Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Svetlana Vetrova, Grigori Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Assorted Boston Bears and Montreal Voyageurs

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Canon Rewrite, but like, Parallel Canon Fic That Is A Love Letter To Canon, Miscommunication, Lies & Deception, Explicit Sexual Content, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, They've Just Made It Difficult, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, Slow Burn

Language:

English

Series:

Part 4 of my heated rivalry anon fics

Collections:

Anonymous Fics

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-07 Updated: 2026-03-12 Words: 35,631 Chapters: 3/?

win and bear it

Summary

Finding your soulmate is supposed to be beautiful. You stand in front of someone and you say their full name; they say yours. Your soulmarks appear somewhere on your bodies, and it's supposed to be beautiful. Life-changing.

It's not supposed to happen a week before the World Juniors tournament in a dirty Saskatchewan parking lot. It's not supposed to be Canada's newest darling hockey player and your future rival who whispers your name. It's not supposed to be a boy that your skin blooms for.

And if that does happen, despite the fact that it shouldn't, you're definitely not supposed to lie to your soulmate's face, refuse to say his name in return, and pretend that you never felt your soulmark appear at all. And if that happens, somehow, you're definitely not supposed to kiss him less than a year later. And then later. And then later. And then later, until you realize you never want to leave his bed despite the fact that you've never told him the truth about the bear tattoo on your chest.

or, finding out that his soulmate is Shane Hollander isn't beautiful. Ilya can't pretend that it's not life-changing though.

Notes

this fic is a love letter to all the soulmate fics and tropes i read from 2010-2014. and also a love letter to the heated rivalry tv show i have watched back to forward to forward to back like twenty times in the past two weeks. and a love letter to the people who make the gifsets on tumblr of the timeline from the show because they're lifesavers. and a love letter to the people who make the gifsets on tumblr of the tv show with the text from the book on top of it because i still haven't been able to find the book in a bookshop or in my library since the show came out so that's how i've been reading the book lol

that being said, this fic will mix a bunch of show stuff and book stuff that i've picked up in my mind (i.e., they're the boston bears and the montreal voyageurs for example, but svetlana and ilya's relationship is more similar to what it is in the show than in the book) i am following the timeline depicted in the show pretty closely, just changing a few things here and there to answer the question 'what if they're soulmates and ilya knows that but doesn't tell shane?'

some of the dialogue is lifted from the show - hopefully it rings as callbacks instead of plagiarism lol i haven't figured out exactly how i want to signal what i wrote and what i took from the show, but i'm thinking about it. it feels very obvious to me (who has watched the first episode many many times) but maybe not to someone else - for this chapter, there's only a few lines (their first meeting, for example)

this fic is going to be long but i hope you come on this journey with me :D i promise it doesn't get too angsty despite the whole. miscommunication and lying thing. i wrote all of this in two days, so i'm expecting relatively quick updates! enjoy!

Chapter 1

Part One: Ilya

Chapter One: December 2008 - Regina, Saskatchewan

The cold is a different kind of beast here. In Russia, winter gnaws at every exposed piece of flesh it can find, biting at red cheeks and noses and the thin skin stretched over bare knuckles. It’s a starving wolf of a season that would strip you down to bloody bones if it could, nipping at your heels and chasing you all the way up to your doorstep. Russian winters stalk you. They snarl; they hunger. 

Canadian winters are different. It was the first thing Ilya noticed stepping off the plane in Regina. The cold here is less starving, more patient. It slithers across his shoulders, finds the gaps between his skin and his clothes and worms its way inside to tighten around his chest like a great python. Restrictive, paralyzing. Canadian—or maybe just Saskatchewanian—winters bide their time. They linger; they wait.

His fingers fumble against the spark wheel of the lighter, clumsy from the winter air. It’s inescapable, the Canadian cold. Even inside his hotel room in the middle of downtown Regina, he’s felt it against his skin, inside his throat and spreading through his lungs until he feels numb from the inside out.

Out here, with only the concrete wall of the rink to give him shelter from the chilly wind, it is worse. But it is a necessary evil if he wants to steal a smoke before practice, and the soothing wash of nicotine through his body may just be the only thing that gets him through this first session.

The spark wheel slips against his thumb again; the flame flickers and fails to catch. 

Captain of the Russian team, even though there were older players who’d been salivating for the opportunity. Ilya isn’t stupid. He knows he’s good on the ice—the best in Russia at his age, maybe already one of the best players in the world. But there are no laurels he can rest on, not yet. Just more to prove: to the audience of fans who have yet to learn how to fit the consonants and soft vowels of his name into their mouths, to the NHL scouts still circling his games but confirming nothing more than their passing interest. To the players on his own team, who glance sideways at his jersey and swallow down their resentment. To his father, who—

He feels it in his bones that this team is good. That they can take the Prospects Cup home to Russia, that they want it more than they care that an undrafted, unproven protostar of a future supernova is wearing the C. 

That does not mean team cohesion will come easily to them, even if the goals will. And that can fall on Ilya’s shoulders, afterwards. Yes, yes, we were a great team. But it was in spite of our Captain, not because of him. Rozanov could not lead us out of Moscow if he had a clear sky and a detailed map of the city. He is just lucky we hunger for Russian glory, always. 

The lighter’s fire spits for a moment and then dies again. Ilya’s thumb presses into the ruts of the metal wheel until it hurts and pushes at the stone. 

It will not matter to Russia. As long as they win. 

But it will matter to the scouts, maybe. It will matter to his father. 

He clicks at the lighter again, harder this time. Frustration sparking and flickering in his chest as the stupid piece of shit Zippo clicks uselessly in his hand. He bought it yesterday along with the pack of cigarettes, snuck out of the hotel to a corner shop a few blocks away that looked like they wouldn’t care so much about his age. Just shy of eighteen, too young to smoke legally in Canada. Dangerous to even try, but it was something he needed, brushing up against danger. Even if it was mundane and petty and purposeless.

What if the shopkeeper recognized him. What if the shopkeeper got in touch with the Canadian media. What if the shopkeeper wanted to see him arrested for underage smoking. 

An absurd possibility, but there. Flickering like coals after a fire. 

Danger is always like that, for Ilya. Embers to be stoked, flames to be coaxed back to life and then studied. Maybe in another universe, one where he has not chosen to live with the ice of a hockey rink under his fingernails, he is something of a pyromaniac instead. Sveta calls him self-destructive, but she is hardly the expert. She has read half a book on twenty-first century trends in American psychology because this year she wants to go to university there, and she has decided to make it everyone’s problem. 

The spark wheel slips out from his numb fingers, light dying before it has a chance to catch and burn the end of his cigarette.

Canadian cold is worse than Russian cold, Ilya decides, flexing the muscles in his hand and clicking at the lighter again. Then again.

The real danger is losing, of course. That is always a possibility in ice hockey, but maybe for other people it is a sin that can be confessed away, a bruise that heals overnight. Get back out there, try again. Maybe this is something other people’s coaches say. Other players’ fathers.

The real danger is not losing. It is what can happen afterwards. It is Ilya’s father, curt voice snapping like gunfire down the phone line, supposition and threat and cold, calculated promise stacked one after the other. Efficient. International phone calls must be kept short. Costs per minute are astronomical, but then that’s the way Ilya’s father has spoken since he was a child: command, demand, threat. Pause for breath, pause for agreement. Continue.

When Russia’s coach tapped Ilya on the shoulder this morning during breakfast and told him his father was calling, he wasn’t stupid enough to think it was to tell him good luck.

But he was still too naive. Or maybe his father will always find ways to surprise him. 

The lighter clicks; nothing happens. 

“We have been thinking,” his father says. “This cup, your captaincy. It is a good point to stop and reassess, yes?”

The eggs and toast Ilya managed to eat turn in his stomach. The hallway is empty of spectators, the coach whose phone Ilya is holding to his ear still downstairs at the breakfast table. The man gave him a weird look when he took his phone and practically ran from the room, as if phone calls between fathers and sons were allowed to take place around witnesses. Sometimes, you meet someone and you know instinctively that they have never been a wounded animal.  “Yes, sir.” 

“North America might take you still if you do not win, but you would not be ready for the draft. Your coach here agrees. Another year in Russia would strengthen your short-comings. A season with the KHL, perhaps an entry level contract. It would be real hockey; they would not allow you to be lazy, to shrug off work.”

“Yes sir.”

“I will not let any son of mine make a mockery of his life,” his father says. It sounds like a threat. “Of this family.”

“I will not,” Ilya says, automatic.

“Do not interrupt,” his father snaps. “Listen, attempt to understand.”

“Yes sir.”

“Losing will bring home dishonor to this family, to your name, Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov. It cannot happen.”

In this, at least, they are in complete agreement. Ilya leans his forehead against the hotel’s corridor. It is deserted, everyone in these rooms down in the lobby for breakfast, so he allows himself this show of weakness. He allows himself the smallest flinch at the way his name rolls off his father’s tongue.

“If you fail to honor your country with the little amount of skill we have managed to manufacture into you over the past ten years, then there are alternate routes of service. The police force will never take you, you are too lazy. Too weak. But the military has extensive experience making men out of boys like you.”

Ilya’s mouth is dry; his lips are cold and numb, like the Canadian winter has snuck its way into the hotel. His chest is tight, the ghost of frigid winds curled around his lungs. “Yes sir.”

“It would be an honor.”

“It would be an honor,” Ilya says. 

“The shadow minister of the Interior has a daughter who is…in the family way,” his father tells him. “The problem will be resolved, of course, but her father has decided that changes will need to be made. Her name is Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov. Say it.”

“Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov,” Ilya says. There is no spark beneath his skin, no rush of endorphins or burn of electricity down his spine, but then he didn’t think there would be. Soulmarks only appear if a person’s soulmate says their name in front of them, within their hearing. But the romantics like to think that soulmates can feel it, even with just the name, even from great distances apart. Like a shiver in the breeze. A rightness in the bones. Perhaps somewhere in Moscow, Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov has just sneezed. Perhaps she has already said his name, had this same conversation with her father. Soulmarks—with the right kind of money, the right sort of incentive—they are easy to fake. This is not a conversation. This is a declaration of intent.

