tightness in his stomach shift into something sharper. Something he refuses to name.

Then Ilya turns and heads out into the cold.

December 2007 - Moscow

Ilya is sixteen and he knows exactly what he’s doing when he follows Sasha into the storage room behind the rink.

He doesn’t hesitate. Hesitation is how you get caught.

Sasha slips through the door first, shoulders turned, quick and practiced, like he’s done this a hundred times. Ilya follows and pulls the door nearly shut behind them, leaving only a thin slice of light from the hallway. The storage room smells like old tape and dull skates and wet fabric. Sticks lean in a crooked rack. A box of pucks sits open on the floor like someone dropped it in a hurry.

Sasha turns around and shifts lightly onto his heels. He looks different in here. Here he’s not the Coach’s son or the untouchable brat who rolls his eyes and floats through trouble like it’s a hobby.

Here he’s just Sasha.

He reaches for Ilya’s sleeve and tugs him in, impatient but not rough.

Ilya leans in and kisses him.

It’s quick and a little messy, the way it is when you’re a teenager and there’s a clock ticking in your head. Sasha’s lips are chapped from the cold and he tastes like mint gum. His hands are warm through Ilya’s jacket, gripping and ungripping at his sides as if he can’t decide what to do with them.

Ilya’s stomach flips, sharp and stupid.

They have to be fast. They always have to be fast, someone could walk in at any moment. A trainer, a kid who forgot his gloves, or one of the dads who lingers around like he owns the place. Worst of all, Coach himself.

Ilya doesn’t let himself finish that thought. He doesn’t let himself picture what would happen to Sasha if they were caught.

Sasha makes a small noise, like a laugh he’s swallowing, and bumps his forehead lightly into Ilya’s shoulder.

“You’re freezing,” Sasha whispers. “And you smell.”

“It was hockey practice,” Ilya whispers back. “That is what we do, sweat on a cold rink.”

Sasha pulls away and looks up at him. His cheeks are pink and his hair is falling into his eyes. He has the kind of face that makes adults assume he’s harmless, which is funny because Sasha is the second most reckless person Ilya knows. He is all sharp edges under a soft-looking exterior.

Ilya knows a lot of things now. He knows how to win face-offs. He knows how to take a hit and pretend it didn’t hurt. He knows how to read his father’s moods from the sound of his keys in the door. He knows what topics are safe to mention at the dinner table and which ones turn the air heavy.

Sasha is not safe.

He’s a secret that feels different from girls.

With girls, it’s easy and fun. It’s something you do because you can, because you feel like it. It’s simple and it stays simple.

This does not.

At first, Ilya thought this might be the woodpecker’s goal. He thought, with a sick drop in his stomach, that fate had chosen a boy for him. That the universe had handed him something his country would never forgive. He thought, briefly, that he was doomed.

Then time passed, and reality did what it always does. It settled in.

Sasha doesn’t feel like safety or a promise. Sasha feels like a dare—something you steal and shove back into your pocket before anyone sees.

There’s no calm certainty here or soft inevitability. There is only the thrill of getting away with something and the relief of having someone who understands the rules without needing them explained.

Ilya lets himself have this, because he’s sixteen and he works and he bleeds and he wins and he is never allowed to want anything that isn’t useful. So when something feels good, he takes it and he doesn’t apologize.

He leans in and kisses Sasha again, brief and warm, then steps back first, because someone has to be the one who ends it before they get caught.

Sasha frowns at him. “Already?”

Ilya nods. “I can come over tomorrow, when your father is coaching the little kids.”

Sasha rolls his eyes, but his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile. “Fine. But wouldn’t this be more fun?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, meaning it. “But I know you. You won’t actually do anything here.”

Sasha shakes his head like Ilya is ridiculous and heads out, quick and light.

Ilya waits ten seconds, listening for footsteps, for any sound that means someone is coming. Then he slips out too, moving like he belongs.

He leaves the rink later than he should, moving fast through the lobby so no one stops him with questions.

Outside, the cold hits him hard enough to sting. His cheeks burn. The sky is already dark, winter pressing down early. He walks with his hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, like he owns the night. He keeps his face neutral and unbothered.

He’s halfway home when the woodpecker appears.

It lands on a fence post near the sidewalk, quiet as a shadow. No tapping this time. No yelling at him through glass. Just there, watching him with those hard button eyes.

It hops once, then flits to the next post, keeping pace with him. Not blocking him or punishing him. Escorting him like it has all the time in the world.

Ilya looks at it and mutters, “What do you want?”

It doesn’t answer.

Ilya walks, and the bird follows, silent and steady.

He thinks, unwillingly, about soulmates.

Not because he doubts them. He doesn’t. He believes in them the way he believes in gravity. He has seen the mark. 

But Love is dangerous.

It’s something his mother used to talk about when they were alone in the apartment and the world outside felt far away. Sometimes she talked about her parents like she was describing a painting. Careful and reverent, yet bright in a way that made Ilya’s chest ache.

He met his grandparents only a few times. He remembers hands that squeezed his shoulders too hard. He remembers perfume and wool coats. He remembers a funeral. Maybe two. Memory blurs around grief until everything turns into the same dull color.

The first time he heard the word soulmates, his mother said it softly, fond and aching, like she was testing whether it still hurt to say out loud. When she smiled, it looked like the hardest thing she had done all day.

One night, when Ilya couldn’t sleep and she was sitting at the kitchen table with cold tea, she told him that her own marked bird came when she was very young. It stayed close. It was strong, she said, as if the bird provided strength to her as well.

Then her soulmate died. A car accident, young and sudden. After that, her bird stopped coming.

She married Ilya’s father because life moves on whether you want it to or not. Because in Russia you do not sit around waiting for fate. You find a practical solution and you swallow the grief.

Ilya’s father never talks about any of it. The one time it came up, he slammed his glass down so hard the table jumped. He ranted about distractions and fairytales. He told Ilya he was getting soft. He told him to focus on what mattered.

So Ilya keeps his woodpecker to himself and hidden in whispers to his mother’s memory.

The bird hops to the next fence post, heart-mark catching the light for a split second.

Ilya walks on, jaw tight, pretending he doesn’t see it.

Pretending he doesn’t want things he isn’t supposed to have.

December 2008 - Regina, Saskatchewan

When Ilya is seventeen, he leaves.

Not forever, unfortunately. But it’s enough that the air in his lungs changes.

Canada is fine. Regina is boring with its flat streets, cloudy sky, and dull conversations. He’s been told there are better cities, places with real nightlife and restaurants that stay open past nine, but he doesn’t believe anyone who says Canada is interesting. They’re either lying or they’ve never been anywhere else.

There’s a kind of quiet here that gets under his skin. The mornings are peaceful in a way that feels suspicious. People smile at strangers like it doesn’t cost them anything.

Most important, the woodpecker is gone.

No banging outside his window. No sharp, rhythmic tapping to drag him out of bed at the crack of dawn. No heart-mark taunting him.

For the first week, he wakes up early anyway, automatically, body trained by years of punishment and routine. He lies in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for the noise to start.

It doesn’t.

He should feel relieved.

It’s probably better like this, he tells himself. His woodpecker doesn’t belong here. His soulmate isn’t going to be in the middle of nowhere Saskatchewan. His soulmate isn’t going to be hanging around a junior rink in Regina. Fate, for once, is being sensible.

- - -

He zips his Team Russia parka up to his chin and slips out a side door with a Coke and a cigarette. The cold hits him like a slap. He tucks himself against the brick, lights up, and feels his shoulders drop on the first inhale. For a second, the world narrows to smoke and quiet and the small satisfaction of doing something entirely in his control.

Before he can even take a second drag, a voice says, “You’re supposed to smoke over there.”

Ilya is still translating the words when he follows the direction of the pointed finger.

He’s pointing at a snowbank.

At first glance there’s just a dark shape against white. From far away it could be a duck. 

A normal bird should be twitchy in this cold. It should bob or shuffle or peck at the crust of snow.

This one does nothing.

It sits like it was placed there.

Like it chose that exact spot, high enough to see, far enough to stay out of reach.

Ilya looks back at the boy who spoke, trying to figure out if he’s actually pointing at the bird, only to find that Shane Hollander is staring at it too. Not casually. Not the way you glance at a random animal.

Like he didn’t expect it to be there.

Hollander shakes his head once, as if snapping himself back into his own body. Then, because he seems incapable of leaving a conversation unfinished, he holds out his hand, introduces himself, compliments Ilya’s playing, asks about parents, makes a valiant attempt at small talk.

Ilya gives him as little as possible, just to see if Hollander will keep going.

He does. Of course he does.

Hollander is earnest and stubborn while Ilya stays unimpressed on purpose. He watches Hollander flush when Ilya meets his eyes.

Then, right in the middle of Hollander’s careful little routine, a prickle hits the back of Ilya’s neck.

He doesn’t move right away. He keeps his posture loose, cigarette balanced between his fingers, face blank. Only his eyes shift.

Past Hollander. Toward the corner of the lot.

The bird is still there.

Ilya’s breath catches. Not because it’s pretty, because it’s wrong in a way he recognizes immediately.

It does not look at him.

It only watches Hollander.

Its eyes are dark and steady, too patient for a normal animal. Like it’s waiting for a cue only it can hear.

On its tail, a patch of green catches the light. Emerald, glossy, the same sheen that flashes faintly along the feathers at its neck when it shifts just a fraction. The color is too vivid against the winter gray, like someone painted it on with a careful hand.

And the shape is familiar.

A heart, if you look at it just right.

Ilya drags his attention back to Hollander and keeps his face smooth, gives him nothing. It’s instinct now. It’s how he survives. Hollander keeps trying anyway, stubborn as he looks, and then he seems to realize he’s losing the thread.

Hollander clears his throat and finishes on autopilot. “Good luck in the tournament,” He says, his hand reaching out for another handshake.

Ilya grins, this he knows how to respond to. “You will not be so friendly when we beat you.” 

Hollander’s jaw sets. “That’s not happening.”

He says it like he believes it completely.

Then he turns and walks away, shoulders squared against the cold.

The bird stays on the snowbank, still as a statue.

Its head turns slowly as Hollander crosses the lot, tracking him with smooth precision. It doesn’t hop after him. It doesn’t flap or call. It just watches, as if making sure Hollander stays on the right path.

The path away from Ilya.

Of course Hollander has a soulmate. Hollander looks like fate would hand him a perfect match the way coaches hand him praise. Like it’s expected. And he’s Canadian, it’s common here. Most people have them. Most people get to want it out loud.

It crosses Ilya’s mind, sharp and amused, that the bird is here to herd Shane away from him. Like it can tell Ilya is exactly the kind of person who notices a boy like Shane Hollander and immediately starts imagining how easy it would be to make him blush again.

Because Shane did blush. Ilya saw it. That flash of color high on his cheeks when Ilya didn’t play nice. That stiff, offended little inhale when Ilya refused to return the compliment.

That means Shane noticed Ilya too.

It’s tempting.

Ilya’s not stupid enough to steal someone from their soulmate. He’s not that kind of cruel. He has rules, even if he enjoys bending everyone else’s.

But fun is not the same as stealing.

Fun is a moment. A little heat in the cold before real life closes its fist again.

Ilya looks at the heart-mark one more time and exhales, smoke curling into the air, slow and deliberate.

Chapter End Notes

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Chapter 2: SHANE

Chapter Notes

July 2010 - Toronto

He can’t sit still. He paces from the bed to the window and back again, straightening the desk chair as he passes, then pushing it out of place like that will fix anything. His phone lights up in his hand. He checks the time.

Three minutes since the last time.

“Jesus,” he mutters.

He changes his shirt, changes it back, runs a hand through his hair, then goes to the mirror to fix it.

This is insane.

Ilya Rozanov flirts like it’s a sport. For all Shane knows, this is nothing to him. A joke. Something he’ll laugh about later. Or maybe he does this all the time and Shane is the only one acting like he’s about to throw up.

Shane exhales sharply, grabs his jacket and wallet, and decides he’s done. If he goes down to the lobby, buys a ginger ale, takes a long walk, then he simply won’t be here when Rozanov arrives. That solves everything without Shane having to say anything out loud.

He pulls the door open and stops so hard he almost gets whiplash.

A bird is sitting directly in front of his door.

A loon.

Shane blinks at it.

For a second, his brain refuses to process it. They’re several floors up, in the middle of a city. Loons belong on lakes, not outside room 1410.

“How—” Shane starts, then tries again. “What.”

The bird doesn’t move. It just watches him.

He glances down the hallway, expecting someone to be there laughing or filming, waiting for him to react. The corridor is empty. Quiet.

When he looks back, he sees it.

At the base of its tail, a flash of green catches the light. Not dull. Not accidental. The same deep emerald that rings its neck. When it shifts, the shape resolves.