“Practice it,” his father commands. “It would be advantageous for both of our families if your skin bloomed for her.”

“It would be an honor,” Ilya says. He closes his eyes when he realizes it’s been so long since he’s blinked that the wallpaper in front of his nose has started to blur.

“Good,” his father says. Then, as if he has just remembered: “Win. Show me you are capable of it.”

“Yes sir,” Ilya says just as the call disconnects.

The lighter clicks with nothing to show for it, and Ilya hits it against his palm before trying again. 

He shouldn’t be smoking, but he needs it. Needs the release, the heat. The Canadian winter has snuck down into his bones and he cannot shake it. He cannot play like this, and there is so much on the line. There is his whole life on the line, his future extended before him and planned out in someone else’s handwriting.

The unrelenting swarm of thoughts bite at his mind. His father has been planning this for longer than Ilya has been training for the World Juniors, then. It’s the only thing that makes sense, and it is something his father would do: he has given Ilya just enough rope to hang himself with. He has given him the freedom to play in this tournament, the hope of a future with the NHL in North America. But he has been quietly moving in the shadows of Ilya’s life all the same. Having a star hockey player for a son is only good if he doesn’t burn out. If he performs to the standard. If he brings home glory with every game. Glory and a hefty paycheck the NHL would give him that the KHL never would. 

But if Ilya cannot prove that his game is a worthy one, that he can make it to the money and to the glory, then he will become just another piece on his father’s board. A soldier in the national forces. A political puppet for his father’s ambitions. Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov’s soulmate, one way or another. 

Never mind that it’s illegal in most countries to force or fake a soulbond between two people; never mind that the UN has a treaty on international soulmate rights, which prohibit the forced removal of soulmark tattoos as well as the coercion of two people into a contract that supersedes the rights of a soulbonded couple. 

Russia is a different place, behind the cracked and faded genial front it presents to the international community. In Russia, soulmarks are nice. Sometimes, they are even celebrated. But not by Ilya’s family. Not by the people his father surrounds himself with.

In Russia, in some parts of Russia, soulmarks are to be covered up and ignored. Recopied onto other people’s bodies as convenient. A soulmate should never get in the way of a good business deal, is the saying.

There is another Russian saying about soulmates too. Ilya does not think about it often, but it is sometimes unavoidable when he coaxes dangerous fire to leap from half-burning embers. Like when he fucked his coach’s son beneath the empty seats of the hockey rink at night, when Sasha spat out his full name as if it were a threat. Maybe it was at the time, Ilya doesn’t know. Ilya never repeated Sasha’s back to him. 

Better to cut out a man’s tongue than hear him say another man’s full name. 

That’s also illegal under most of the UN treaties, of course. But Russia hadn’t signed those treaties, and everyone knows what the state police get up to late at night. They are not embarrassed about it; they’re not secretive.

Maybe that is a bright side to this, Ilya thinks. He strikes his lighter again. Again. If he is told to marry Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov, if he does it, if he sits under a tattooist’s needle and lets them give him a—flower or a piece of Cyrillic script as a soulmark, he will have far less opportunity to fuck men in the shadows of Moscow. Even less opportunity to hear them say his name, to say their names in return. It is a safe option. He likes his tongue where it is.

There are bright sides to everything if one has stared into the dark for long enough. Fire flickering against a cave’s wall starts looking a bit like the sun.

Ilya turns into the wind, away from the wall of the rink, strikes the wheel of this shitty defective lighter and presses down the stone. 

Fire catches. The flame holds.

Relief burns over his skin as he leans his mouth down to light the end of his cigarette. Though, really, he thinks, it’s unfair to the cigarette to think it can ease the heavy thoughts in his mind. Still, it is what he is allowed. All he has in the moment—maybe he shouldn’t smoke, maybe he is ruining his body and courting death with each flicker of his lighter, but it is still his body for now. It is still his future he can watch go up in flames.

Self-destructive. 

Maybe Sveta is onto something. 

Or maybe—

“Ilya Rozanov?” the voice wavers slightly, pitched up like it’s a question but also like the speaker already knows the answer too. Ilya’s name sits like a jumbled mess of consonants in the air until Ilya turns around to see Shane Hollander standing near him. 

Hollander’s face is open and flushed warmly red despite the cold around them. He has a toque pulled down over his ears, an overcoat and a sweatshirt on, but that’s all the defense he’s mustered against the winter. He gives him a small, genuine-looking smile when Ilya looks at him, taking a step closer and holding out his hand. “Shane Hollander,” Hollander says. “I–I wanted to introduce myself.”

Ilya blinks. Hollander’s shorter in person than he expected. Smaller, too, outside of his hockey gear. He’s watched tape of Hollander’s games in his coach’s office after practice, but the footage has never been clear enough to see much more than the blur of a 24 on a rainbow cascade of different jerseys, skating around a childhood’s worth of ice rinks. 

The tapes prepared him for Hollander’s speed, his puck-handling, his adaptability.

They didn’t prepare him for his freckles. 

They’re scattered across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks, darker brown dots splattered over golden skin like an artist has taken the edges of his paintbrush and flicked it over a complete canvas. The burn of the cold has rubbed Hollander’s face a light red, and his freckles stand out against the color. Impossible to miss. Impossible to prepare for.

Ilya watches his hand extend towards Hollander’s as if someone else is controlling his body. Sportsmanship is not—well, maybe it is done in some parts of Russia, but it is not done in Ilya’s rinks.

Hollander’s palm is rough in his own; his fingers are dry and calloused, like Ilya’s, toughened out from hours of stick-handling and weight-lifting.

Something about the touch, the handshake, makes Ilya’s stomach tighten and flip over. Something in him stirs. Danger, danger.

He lets go. Hollander blinks at him, dark eyes slightly wide like he doesn’t know what to say next. What to do. His hand is still held out in front of him. 

Ilya doesn’t know why he opens his mouth. Maybe it’s just his instinct to fan the flames of anything dangerous he comes across to see how big he can make his funeral pyre. Maybe he is numb and angry and he wants to make it someone else’s problem for a moment. Maybe he looks at Shane Hollander and feels a spark of jealousy at how warm the boy looks in the middle of a Canadian winter. Maybe he looks at Shane Hollander and feels a spark of something that would ruin his life if he ever let it catch fire and burn. 

Maybe it is a fuck you to his father. Maybe it is a fuck you to Russia, to Hollander, to himself. Maybe he looks at Shane Hollander’s polite face and doesn’t want the warmth of his kindness when he feels like he’s hollowed out on the inside and cold to the bone. 

“Mm, no,” Ilya says with a jerk of his head that turns his cheek but allows him to keep his eyes on Hollander. “That is not how you say my name.”

“I—oh,” Hollander’s cheeks redden. His hand drops; he shoves it into the pocket of his coat and blinks wide onyx eyes up at Ilya like he’s embarrassed. “I’m sorry, that’s just how I’ve heard it in Ottawa. I’ve watched your games. You’re, uh. You’re an awesome player to watch.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees, exhaling a trail of smoke. It is good to hear; it is not enough. Not enough of a reaction from Hollander; not enough of a gift for Ilya. “Canadian announcers, da?”

“Uh, yeah, from our sports networks,” Hollander admits. He rubs at the back of his neck and his eyes drop down. He addresses Ilya’s shoulder next. “Anyway, I should go—”

“Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov,” Ilya says. He speaks slowly, lowly, letting each syllable linger against the backs of his teeth. “That is my name.”

Hollander’s eyes snap back up to his. He’s flushed bright red now. It is not done, probably, in Canada. Giving your full name to a stranger. It is not done in Russia either. There are social norms about these sorts of things. Cultural rules. It is dangerous, dangerous. 

Ilya smirks at him, putting the cigarette back between his lips and raising an eyebrow. Maybe he says it because he knows that it’ll fluster Hollander. Maybe he is trying to get under his skin before the games begin. Maybe he just wants to see what Hollander will do, how quickly he’ll anger, how quickly he’ll toss aside his polite Canadian sportsmanship act. 

Or maybe Ilya is going to lose this cup and go back to Russia with his tail between his legs and become the plaything of an army of corrupt politicians and their daughters and he’ll never again get to hear the way his name sounds on another boy’s tongue and that loss feels devastating when looked at with the naked, honest eye. So really, why shouldn’t Hollander give him this? Hollander stands poised to take away the rest of his life depending on how well he skates these next few days. If he wants to show him kindness, he can sound out Ilya’s name. He can give him this.

Ilya takes the cigarette from his lips and tilts his head back to blow the smoke up and away from the both of them. It swirls gray-white into the air, dissolves into the dark gray Canadian sky. “Go on,” he demands, turning his attention back to Hollander. He drops his voice, leans closer. It’s a challenge, it’s a dare. It’s an order. It’s almost like a plea. “Say it.”

Hollander blinks at him, and then, like the words are being pulled out of him without his conscious choice, he says, soft, “Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov.”

In the books and in the movies and in the songs, getting your soulmark is always described like seeing fireworks on the backs of your eyelids or feeling lightning running through your veins. 

What they don’t say is how much it fucking hurts to be struck by lightning. No one lingers on that part much. It doesn’t fit the beauty of the soulmate story. It is an ugly truth. The sudden jolt of heat and burning pain across the left side of Ilya’s chest, over his heart, that is an ugly truth.

He coughs, shoulders slanting forward with the movement, and the cigarette slips out of his fingers to land on the ground between them. The only reason he stays on his feet, the only reason he does not slip, does not cry out is because he is good at taking unexpected hits. Good at bracing against impacts he never saw coming. Good at holding his body steady and keeping his face blank when all he feels is pain. He’d fallen out of a tree when he was ten years old. The landing had broken his arm in two different places and he’d been late to dinner. His mother had already retired to her bedroom for the evening; his father had made him sit through the meal before calling for a doctor. He hadn’t cried once. 

This feels like that, like a sharp agony he can disconnect his brain from, like the fire is consuming someone else’s body. Like watching his brother cut into a slab of venison meat dripping with bloody sauce and feeling like perhaps he never made it out of the woods at all.

He can’t feel anything at all. He straightens his shoulders and stubs the cigarette out with the heel of his shoe. He can’t feel anything at all. He is Russian, it is in his blood. He is his father’s son, it is trained into him.