A heart.

Shane’s stomach drops.

Regina. A year and a half ago, there was a loon on a snowbank outside the arena, marked the same way. He’d noticed it then and told himself it belonged to someone else because it had to.

The bird in front of him tilts its head, calm and certain, like it’s been waiting.

He steps back and shuts the door fast, pressing his spine against it. The room feels smaller. He drags a hand down his face and forces himself to breathe.

Okay. Fine. Move it. That’s all.

He checks the time again. Two minutes.

“Shit.”

Rozanov cannot see that bird.

He yanks the door open.

Ilya Rozanov is standing there, close enough that Shane nearly collides with him. Shane’s gaze drops immediately to the carpet, then snaps left and right, searching for feathers.

Nothing. Empty hallway.

Rozanov watches him do it. One brow rises slowly.

“Looking for someone else?” Rozanov asks, voice low and amused.

Shane’s brain blanks. He steps aside.

“Get in,” he says, and hopes his voice sounds steadier than he feels.

Rozanov slips past him like this is normal. Shane shuts the door a little too quickly and turns around.

Rozanov takes in the room in one glance, then looks back at Shane, eyes sharp like he’s already clocked the jacket still in his hand.

“You were leaving,” Rozanov says.

“I wasn’t.”

“Mm.” Rozanov’s mouth twitches like he doesn’t believe him. “You are nervous,” he says.

“I’m not.”

“I can see,” Rozanov says, and now he’s definitely amused. He steps closer, slow enough to make Shane’s skin feel tight. “You do not have to do this if you do not want.”

Shane’s throat closes. 

Rozanov takes another step, and Shane holds his ground.

“You want me to leave?” 

Shane opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He shakes his head.

Rozanov exhales, and reaches up to catch Shane’s chin between his fingers. It’s not gentle, but it is slow. Slow enough for Shane to step away if he’s changed his mind.

Then Rozanov kisses him.

Shane freezes for half a second, pure panic flashing hot through his chest, and then it’s gone. His hands lift automatically, grabbing at Rozanov’s shirt like he needs something to hold onto. Rozanov’s mouth is warm and firm and completely unapologetic.

Shane’s thoughts scatter.

The loon.

The mark.

All of it drops away the moment Rozanov presses closer and deepens the kiss. Shane makes a small, broken sound into Rozanov’s mouth and Rozanov smiles against him, like he heard it and liked it.

Shane can’t remember what he was afraid of.

Not right now.

December 2012 - Boston

Shane has seen his bird enough times now to know something isn’t right.

Not wrong, exactly. Nothing dramatic, nothing he could point to and say, see, this is broken. It just doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to. 

Everyone knows what marked birds do. They herd you. They block your path and steer you like you’re stubborn until you finally stumble into the person fate picked for you.

That’s the deal.

Shane’s doesn’t do any of that.

It watches.

He sees it again outside the TD Garden, right after the Bears beat them in overtime. He’s still pissed about a missed pass late in the third, replaying the moment on a loop as he shrugs into his coat, trying to keep his face neutral like he always does after a loss.

Hayden falls into step beside him as they head out into the cold.

“You staying in tonight?” Hayden asks. “A couple guys are skipping the bars. We were thinking movie night.”

Shane’s not staying in, but he hasn’t figured out how to say that without making it into a conversation he doesn’t want to have. He keeps his eyes forward, breath fogging in front of him.

“Tempting,” he says.

Hayden gives him a sideways look. “That’s not a no.”

Shane shrugs. “Might just go for a walk. Quiet night.”

“A walk,” Hayden repeats, like he’s trying to translate.

Shane flicks him a look. “What, I’m not allowed?”

“You’re allowed,” Hayden says, still skeptical.

Shane looks at him. “Watch your movie in someone else’s room. If I change my mind, I’ll show up.”

“Yeah, okay,” Hayden says easily. “I’ll text you what we pick.”

They push through the doors and into the parking area, the city loud and bright in that post-game way. People lingering in jerseys, traffic inching along, the air sharp with exhaust and winter.

That’s when Shane sees it.

Across the street, perched on a lamppost.

Perfectly still.

Black and white against the city gray, too deliberate to be random. It isn’t hunched against the cold, isn’t shifting its feet, isn’t doing anything a normal bird would do. It’s just there, upright and patient, like it chose this exact spot because it knew Shane would look up.

His steps falter.

Hayden is still talking, something about grabbing food before the bus leaves, but the words blur. Shane’s focus narrows the way it does before a face-off, everything tightening to one point.

The loon’s head turns.

It doesn’t call. It doesn’t move. It just watches Shane, steady and unblinking, and when it adjusts its tail by the slightest fraction the streetlight catches the flash of green at the base.

A heart.

Shane swallows hard, forcing his feet to keep moving.

The bird doesn’t follow him. It doesn’t swoop down to block his path or do anything dramatic that might justify the spike of adrenaline in his chest. It stays exactly where it is, tracking him with that calm, unnerving precision until he disappears onto the team bus and the doors fold shut.

Only then does Shane let himself breathe.

Later, when he knocks on the door of a hotel room, he’s still thinking about it. The stillness. The watching. The way the bird had turned its head like it was keeping tabs.

Rozanov opens the door wearing dark jeans and a loose top, a few upper buttons undone like he didn’t bother pretending. His hair is a mess in a way that looks deliberate, and he smells faintly like shots and too loud music. His expression is unreadable for half a second before it settles into something faintly amused.

“You could not resist,” Rozanov says, grinning like he’s already won.

Shane steps inside without answering, shutting the door behind him. The hallway noise disappears. The room is warm, lights low, and there’s nothing here except Rozanov standing too close. No emerald flash in the corner of his vision.

“I can still leave,” Shane says, because he can’t let that grin sit there unchallenged. 

Rozanov’s smile widens, like he likes the fight. “No, no. You came all this way,” he says, gesturing vaguely. “We will have good time.”

“It was six floors,” Shane says flatly.

Rozanov rolls his eyes. “Do you want to leave?”

Shane opens his mouth, ready to give the safer answer, the one that keeps him in control.

“No,” he says instead, and it lands honest enough that his face heats.

Something shifts in Rozanov’s expression. Not softer, exactly, but satisfied, like he’s been waiting for Shane to stop pretending.

“Good,” Rozanov says simply, and steps closer.

He reaches for Shane like it’s the only thing that matters. Like he’s decided, and that’s that.

When Rozanov kisses him, it’s immediate and sure, and Shane’s thoughts scatter. The weird, unnerving bird outside the Garden drops out of his head completely, replaced by heat and pressure, and the simple fact that he’s here and he didn’t run.

September 2013 - Montreal

Shane tells himself it’s an investment.

That’s the line he’s settled on because it sounds adult and sensible. Three units. A manageable first purchase. His financial manager called it low risk and Shane has already convinced himself that the renovation budget is a sign of maturity rather than desperation.

The fact that it’s also neutral territory, somewhere Rozanov can go without crossing into the parts of Shane’s life that feel permanent, is beside the point. A minor, unexpected bonus. Nothing more.

He knows he can’t have Rozanov in his apartment, because then he’d have to face the reality of the last three years.

So this will be useful. Practical, bu temporary. A place to meet for a few months while the renovations happen. That’s all.

He checks the calendar invite again as he walks, mostly to give his hands something to do. Ten minutes early. Right address. No reason to feel like he’s about to do something reckless.

His foot catches on something in the walkway.

Not hard, but enough to jolt him out of the loop in his head.

He looks down, and his stomach drops.

A loon is sitting directly in his path, right in the middle of the walkway leading to the office door.

His loon.

The emerald heart at the base of its tail catches the light when it shifts, like it wants him to see it. As if it’s making sure he can’t talk himself out of recognizing it.

Shane stops short and stares at it for a beat too long. For half a second, the thought slips in before he can stop it: is my soulmate inside that office?

The loon doesn’t move. It simply watches him, perfectly still, like it has all the time in the world and none of the doubt.

Shane exhales and goes to step over it.

The bird stands and shuffles backward, quick and precise, not startled, not defensive, just exact, sliding into the exact spot where Shane’s foot was about to land.

“What the hell,” Shane mutters, low.

He tries the other side.

Same thing. The loon adjusts without any panic, just calm correction, blocking him again.

Shane takes a few steps back. The bird doesn’t follow. It doesn’t chase him away from the door. It just blocks him with quiet certainty, as if the door is not his to choose.

He turns as if he’s going to leave.

Shane whips his head around, as if expecting it to have changed its mind. It hasn’t. It’s still sitting there, patiently irritating and completely sure of itself.

“So you don’t want me to go in,” Shane says under his breath, “but you also won’t show me where I’m supposed to go instead.”

The loon blinks once.

Shane stares back like that’s going to help.

“Dumb bird.”

He takes a breath and starts toward it again, faster this time. He doesn’t think about what it means. He doesn’t give himself room to hesitate. He thinks about the ice instead, about cutting around an opposing defender, about making space where there isn’t any.

He feints left.

The loon shifts.

Shane cuts right and slips past it in one quick step, pushing the door open and getting inside before the bird can adjust again. He pulls the door shut behind him immediately, heart thudding harder than it should.

He stands there for a second, breathing, then checks the time like that’s the important part.

Still early.

He smooths the front of his jacket, forces his shoulders down, and walks toward the receptionist like nothing just happened.

January 2014 - Montreal

The condo is too quiet. That’s the first thing Shane notices when he lets himself in and shuts the door behind him.

Not peaceful. Not calm. Just empty.

He stands in the living room with his tie loosened and his sleeves pushed up, jacket draped over the back of a chair. His body still carries the win, loose and keyed up. Rozanov’s look across the ice sticks with him too, irritating and familiar, like he’d find a way to make up for the loss tonight.

Shane checks the time again and hates himself for it.

They’re never precise. They don’t really do plans. Earlier, Rozanov had said he still had the address, and then he’d added ‘we’ll see’ like it was a joke and not the entire point of the night. Shane had rolled his eyes at it at the time.

Now he’s standing here, waiting anyway.

Of course he’s late.

It’s petty.

He lost, so now he’s making Shane sit with it. Making it inconvenient. Making it just irritating enough that Rozanov gets something back even when he doesn’t win on the ice.

Shane lets out a quiet laugh with no humor in it. “Unbelievable.”

He crosses the room, turns back, crosses it again. He tells himself this is stupid, all of it, the condo and the secrecy and the waiting like this is something he agreed to, something normal. He doesn’t have to do this. He doesn’t have to stand here checking the time for someone who can’t even be bothered to show up when he should.

The thought lands hard enough that he stops moving.

He doesn’t have to wait. He doesn’t have to keep doing this at all.

This was supposed to be temporary. Controlled.

He grabs his jacket off the chair. “That’s it,” he mutters. “I’m done.”

It feels good to say. Clean. Like snapping something that’s been stretched too tight.

He heads for the stairs and takes them two at a time, moving fast before he can talk himself out of it. He won’t answer next time. He won’t engage. Rozanov won’t be heartbroken, at most he’ll be annoyed to lose someone reliable and discreet, and Shane can live with that.

At the bottom, he yanks open the exterior door.

And the loon is sitting on the small concrete landing, squarely in his path.

Not moving. Just there, placed neatly in front of him like it belongs.

Shane freezes.

The air is cold and unforgiving. There’s no voices, no footsteps, nothing but the building settling around him and the hum of lampposts around the parking lot.The bird doesn’t flare its wings or lunge. It doesn’t need to. It just watches, head tilted slightly, and when it shifts its tail the emerald heart catches the light.

Shane exhales sharply through his nose, tension tightening into anger because anger is easier than whatever else this is.

“What do you want from me?” he demands, and it comes out louder than he means it to.

The loon remains perfectly still.

“Fine,” Shane says, voice tight. “Take me somewhere, then. Show me. I’m game.”

Nothing.

No direction. No herding. No big dramatic shove.

Just that calm stare, like the bird is waiting for Shane.

He could still leave. He could step around it the way he did months ago outside the agent’s office, push past onto the sidewalk, keep going to his car and be done with this. There’s nothing physically stopping him.

His hand tightens around the edge of the door anyway.

Because now that the choice is right in front of him, simple and uncomplicated and entirely his, it doesn’t feel as clear as it did thirty seconds ago.

Shane stares at the bird, jaw clenched, and lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Christ,” he mutters.

The loon doesn’t move. It doesn’t need to.

Shane steps back inside and pulls the exterior door shut. The lock catches with a small, final click.

He rests his forehead against the wood for a moment, eyes closed, like he can press the decision back into his skull and make it make sense.

“Ugh,” he says, frustrated with himself.

He turns away from the door and the knock comes almost immediately.

Shane turns back quickly.

When he opens the door, the landing is empty except for Rozanov leaning against the railing like he’s been there longer than he should have.

The loon is gone.

“You waited,” Rozanov says, voice edged with amusement.

Shane’s relief burns into irritation so fast it almost gives him whiplash. “Fuck off.”

Rozanov’s mouth curves. He steps past Shane like he belongs in the space. Shane shuts the door behind him and follows, slower, watching Rozanov move through the room with that easy confidence that should be illegal.

Rozanov turns back, close now, that familiar, dangerous proximity settling in immediately.

“How about,” Rozanov says, eyes flicking over Shane’s face, “I fuck you instead?”

Shane huffs a laugh that isn’t quite a laugh. “You’re late.”

“I didn’t give time.”

“You did that on purpose.”

Rozanov’s brows lift. “Maybe.”

Shane’s jaw tightens. “You lost, so you thought you’d make me sit here waiting.”

Rozanov’s expression shifts, a flash of annoyance. “What is wrong? I lose yet you are angry.”

Shane opens his mouth, then closes it again, because the obvious answer is not something he’s saying out loud.

He makes it about the one thing he can admit. “Next time agree to a plan. Show up at a decent time.”

Rozanov’s edge drops, not quite into softness, but into something understanding. “Had to wait,” he says. “Boys were watching. They want to do shots. If I leave too fast, they would notice.”

“Oh.” Shame say flatly. He hadn’t thought about that part, the risk of Rozanov disappearing too obviously. How, unlike Shane, Rozanov’s presence is expected at after parties.

Rozanov watches his face, and something in him settles, satisfied, like he’s confirmed what he wanted.

And that’s all it takes. Whatever Shane thought he was doing ten minutes ago dissolves under the weight of Rozanov standing here, in this room, looking at him like this.

Shane closes the distance first.

He grabs the front of Rozanov’s shirt and hauls him in. The kiss is immediate and rough, more teeth than usual, more frustration than anything careful. Rozanov makes a low sound, surprised for half a second before he matches it, hands gripping Shane’s sides, pulling him closer like he isn’t going anywhere.

“Easy,” Rozanov murmurs against his mouth, though there’s nothing easy in it.

Shane doesn’t slow down. He pushes, presses, drives them back a step and then another until Rozanov hits the wall with a dull thud, and the impact only sharpens something in both of them.

It’s fast, not careful. Everything from the game, the waiting, the almost-leaving spills over into something physical and immediate.

Rozanov laughs once under his breath, breathless and edged. “That bad tonight?”

“Shut up,” Shane mutters, and it comes out rougher than he intends.

Rozanov doesn’t push after that. He lets Shane set the pace, which is almost worse, because Shane realizes just how much he wants this.

Rozanov leaves like he always does, like it’s nothing.

He pulls his shirt on without looking at Shane, tugs the hem into place, and crosses the condo to the door. He doesn’t linger.

“Was good,” he says over his shoulder, already halfway out, like he’s talking about a meal and not the fact that he’s just knocked Shane off balance and left him standing there. “Maybe even better next time.”

“Next time?” Shane says, voice rough.

Rozanov pauses just long enough to glance back, mouth tilting like he’s amused, and then he’s gone. The door clicks shut behind him, clean and final.

The quiet rushes back in all at once, like a storm took out the power.

Shane stands under the shower with the water turned hotter than it needs to be, letting it pound the back of his neck until his skin stings. Steam clouds the glass. The fan hums. 

He braces both hands on the tile and exhales slowly, forcing his breathing to match the steady rush of water.

The loon flashes back, uninvited—sitting on the landing, perfectly still, the emerald heart catching the light. It hadn’t attacked him. It hadn’t pushed. It had just sat there and watched, patient enough to let Shane decide.

Which is the problem.

Shane drags a hand down his face, water streaming from his fingers, and lets out a short breath that could almost be a laugh.

Maybe he’s been thinking about it wrong.

Maybe the bird isn’t leading him to something. Maybe it’s doing the opposite. Making sure this stays what it’s supposed to be.

A phase. A pressure valve. Something he burns through, gets out of his system, and then leaves behind when he gets back on track and finds something that fits neatly into the rest of his life.

A woman. A real relationship. Something ordinary.

Shane tips his head back under the spray and lets the water hit his face until his eyelashes are heavy with it.

So maybe he should just take it for what it is. Enjoy it while it lasts. Maybe it’ll be easier to keep it simple now that he understands what the bird is trying to do.

Chapter End Notes

Kudos 🖤 Comments 💬 Bookmarks📚 and Subscriptions 👀 make me do a happy dance!!! Thank you! 🖤🦆

Chapter 3: ILYA

Chapter Notes

A/N: As a reminder, italicized text is being spoken in Russian.

And thank you to everyone that called Shane an idiot in the comments of the last chapter. Because yes. 🖤

February 2014 - Sochi

The opening ceremony is full of spectacle and noise and carefully engineered pride. He knows how to look like youthful confidence—cocky, bright, inevitable.

He also knows it’s a mistake.

This isn’t about gold. Not really. The roster is young, with the veterans who used to carry them gone or aging out. The press has been circling for months, calling it a rebuilding year with polite smiles and sharp undertones. They’ll be lucky to get bronze. Russia doesn’t do lucky.

And this is Russia. On home ice. In front of everyone.

Failure here won’t be quiet.

When the ceremony ends and they funnel beneath the stadium into concrete corridors and fluorescent light, the noise dulls into echoing footsteps and distant cheers. 

And then he sees him.

Shane Hollander, red and black somehow spotlighted in a mess of colors, as if the world has decided to underline him. He’s turned toward someone and he’s laughing, restrained in the way Shane always is, like even happiness comes with rules. 

It makes Ilya think of him at his most open, the version only a handful of people ever get, and it makes something twist low in Ilya’s chest.

Hollander looks professionally happy. Camera-ready. Safe.

Ilya feels the weight of his phone in his pocket, sudden and accusing, like it’s trying to betray him. The idea of reaching for Shane is there, bright and stupid, and he kills it before it can become a thought.

Shane’s gaze drifts, searching the corridor the way it always does, as if his eyes know something his mouth refuses to admit.

Their eyes meet.

A flicker—recognition, heat, history—so fast it barely exists, and still it hits Ilya like a shove.

He turns away immediately, walking the other way.

He was supposed to meet his team. Go out. Bond. Perform confidence for the cameras and his country that wants him young and obedient and winning.

Instead, he pushes through a side exit into the cold.

The air bites hard enough to sting his lungs. It’s the kind of cold that makes your eyes water without permission.

He doesn’t have to look for the woodpecker. He feels it.

It’s perched on a metal barrier near the arena doors, black and white against floodlit snow. Watching.

It’s been present since he returned to Russia, fewer wake-up calls now, less relentless tapping, more observation. As if it’s waiting for the exact moment to matter.

Ilya exhales.

The bird launches.

The first strike is fast at his collarbone. Hard enough to steal breath, hard enough to make him swear as he staggers. “What the hell—”

It comes again, lower, ribs, an impact that lands with ugly precision.

This isn’t correcting him.

It’s targeting him.

Back toward the doors, back toward the arena, back toward what he just refused.

Ilya steps sideways. The bird intercepts. Wings flare, a blur of feathers and intent, beak snapping inches from his face. He swats at it, furious, half-blind with adrenaline. “No.”

It hits him again. He throws his arm up to block and feels the impact deep in his right wrist, sharp, bright, wrong. The force knocks him back, his heel slips on packed ice near the curb.

He goes down hard.

He catches himself on instinct, palm striking the ground, and the bird is on him immediately, pecking at his hand again and again. Not random. Not frantic. Deliberate enough to feel like punishment, even if it isn’t. He jerks his hand back, tries to swat it away, but it keeps coming, each strike stinging through skin until his fingers burn and his wrist feels unstable.

By the time he manages to scramble upright, his wrist is bleeding, his knuckles raw, his grip already compromised.

He sucks in a breath through his teeth.

He doesn’t run like prey.

Instead, he does the only thing he trusts. He moves offensively.

Not forward, not back, but sideways, sudden and sharp, the way he changes direction on skates when someone tries to cut him off. His feet find purchase where they shouldn’t. His body remembers angles even while his head is still trying to catch up.

The bird dives where he was.

Ilya shifts again, faster, a second hard change that makes the world tilt for a moment, boots scraping ice and gravel. The woodpecker snaps past his shoulder, too fast to stop cleanly, and for one second it has to climb, to turn, to find him again.

That second is enough.

Ilya bolts toward the nearest pool of movement, the place where volunteers in bright jackets are corralling people with clipboards and tired authority. There’s a shuttle idling at the curb, doors open, heat spilling out in a soft rush. A sign in the window reads STAFF in block letters.

He doesn’t think. He just jumps.

A startled volunteer barks something at him as he takes the steps two at a time and lurches into the aisle, shoulder clipping a handrail. He keeps his head down, breath ragged, wrist tucked tight against his stomach.

Outside the glass, the woodpecker circles once in the floodlights, a dark cut against the snow.

It doesn’t land.

The doors hiss shut. The bus pulls away.

Only then does Ilya let himself look at his hand.

- - - 

Ilya spends the next morning with his wrist in his lap, massaging it until his fingers cramp and his forearm burns. The swelling has settled into something uglier overnight. There’s an unending stiffness, heat, and pulses of pain that sharpen every time he tries to make a fist.

He should be stretching. He should be moving. He should be doing the small, careful rituals that keep his body ready before a game.

Instead, he scrolls.

He searches every tag he can think of. Sochi. Opening ceremony. Team Russia. BTS. Athlete village. He flips through clips from strangers’ phones, shaky footage of fireworks, flags, faces. He refreshes feeds until his eyes ache, hunting for one glimpse of black-and-white wings, for a flash of movement near the arena doors

Shane can’t see that.

No one can see that Ilya has been luckily cursed with a marked bird.

His breathing doesn’t steady until he’s confident that there’s no trace.

A small miracle.

When he finally drags himself to the medical room, he keeps his shoulders loose and his expression bored, as if he’s there for something minor, something expected.

The trainer looks up from a clipboard. “What happened?”

Ilya holds out his hand like it’s an inconvenience. The knuckles are raw, and there’s a deep cut along the side of his wrist where the skin split. It’s cleaned, but not properly. It still looks angry.

“Fell,” he says.

The trainer’s mouth tightens. “How?”

“Outside after the ceremony.” Ilya shrugs. “Ice. I fell onto a curb.”

The trainer doesn’t look convinced, but he still takes Ilya’s wrist carefully, rotating it through a small range of motion. Pain shoots up Ilya’s arm. He keeps his face blank.

“Does this hurt?”

“No.”

The trainer lifts his eyes.

Ilya exhales through his nose. “Yes.”

After a beat, the trainer reaches for tape like it’s the only answer that matters. He wraps the wrist tight enough that it bites, layers crossing and locking it down, then smears ointment over the cut with brisk irritation.

“You’ll feel it,” the trainer says. Not a warning. A fact. “Don’t twist too much. No fights.”

Ilya almost laughs.

He hands Ilya two tablets without ceremony. “Anti-inflammatory. You can play through it.”

Ilya takes them.

He leaves taped up, medicated, and already planning how to pretend this never happened.

- - -

By the time his team gathers in the locker room, he can already tell what kind of day this is going to be.

They arrive expecting an easy win, loose with laughter and swagger, like the result has been decided for them. They talk about the medal round like it’s already theirs. They talk about Latvia as if Latvia is a formality.

It makes Ilya’s jaw clench.

People love to call him cocky. They love to make him the villain in their stories because it’s easier than admitting he’s earned most of what he says.

The truth is simpler: he knows when he’s good enough, and he works his ass off to stay that way. Confidence is not a personality to him. It’s a reward.

Most of his teammates treat it like a birthright.

Everyone wants to be the star, and none of them want to do the unglamorous work that makes a team function. They want highlights. They want glory. They want the moment where the cameras find them.

The irony is that Ilya ends up doing the same thing anyway, because they aren’t good enough to carry it together. And he is not going to let Russia go out quietly on home ice.

His wrist throbs every time he grips his stick, but he says nothing. He’s played through worse. He knows how to compartmentalize pain until the game is over.

It almost works, until it doesn’t.

Late in the game, there’s a power play. Russia has five on the ice to Latvia’s four. The crowd rises, hungry, sure this is the moment the score shifts. It should be an easy chance to tie it up. It should be inevitable.

Ilya sees the lane open like a gift.

He knows this shot. He’s scored it a hundred times, in arenas louder than this, with men bigger than him trying to break his ribs.

He pulls back.

His wrist hesitates—just half a fraction, a flare of instability in the release—and that half a fraction is everything.

The puck sails high.