Hollander’s eyes are wide, like he can’t believe what he’s just done. Like he’s just committed a crime, stolen liquor from his parents’ cabinet, smoked a joint. Fucking ruined Ilya’s life, but the pain is background noise is controllable is gone as suddenly as it appeared. 

The skin over Ilya’s heart is oversensitized, tender against the fabric of his undershirt. This side of too much. Unignorable. Present. The aftershocks of lightning skitter up and down his spine, but it’s hard to tell if it’s from the blooming soulmark beneath his skin or if it’s because of the way Hollander’s looking at him.

It’s only been a few moments, a second or two at most, Hollander’s Rozanov is still ringing in his ears, and everything is different.

The decision is instinctive. He blinks at Hollander’s open face. Sometimes you just meet someone and you know they’ve never been a wounded animal. They’ve never limped through a dark forest with hunting dogs and Russian winter nipping at their heels, baying for their blood.

The decision, when he makes it this very first time, is instinctive. He’ll spend ages, later, trying to justify it to himself. The fancy reasons will come eventually, the excuses that shift the blame, that relieve some of its pressure from his shoulders. But the truth is that it’s instinctive. 

Ilya Rozanov’s soulmate says his name in a cold, gray arena parking lot in Saskatchewan, Canada. And Ilya thinks, in this order, that no one told him how much it would hurt to get his soulmark; that everything is different; that no one can know. 

The cigarette is out, but Ilya stamps at it again. He makes a show of leaning back against the wall behind him and coughing out a rusty laugh, like Hollander has surprised him so much he accidentally swallowed cigarette smoke instead of knives. 

The sneer he finds to cover his face feels awkward and too fixed. Svetlana, who knows him better than anyone, would see through it in a second if she were here. But she is not and Hollander doesn’t know.

Hollander doesn’t know.

“Better,” Ilya tells his future hockey rival, who’s still blinking up at him from beneath his long eyelashes like he can’t believe his own daring. “But is still terrible accent. I would not count that as my name and I do not think any gods would either, but I’m sure you try your best.” 

The English words slip and slide across his tongue. He can’t focus on them, knows his own Russian accent is heavy and his sentences are fragmented. But Hollander is still looking at him, and Hollander can’t—he can’t know. Ilya laughs again, can’t hold it in. He feels winded, he feels like he has taken a stick to the throat, a puck to the face. Maybe it’s too much, too telling, to bring up soulmarks even just tangentially, but it’s the only thing Ilya can think to say. Maybe if Hollander believes he has butchered Ilya’s name so badly that whatever god or higher power has given them soulmates would not qualify his attempt as Ilya’s actual name, maybe he will look away. Maybe it will be enough.

Ilya just needs a moment. Ilya just needs to catch his breath. 

And like a miracle, Hollander’s expression closes off. His eyebrows slant down together into a neat little furrow, and his button nose wrinkles. He thinks Ilya is laughing at him. “Fuck you, asshole,” Hollander is quick to snap, hands shoving deeper into his pockets.

Ilya’s own hands have found their way into his jacket now that his cigarette’s been stubbed out. “Very good sportsmanship, Hollander,” he mocks, leaning back against the side of the rink. This is good, this easy. He has years’ worth of experience letting his mouth run, riling people up just to watch them get mad enough to lose concentration on the ice. 

It is so very funny how quickly one’s brain can flick into survival mode. Ilya doesn’t even feel the cold anymore. His chest is on fire. His blood is singing. He’s never felt so alive.

“Whatever, Rozanov,” Hollander scoffs and he’s turning around. Stalking away. Yes. Yes, this is good. This is exactly what needs to happen because Ilya needs—Ilya needs to be alone. He needs to inspect the damage. He needs to think. He needs to sit down. He needs another fucking cigarette. 

But his chest aches when Hollander leaves. Like Hollander’s tied a leash around his heart and is yanking at it with both hands, ripping it out of his ribcage. Would it be so bad? If—if Hollander knew? Would it be so bad if Ilya followed him, grabbed his arm and tugged him somewhere private enough that they could lift up Ilya’s shirt and look at the mark together? Would the ache go away then? Would Hollander stay? 

Ilya tears his eyes away and lets his head thump back against the wall, staring up at the overcast sky. Yes. It would. They’re at an international fucking tournament about to skate for their countries. They’ve both already watched each other play because they both know that the other is going to be their rival, the sort of player that they’ll be defined against for their entire careers. There’s no room for soulmates in that equation. 

And—there’s Russia on the line, Ilya’s family to think about. Ilya’s future. If his father found out, if his brother did—

Better to cut out a man’s tongue...

And what would Hollander say if Ilya told him he wore his soulmark? Would he even believe him? Would he freak out? Ilya feels like freaking out. Ilya feels like he’s burning, like the lightning has burrowed inside of him and made a home in his veins. Hollander would accuse him of trying to get under his skin before the tournament, maybe. Or he would be disgusted. Or he would leave. 

He’s already left. 

It isn’t supposed to be like this, Ilya thinks, desperately. Fruitlessly. 

There were supposed to be fireworks. 

“Grayson,” Hollander says, and Ilya startles, hands fisting instinctively in his pockets as his eyes fly open.

Hollander is standing in front of him, arms crossed and scowling. He looks—

Well. He looks adorable, like an angry kitten. He looks beautiful. It makes Ilya’s heart race and his stomach tighten. That’s his soulmate. Hollander. Shane Hollander is his soulmate. He doesn’t need to rip open his shirts to check the skin of his chest. He doesn’t need to see the mark. He knows, down to his bones. He belongs to Shane Hollander. 

It will not be enough.

“I do not know this word,” Ilya tells him. He wants to reach into his pocket and grab another cigarette from the carton, but he’s afraid that his hands haven’t stopped trembling. He doesn’t want Hollander to see that. Doesn’t want Hollander to see him as weak.

Hollander exhales and turns his face away for a moment, jaw working furiously. Ilya doesn’t know what he wants more: to have learned every word in the English language so as to never have put that look on Hollander’s face, or for Shane to teach him what he doesn’t know.

“It’s my middle name,” Hollander says. His eyebrows are still furrowed, but when he looks back at Ilya now, he looks expectant. His foot taps the ground, quick tap-tap-taps that Ilya didn’t know people actually did in real life.

Shane Grayson Hollander. Ilya rolls the name around in his mind, lets it rest on his tongue, in the back of his throat.

He can say it. Maybe nothing will happen. Half-bonds are rare, but they’re not unheard of. Perhaps Ilya’s soulmate is Shane Hollander and Shane Hollander’s soulmate is not Ilya Rozanov. It’s a tragedy. It’s an ugly truth. Maybe nothing will happen.

And what will that feel like? If Ilya says Hollander’s name and Hollander shrugs and tries to shake his hand again before he leaves, unbothered and unmarked? How will that leave Ilya? How can anyone possibly survive that kind of hit? It would take him out at the knees. It would leave him blind and begging and half-alive. He knows himself well enough to realize this, to see it for the weakness it is. He has always wanted a soulmate; it was never supposed to be like this. If his soulbond is unreturned, if he’s faced with the cold and objective fact that there will never be a single person in his life who will love him the way he could love them, then he doesn’t…then he won’t….He won’t make it to the NHL. He’ll play the worst game of hockey anyone has ever played in their lives and no one will want to draft him. All the scouts will close their notebooks and wince to themselves, and Russia will burn out before they even make it to the quarter finals and Ilya—Ilya isn’t even sure he’d make it back to Russia. 

There is too much of his mother in his eyes, that’s what his father has always said. 

He can say it though. He knows it now. Shane Grayson Hollander. He can say it. Maybe Hollander will clutch at his heart or his arm or his leg and fall to his knees before Ilya, who will scoop him up and hold him to his chest and whisper every sweet name he can think of into his hair. And Hollander will be thrilled to have another boy, a boy like Ilya, to have Ilya, for a soulmate. And Hollander’s parents will be thrilled to have Ilya for their son’s soulmate and when Russia revokes his citizenship and his brother tries to cut out his tongue for the sin of saying Shane Grayson Hollander despite knowing the risks, Ilya can move into his soulmate’s country and his soulmate’s town and his soulmate’s house and they can play hockey together. They can be the first bonded pair of hockey players in NHL history, gay and in love and soulmates. The draft will not matter, because of course the NHL would never separate them, so they’ll go to the same team. And they’ll be soulmates and they’ll be in love and play good hockey. And Ilya will never see his family again, but it won’t matter. In a few years, maybe ten, he will go to sleep and wonder if his grandmother is still alive, if they still share the same sky. And he’ll wonder if his brother’s daughter, who is only just a baby, will ever even be told his name. But it won’t matter, because he will have his soulmate with him, and the songs and the movies and the books have promised that that is the kind of all-consuming beautiful feeling you give up everything else for, the kind you write songs and movies and books about.

Shane Grayson Hollander. He can say it. Maybe Shane will feel the burn of the soulmark across his chest or his leg or his arm and it’ll fill him with the kind of fear Ilya knows now intimately well. Maybe Shane will realize everything that’s at stake; maybe he will be better at keeping his head above the water than Ilya feels. Maybe he’ll be happy to have a soulmate, any soulmate at all, even one who is like Ilya. Who is Ilya. And they can be good and secret about it. They can figure this thing out in the shadows. Surely other people have. Surely there are other hockey players who have a man’s soulmark on their shoulder or hip or thigh, who were stupid enough to risk it all to say a man’s name. They can sneak around, they can have each other and have hockey and keep it separate so that Shane can keep his perfect family, who may accept that their son likes men or may not, and Ilya can keep Russia, which definitely won’t. And maybe that feels like enough, and no one ever slips up and no one else ever finds out and the secret doesn’t weigh on the both of them, doesn’t dim the kindness in Shane’s eyes, doesn’t make his shoulders slump, doesn’t make resentment bloom in his heart the way his soulmark once bloomed across his skin. 

Shane Grayson Hollander. Maybe maybe maybe.

Ilya rolls the syllables around his mouth. He lets his eyes travel over Shane’s face, down to his shoulders.