Over the net.

For a second there’s no sound at all, as if the arena has inhaled and can’t exhale.

Then the crowd gasps, collective and sharp.

The power play ends. Russia keeps Latvia from scoring again, but it doesn’t matter. They can’t manage another goal. Every chance feels rushed, forced, desperate. The clock keeps bleeding out, indifferent.

Minutes later, it’s over.

Russia is out.

In the locker room, no one looks at him directly, but he can feel it anyway. That was the moment. That was the chance. The one they’ll replay, the one they’ll freeze-frame, the one that will follow him longer than any of the things he did right.

He sits at his stall and unties his skates with slow, precise movements, favoring his left hand as much as possible. When his right wrist has to work, pain stabs through the tape.

He keeps his face empty.

He keeps breathing.

He focuses on the mundane mechanics of getting undressed, on the ritual of it, because if he lets his mind wander to the night before, he will do something stupid. He will break something. He will give someone a reason to look at him too closely.

His wrist throbs.

“Fucking bird,” he mutters under his breath.

- - -

When he returns to Boston, a trainer pulls him out of practice before he can protest, sits him down under bright lights, and starts unwrapping the tape.

The gash looks worse than it did in Sochi. The edges are angry and split, like it’s been pulled open and closed and pulled open again. There’s dried blood in the creases of his palm he didn’t manage to scrub out.

The trainer’s mouth tightens. “Jesus, Rozanov.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” He presses gently around the cut, and pain stabs up Ilya’s arm. The trainer doesn’t apologize. He just looks up, flat. “Did they even clean this properly?”

“I cleaned it.”

“I don’t mean you in a dorm sink,” the trainer says. He rotates Ilya’s wrist through a careful range of motion and watches his face like he’s trying to catch him lying. “Why the hell did their staff let you play on this?”

Ilya’s jaw tightens. “Russia. Olympics.”

“Yeah, no. That’s not an answer.” The trainer gestures at the wound again. “This looks like it reopened. Like it tore wider, taking shots and gripping your stick. You probably made it worse playing.”

Ilya doesn’t say anything.

The trainer sighs, already reaching for disinfectant and sterile strips. “Okay. We’re going to do this correctly now. You’re off ice for a few days. Maybe a week. We’ll see what the swelling does.”

“No broken bones,” he adds after a beat, almost grudging. “No tendon damage that I can feel. But this is a deep cut.”

A week later, Ilya’s back on the ice, wrist taped so tightly it feels like armor. The bruising fades. The skin closes. The ache lingers.

June 2014 - Boston

Somehow, despite everything, he still drags the Bears through the season anyway. Somehow he still finds a way to win his first Stanley Cup.

The parade is loud and on duck boats, surrounded by a crowd holding photos of his face. There’s confetti and cameras and strangers grabbing at him, and he relishes in knowing he did this thing right.

His wrist heals. The cut becomes a scar. The bruise fades. His body forgets.

His mind doesn’t.

Because the thing he can’t stop replaying isn’t the missed shot against Latvia, or even the trainer’s concern when he unwrapped the tape. It’s the moment outside the arena, in the cold, when the heart-marked woodpecker decided his refusal required violence.

He keeps expecting the woodpecker to show up in Boston like it has a passport and a grudge. A railing outside the practice facility. A streetlight. His balcony at three in the morning.

Nothing.

No tapping. No wings. No correction.

Just hockey. Just ordinary injuries. The kind you can tape and ice and pretend you chose.

It’s almost peaceful.

And then Shane Hollander texts him, and Ilya remembers peace has never been the point.

February 2015 - Boston

The hotel room is like every other. Beige carpet, heavy curtains, a lamp that makes everything look softer than it is. Ilya booked it under a name that isn’t his and requested a top floor, away from the rest of the Montreal team. Shane’s flight is in a few hours, so there was no time to meet at Ilya’s penthouse.

He misses having Shane in his space. He’s gotten used to the day after, when he can still smell Shane in his sheets and pretend it means something. But the hotel is better than nothing.

The sheets are already a mess. Shane is on top of him, forearms braced, mouth dragging along Ilya’s jaw. He’s trying to stay quiet and failing at it. Ilya has his hands on Shane’s hips, holding him in place. Shane bites at his throat and Ilya laughs, the sound breaking halfway out.

Shane’s head snaps up. “Shut up.”

“Make me,” Ilya says.

Shane kisses him like he hates him for it. Messy, hard, familiar. Shane’s knee wedges between Ilya’s legs, pressing in just enough to make Ilya’s breath catch. Ilya drags his hands up Shane’s back, nails digging in.

He flips them, rolling Shane onto his back.

“Jesus,” Shane breathes, head dropping into the pillow, eyes closing. His shoulders tense like he’s trying to keep control, and Ilya doesn’t let him.

Ilya makes his way down Shane’s body, taking his time. Shane’s hands fist in the sheets, then in Ilya’s hair. He swears once, sharp and helpless, and it’s exactly what Ilya wants.

When they finally let go, it isn’t neat. Shane goes heavy for a moment, breath coming hard. Ilya follows him, louder than he meant to be. Shane yanks him down, and Ilya ends up sprawled on top of him, heart pounding, sweat cooling fast.

It lasts a minute.

Then Shane exhales and gently rolls Ilya off him. Ilya flops onto his back on the other side of the mattress, one arm over his face.

“I’m taking a shower,” Shane says, voice rough.

Ilya turns his head. “Your room downstairs has a shower, yes? What about fancy skin products? Sponsors will be disappointed.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, standing. “I’m not getting in the elevator looking like this.”

Ilya takes a second and lets himself look. Shane’s hair is wrecked, his mouth swollen, and his whole body is still flushed. Shane walks to the bathroom naked, clueless to what he looks like. Ilya allows himself to enjoy the view.

The shower turns on and the room goes quiet.

Ilya stays on the bed for a beat, staring at the ceiling until his pulse slows.

Then he sits up and crosses to the window barefoot and naked, pulling the curtain back just enough to look out.

Boston looks cold from up here. Streetlamps, traffic, the dark line of the river. People moving in and out of the hotel entrance, collars up, heads down.

His eyes go where they always go when Shane is around, moving without his permission. The ledges. The streetlights. The empty stretch of sky between buildings.

A loon should be easy to spot. A loon is not subtle.

He sees nothing.

Just the city. Just glass. Just his own reflection.

Ilya lets the curtain fall back into place. He keeps his face neutral even though something in his chest is tight.

He’s back on the bed, still naked, when Shane comes out of the shower fully dressed in sweats and a T-shirt. Shane pauses. His eyes track, slow and involuntary, up Ilya’s body.

When his gaze meets Ilya’s, there’s a faint flush on his cheeks, like he’s annoyed he’s been caught.

“Er,” Shane says, clearing his throat. “Bye.”

Ilya’s mouth twitches. “There is second bed. We should mess it up, yes?”

Shane snorts, tugging his sleeves down. “I already showered.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “One more round. Very quick. You will still make flight.”

Shane shakes his head, but he’s smiling now. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Yes,” Ilya says.

Shane flips him off without heat, grabs his jacket, and heads for the door.

“See you,” Ilya adds, casual on purpose.

Shane pauses just long enough to glance back. “Yeah,” he says, like it’s nothing, and then he’s gone.

The door clicks shut.

Ilya doesn’t shower. He gets dressed, calm again, and heads home.

June 2016 - Boston

Ilya’s bedroom is too cool for June in Boston, but Svetlana said she was hot, so he turned the air conditioning up. Ilya lies on his back with one arm behind his head, the sheet kicked down around his hips, catching his breath in a lazy way like he has all the time in the world.

Svetlana is sprawled beside him. They’re comfortable but not touching. He’s noticed that about them. They don’t reach for each other automatically, even after sex, like contact might mean something neither of them is interested in.

The TV is on. Some silly romcom about lovers whose marked geese show up too late, after they’ve already married other people.

“Americans,” Svetlana says, like she’s spitting out something stuck in her teeth. “Obsessed with their soulmates. It is all they talk about. Like it’s religion.”

“You sound jealous,” Ilya says, because he can’t help himself. It’s a joke, and it isn’t. “They like their stories. They don’t believe in strong partnerships you work for. They want everything easy and handed to them.”

“I think they feel special because of it,” she says. “They think it makes them better than us, since we’ve practically eradicated soulmates. But we are stronger for it.”

Ilya says nothing.

Svetlana watches him for a beat, then her voice softens a fraction, as if she hates herself for it. “But it is kind of romantic,” she adds, quieter. “Isn’t it?”

Something tightens in Ilya’s throat. He works to keep his breathing even.

Svetlana rolls onto her back. “Sometimes I think,” she says to the ceiling, “maybe it would be nice. To have one. To have something that tells you, yes, this is the person. Stop worrying. Stop thinking. Just…go.”

Her mouth twists like she’s annoyed at her own sentimentality.

Then she turns her head and looks at him again, mischief returning. “Maybe we are soulmates,” she says suddenly.

Ilya lifts a brow.

Svetlana laughs and swings herself half on top of him, arms flung around his shoulders like she’s tackling him. “Can you imagine? You and me. Fate chooses two terrible people.”

“We are not terrible,” Ilya says automatically. “But would be terrible together.”

“We are too alike,” she says, laughing into his neck. “We don’t make each other better. We let each other make poor choices. Be selfish.” Her voice turns muffled. “We would not even know, because we have no silly bird to tell us.”

Ilya hums.

Svetlana stills. Of course she does. She’s not stupid.

“Ilya,” she says slowly.

He keeps his eyes on the ceiling for a beat longer than necessary, like he can outwait the question. Like silence is a wall he can build fast enough to keep her out.

Then he says, flat, “I had a marked bird.”

Svetlana freezes. “What?”

Ilya exhales through his nose. “Yes. In Russia.”

The teasing drops out of her face so fast it’s almost frightening.

“What happened?” she asks, softer now.

He shrugs. “It didn’t come with me,” he says, as if he’s talking about a suitcase he forgot at the airport.

Her eyes widen. “So you think your soulmate is in Russia?”

“No.” The word comes out too fast. Too sure.

Svetlana’s brows lift. “No?”

Ilya shifts his gaze to her face. He hates that he said it like that. He hates that he knows it’s true.

“I don’t know,” he corrects, which is a lie. “But no.”

Svetlana studies him. “Why?”

Ilya opens his mouth and realizes he doesn’t have an answer that won’t make him sound insane. It isn’t logic. It isn’t evidence. It’s just a hard certainty in his gut, like something in him has already decided.

So he gives her the safest version of the truth he can manage.

“Been two years since I saw it,” he says. His voice is even. His hands are calm. He hates himself a little for how calm he is, like he’s talking about the weather. “Did not see it last summer in Russia. Olympics was last time.”

Svetlana’s mouth parts. “Who else knows?”

“No one.”

She huffs, annoyed, then says, almost casually, “Maybe your father saw it and killed it.”

The words hit like a slap, even though she throws them out like a joke.

Ilya goes cold.

Svetlana’s expression sharpens instantly when she sees his face. “Oh,” she says, quieter. “Maybe not joke.”

Ilya swallows. His tongue feels thick. He forces a shrug, but it’s rougher this time. “Maybe.”

Svetlana shifts off him, sitting up with the sheet wrapped around her chest. She looks suddenly restless. She drags her hair over one shoulder, twists it once, then lets it fall.

“My parents weren’t soulmates,” Ilya says.

Svetlana turns fully toward him. “No?” There’s surprise in her voice, and something like pity she tries to hide. “Yet you still have a bird?”

“I had a bird,” Ilya corrects.

“Maybe it was too weak to travel,” she suggests.

Svetlana looks at him like she wants to ask a hundred questions, then thinks better of it. Instead, she reaches out and touches his wrist, a rare gesture that isn’t teasing.

Ilya pulls his wrist away, not harshly, but enough to make the boundary clear. He sits up, grabs his shirt from the floor, and starts pulling it on.

Svetlana watches him, sheet still clutched at her waist. “Do you want it back?” she asks.

Ilya pauses with his arms half in the sleeves.

The answer is yes. The answer is always yes. He wants the proof. He wants the certainty. He wants the universe to stop hovering just out of reach and actually commit to something.

He also doesn’t want to want it.

He finishes pulling on the shirt and says, “It doesn’t matter.”

Svetlana snorts, but it’s gentle. “You are such a liar.”

Ilya doesn’t bother buttoning anything. He just sits there, hair damp, face unreadable, trying to put himself back into the shape he likes. The shape where nothing can touch him.

Svetlana’s voice softens again. “If it was real,” she says, careful, “if you truly had a marked bird, then somewhere there is someone.”

Ilya’s throat tightens. He doesn’t answer.

“And you will find them,” she adds. “Or maybe, they will find you.”