They look brittle, like a secret as heavy as a soul is could crush them.

No, they don’t.

But Ilya can’t risk it. He has hockey on the line. He has his entire future. He has Shane Hollander’s future now too, to think about. To consider. 

It’s cowardly; it’s selfish. But there are too many odds, too many unknowns. 

Shane Grayson Hollander. He could say it. He could know. One way or another.

“Well?” Shane Grayson Hollander says. The blush is back. Maybe, in another universe, Ilya gets to kiss it one day. Gets to count all his freckles and run his fingers over the soft pink of his lips. 

But not this one.

He makes his eyes go half-lidded, reaches for the smirk, reaches for the memory of that dinner when he was eight years old and his arm felt like it was being sawed off his body and all he could do was sit and wait and pretend he couldn’t feel a thing. When he pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, his hands don’t shake. He can’t feel anything. He puts it at the corner of his mouth and raises his eyebrows at Shane Grayson Hollander. 

At Hollander.

“Okay,” he says, like it’s a question. Like it’s an insult. Like Ilya doesn’t care about Hollander’s middle name, like he’d never say it, not even to rule Hollander out as a soulmate. Like he already knows there’s no way in hell that he’d be Hollander’s soulmate and he doesn’t know why Hollander wants him to try when he’s so much cooler and hotter and more desirable than Hollander could ever be. 

He can see the way it strikes Hollander in his vulnerable underbelly, like he didn’t expect it. Like Ilya Rozanov being an asshole has taken him by surprise.

Hollander will learn. Maybe.

Even if it makes Ilya’s chest twinge just thinking about teaching him.

“Asshole,” Hollander announces, like it’s a revelation. There’s no trace of kindness left in his eyes, just an annoyed flush on his cheeks. Ilya shrugs and pulls out his lighter.

“You say this now, but wait until we beat you,” he says, tilting his head and covering the tip of the cigarette with his palms. He doesn’t try to strike the lighter; he doesn’t know if he can handle it should the spark wheel fail to ignite the butane.

Hollander draws himself up, stiff with wounded pride or country pride or something in between the two. “That’s not happening,” he snaps. He gives Ilya another heated look, nostrils flaring and mouth tugged down into what can only be called a pout. Then he’s gone, stalking across the pavement and through the front doors of the rink without bothering to look back once.

Ilya watches him go until he’s disappeared. When his chest aches, begs him to follow, he rubs at it like one of the physical therapists at the club rubbing at a knot his shoulder. Like if he just gives it a little bit of pressure, the tension will dissipate. As if his luck has ever been that fair.

A minute passes. Then another. Hollander doesn’t return. Eventually, Ilya slides the unlit cigarette back into the carton. Then he’s on the ground. It’s a toss-up between whether his legs give out or he decides to sit. Either way, he ends with his back up against the wall, ass on the dirty concrete and eyes trained on the sky.

“Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov,” he says to the light pieces of snow that have begun to fall. Nothing.

He closes his eyes. 

“Shane Grayson Hollander,” he whispers, just once. Just for himself. 

Lightning dances through his veins.

Occasionally, soulmarks match, the same design painted on two different bodies like a perfect copy of itself. Sometimes, they complement each other, like a bumble bee on a woman’s hip bone and a daisy flower on her soulmate’s clavicle. But there’s no exact science, no predicting what one’s soulmark will look like on their mate’s skin, what they’ll be given in return. Sometimes the marks correspond with the wearer’s cultural background, or their mate’s. Sometimes they look nonsensical, something that only makes sense to the soulmated pair. 

Ilya has always liked those the best, liked the idea of wearing some secret bit of knowledge on his body that no one would ever be able to understand save for the person the mark belonged to.

As far as anyone knows, there’s no exacting science behind the ink, the marks. How big they are, how detailed. The movies and the books and the songs like to pretend they have it figured out, that the bigger and more elaborate the mark, the more powerful and idyllic the love story.

That’s all bullshit, as far as the scientists and Ilya are concerned. The marks are a scientific anomaly, a modern-day commonplace miracle that everyone has to live with, but there’s only so much that can be hidden in ink. They’re not that telling; they don’t hold that much meaning.

It’s the appearance of the soulmark that triggers the realization that a person has just found their soulmate. But it’s not, really. That’s not how souls recognize each other. Most soulmates already know before they ever say their partner’s name.

You just know. Whether it takes ten seconds or ten years or twenty. You just know.

Ilya’s mother’s soulmark was a tree, a beautiful sapling stretched down the length of her spine. His father doesn’t have one, as far as he knows. He just has a tattoo on his sternum, done by a discreet professional somewhere in a gold-trimmed apartment in Moscow the night before their wedding.

His mother’s mark was real though and belonged to someone else. Ilya still doesn’t know what happened to his mother’s mate, if they left her before she met his father, before Alexei was born, or if the tattoo appeared there after the prison sentence was already read. When he was a child, the details were too scandalous for his ears; by the time he grew up, no one talked about Irina anymore. All her secrets died with her.

It’s hard to tell the story a mark illustrates when you only see one. A sapling tree can have a boundless, infinite amount of meanings, all spoken in a language no other tongue can wrap itself around. Its partner, its match, fills in the gaps, unfogs the mirror. Becomes a bookend, turns it from a soliloquy to a conversation. A story.

Without the sapling's soulmark match, all Ilya knows about his mother’s soul is that when given the chance to choose anything he wanted to manufacture the appearance of a soulbond, his father had chosen an axe.

Ilya’s soulmark is a bear. Just the head of one, a snarling, roaring beast of an animal with its teeth bared and its beady black eyes glaring out at the world, cold and unfeeling. It spans most of the skin of his left pectoral, its scruff trailing into nothing around the ball of his shoulder, at the bottom curve of his pec.

It’s sensitive to the touch, even though it doesn’t look like anything more than a months’ old tattoo.

He’d always wondered about what his soulmark would be. Where it would appear on his body. If it would relate to his soulmate or himself, if the marks would match or complement or whisper across his skin like a secret only his mate could understand.

It’s hard to tell, with just one half of the story. But Ilya will make do.

His fingers are shaking as he pulls his Underarmour shirt back down over the damning ink. His body immediately protests, shivers away from the brush of the material. In stupid, thoughtless retaliation, he presses the polyester unforgivingly against the mark. A sharp pain flares through his chest before it subsides into submission.

He braces himself against the bathroom countertop and stares at his reflection until the angles of his face start to blur.

It is a Russian bear. It is big, detailed. This means nothing, of course, Ilya knows it means nothing. Knows there’s no idyllic love story waiting for him in Shane Grayson Hollander’s arms. 

But it could be worse. It could be a—a maple leaf. Or a moose. Or some sort of Canadian bird. Something Ilya Rozanov would never in a million years choose to tattoo on himself. A snarling, vicious-looking bear is not something Ilya would get tattooed, he thinks. But no one else knows that. It fits his persona, all the masks he picks from when he leaves the safety of his bedroom and his rink to face his family and the Russian media.

He will have to hide it, of course. For a few months. If Russia wins the Prospect’s Cup, maybe he can sneak away from the celebration, before the flight back home. He can fake a tattoo appointment. Book a tattoo appointment, even, so that there is a paper trail if anyone looks. Not show up. Wait a month or so, tell everyone that he’d felt so proud to call Russia his homeland that he’d tattooed her bear on his chest to carry with him the rest of his life. 

Or if they lose, he will go back to Russia. Maybe he can find a tattooist that can put his name in his books, for a fee. Tell people he got it to remind himself that he carries Russian glory on his shoulders every time he steps onto the ice. 

The thoughts, both of them, make his stomach sick and his hands feel clammy. It yanks at something deep inside of him, the idea of lying about his soulmark. Whatever else it is, however life ruining and inconvenient, it is his. It is Shane’s. Hollander’s. He can never be honest about the bear that has etched itself across his chest; it’s the only thing that he wants to do.

It could be worse. At least it is a Russian bear. It could have been a maple leaf. It could have been something that screamed Shane Grayson Hollander. 

But it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with Hollander. It is just a bear; it is just Russia, staking a claim on his skin that he’ll never be able to shake off or run from no matter how far away he goes.

He ignores the tightening of his chest, the spark of disappointment that flares up in his stomach. It is much better that his soulmark carries no traces of Hollander in its lines, in its shadings. It makes things just a little bit easier. 

But Ilya doesn’t want easier. He wants—

He slams his hands on the countertop to scatter the thought away before it has time to form. He will have to dress separately from the team for the next week. He can show up to practice already dressed in his Underarmour, many players do that. It is cold outside, Canadian winter lingering even in the depths of the Saskatchewan arena, even in the corners of the locker room. It will be harder, after practices. He could stay on the ice longer, skate another fifteen minutes, another thirty. Leave without showering, shower at the hotel.

It will be hardest after games, but not impossible. Gross, maybe, to sit in his own sweat until he can wash off at the hotel or in an empty locker room shower. But covering the soulmark in bandages will be suspicious, will draw the eyes of his coach. Star players cannot be wearing bandages the week before the final.

Star players cannot be injured so close to life-defining games. Star players cannot be thinking about anything except their stick-handling skills, their powerplay formations, their shots on goal. Star players cannot be handing out their full names to pretty boys in parking lots. Bad things can happen. Terrible things. Things there’s no coming back from.

Ilya unlocks the bathroom door and slips into the silent service corridor. He’s due on the ice in two hours, the Canadian team practice falling just before Russia’s on the event's timetable. That means Hollander’s on the ice right now.

He shouldn’t—but really, there is no other option. No reason besides the obvious to avoid watching Hollander skate. He is Russia’s team captain. Of course he should scope out the competition, watch their practices from a safe distance away. No one will think anything more of it than that. 

He shouldn’t, because this stupid pull in his chest cannot define his life or his actions. And he has never trained a dog before, but he knows if you give them scraps from the table once, they’ll beg for the rest of their lives.

But—it is just a little thing. It is just one time. 

That is what Ilya tells himself as he sinks into one of the arena’s empty seats, sat far back enough that he’s unobtrusive. Unnoticed. It is just one time. It is for research purposes. He has seen so much game tape of Hollander. He wants to watch how he moves on the ice in front of him in real time.