Ilya looks at her, expression flat. “Maybe.”

Svetlana’s eyes flicker, thinking, then she forces a smirk back onto her face, because she hates sincerity. “If they do,” she says, “tell them I am not sorry for having you first.”

Ilya huffs a laugh despite himself. It’s small, but it’s real.

They move to the living room to watch the Stanley Cup Final. Svetlana takes the couch like she owns it, bare legs tucked under her, hair still damp, wearing one of Ilya’s T-shirts. Ilya sits at the other end with the remote, pretending he’s in charge.

Before the broadcast even finishes its opening montage, Svetlana lifts her chin and says, smug, “I called it.”

Ilya doesn’t look at her. “What this time?”

“This,” she says, delighted. “Game one, first period. I said it will go to seven.”

“I don’t remember,” Ilya says. He does.

Svetlana points at him without taking her eyes off the screen. “You said only five games!”

On TV, the camera sweeps the arena, the noise almost physical even through the speakers. Svetlana’s attention sharpens. She’s not casual about hockey, she watches it like she’s reading a threat assessment. When the broadcast cuts to Shane Hollander during warm-ups, his helmet off and jaw set, Svetlana makes a satisfied sound.

“He is very hot,” she says. “Maybe hottest.”

Ilya pouts at her. She looks at him and laughs.

“Hottest after you, of course.”

Ilya hums. “Is this who you are now? Watching for hot players?”

“No.” Her mouth curves. “I am very intelligent. I can criticize hockey plays while also enjoying beautiful men.”

Ilya keeps his expression flat, but his thumb rubs his wrist once, absent. His mind slips, brief and unwanted, to black-and-white wings, to a heart-mark, to the way longing has started feeling like a language he understands too well. He forces himself back to the screen, to the game, to the simple logic of puck and ice.

Svetlana leans forward as play begins, calling small things under her breath. When a play breaks exactly the way she predicted, she clicks her tongue, smug. “See?”

Ilya flops over with a groan, jokingly annoyed.

Svetlana smiles like she’s won.

When it’s over, Ilya sends a single text, not expecting a response.

Jane
June 15, 2016 11:02PM

Ilya
Congrats
🎉
😥

Jane
Thanks!
No comments on how you would have done it in 6?

Ilya
4
But better you than San Francisco
Fuck San Francisco
But no more for you
Bears again next year

Jane
No way.
You’ll have to get through us first.
Which is not happening.
They’re calling us a dynasty.

Ilya
My best friend thinks you are hot.

Jane
Marleau?
Thanks?

Ilya
🙄

Svetlana stays over.

In the morning, Ilya stands in the kitchen in sweatpants with his hair still damp from the shower, watching coffee drip into the pot. Svetlana sits on the counter, barefoot, wearing her dress from last night. Her heels are on the floor beside her. Her phone is face down.

He slides a mug toward her. She takes it without saying thank you.

“So,” she says, with a forced casual tone. “Your marked bird. Was a goose?”

It takes Ilya a second to understand what she means. Then his mouth tightens, as if he’s annoyed that his brain even needed the second.

“No,” he says. The word comes out almost shy, which irritates him. “Not goose.”

Svetlana lifts her brows. “Well?”

He looks down into his coffee like the answer might be floating there. “Woodpecker.”

Svetlana stares at him for half a beat. Then she laughs so hard she folds forward, one hand braced on the counter like she might fall off it.

Ilya frowns. “What is so funny?”

“Of course,” she manages, still laughing. “Of course you have the most obnoxious bird possible.”

“It was not obnoxious.”

Svetlana makes a sound that clearly means liar. “Did it chirp at you?”

Ilya rolls his eyes. “No. It did not chirp.” He takes a slow sip of coffee, as if he can drown his embarrassment in caffeine. “It just never let me sleep. Like alarm clock. For hockey practice. Always.”

Svetlana’s laughter dies down, but something sharp stays in her eyes. A look he’s seen on her when she’s evaluating how a hockey team can best win. “Huh,” she says, quiet and thoughtful, as if she’s turning the shape of that sentence over in her hands.

A few minutes later, she disappears into his bedroom to collect her purse. Ilya washes their mugs slowly.

When she comes back out, she’s more put together, hair pulled back, lipstick reapplied like armor. She crosses the kitchen and kisses his cheek, quick and light.

Then she pauses with her hand on his shoulder, as if something has snagged in her mind.

“Do you think,” she says, measured, “your soulmate might be a man?”

Ilya blinks at her. “Why?”

Svetlana’s mouth twitches. “Well. Pecker.” She says, switching to English.

He stares. “What.”

She looks pleased with herself, as if she’s been waiting to deploy this. “To Americans,” she says, with deep satisfaction, “pecker is another name for cock.”

Ilya’s face goes hot. It’s a stupid reaction and it happens anyway.

Svetlana grins, eyes bright. “Maybe fate has sense of humor.”

Ilya exhales hard through his nose. “You are insane.”

“And you,” she says, stepping back toward the door, “are avoiding question.”

Ilya doesn’t answer. He watches her slip her coat on, watches her check her reflection in the dark screen of her phone.

At the door, she lifts two fingers in a lazy wave. “Call me if your bird comes back,” she says. It sounds like a joke.

It isn’t.

The door clicks shut behind her.

Ilya stands there for a long moment, hands on the counter, staring at nothing. His coffee has gone lukewarm. The apartment is too quiet.

He picks up his phone and opens his messages, thumb hovering over a name he has no right to want.

He doesn’t type anything.

He just stands there, feeling the shape of the question Svetlana left behind like a bruise.

Chapter End Notes

If I had a nickel for every time I half joked about a fictional character’s soulmate bird being killed by evil family members, I’d have two nickels, idk what’s wrong with me. My sincerest apologies to Prince Henry and Ilya Rozanov. I’m glad your birds lived.

Kudos 🖤 Comments 💬 Bookmarks📚 and Subscriptions 👀 absolutely make my day!!! Thank you! 🖤🦆

Chapter 4: SHANE

Chapter Notes

Oh hey! Sorry for the delay - when I first outlined this fic it was supposed to be 10k words, with Shane's chapters being the lightest. Somehow this chapter alone grew to 9k words. Hence the delay.

July 2016 - The Cottage

Shane’s cottage has never looked more like a version of him someone else would approve of.

Not cleaner. It’s always relatively neat.

Just edited.

By noon, Yuna has made a series of small, strategic adjustments that turn the place from his into something a camera will understand on sight. The framed photo of him and his parents has been moved to a side table in the living room, where it looks warm instead of private. A neat row of athletic and health magazines has appeared beneath the coffee table. A sponsor gift basket—protein bars, electrolyte powder, a shaker bottle with the logo turned neatly outward—has been redistributed across the kitchen in a way that he knows is intentional.

By the front door, his usual line of shoes has been reduced to a single pair of sneakers and one pair of CCM slides. In the gym, CCM gear is everywhere. Just enough of it to look questionably staged.

The books are the clearest tell.

He stops in front of the coffee table and looks down at a stack he knows for a fact was not there this morning. A book about leadership. Something with high performance habits stamped across the front in bold, self-important lettering. A general history of Canada, for some reason.

He picks that one up, turns it over, and snorts.

“Really?”

Yuna doesn’t look up from where she’s adjusting a throw blanket on the couch. “They’re doing a profile. It’s an opportunity.”

“It’s not a big deal. This all looks staged.”

“That’s because it is staged,” she says. “That’s how these things work.”

She steps back and surveys the room.

“You need to look like a serious person.”

Shane glances up. “I am a serious person. People already say I’m too serious.”

Yuna gives him a look. “Good. Serious is dependable. We want fans and management to remember that you’re dependable.”

“Fine,” Shane mutters.

She studies him for another second, then walks over to the TV console and opens a drawer. A moment later she pulls out the newest NHL video game and drops it onto the coffee table, right on top of the books.

“Better?” she asks, smiling a little.

Shane looks at it, sees Ilya Rozanov’s menacing look. “Sure.”

He looks around again.

The cottage doesn’t actually look that different, which might be the problem. It still looks like his place, just filtered slightly. The edges softened into something easier to read, easier to sell. His favorite thing about the cottage is that it doesn’t belong to anyone but him. Now it feels like it’s being translated into a version other people can consume.

He already regrets agreeing to this.

The crew is supposed to arrive tomorrow morning. One day, his agent had said. Simple. A few interior shots, a sit-down interview, maybe some footage outside if the weather cooperates. Good exposure. Good for his brand.

He carries a box of framed photos from the hall table into the living room, where Yuna is sorting what should stay visible and what should disappear before camera day. She has made three piles already: keep, store, and absolutely not.

He sets the box down. “We’re sure they remember the agreement about exterior shots?”

Yuna glances over. “Shane.”

“I mean it.” He nods toward the windows. “I don’t want anything wide enough that people can figure out where this is.”

Yuna straightens slowly. “You think people are going to track you down from a few shots of a lake?”

“No.”

He does. A little.

Not because he thinks he’s that important. He’s not. Not really. He’s famous enough to get recognized in airports and Montreal restaurants, but not in a way that should make him paranoid.

Still.

This place is his. The whole point of the cottage is that it isn’t an arena or a hotel or a street where someone can clock him from half a block away and ask for a photo. Out here, the trees are thick and most people mind their own business.

He’d like to keep it that way.

Yuna crosses her arms. “You’re not exactly living in Buckingham Palace.”

“I know.”

“And if someone was determined to find you, they probably could anyway.”

“Great,” Shane says. “That’s comforting.”

She smiles, because she knows he’s irritated and they both know it’s unreasonable. “I’m only saying the risk is low.”

“It still feels weird.”

That, at least, she seems to accept. Her expression softens.

“I’ll make sure they’re reminded,” she says. “But you need to be okay with some exterior shots, as long as they don’t show too much.”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “That’s fine.”

Yuna nods and goes back to rearranging photos.

Later, doing one last pass through the bedroom, Shane finds a neatly folded pair of brand-new underwear laid out on top of his dresser. Brand name clearly visible.

He stares at them for a second.

Then he rolls his eyes, opens a drawer, and shoves them inside.

The two strategically placed watches, though, he leaves where they are.

When he feels like he’s done all he can, and more than he ever wanted to, he heads outside.

The back doors are open to let in the breeze. Warm air moves through the cottage carrying the smell of sun-warmed pine and water. Somewhere across the lake, a boat engine drones and fades. Shane steps onto the deck with his coffee and leans a shoulder against the railing.

The afternoon is bright enough that the water looks hard at first glance, all glare and silver-blue. Their dock cuts into the lake in a clean straight line. Beyond it, endless trees.

Yuna joins him a moment later.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t schedule your Cup day for tomorrow,” she says.

“I could have,” Shane says. “I didn’t want to.”

“But imagine if you had the Cup just sitting on your kitchen counter.”

He doesn’t answer, instead he’s looking at the dock now. There’s a loon sitting near the end of it, black head glossy in the light, body low and neat against the boards.

That, on its own, isn’t strange. There are plenty of loons out here. He’s heard them his whole life, that fierce, carrying sound over the water that used to make him laugh when he was little and now just means summer.

But something about this one catches at him.

Loons don’t usually come this far up onto the dock.

And this one isn’t moving. It isn’t preening or shifting or looking around.

It’s just sitting there, watching him.

A tightness starts, small and mean, low in Shane’s stomach.

He looks away on purpose.

Yuna follows his line of sight and spots the bird almost immediately. “Oh, honestly.”

Shane keeps his expression neutral. “What?”

“If that thing leaves a mess all over the dock, you’re cleaning it.” She sets down her coffee and starts toward the stairs, heading down toward the shore. “We should let them get the exterior shots early, before everything’s covered in bird crap.”

“Mom.”

She glances back. “What?”

He opens his mouth. Nothing useful comes out.

Because if he says don’t go near it, she’ll ask why.

Because if he says I think that might be my soulmate bird, out loud, casually, on a sunny afternoon while she’s been rearranging his furniture for television, the whole day will split open around it.

He hasn’t told her.

The loon has been appearing for years now, but it never herds him anywhere. It never blocks him for long. It never does what marked birds are supposed to do.

It just watches.

At first Shane thought maybe it didn’t count. Maybe the mark meant something else. Maybe there had been some freak mistake. Maybe it belonged to someone nearby and he was projecting because, really, why else would it behave like this?

Like he’s a lost cause.

But the bird kept appearing. So did the emerald heart.

After that, not telling anyone started to feel easier than trying to explain a bird that seemed to have shown up with no actual instructions.

Yuna is already halfway down to the dock.

Shane follows more slowly. “You don’t have to—”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m just going to scare it off.”

The closer they get, the worse the feeling in his chest becomes. The loon doesn’t startle. Doesn’t shift. Doesn’t slide toward the water.