It’s a little thing. 

It’s dangerous beyond words. 

Hollander is a phenomenal skater, crossing the rink at a breakneck pace and dodging his scrimmage opponents like they’re standing still, like they’re nothing more than cones on the ice to spin around. It makes everyone else look like they’re wearing wooden clogs while he has winged sandals. 

Where Ilya would rather fight through a board battle than give even a centimeter of ground, Hollander slips out from bigger, heavier bodies, stays at the edges and finds the puck the moment it leaves the tangle of other people’s skates to push it forward to the goal like he never moved backward at all.

It’s a different style of play. Watching it feels like watching a separate sport completely from the one Ilya plays, but it’s clear exactly how much Hollander knows hockey, knows how he moves on the ice, knows how the puck responds to his stick. 

Ilya slouches further into his chair and chews absently at the string of his hoodie. 

Maybe it is all some kind of cosmic mistake, a blip, a misunderstanding. Hollander is not really his soulmate, he is his opposite, his soul’s antithesis and someone’s wires just got crossed. A cosmic zero was accidentally dropped. Upon review, the math doesn’t hold up. 

But then, halfway through a shooting drill, when Hollander is waiting for his turn in front of the goalie, he looks up into the seats. His eyes find Ilya’s as if they’ve been drawn there magnetically. 

It does not mean anything; Ilya is the only one watching them practice. As unobtrusive as he’s being, of course Hollander has found him. There is no one else around to draw his attention.

From this distance, it’s impossible to read the look on Hollander’s face.

Ilya’s chest aches. The moment Hollander’s attention is called away, Ilya rubs at it with his hand, pressing the heel of his palm against the tight skin above his heart, like he can soothe the bear by petting it into submission.

It is both a surprise and not, when Ilya glances into the stands during his own practice and finds Hollander leaning against one seat, hands in his pockets and face fixed on the ice as a sharply dressed woman sits in the chair next to him, sharp eyes watching the players move below her like they're nothing but little bugs.

Of course Hollander has snuck into Russia’s practice; Ilya did it first. He is following Ilya’s cues. He is curious. He has seen Ilya skate on shitty, grainy footage. He wants to see him skate with his own eyes. Their motivations are the same; it is just a small, meaningless thing.

When Ilya’s chest twinges with insistent, pointed pain, like a muscle spasm, he presses his glove against it like he’s working out an old injury.

His eyes find Hollander again, instinctively. The boy’s back is turned to him as he follows the woman out of the stands, back to his Canadian team and his Canadian hotel and his perfect life. He makes it look so very easy, leaving Ilya. Like it is a small, meaningless thing.

For him it is. llya has ensured it. This is the victory he has won. 

“Rozanov!” His coach yells, sensing his distraction, and Ilya’s eyes jump away from Hollander. Back to the ice. Quickly, before anyone can notice where he’d been looking—who he’s been looking at.  “Is there something more important going on?”

Ilya shakes his head. Nothing. Of course not, Coach. 

There is nothing more important than this. Everything else Ilya has has already gone up in flames.

Sveta connects the call before the second ring. “Hello, this is Svetlana Vetrova speaking,” she says politely in perfect English. Ilya almost takes the phone away from his face to make sure he’s dialed the right number, but then there’s no need. She’s introduced herself. It’s definitely her. 

“Sveta,” he says, a question, eyebrows furrowing as he leans back against the brick wall of the arena. It’s Janaury now, 2009. Tonight, Russia will play Canada in the final round of the Prospect Cup. It is not a surprise to Ilya nor any of the announcers he has heard cover the tournament so far. They have called it fated.

Even just the memory of the word tastes like ash on his mouth.

Tonight, he will either win the cup and bring home temporary glory to a country that will tarnish it within seconds—or he will win nothing and find out how durable his father’s plans for his future have become in his absence. 

But right now it is still the morning. There is still time for a smoke, for a phone call. 

Maybe he should be surprised that his feet have led him to the same stretch of wall where he met Shane Hollander a week ago, but he is not. He thinks, probably, he will re-tread this ground many, many times in his mind. Maybe for the rest of his life.

“Ilya,” Sveta says, sounding surprised. “I thought you were an admissions officer!”

“Why would I be an admissions officer?” Ilya says, taking the cigarette from his mouth and exhaling the smoke back into the sky. “Why would an admissions officer call? Do they not email? I have heard everyone is emailing everything now.”

He can hear the eye roll in her voice. Strangely, this is what makes him feel homesick for the first time since boarding the plane away from Russia. “What do you know about academic admissions, Mr. Star Player?” she teases, and just the sound of her voice relaxes his shoulders. He lets himself slide down until he’s sitting, legs curled up almost to his chest. 

“This is a Canadian phone number,” he points out instead of admitting that he knows nothing about academic admissions. He will graduate from his preparatory school, but everyone knows that the senior classes have done shit for actually preparing him for his life. “I thought you only applied to fancy American schools.”

Sveta hums, and he can hear shifting like she’s in her bed. It is evening in Moscow but not late enough for her to be asleep. She only goes to bed early when she plans to stay up late into the night, go out partying with her friends until dawn.

It hits him suddenly that with the time difference between Russia and Saskatchewan, his game will air in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps that is what she sleeps for now. So that she can watch later.

He rubs at his left shoulder, but this time, the tightness in his chest has nothing to do with his soulmark. 

“I applied to many fancy American schools,” Sveta agrees. “And a few Canadian ones.”

“Oh?”

“McGill,” she says. 

“What the fuck is McGill?” Ilya asks, letting his head roll back against the brick. “I do not know it. It sounds like an American food.”

“It’s in Montreal,” Sveta tells him, laughing. She laughs a lot, so easily. It is nice. 

“Don’t go to Montreal,” Ilya says quickly. “You have to promise me. It is a terrible team to root for, and you know you will be expected to root for it.”

“You say that like there’s not a large chance that you become a Voyageur,” Sveta says. “They traded their centre and one of their goalies for the second draft pick, remember. You’ll have to eat your words if they give you one of their blue and white jerseys.”

Ilya brings the cigarette back up to his lips. “Don’t remind me,” he says, exhaling. “But you know I will not be second.”

The words get easier to say every time he tells them to someone else, like cockiness is a pair of new boots that must be broken in before you wear them.

“Hm,” Sveta says. It is not confirmation and it is not denial. She would never give him these things. Her love is not artificially soft, nor is it something she keeps stored up away from him where he cannot reach it. It is why he called her. It is why he always calls her. “I am waiting for word from Tufts,” she tells him. “That is in Boston.”

Boston. He smiles up at the Canadian sky, lips twisting and pressing white around the cigarette end. Sveta has her own plans and her own dreams that do not include Ilya, that have not been built around him and his future and whichever NHL team drafts him, if any do. 

But it is nice, he thinks. To be told that there is room for him in her life. That she has cleared out a space. That she has thought very long and very hard about what she wants out of her future, and she has left open the possibility that what she wants is for Ilya not to feel alone in a strange city far from home. 

“Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova,” Ilya sighs, shaking his head and wishing that lightning was a sensation you could create if only you wanted to feel it enough. He doesn’t love Sveta like a soulmate, but God, he loves her like a friend and that is so very close.

“Stop that, Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov,” Sveta replies, immediate and unrelenting. She’d said the same thing when they were seven years old and they’d traded names in the coat closet just off of the grand foyer of her house. She’d hit him in the chest afterwards with a closed fist. All these years later, Ilya still can’t decide if she’d been mad because they were not soulmates or because he’d forced the question.

Still, to this day, she’s the only person he’s ever said the full name of. He wonders if she knows that.

He wants to tell her. He wants to tell her about everything. About his father, about the unwieldy and unsurvivable future that lurks in front of him if he loses this tournament. About being captain to a team that scores goals but doesn’t know how to celebrate them in the locker room. About Shane Grayson Hollander.

God, he wants to tell her about Shane, which really means telling her about the bear, which would really only make sense if he first tells her about the freckles. Fuck, he wants to tell her about the freckles. And the bear. And Hollander.

But no one can know. Even if he loves them—even if he trusts them. No one can know. It has to be like it never happened. It has to be like Ilya Rozanov never met his soulmate, like his heart still resides in his chest, whole and content to be there. Like it is not straining against his ribcage every minute of the day, beating and howling and begging to be closer to the most annoying Canadian he has ever met in his fucking life.

“Why are you calling me?” Sveta asks, tone brisk, to business. He can imagine her sitting up in bed, silk bonnet curled around her head and eye mask discarded on the pillow next to her. “International calls are very expensive, Ilyukha. I should be charging you by the minute.”

“I’ll make you a deal, yes?” he says, examining the end of his cigarette. It has burnt down to nothing. He should not reach for another; he does anyway. “If I win, I will pay your entire phone bill for this month, international calls included.”

He can hear the smile in her voice. “And if you lose?”

“I will not be doing that,” he informs her, mock-serious. Very serious. Only a bit afraid. “Who do you take me for?”

“Hm,” she says, drawing out the syllable. “Deal.”

“Good,” Ilya says. He clicks the lighter, tilts his head to his shoulder to keep the phone pressed against his ear as he brings the flickering flame up to light his cigarette. “Now that we are speaking on my dime, tell me what you think about the competition.”

“Oh, I see what this is. You want to talk about Shane Hollander,” her voice is far too knowing. Or—is it? Or is Ilya just hyper-sensitized to that name? To the very mention of the boy?

“I have other competition,” he grunts, dropping the lighter before the heated metal can burn his fingers. He feels—disconcerted. On edge. Transparent.

Sveta sounds unbothered when she scoffs, and he can picture her waving a careless hand through the air. “You will have other players on the ice,” she corrects. “But Hollander is your only competition.”

Ilya’s exhale feels punched out of his mouth. “He is a good player,” he admits, because he wants to tell Svetlana the truth about everything, but he can’t. He has to fit it all into those five words and hope that maybe she will understand.

“Very good,” Sveta agrees. “But Russia’s team is better. Canada is very young this year, and it shows in their play. Sweden almost took them out, and the Swedish team is shit. You will win, Ilya. I know it.”

It sounds different to hear her say it. His father’s words had been a threat. Sveta just sounds unshakably confident, like she can see no path forward that does not include Russian gold around Ilya’s neck.

He lets his head drop forward. The Canadian winter has slipped beneath his hoodie. His chest feels tight with, cold and restrictive.

Sveta has moved onto analyzing Canada’s powerplay, which is one of her favorite things to do, so Ilya lets her talk and lets his attention drift. A team bus has pulled into the parking lot and up to the doors of the arena. 

A line of red and white clothed boys spew out of the arena’s doors. The Canadian team has finished their morning practice then. They’ll be going back to the hotel for a nap before the game. It is Russia’s turn on the ice soon.

Ilya watches the line move forward—each boy stuffs his things into the bus’s undercarriage before climbing aboard. Hollander is there, somewhere, among them.

“Ilya? You are not even listening,” Sveta complains into his ear. 

There. Hollander is in the line, second to last to board. Ilya knows it. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does. He thinks maybe he could recognize the slant of Hollander’s shoulders anywhere. He thinks maybe he should never get closer to him than he is now, a parking lot away. Everything else is too risky. Too dangerous.

But his chest has loosened at just the sight of Hollander, standing at the back of his team’s line with both fists around the strap of his equipment bag like he’s afraid someone is going to take it away from him.

The Canadian winter feels suddenly so far away; the bear in his chest roars its approval.

“I am listening, I am listening,” Ilya tells Svetlana, standing and stubbing out the remainder of his cigarette. “I am just in shock. You’ve never been so nice before a game, Sveta.” 

“You’ve never called me nervous before a game,” Svetlana sniffs. Hollander has stowed his equipment with the rest of his team’s. He’s at the doors to the bus.

He turns his head; he looks at Ilya from across the parking lot. 

“I am not nervous,” Ilya says, even though his throat is dry and his heart is racing. His chest feels…light, buoyant, like his body sustains itself on photosynthesis and it recognizes Hollander as the sun. Like his body is a dog beneath the table and it has just been fed an unexpected scrap of food and now it knows it can beg for brief moments for the rest of its life and occasionally get its way. “I am…happy.”

Is he? He doesn’t know. He has a soulmate. Shane Hollander is his soulmate. He feels warm all over, heated from within.

“You have never called me like that either,” Sveta points out, but her voice has softened. There’s a hesitation now, when she asks carefully, “Has something happened, Ilya?”

Hollander breaks their staring contest when his teammate pushes at his back. He disappears inside the bus.

Ilya turns away from the arena’s front doors, from the Canadian team’s bus. His fingers are trembling, which is a pointless reaction. Weak. Telling. He rubs at his left shoulder, ghosting his palm over the bear’s twisted, snarling mouth. Lightning dances beneath his skin.

“Not a damn thing,” Ilya lies. 

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

my evening plans were canceled due to Inclement Weather, so i wrote 6k in 5 hours and here's chapter 2 of my soulmate fic!! i'm posting and then i'm gonna finish responding to everyone's comments from chapter 1, thanks so much for reading and leaving a comment last time! i hope you enjoy this chapter and i promise the wait time will be shorter going forward <3

Chapter Two: June 2009 - Las Vegas, Nevada

The Boston Bears take the first draft pick. 

Then they take Ilya. 

It’s almost as good of a feeling as winning the Prospect Cup had been six months ago, hearing his name called from the stage first, from the very beginning, no hesitation at all in the Commissioner’s voice or in the faces of the Bears’ General Manager and Coach behind him.

Just hunger. Just an opportunity given in exchange for everything he is. All eyes in the auditorium are on Ilya, all of the cameras, as he rises from the seat next to his father and walks to the stage to accept the black and gold sweater from the GM’s coach. First overall: Ilya Rozanov.

His father is clapping, the slow polite clap you’d expect from an outsider and not a parent. His brother is in Russia still, where he belongs. And none of it matters because the hockey sweater fits perfectly over the lines of his suit when he tugs it over his head, and the NHL wants him. They want him before they want anyone else.

Ilya doesn’t go back to his seat after he’s ushered off stage, Bears jersey clutched tight between his fingers like he’s half-afraid someone’s going to try and take it from him. He thinks he probably is.

But there’s no point sitting back down next to his father. It doesn’t matter. For just this hour, just for the rest of the draft, it doesn’t matter.

He’s going to America.

The thing that’s been coiled around his lungs since December finally falls away completely. It’s hard to remember a time he’s felt so—light.

And he knows a part of that is because after six months of distanced, aching agony, he’s finally in the same room as his soulmate. He’d seen Hollander before the draft started, sitting between his parents across the auditorium from where Ilya was put. That’d really been the moment his chest had expanded, when the bear had paused in clawing at its cage, when Ilya’d felt like he could breathe again.

But even that doesn’t matter. Even Hollander and his soulmark and the way Ilya wasn’t able to stop his eyes from drifting over to him throughout the opening remarks don’t matter. Just for this moment, with the Bears’ jersey in his hands and the next eight years of his future sketched out in a hand that doesn’t belong to his father, even having his soul half-belong to Shane fucking Grayson fucking Hollander doesn’t matter.

Because Ilya is going to play hockey for the Boston Bears.

Korogyi finds him first, cheeks looking like they hurt from the width of his smile. “Rozanov, congratulations!”

He extends his hand, fingers curled into a fist. His jersey from the Dallas Drivers is slung over the shoulder of his suit. Ilya has no idea who the fuck Korogyi is.

He knocks their hands together anyway. “You as well,” he says. His phone is a heavy weight in his pocket. He wants to call Svetlana, wants to hear her bitch about international phone calling costs and packing up her things for her classes that start in August and how expensive moving to a new country is, so he can say something like maybe you should have decided to play hockey when you were eight years old so you could bleed and sweat and vomit and sell your body to your team so that eventually when you’re good enough, they’ll pay you to move to America instead of the other way around.

So then she can say something that sounds like congratulations, I was watching and I am so proud of you. 

Ilya clears his throat. Korogyi is just standing there, smiling like today is the best day of his life. It’s unnerving. “I must make a call,” Ilya says carefully, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder in what he hopes is the universal symbol for I’m going to leave now, please don’t follow me. “I will see you on the ice next year—”

“Oh, the photographers want pictures of the top three draft picks,” Korogyi says, like this has slipped his mind. “Hollander’s up front already waiting, they asked me to find you.”

Ilya stares at him.

“Er,” Korogyi stutters. He looks between Ilya and the silent presence of his father at his right. “Pictures,” the boy says, making a gesture with his hands that bears some passing resemblance to a camera. “Us and Shane. Together.” He points at his own chest, then Ilya’s chest and then over his shoulder which may be the universal gesture for your soulmate is over there and you need to stand next to him, unaffected, and have that documented forever. 

“Perhaps the Dallas Drivers announced the wrong name,” Ilya’s father says in acerbic Russian. “Is it too late for them to rescind their draft pick?”

Ilya fixes a smile across his face that feels only a little brittle. The coiled thing is back around his lungs, but the bear in his chest has perked up like those are the only words it recognizes: Hollander. Shane. Together.

It is a stupid animal, the bear.

“Yes of course,” he tells Korogyi because it’s easier than trying to decide if he wants to say why the fuck didn’t you lead with that or why the fuck did you tell me that at all. “Lead the way.”

Hollander is standing next to the same woman who had watched the Russian team practice with him back in December. His mother, then. The Montreal jersey is fisted in between his hands down by his waist like he can’t put it down but can’t bear to look at it. His eyes flicker around the room like he’s searching out threats. Or maybe this is just how Hollander looks when he’s off the ice. Like a cornered animal ready to chew off its own leg to escape.

“Oh, good, there you are,” the photographer says. “Okay, let’s have Mr. Rozanov in the middle, jerseys up high, boys.”

Ilya thinks he lifts his jersey up to his chest. He thinks he smiles. Hollander is right next to him, and there’s this flash of awful, pinprick awareness that Ilya can’t shake. The mark on his chest aches like it’s a physical wound. 

“Closer, boys, please,” the photographer says. “Shane, you’re half out of the frame.”

Hollander stiffens; he moves into Ilya. Their shoulders brush together. Ilya feels it like a kick to the chest, even through the layers of their suits.

It’s a bit like skating on a frozen lake, right at the beginning of October when the first ice has just finished setting in. It’s not a terrible surprise when the surface cracks and breaks beneath you; that doesn’t make the rush of cold water any easier to survive.

Hollander is right here. Against him. Touching him. It’s been six months since the handshake on ice after Russia beat Canada in the finals. Not nearly long enough to build up any sort of—of immunization to this. To Hollander. Maybe Ilya thought he could control it, his own body’s stupid reaction to Hollander’s presence, but the ice is cracking under his feet and he can smell the cologne Hollander’s put on for the night. He must have borrowed his father’s because he smells like an old man, and fuck, is Ilya genetically predisposed to find that endearing just because they’re soulmates? Surely evolution is smarter than that.

He doesn’t want to look at Hollander because he doesn’t know what will happen afterwards. Sometimes avalanches start with just a single shift in the snow, and Ilya thinks there really might be a danger of looking at Hollander then never being able to look away again. 

The past six months were not…easy. By any means. They were not kind, and Ilya was not kind to his body in turn. He’s looked it up, research he’d done in the back of a library on an old desktop sometime in the spring: side effects of soulmate separation after recently receiving a soulmark vary from mark sensitivity to mental fog to extreme touch aversion to mild depression-like symptoms to severe depression-like psychosis—

Well. Ilya stopped reading after that point. But he has been living the past six months of his life like it’s a competition he can win, except this time his body is the opposition team. The first time he’d gone out in Moscow after returning with the Prospect’s Cup, he’d taken a girl into a coat closet and fucked her against the door. Every single moment had felt like hell, like bees stinging his skin, like claws raking down his spine. Her hands had felt wrong, his chest had felt tight.

How can you miss something you’ve never even fucking had? It drove Ilya crazy. He’d insisted on going out again the next night, finding someone else. Then someone else, then someone else. Until the bear on his chest learned its fucking place on the list of priorities that make up Ilya’s life.

And now—six months later, Hollander is here. Their shoulders are brushing and cameras are flashing and Ilya was drafted first overall, so doesn’t that mean he deserves some sort of reward?