It remains exactly where it is, still and patient.

Yuna steps onto the dock and claps her hands once. “Shoo.”

Nothing happens.

She frowns and walks a little closer. “Go on.”

The bird turns its head a fraction and sunlight catches at the base of its tail.

Yuna stops.

Shane stops too, one foot still on shore, pulse suddenly loud in his ears.

For a beat, neither of them says anything.

Then Yuna looks back at him, startled. “Shane.”

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice comes out flatter than he means it to.

“Shane, come look.”

He doesn’t move. “I can see it.”

“It’s a marked bird,” she says.

He gives a short nod. “I know.”

Her head snaps around fully this time. “What do you mean, you know?”

He shoves a hand into the pocket of his shorts. “I mean I know.”

“Is this—” Her gaze flicks from him to the bird and back again. “Is this yours?”

“Yeah.”

She just stares at him.

“This isn’t the first time?” she asks finally.

He shakes his head.

“How long?”

He shrugs, which is not an answer and they both know it. “A while.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He looks at the bird instead of her. “Because it’s not exactly exciting.”

Yuna blinks. “Shane.”

“It doesn’t do anything.” He gestures toward the loon. “It just sits there and watches me. Like this.”

As if on cue, the bird remains perfectly still.

Yuna turns back to it slowly.

Shane crosses his arms. “I think it’s broken.”

That gets her attention. She looks at him the way she used to when he was fifteen and saying deliberately ridiculous things just to see what she’d do.

“A loon,” she says softly, almost to herself. “I don’t think I know anyone else who has a loon.”

There’s a brightness in her face now that makes something in Shane pull tight. Wonder, maybe, or joy. The kind of uncomplicated happiness he’s never felt about this bird.

“Most of my friends had geese,” she says. “Just like your father and I.” Her eyes come back to Shane, warm and a little damp at the edges. “Something different like this is supposed to be special.”

“Yeah, well,” Shane says, “it doesn’t seem to know what to do with me.”

Her mouth presses briefly together.

Then, without comment, she turns and walks back down the dock toward Shane and the house.

Shane watches her approach. “What, that’s it?”

“Come on,” she says softly. “Let’s sit.”

She slips an arm around him as they head back up the lawn together. Shane lets her, which probably says enough on its own.

They settle into the deck chairs, retrieving their abandoned coffee mugs, and sit looking out at the lake. The loon is exactly where they left it.

The water stretches flat and bright. Somewhere farther off, another loon calls, the sound strange and lonely and familiar all at once. The one on the dock doesn’t answer.

Shane wraps both hands around his mug. “I don’t think I have one.”

Yuna glances over.

The words sound stupid as soon as he says them. Too blunt. Too young, somehow.

But now that they’re out, he keeps going.

“I think that’s why it’s like this.” He nods toward the bird. “Maybe it showed up and there’s just… nothing on the other end. So it doesn’t know where to take me.”

Yuna’s expression doesn’t shift into pity, which he appreciates.

Instead she hums, thoughtful. “That isn’t how it works.”

“How do you know?”

“Marked birds aren’t always direct,” she says, sidestepping the question. “You know that.”

He does.

Everyone does, more or less. People tell stories. Birds that shove someone into a ceramics class where they meet their soulmate six months later. Birds that won’t stop dragging a man to the public library until he finally picks up a book on grief and becomes the sort of person capable of keeping the relationship fate is trying to hand him. Birds that lead people toward jobs, cities, roommates, routines.

Not always pushing toward the person, sometimes just the path.

He knows all that.

He also knows it hasn’t made his own bird any less useless.

“It could be preparing you,” Yuna says. “Or moving you toward something connected. It doesn’t always mean the people around the bird are important.”

Shane stares out over the water. He’s heard versions of this before, secondhand, from teammates and distant relatives and glossy magazine profiles about soulmates that try to make it all sound mystical instead of inconvenient. There are dozens of cliche romance movies built around the same idea. But he’s never paid much attention. It was easy not to, when hockey already took up all his time and energy.

He rubs his thumb against the handle on his coffee mug. “I think my soulmate has something to do with hockey.”

Yuna doesn’t laugh. “Oh?” she says, curious.

“I mean, if this thing has ever showed up anywhere specific, it’s usually been around hockey. A rink, a hotel, training, something like that.”

“Then maybe that’s it.” She leans back in her chair. “Administration, maybe. Or media. A journalist.”

Shane nods, because those are reasonable answers. Safe ones.

“Or a trainer,” she adds. “A doctor. Someone who works with the team.”

“Yeah.” Shane takes a sip of coffee gone slightly cold and barely tastes it. “Maybe.”

He doesn’t say the rest.

That sometimes, on the worst nights, when the loon appears and does nothing but sit there with that maddening certainty, Shane thinks the bird is waiting for him to figure something out on his own.

That maybe it has already taken him where he was supposed to go, more than once, and he just didn’t recognize it.

That maybe the problem isn’t the bird.

Maybe the problem is him.

On the dock, the loon finally moves.

Not much. Just enough to stand, give one tidy shake of its feathers, and settle again, facing the shore head-on this time instead of angled toward the lake.

Shane lets out a quiet laugh with no humor in it. “See?”

Yuna looks from the bird to her son.

“It’s weird,” he says.

“Maybe,” she says gently.

He looks down into his coffee. The surface trembles slightly in the breeze.

The next day, the film crew shows up and points cameras at his life and asks carefully managed questions about pressure and leadership and playing through all of it. Yuna makes sure the books are stacked correctly. Somebody suggests a shot on the dock where the lake does it’s job and glitters. Shane nods and smiles. 

And, apparently, his soulmate bird might show up in the clips too.

- - - 

A week later, Shane drives over to his parents’ cottage with a container of leftover burgers balanced on the passenger seat.

He could do the ten-minute drive half-asleep, along the same narrow roads through trees and rock, with glimpses of water flashing between them. The burgers slide a little when he takes a turn, and he reaches over to steady the container with one hand.

The cottage looks exactly the same as it always does, and something in him eases at the sight of it. He grabs the burgers and heads inside.

Yuna is at the kitchen table with her laptop open, typing when he comes in. She has the kind of focus Shane has learned is her baseline, though on anyone else it would look intense. David is out on the back deck with a copy of The New Yorker in hand. The screen door is open between them, which means they’ve probably been talking back and forth.

“I brought food,” Shane says, setting the container on the table.

Yuna glances at it. “More burgers?”

“I like the recipe. And I’ve been working out a lot.”

“Mm,” Yuna says. “You know, you can put leftovers in the fridge and eat them tomorrow.”

Shane flips open the lid. “You can just say no.”

David comes in from the deck, drawn by either Shane’s voice or the word burgers. “What’s this?”

“More burgers,” Yuna says.

David grins and claps a hand on Shane’s shoulder on his way to inspect the container. “Perfect.”

Shane lets himself be nudged into a chair while Yuna gets up to pull out plates anyway, like she’d anticipated being fed and planned accordingly.

“I heard from the production team this morning,” she says casually.

Shane looks up. “Yeah?”

She nods. “They said the footage looks very good. They were very happy with it.”

He leans back a little in his chair. “Good.” He feels awkward about it. He didn’t do much, and it doesn’t feel like something he should get credit for.

Yuna starts transferring burgers to plates, they’re still a little warm. Shane’s nearly perfected how long he has to eat one after making them before he needs to get them in a container and in the car so they’re still warm when he arrives.

“Oh, Mom. Those are for you two. I already had one,” Shane says when he sees her set out a third plate.

“I think you’ve been working out enough that you probably need a second.”

She hands him a plate anyway, then serves herself and David.

When she sits back down, she has a book in her hand.

It’s a glossy hardcover, slightly bigger than average, with a loon floating across an impossibly misty lake at dawn on the cover.

The title is earnest to the point of aggression: Listening to Loons: Behavior, Habitat, and the Language of the Lake.

Yuna slides it across the table to him.

Shane stares at it. “What’s this?”

“I thought you might want to learn more.” She studies his face. “Maybe it isn’t acting weird. Maybe this is just how loons are.”

Shane flips it open and scans the table of contents. “This isn’t about soulmates at all.”

“Yes, well, a loon as a marked bird is very rare. There aren’t exactly books about that.” Yuna says carefully, like she knows he might bolt if she pushes too hard. “But I thought this might still tell you something.”

Shane looks up and finds both of them watching him.

“You told Dad?”

“Was I not supposed to?” Yuna asks, giving him a look.

“No. I don’t care.” Shane pulls the book a little closer. “It’s just a stupid bird.”

David leans over and sets a hand on Shane’s forearm. “Hey. I’m glad you have a soulmate. And if they’re taking their time, that’s okay too.”

Shane sighs.

Yuna’s expression softens. “It’ll be okay, Shane.”

He doesn’t answer. He looks back down at the cover, at the loon drifting across the mist like it has all the time in the world.

- - -

The book sits on his coffee table for three days before Shane opens it.

Not because he doesn’t want to. Because he does, a little, and that irritates him on principle.

It stays there while he moves around it. On the way to the kitchen in the morning. When he drops onto the couch after workouts. When he’s watching TV and scrolling through his phone instead of paying attention. The glossy cover catches the light every time he looks in that direction, the loon floating there in its misty lake like it knows something he doesn’t.

By the third day, the whole thing starts to feel like an unavoidable heaviness. 

Shane is on his way through the living room with a glass of water when he stops, doubles back, and picks it up.

“Fine,” he mutters.

He sits on the couch and opens to the table of contents.

There’s a chapter on habitat. Another on migration patterns. Several pages on nesting behavior that he skims because none of that seems remotely useful to his life. He doesn’t need to know where loons prefer to breed or what kind of shoreline they favor. He’s not building one a sanctuary. He’s trying to figure out why his marked bird keeps showing up, staring at him, and acting like a weird little spy.

Then he gets to the section on vocalizations and laughs out loud.

Of course there’s a whole section on loon sounds.

Wails, yodels, tremolos, hoots.

The book describes each one in loving detail, earnest and specific. The wail is used to locate companions. The yodel is territorial, a warning call from one male to another. Tremolos signal agitation or alarm. Hoots are softer, meant for close-range communication.

His loon has never made a single sound.

Not a hoot. Not a wail. Not whatever the hell a tremolo is.

The book isn’t profound. It doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t offer some hidden key to soulmates or fate or why his bird seems to have missed the day in marked-bird school when they explained the assignment.

After a while, Shane drops it shut and lets it fall against the couch cushion beside him.

Fine.

He doesn’t care.

Or at least, he doesn’t want to care.

If the bird gets its shit together later, great. He’d be happy to have a soulmate. He’s not against the idea. He’s seen what it can look like when it works, that quiet certainty, that sense of being chosen in some deep and irreversible way.

But he’s not going to lose focus over a bird that won’t even do the bare minimum.

Training camp is coming. He has real things to think about, things he can control.

So he puts the book back on the coffee table.

He doesn’t let his mind wander after that.

He doesn’t think about what it might be like to have a soulmate.

He doesn’t think about what kind of person they’d be, or what their voice might sound like, or whether he would know right away.

He definitely doesn’t picture a face turning toward him across a room.

And he absolutely does not think about the loon appearing someday with purpose instead of silence, as if it has finally made up its mind.

Instead he leaves the book where it is.

November 2016 - Boston

Boston hits him the second he steps off the plane: airport air giving way to damp cold, everything gray at the edges, the sky hanging low enough to feel personal.

By the time they get to the hotel, Shane is tired, stiff through the shoulders, and already wondering if it’s time he got his own room on the road. 

Shane is halfway off the team bus when he sees it.

The loon is sitting beside a concrete planter near the hotel entrance, black head glossy under the overhang lights, body tucked low against the slush-streaked pavement like this is a perfectly normal place for it to be.

Shane stops with one foot still on the curb.

The rest of the team keeps filing off the bus with their bags. Hayden is already three steps ahead, oblivious.

“You coming?” Hayden asks over his shoulder.

Shane tears his eyes away. “Yeah.”

When he looks back, the loon is still there.

Watching him. Like always.

He shoulders his bag and walks into the hotel without acknowledging it, which feels childish, but yelling at a bird in public wouldn’t be any better.

The lobby is loud and too bright while room keys get handed out. Someone drags a suitcase across the tile loudly enough to make Shane clench his jaw. Hayden is talking about dinner options, or room service, or Jackie; Shane isn’t really listening, because the prickling at the back of his neck hasn’t gone away.

By the time they get upstairs, he’s irritated enough to go quiet in a way that is definitely obvious to Hayden, who is somehow only observant when Shane wishes he isn’t.

“You okay?” Hayden asks, tossing his bag onto the bed nearest the door.

“Fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Hayden snorts and starts digging through his toiletry bag.

Shane sets his suitcase beside the other bed and glances out the window, without thinking he finds himself searching the ground.

The hotel entrance is partly visible from here.

The loon is still there. A dark shape, motionless and patient.

“Jesus Christ,” Shane mutters.

Hayden looks up. “What?”

Shane hesitates.

Then, because apparently he’s ignoring his plan to pretend he doesn’t care, he says, “Can I ask you something?”

Hayden’s expression changes instantly, curiosity replacing amusement. “What’s up?”

Shane ignores that. “Your bird. With Jackie. When did you know, I guess.”

Hayden’s eyebrows lift. “Wow.”

“Never mind.”

“Yeah, no. We’re definitely talking about this.” Hayden grins. “Why the sudden interest in soulmates? I thought hockey was your soulmate.”

Shane throws a balled-up clean sock at him. Hayden knocks it away, still grinning.

“Okay,” Hayden says, relenting. “What do you want to know?”

Shane sits on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees. “How direct was it?”

“With Jackie?”

“Yeah.”

Hayden considers. “Not that direct at first.”

That gets Shane’s attention.

Hayden shrugs. “I mean, obviously once we were actually together, there were things that made more sense looking back. But before that? It wasn’t like the goose dragged me into her lap or anything.”

Shane huffs a laugh despite himself.

“It got pushier the longer we dated,” Hayden says. “Like it knew I was being an idiot.”

“You?” Shane says flatly.

“I know. Hard to believe.” Hayden leans back against the headboard. “A few months in, it led me into this baby store.”

Shane looks up. “What?”

Hayden laughs. “Yeah. Strollers, tiny socks, cribs that had all these features, like transitioning into toddler beds. I had no reason to be there. Jackie wasn’t with me. We weren’t even talking about that kind of future yet.”

“But you went in.”

“The goose pecked the back of my leg until I did.”

Shane can almost picture it.

“What happened?”

Hayden’s grin softens into something quieter, more private. “Nothing happened, exactly. I walked around for five minutes feeling insane. Then I saw this little onesie with hockey sticks on it and had this sudden, horrifying moment where I pictured a kid that looked like Jackie.”

Shane looks away.

Hayden keeps talking, voice easier now. “Not in some vague someday way. In a real way.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. It was like—” Hayden makes a face. “Like a reality check, except from the future.”

Shane says nothing.

“Anyway,” Hayden says, “that was kind of it. Not right then, but after that I couldn’t really pretend I wasn’t already all in. I proposed a few weeks later.”

Shane stares at the carpet.

Hayden studies him for a moment. “Why?”

“No reason.”

“Bullshit.”

Shane shrugs. “Just wondering.”

Hayden is quiet for a beat, which is somehow worse than the teasing. Then he says, more gently, “It’ll happen when it happens. Don’t think about it too much.”

Shane glances over.

Hayden’s expression has gone annoyingly sincere. “You deserve the right soulmate. It might just take a while.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not.”

Shane picks at a loose thread on the comforter. “And honestly, you’re kind of right. I don’t have time for a relationship. I need to stay focused on hockey.”

Hayden nods, but Shane can tell he doesn’t really buy it.

Shane doesn’t look back out the window.

He doesn’t need to.

He already knows what he’ll find.

- - - 

Shane isn’t sure how he got here.

Sitting on Rozanov’s couch, eating a tuna melt, talking about soulmates.

Rozanov has one arm stretched along the back of the couch, still not quite touching him, and says, too casually, “You believe in marked birds, Hollander?”

Shane blinks. “What?”

Ilya shrugs, eyes still on the TV. “Question is simple.”

Shane stares at him. “They’re scientifically proven. Why wouldn’t I believe in them?”

“Most Russians do not believe. Or pretend not to.” Ilya takes a drink from his Coke. “Too inconvenient for the government.”

Shane glances over at him. “I didn’t know that.”

Ilya shrugs again.

“What about you?” Shane asks.

“Yes. I believe,” Ilya says, glancing at Shane. He leans deeper into the couch, expression blank as he goes back to watching the TV without seeming to see it. “Mine is maybe in Russia.”

The shift is small but immediate.

“Oh,” Shane says, not sure why that lands the way it does.

Ilya looks down at the can in his hand. “Have not seen my shit bird in years.”

Shane frowns. “Seriously?”

Another shrug. “Maybe my soulmate died.”

The words land between them with a hard little thud.

Ilya drinks. “Who cares.”

Shane looks at him properly then. “That’s bleak.”

Ilya’s mouth tilts. “I am Russian. It is our brand.”

“Jesus.”

“Maybe bird got bored,” Ilya says. “Maybe I am too lazy. Maybe fate looked at me and said, no thanks.”

Shane huffs a laugh despite himself.

But Ilya is still staring at the TV, gaze gone distant, and Shane gets the uncomfortable sense that he means at least some of it.

“You’re not lazy,” Shane says. “You’re the second-best hockey player in the NHL. You couldn’t be lazy and do that.”

Ilya finally looks at him. It’s one of the softest expressions Shane has ever seen on his face, and that alone is enough to make something in him tighten.

“What about yours?” Ilya asks.

Shane reaches for his ginger ale too quickly. “I don’t really think about it,” he says, avoiding Ilya’s gaze. “She’s probably out there somewhere.”

Ilya turns his head. “She?”

Shane pauses. “My soulmate.”

Ilya gives him a long look. It’s not teasing or smirking. Just looking.

Somehow that’s worse.

Shane shifts uncomfortably against the couch. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Ilya reaches over then and pulls Shane in against his side.

At first it just feels unfamiliar. They don’t usually sit like this. But then Ilya is warm. Solid. His arm settles across Shane’s shoulders like it belongs there, easy as breathing, and Shane hates how quickly his body starts treating it like something safe.

That’s the problem.

If it were only sex, Shane could handle it.

If it were just Rozanov being obnoxious and hot and impossible, he could handle that too. He has been handling it. More or less.

But this is different.

This is softer.

Something in Shane’s chest goes bright and frightened.

He jerks away.

Rozanov stills immediately. “Hey.”

Shane is already sitting up, breath uneven, skin hot. “I should go.”

Rozanov blinks at him. “What?”

“I should go.”

“Hollander.”

Shane is on his feet now, reaching for his jacket with the kind of clumsy urgency that only makes him feel more out of control. “I have to go.”

Rozanov stands too. “Did I do something?”

“No.”

Which is true. And not true. And useless either way.

Shane shoves one arm into his sleeve. “I just—I should go.”

Rozanov takes a step toward him, his expression changed now, the easy sarcasm gone. “Talk to me.”

He gets out something that might be goodbye or might just be Ilya’s name catching in his throat, and then he’s gone.

The hallway feels too hot, and the elevator takes too long to arrive. By the time he gets outside, the cold hits him like a slap and still doesn’t fix anything.

His head is a mess. His skin feels burnt, and his mouth still tastes like melted cheese and Ilya. The whole thing is lodged under his ribs.

He needs to get back to the hotel.

No. Not the hotel.

He can’t deal with Hayden right now—with Hayden’s stupid perceptive face, his normal, functional soulmate life, and the possibility of being asked if he’s okay in that careful voice that somehow makes everything worse.

What he needs is space. A walk, maybe. Something long enough to stop feeling like he’s about to crawl out of his own skin.

He barely makes it five steps before he sees it.

The loon is standing on the sidewalk ahead of him, not sitting this time. The second Shane stops, it starts waddling toward him.

He stares at it. “You have got to be kidding me.”

The loon keeps coming, waddling with each determined little step, the emerald heart at the base of its tail flashing when the light catches it. Under different circumstances, maybe if he were less stressed and less aware that his entire life seems to be turning into some kind of deranged fiction, it might actually be funny.

Instead, his stomach drops.

Because it’s moving toward him.

“Fuck off,” Shane says.

The loon opens its beak and lets out the ugliest, loudest sound Shane has ever heard in his life. He actually flinches.

“What the fuck.”

Another furious squawk follows, loud enough that people across the street turn to look. Shane starts walking again, and the loon follows.

Not gracefully, and not especially fast, but with relentless, horrible purpose, squawking all the way down the block like it’s personally offended by every decision Shane has made tonight.

“Go the fuck away,” Shane hisses, looking back briefly.

The loon answers with another squawk.

He reaches up and yanks the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, pulling it low over his face. The last thing he needs is for this to end up online. A couple of people are openly staring now, and Shane keeps his head down and walks faster, heat climbing up the back of his neck while the loon continues after him, furious and loud and completely committed.

At the next corner, he slows just long enough to get his bearings and figure out which direction the hotel is. That’s when the loon catches up and immediately goes for his ankles.

The first jab lands sharp against the back of his left leg, just above his shoe. Shane jerks sideways with a curse, and before he can recover, the loon pecks at him again, then the other ankle, quick and vicious and weirdly precise, as if this has been its plan all along.

He looks around wildly. No one is helping. One guy across the street is definitely laughing.

“Are you serious?” Shane mutters.

The loon squawks again and comes at him repeatedly.

Shane hurriedly taps at his phone, looking for the number for a cab or trying to find an uber. His hand is shaking and he isn’t having much luck.

When the loon comes at his right ankle from the side, smacking right into the bone, that does it.

He takes off at the fastest pace he can manage, fully sprinting, his lungs jolting at the sudden effort. He knows this is stupid, knows he has a game tomorrow, knows he didn’t stretch and is probably going to regret every second of this later, but none of that matters as much as getting away from the homicidal bird trying to maul him in public.

For half a block he can still hear it behind him, squawking like an alarm he can’t shut off. Then, finally, there’s nothing.

By the time he makes it back to the hotel, he’s breathing hard and sweating under his coat, and the humiliation is almost worse than the pain. He slows under the overhang and risks a glance behind him.

No loon.

Thank fuck.

He limps into the lobby, trying to walk normally, which might have worked better if pain weren’t shooting up both legs from just above his heels. In the elevator, when the doors close and he’s finally alone, he looks down and sees blood already soaking through the backs of his socks.

“Unbelievable,” he mutters.

When he gets back to the room, Hayden is sitting on his bed in sweatpants, on speakerphone with Jackie. He takes one look at Shane and says, “Hey, babe, I’ve got to go. Kiss the kids goodnight for me.”

He hangs up and stares. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

Hayden’s eyes drop immediately to Shane’s ankles, where the blood is undeniable.

“You’re a shitty liar,” Hayden says.

Shane shrugs out of his coat and sits heavily on the edge of the other bed. “I walked into something.”

Hayden gets up and heads for the bathroom. “Backwards?”

Shane lets out a breath that is almost a sob and drops his head into his hands.

When Hayden comes back, he’s holding a wet washcloth. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Is it at least an interesting story?” Hayden asks softly.

“No,” Shane says sharply.

Hayden doesn’t look convinced, but he crouches beside Shane’s bag and starts digging until he finds the first-aid kit Shane has carried for years, captain or not. He passes over disinfectant, then bandages, while Shane cleans the cuts as carefully as he can and tries very hard not to think about anything at all.

Ilya’s face.

The loon.

The sound it made.

The way one arm around his shoulders had made his whole body melt.

Hayden studies him for a second, and Shane can feel the question coming long before Hayden says anything. He already hates him for being there to ask it.

But Hayden, maybe out of mercy, only says, “You want me to turn the TV back on and pretend you’re not having whatever kind of crisis this is?”

Shane exhales through his nose. “Yeah.”

Hayden nods once, reaches for the remote, and lets it go.

Shane leans back against the headboard with his throbbing ankles stretched awkwardly in front of him. Outside the window, the city hums on, indifferent as ever, and for the first time in years he finds himself wishing his bird had stayed broken after all.

January 2017 - Montreal

Rose is pressed close in front of him on the dance floor, one hand looped loosely around the back of his neck, smiling up at him like she’s noticed he’s only halfway here and decided, for now, not to hold it against him.

Shane is trying.

That should count for something.

But across the room, Rozanov has a brunette half-draped over him, and Shane can’t stop looking.

It’s not even subtle. Rozanov is dancing in the loose, lazy way he does everything physical, like his body just knows what to do without ever having to think about it. The woman laughs at something he says, leans in, and a minute later they’re kissing.

Shane’s jaw tightens.

Rose’s fingers brush the strip of skin at the bottom of his shirt, and he realizes he’s stopped moving entirely. He hadn’t been dancing all that well to begin with, but standing frozen in the middle of a crowded floor with Rose Landry draped around him is probably noticeable. Or at least weird.

Rose, to her credit, doesn’t seem annoyed.

She sways a little closer instead, her mouth near his ear. “Do you want to get out of here?”

Shane looks at her.