It feels inevitable, to lose the fight. He glances over at Hollander when the photographer lowers his camera to check one of the pictures. He gives himself two seconds, that’s all. 

Hollander’s expression is sour, twisted up into something resembling a smile. His hands are white-knuckled on the jersey. His freckles are standing out against his face. They’re close enough to count like this.

Two seconds. Ilya looks forward again. He’s grinning, he can feel the smile stretching out his face. His lungs feel light, his heart hammering like he’s just scored a hat trick. 

It’s a good look on Hollander, losing to Ilya. Maybe that makes him an asshole. Maybe soulmates are supposed to only want sunshine and roses for each other. But Ilya’s spent the last six months pushing this thing down and clawing it back into his control, all the while thinking he’s losing his mind, so. It’s nice. Watching Hollander swallow his loss. Knowing it happened because Ilya won. 

Maybe that makes him an asshole of a soulmate, but it’s not as if he isn’t already. He’s barely a soulmate at all, really.

“Where’s number two, come on,” the photographer tells them, and Ilya glances back at Hollander before he can stop himself. Hollander’s face freezes before he angles his fingers up—number two. His mouth flexes into a grimace followed a moment later by the same sort of hollow-eyed smile Ilya recognizes from the mirror these past six months, and it makes Ilya grin boyishly bright as he focuses his attention back on the camera. 

He feels warm all the way down to his toes. He feels satisfied and content and smug and like maybe he can take on the world. Hollander looks adorably petulant, a child who has realized that he can’t always get his way. Competition has always been a language Ilya’s understood. The stakes of winning and losing, too. 

This feels like everything. This is better than any congratulations Sveta could have offered. Ilya’s soulmate is standing next to him, close enough that their shoulders are brushing, and Ilya has won. Ilya would trade a hundred victories in the hockey rink in exchange for another moment exactly like this. All his senses feel heightened, feel honed into where Hollander’s shoulder knocks against his.

He knows the edges of his grin are too sharp for the moment, his eyes too bright, but he needs this. He deserves this. 

Maybe he’ll spend the rest of his life keenly aware of every room Shane Hollander has entered, and maybe he’ll always have to mentally fortify himself against the way the bear in his chest will roar and rage and try to get to Hollander each game Boston plays against Montreal, and maybe he’ll have to fuck other people with his shirt on for the rest of his life because his mark doesn’t like the feeling of strangers’ fingers stroking over it—but at least Shane Hollander will have to move through his life knowing that Ilya Rozanov was drafted first overall. 

It’s not nearly enough for Ilya. But he makes do. They can’t be soulmates; they probably won’t ever be friends. But they can be rivals. It can be enough for the bear and for Ilya Rozanov, if their names chase each other across the hockey headlines and the history books. It’ll have to be.

The bedside clock informs him that it’s past midnight, and Ilya feels the hour in his bones. The adrenaline rush from the draft ceremony has faded, unable to withstand the slog of the afterparty. Party is, of course, the wrong word for the tedious and sycophantic networking event that followed the closing of the draft ceremony, but that was the official title it was given.

His father had fit right into the ranks of businessmen in fancy suits, lingering around the reception area with a thin-lipped smile on his face. Like he was indulging the NHL with his presence, like he was unimpressed with the league, the city, the country but had deigned to attend for their sake.

Ilya can hear him in the next room, pacing around his hotel suite. They’d booked two rooms, connecting, so that his father could have room to work in privacy and Ilya could have room to breathe. The door between the two is flung open. Given the choice, Ilya thinks, his father would always be willing to sacrifice a little bit of privacy for the sake of total control over his son’s life.

Despite the late hour and his own exhaustion, something tugs in his chest like a live wire every time he tries to close his eyes and go to sleep. It’s like a gnawing sort of hunger, like when he finishes a game where he’s spent twenty-five total minutes on ice and has to blink black spots out of his vision and press his hand against his stomach to quiet its growls. 

It’s unignorable, the ache.

It’s better if it goes unnamed, even though Ilya thinks he knows exactly what it is. 

They hadn’t been asked to pay for Ilya’s hotel room, and it’s the same hotel where the reception was held, which means, logically, most of the NHL draft picks have been put up in this hotel. Which means, the bear in Ilya’s chest knows and hasn’t let Ilya forget, that there is a very good chance that Hollander is here.

And the bear may be very good at logic and reason, but it’s just a stupid animal in the end. It can’t understand why Shane Hollander is in the same hotel as Ilya Rozanov and yet Ilya Rozanov is not next to Hollander.

Restlessness runs like a river under Ilya’s skin. A part of him wants to stand and pace the floor like his father in the next room. They’re flying back to Russia in the afternoon, and his father had decided it was inefficient to adjust his sleep-schedule for a two day trip to America. Ilya could join him in his silent guard, push through the energy until the bear subsides, until Hollander leaves the hotel with his parents, until his soulmate is miles away again. He can sleep in the airport, on the planes.

But the room feels too small. Like a cage. Or a prison, with his father in the next room his warden. He doesn’t want to think like that. Not tonight. Not when he’s been drafted first overall, when he’s signed a preliminary contract with Boston, when he’s so fucking close to every ounce of freedom he’s only ever been able to catch glimpses of in dark corners of Moscow clubs. 

Ilya doesn’t want to pace the circumference of his cell. He wants to run.

So he gets out of bed; he goes to his suitcase; he changes into a set of workout clothes, sticking his head into his father’s room to show him his running shoes in explanation and excuse.

He goes to the gym.

It’s maybe one of the greatest ironies of his lifetime, that he goes to the gym to try and burn through the lightning sparking in his veins at just the possibility of being in the same hotel as his soulmate.

And when he walks into the basement unit, the first and only thing he can see is that someone’s already there. On the stationary bikes, pushing his muscles through a warm-up, head down between his shoulders and arms braced up on the handlebars.

Hollander.

Lost in his own thoughts, eyes vacant and unfocused as he works the bike, headphones tucked into his ears and music blaring so loudly that Ilya can hear the faint beat of it from here.

Seeing him is like being checked up against the boards when he thought he was alone on the ice. He’s unprepared for it. It makes his head spin and his heart thunder inside his chest, adrenaline pumping through his body like he’s just survived an attempt on his fucking life.

He isn’t sure he hasn’t, really. Hollander is here. In front of him. Just Hollander. No parents, no hockey jerseys, no country pride or winter layers to hide him away. Ilya’s never seen so much of Hollander before, and he’s spent an embarrassingly long amount of time just—watching him, studying him. His backhand (weak), his freckles (gorgeous), his leadership skills (impressive), his on-ice awareness (singular), his off-ice awareness (terrible, demonstrably). 

But it’s different now. Seeing him like this. Stripped of everything Ilya has learned to associate with Hollander. No rival team jersey, no stony expression, no annoyance glimmering in his eyes, no mother at his shoulder.

His soulmate has knees. It feels like a suckerpunch to the gut, seeing them all bare and hairy and unprotected. Hollander has knees, kneecaps, sinew and bone and joint and veins and blood. 

Ilya stares at the flex of Hollander’s calves and feels poleaxed.

He’s real; he’s here. That’s his soulmate. Shane. Not Shane Hollander, not Hollander, not Shane Grayson Hollander. This boy on the bike, lips curling into a frown as he stares sightlessly ahead of him—this is his soulmate.

Maybe his father is right and Ilya has always been slow on the uptake, because it sort of feels like Shane’s just said his name, all nine syllables of it, and his skin’s on fire all over again. He has a soulmate, and it’s this boy, and they both apparently turn to the same thing when they feel like they can't turn the noise off in their heads. 

Ilya is closing the distance between them. It’s thoughtless, instinctive and automatic. The bear is clawing at his chest so fiercely that Ilya’s sure it’ll burst out of his body and he’ll just be a mess of blood and broken bone on the hotel gym’s floor. It’s just a survival instinct to walk towards Hollander. 

He forgets about the row of treadmills behind them, forgets about the reason he decided to come down here in the first place. He sits on the bike directly next to Hollander. It feels like the only option he has.

Or—maybe he has other options, a whole empty gym of them and a hotel room a dozen floors away he could run back to. But he’s got tunnel vision now. All he can see is Shane Hollander’s stupid fucking knobby knees.

The bear purrs as it settles, way gotten. Selfish, stupid creature.

But then—why shouldn’t he be here? It is a free country, allegedly. This bike is empty. Hollander hasn’t even looked at him yet, so absorbed in his own thoughts it’s like the outside world doesn’t exist.

Which isn’t fair, really, if Ilya thinks about it. It’s not fair that Hollander gets to just—ignore him when Ilya’s body has been tearing itself to shreds over the last six months, rerunning every moment of their interaction through his head until he can picture it like it just happened. He just has to blink and he’s back there, gray and boring Saskatchewan parking lot, grit beneath his shoes, cigarette smoke wafting into his nose, and Hollander standing in front of him like a challenge and a gift from the universe all at the same time.

And yes, fine, it is Ilya’s fault. He knows that. It’s his fault, all of it, the constant stinging agony of the half-bond, the fact that he has the stupid bear on his chest in the first place. These are the consequences he has chosen because he’d thought they’d be easier to bear than everything else he could imagine getting and then losing just as fast.

But that doesn’t make it fair.

That doesn’t make the irritation burn itself out. That’s what a good workout is for though, so Ilya leans forward on the bike, matches Hollander’s pace but adds a spin of more resistance to his machine. 

He adds another one when the motion makes Hollander’s eyes dart to him, then down to the way his legs are pumping. Hollander’s expression flattens, but he’s watching now, caught and tugged out of his head and looking at Ilya. There’s a flash of petulant recognition across his face, a tightening of his eyebrows before he glares down at his handlebars. His feet start pushing him faster.

His breathing speeds up in time with his pacing, and fuck, Ilya brought a pair of headphones but there’s no way he’s going to put them in now when he could be listening to the soundtrack of Hollander’s pants and grunts and bitten-off curses.

It is about time that the universe gives him a gift like this. Ilya will appreciate every moment of it. 