Under different circumstances, this should be easy. Rose is warm and sharp and clearly interested in him. He likes her. He does. He likes talking to her. He likes that she never pushes too hard. He likes that being with her makes sense in a way too many other things lately haven’t.

He says yes before he can think too hard about why he shouldn’t.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

Rose smiles. “Okay.”

They make their way out through the crowd, past the bar, then down a hallway washed in red light and into the cooler quiet near the entrance, where people are waiting on coats and rides.

Rose checks her phone, then slips it back into her bag. “The car will be here in five.”

Shane nods. He has the vague sense that he should have been the one to suggest leaving together, or call the car, or take charge of the evening in literally any way. Instead he slides an arm around her waist and pulls her in a little closer.

At least he can get that part right.

She looks up at him. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Then Rose lifts a hand to his jaw and kisses him, and Shane’s brain immediately gets in the way.

He starts thinking about the mechanics of it—whether he should use more tongue, whether he should pull back and tease her a little, whether he’s being too restrained or not restrained enough. He has the brief, disorienting thought that maybe he’s supposed to be softer with a woman.

And then, because apparently his mind is determined to sabotage him, he thinks of Rozanov on the dance floor.

Ilya had not looked soft at all.

Shane pulls back and gives Rose a smile that feels normal enough, or that he hopes does.

She smiles back, but there’s something searching in it now.

Her phone buzzes and they step outside just as headlights sweep across the curb.

Shane is halfway to the car before he sees it.

The loon is sitting at the edge of the sidewalk under a streetlamp, body tucked low, black head glossy in the cold. Still. Silent.

Watching.

All the blood seems to drain out of Shane at once.

Rose turns to follow his line of sight. Her expression changes—not startled exactly, but intent, like she’s putting something together. 

“Oh,” she says.

Shane says nothing.

The driver is already out of the car, holding the back door open, but the whole moment has gone crooked somehow. The bird isn’t moving. It isn’t doing anything except existing where it shouldn’t and making Shane feel like his skin fits wrong.

Rose looks from the loon to Shane.

Then she touches his wrist, light and brief. “I think maybe we should call it a night.”

Shane looks at her sharply. “What?”

She stays calm. Not offended. Not even cold. If anything, she sounds almost kind, which makes it worse.

“It’s okay,” she says. “You seem distracted.”

“I’m not.”

Rose gives him a look that says he obviously is.

The driver is still standing there with the door open.

Shane glances at the bird again. It hasn’t moved.

“I want you to come home with me,” he says, and hears too late how forced it sounds, like he’s saying it because he should want it, because this night is supposed to go somewhere, because if it does then maybe everything else will make some kind of sense.

Rose’s face softens just enough to make it worse.

“No,” she says gently. “You don’t.”

He opens his mouth, but nothing useful comes out.

She shakes her head once. “It’s okay, Shane.”

She says it with enough grace that he can’t even argue.

Or maybe he could, but he knows he’d lose.

Rose leans in and kisses his cheek instead, quick and warm. “Let’s get dinner sometime soon, okay?”

Then she gets into the car.

The door shuts. The car pulls away into traffic, taking with it whatever version of the night Shane had been trying to force into existence.

He stands on the curb with his hands in his pockets and the silent loon ten feet away.

“Fuck off,” Shane mutters.

The loon doesn’t move.

- - -

Rose invites him to dinner a week later.

She suggests somewhere quiet and expensive enough that nobody bothers them, a place with low lighting, excellent wine, and the kind of service that makes discretion feel built into the walls.

Shane arrives early and still feels off-balance when she walks in.

Rose smiles easily when she sees him. There’s no visible awkwardness or tension. She kisses his cheek like they are exactly what they have always been, as if the disaster at the club never happened.

He’s immediately grateful for that, and somehow even more nervous.

Rose picks up her menu. “Relax.”

Shane looks down at his water glass.

The waiter comes and they order. For a few blessed minutes, they talk about ordinary things: the movie Rose is filming in Montreal, Detroit’s recent win, Montreal’s recent loss. It almost starts to feel normal.

Then their food arrives, Rose folds her hands lightly around her wineglass, and says, “So.”

Shane stares at his plate. “Right.”

Rose waits.

That, more than anything, gets to him. She doesn’t pounce or fill the silence for him.  She just lets the silence sit there until he either says something honest or makes an ass of himself trying not to.

He takes a deep breath. “I owe you an explanation.”

Rose tilts her head. “You don’t owe me anything. But it might help to talk about... whatever this is.”

Shane lets out a breath through his nose.

“It’s not that I’m not interested in you,” he says.

Rose’s mouth twitches.

He almost smiles back.

“It’s not that,” he says again, quieter this time. “I just think maybe I’ve got too much going on right now for this to be fair to you.”

Rose watches him for a moment. “Okay.”

So he keeps going.

“My marked bird is all kinds of fucked up,” he says. “And I don’t think you deserve to get dragged into that. I haven’t seen your bird at all, so I don’t think we’re missing some huge future we’re supposed to have.”

“What do you mean your bird is fucked up?” Rose asks softly.

He looks down again. “It never does anything. It just watches me.” He gives a short, embarrassed laugh. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe I just don’t have a soulmate. Or maybe I’m not...” He stops. “Maybe I’m not good enough yet.”

Rose reaches across the table and takes his hand.

“Shane, anyone would be lucky to have you,” she says. “The right person will come along and fall head over heels for you.”

He ducks his head.

“Can I ask you something?” she says.

He looks up.

She hesitates just enough to make it clear she is choosing her words carefully. “Have you considered that maybe the problem isn’t your bird?”

Shane frowns. “What does that mean?”

Rose keeps hold of his hand, but lightly, like she will let go the second he wants her to. “Maybe your bird isn’t confused. Maybe you are.”

He goes still.

Rose studies his face for a second. “And I might be wrong. If I am, say so, and I’ll drop it.” She takes a breath. “But have you considered that your soulmate might be a man?”

The directness of it sends heat rushing up Shane’s neck.

He stares at her. “What?”

“Shane,” Rose says gently, “tell me if I’m wrong. But has that crossed your mind at all?”

He pulls his hand back.

“I like you,” he says too quickly. “I like talking to you. I like being with you.”

“I know.”

“And I know the sex part is...” He stops, jaw tightening. “Complicated.”

“It isn’t complicated,” Rose says, not unkindly. “It just doesn’t work. And that’s okay.”

He shakes his head. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t another woman out there where it would be different.”

Rose is quiet for a beat. “Has it ever been?”

He looks at her. “What?”

“Has it ever been different?”

Shane doesn’t answer.

Rose’s voice stays gentle. “Has sex with women ever actually felt right to you?”

“Sure,” he says automatically.

Rose just looks at him.

He drops his head into his hands. By now the food between them is going cold.

“Hey,” Rose says. “It’s okay. We don’t have to do this tonight. But I care about you, and if you want to talk about it, I’m here.”

Shane lets out a long breath into his palms. “I don’t know if my soulmate is a man.”

“Okay,” Rose says simply.

That almost undoes him more than anything else, the fact that she doesn’t push.

After a moment she asks, “Have you ever been with a man?”

Shane hesitates, then nods.

A small smile slips across his face before he can stop it.

Of course Rose notices.

“And was it good?” she asks.

Shane’s smile turns helpless at the edges. He thinks, unwillingly and all at once, of the first time with Ilya.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “It was really good.”

Rose smiles then, warm and unsurprised, and reaches across the table to squeeze his hand again.

“You think that means my soulmate is a man?” Shane asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “But maybe. And if it is, that might explain why your duck isn’t pushing you yet.”

“It’s a loon,” Shane says automatically.

Rose laughs.

The sound loosens something in his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Rose shakes her head. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You are a wonderful friend, and I very much want to stay your friend.” Her voice is gentle, but not pitying. 

Shane picks at the edge of his napkin. “I want that too.”

“I know.”

That gets a brief laugh out of him, and some of the tension finally leaves his shoulders.

They eat after that, slowly picking at food that has gone colder than either of them meant it to. The conversation drifts, then circles back. Rose tells him about a cousin whose bird led her through three different cities before she met her wife, and Shane listens more closely than he means to.

By the time they step back onto the sidewalk, the air has gone sharp.

They pause under the awning for a second, neither of them in a hurry to bolt.

“This was nice,” Rose says.

“It was.”

“And weird.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“But nice weird.”

He almost says thank you, but before he can, Rose glances down.

Shane follows her gaze.

The loon is standing beside them.

Of course it is.

Only this time, instead of staring at Shane from a distance, it steps closer to Rose and brushes lightly against the side of her ankle, feathers grazing the leather of her boot.

Shane stares.

Rose stares too.

The loon stays there for one strange, deliberate second, then steps back.

“What the hell,” Shane says.

Rose’s expression shifts into something softer, almost amused.

Then she looks up at him and smiles. “I think it’s saying thank you.”

Shane blinks. “For what?”

Rose lifts a hand and cups his cheek. “For not letting you waste any more time.”

She kisses him then, soft and brief and final.

When she pulls back, she smiles again. “Text me.” Then she points toward him as the driver opens her car door. “I mean it.”

Shane huffs a laugh. “Okay.”

Rose gets into the car and is gone a moment later, taillights slipping into traffic.

The loon stays beside him for another beat before turning, almost casually, toward the street. It settles at the edge of the curb.

Shane looks at it for a long moment.

“I think I’ll be ready soon,” he says quietly.

The loon doesn’t answer.

January 2017 - Tampa Bay

Florida in January feels wrong.

He should be used to it by now, after years of road trips and midseason travel, but the idea of standing on a beach in January with bare legs and salt in the air still feels fundamentally incorrect. Beaches are for summer. For cottages and lake water and the familiar bite of wind, not this soft, damp warmth in the middle of winter.

It’s fully dark by the time Shane wanders down to the sand.

The hotel lights glow behind him in warm squares, blurred by distance. He walks without any real destination, hands in the pockets of his shorts, sunglasses long gone, the night open around him.

The beach is mostly empty this far down. A few distant hotel guests linger near the waterline. Somewhere behind him, a couple laughs and then fades away. The rest is just surf and wind and the hush of a place that looks like it should be bright and crowded, but isn’t.

He should probably go back inside soon. He has an early flight tomorrow, back to Montreal.

But for a few minutes he can pretend he’s just some guy walking alone on a beach in Florida at night.

Then he sees it.

The loon is perched halfway up a dune in the darkest stretch of beach, where the hotel light falls off and everything turns to shadow.

It looks wrong enough that his stomach drops.

Loons belong to northern lakes and cold mornings and that familiar sound carrying over dark water. Not this warm moonlit strip of Florida sand. Not a beach at night with palm trees somewhere behind it and the ocean breathing in front.

But it’s there.

Shane tries to think of other southern cities where it’s shown up and comes up with almost nothing. Maybe Los Angeles during All-Star weekend a few years ago, though he can’t remember it clearly. Nothing like this, anyway. Nothing where the bird has looked this misplaced.

It feels even more wrong here than it ever has in the middle of a city.

As usual, it’s just watching him.

Shane stops walking.

“What?” he says quietly.

The loon doesn’t move.

A few weeks ago, maybe even a few days ago, he would have turned around and gone the other way. But since talking with Rose, the bird doesn’t unsettle him in quite the same way. Or maybe it does, just differently.

He takes a breath and walks a little closer. Not too close. Just enough to settle himself at the bottom of the dune, the sand cool under his legs as he sits.

The loon stays where it is.

After that, he stops keeping track.

He listens to the ocean and lets himself think about ordinary things. Montreal’s playoff chances, which are basically guaranteed. Another Cup, which feels possible in the way the best things always do—close enough to imagine, far enough away to stay dangerous. He thinks about the cottage, too, and how some people love beach houses, how he can see the appeal in theory, but wouldn’t trade the cottage for anything. Not for this beach, not for any beach. 

The waves keep rolling in.

Then he hears footsteps in the sand behind him.

Not loud. Just close enough to cut through the water and the wind.

Shane turns.

Ilya drops down beside him like he belongs there, like this is not absurd at all, like finding Shane alone on a dark Florida beach was the most natural thing in the world.

“Found you,” Ilya says.

Shane’s head snaps immediately away from Ilya and to the dune.

The loon is gone.

The top of the dune is empty, smooth and pale in the moonlight.

Something in him sinks before he can stop it.

He looks away from the dune almost at once.

He looks back at Ilya.

“You were looking for me?” Shane asks.

“Of course not,” Ilya says, with the beginning of a smirk.

Shane looks at him for a second, at the moonlight caught on his cheekbone, at the easy lie of it, and feels his whole body go unexpectedly still.

Then he turns back toward the water, shoulder almost brushing Ilya’s, and lets the quiet stretch between them.

He doesn’t think about outrunning what might happen next.

Chapter End Notes

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