He adds another spin of resistance on the bike, pushing himself faster than he probably should, but Hollander is right there with him, grunting from the effort. Ilya only wants to glance at him, but the moment he looks over, his eyes get stuck on the way that sweat drips down the side of Hollander’s face, beads at his jaw, makes pieces of his hair stick against his forehead.

Suddenly, he’s beyond grateful that Hollander’s on a bike instead of a treadmill. Ilya’s pretty sure that if he were running, he’d have tripped over his own feet by now trying to keep his eyes on the way Hollander’s flushed face highlights the spray of his freckles across his cheeks.

For a second, Shane’s eyes cut to his and he inhales sharply at whatever he must find there. It’s a pitchy gasp, thready and high, something separate from the work out. Something that belongs to just Ilya.

A moment later, Hollander slams on the emergency release button of the bike and his legs slow, pedaling into a stop that leaves his chest shaking with effort. Hollander’s eyes have returned to the handlebars, intent and focused, like it’s the most interesting piece of gym equipment he’s seen in his fucking life. 

Ilya leans back on the seat, raising his hands up and wrapping them around the back of his neck as he slows down his own movements to match Hollander. It feels like a win, even though Ilya isn’t quite sure what exactly they were doing. He’s been in a few dick measuring contests before in his life, of course. He’s been the best hockey player in every locker room he’s ever set foot in—there’s always been people who want to knock him down a peg. Who want to prove that they’re better at something than he is.

He doesn’t usually start them himself, but ‘Winning Feels Good’ is basically the baseline for his entire life.

So he doesn’t really know what to do with the fact that the heated pleasure curling in his stomach isn’t as satisfying as it usually is. That he’d trade it in a heartbeat for Hollander’s eyes back on him.

But no, Hollander isn’t looking at him at all,  dismounting from the bike and hobbling over towards the front of the gym so he can collapse against a weight rack and tilt his head back. His eyes fall shut, just for a second. His chest is still heaving. 

Sweaty and disheveled is a good look on him.

The bear—or Ilya, maybe, just Ilya—follows Hollander, pushing itself down to lean against the opposite weight rack, legs sprawled out in contrast to the way Hollander’s kept himself closed off even in his exhaustion.

The lightning is back beneath his skin, but close like this, feet almost touching if only Hollander would give just an inch of ground, the bear in Ilya’s chest is quiet, content. Of course it is. It’s getting everything it fucking wants, Hollander in its eyesight. Looking like that. Not running away.

Looking at him with onyx dark eyes, heavy-lidded from the late hour maybe, from the workout.

It makes Ilya feel breathless, checked into and bowled over all over again. He wonders if Hollander knows that the only people who’ve ever looked at him like that are ones he’s about to fuck. Ilya wonders what Hollander would say if he told him that. If his mouth would drop open in shock, if his nose would wrinkle up in disgust. If he’d blush.

Ilya tilts his head back, taking a long drag from his water bottle. He should go. This is dangerous. This is everything he’s been trying to avoid. His soulmate, opposite him, looking soft and vulnerable and a little bit annoyed with him, jaw clenched and nostrils flaring and yet apparently just as incapable of looking away from him as Ilya feels.

And—Ilya should really go. But he has a feeling that the workout will have done nothing to dissipate the lightning storm as soon as he’s back up in his bed. But here, right now, he feels—calm. Maybe. That’s the only word he can think of for the way even the bear feels content to rest in his chest when even an hour ago it felt like it was ready to tear him asunder.

Ilya should really go. Hollander wouldn’t miss him, doesn’t want him to stick around. Not tonight, the night of the draft where he went second. Because Ilya went first.

Maybe Ilya’s let that go to his head already, that glimpse of freedom and that feeling of winning that had curled so expansively through his stomach. Maybe he thinks he can win anything now, maybe it’s made him reckless and stupid. Maybe the bear’s stupidity is rubbing off on him.

Because he doesn't go; he stays.

Hollander shifts on the ground like he’s debating whether or not to stand, and Ilya suddenly can’t stand the thought of it. Of Hollander leaving first. Of not speaking to him. 

It would be so sweet to hear his voice.  Which is only a little funny because of how this whole shit started in the first place, really, Ilya prodding when he should have looked the other way, Ilya courting danger and striking matches and letting himself burn first.

“What a fucking day, huh,” he tells Hollander, taking another drink and watching Hollander watch the bob of his throat. He raises his eyebrows, catches Hollander’s eyes for a moment before the other boy blushes and looks away. 

“Yeah,” Hollander mutters, lips pulling up into a smile that looks more like a grimace. “Totally.”

Ilya nods, then asks, innocently, “Is everything you dreamed of?”

It’s easier to be an asshole. Safer, too. And—well, Ilya can’t pretend it’s not fun either. Not when Hollander’s eyes flash and his lip curls for a moment before he says, flatly, “Almost.” 

Like Ilya should feel bad for Hollander. It delights Ilya to find out that Shane Hollander is a sore loser. Then he has to wonder: has Hollander ever really lost? Before Ilya, that is. Because Ilya won Gold at World Juniors, he won first overall draftpick, he won their stupid little biking competition. Maybe this is a new experience for Hollander, coming second. Maybe he is on a learning curve of his own. 

He grimaces, exaggerated, and clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Eh,” he whistles out, tipping his head. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Hollander says, quick and sure. Not like he can read Ilya’s cues for what they are, but like he knows because he wouldn’t be in Ilya’s shoes.

Ilya grins at him in response, all sharp teeth. No, he’s not. Hollander is right. Hollander just doesn’t know how right he is, how much satisfaction Ilya is taking from these wins against him. It’ll be all he has soon. Boston and Montreal are rivals that’ll meet on the ice again and again and again during the regular season. Each time, seeing Hollander will feel like he’s been run over by a zamboni. If how he felt in January is any indication, Ilya’s going to be sore and aching and useless for at least a week, maybe a month, after each time. Made to quit Hollander cold turkey over and over and over again.

He shrugs again, exaggerated. “At least you did not go third,” he says, like it’s a consolation. Like it’s not what he’d secretly been hoping for even as he knew it would never happen. Third pick went to the Dallas Drivers, the worst team in the Western Conference. 

But at least Hollander would have been in the Western Conference then. That would have been a goddamn miracle, to just shove him into a state like Texas and forget all about him. That’s the kind of scenario Ilya dreams about.

But Montreal would have had to be incredibly blind to have gone with anyone other than Hollander. It’s been fifteen hours, and Ilya still can’t quite believe that Boston decided to go for someone other than Hollander. 

In front of him, Hollander wrinkles his nose at the idea of—Ilya doesn’t know. Maybe Texas as a whole. “Yeah,” he admits grudgingly, rubbing his hands down over his thighs. Ilya has been trying not to stare at them, but it’s almost impossible. “Wouldn’t have…liked that much.”

“You would not last one day under Texas sun,” Ilya agrees, and Hollander scowls. “You go out for lunch, come back with one hundred more freckles.”

He knows that’s the right word for the constellation of darker spots of skin across Hollander’s cheeks and the bridge of his nose, but he taps his cheekbone just in case, so Hollander knows what he’s talking about. 

Hollander’s expression smooths out slightly at this, his thumb coming up to brush against the edge of his nose. He does it so easily, too, like the action isn’t something Ilya’s been thinking about doing himself for the past six months. “Freckles, huh,” he says, and there’s a new furrow between his eyebrows, something like confusion. But softer. “Who’s teaching you English? Wouldn’t think that word’s a priority.” 

Ilya closes his mouth. He can feel the way his smile fixes into place on his face, morphing into the ghost of a cocky smirk. 

The answer is, of course, that he taught himself the word within a week of landing in Moscow a World Juniors Champion. He’d wanted to know it, wanted to know every part of Hollander he’d been shown. He’d watched an interview of Hollander speaking in French to a Canadian outlet, and so he’d learned the word in that language too: taches de rousseur.

But he’s not going to say that.

He tosses his water bottle to Hollander instead, half-hoping it’ll hit him in the face. That’s what cornered animals do, even ones that have been half-domesticated. Prod them hard enough and they lash out, it’s in their nature.

“Drink,” he tells him. “You are, hm, blushing.”

“I’m flushed, asshole,” Hollander snaps, but he brings the bottle to his mouth anyway, wraps his lips around the imprint of Ilya’s mouth.

The lightning is back. Even the bear in his chest, so happy to bask in Hollander’s presence that it’s been asleep, sits up muzzily and takes notice.

Hollander’s eyes stay glued to his as he tips his head back, draining more of the water. Because Ilya told him to drink.

Ilya shifts on the floor, legs kicking out without conscious permission from his mind, body desperate to close the gap between them. 

He wants to push Hollander further, wants to capitalize on the way Hollander’s eyes have lingered on his arms, his neck, his legs and the tight shorts covering just the tops of his thighs. If it were anyone else, he would. He would crawl forward, push himself up between Hollander’s legs and make him make room for him. He’d lick the sweat from the dip in his throat. He’d tangle his hands in his hair, tug his head back so he can bite at his neck until Hollander is begging for anything, for more, for Ilya everywhere over and around him.

But it’s not anyone. It’s Hollander, who is his soulmate. 

Hollander, who could deccimate him better and more handily than anyone else has ever been able to, if Ilya keeps toeing the edge of the cliff like this. If Ilya keeps giving him opportunities to do so. 

And what would kissing him be, other than giving him the biggest opportunity there is to destroy him?

Hollander’s eyes are dark and heated. His expression is broken open. It’s impossible to miss, impossible to misread. Ilya’s water bottle is held loosely in his hand; his lips are wet and red and Ilya thinks—if it were anyone else. Fuck. If it were anyone else, or if Hollander could be someone else to him. Someone safer.

He swallows the urge to demand more from him, to see what Hollander will do, if he’d obey the way he’d obeyed so easily to Ilya’s first command to drink in the first place.

But that wasn’t the first thing he’d demanded from Shane Hollander, was it. 

“Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov,” he’d said six months ago. “Go on. Say it.”

And Hollander had. For some reason that Ilya still can’t make sense of. He’d said it. And look what happened.

So really, it’s far safer to ignore the part of him that’s hungry to see what Hollander will do if Ilya asks it of him. What commands he’ll buck up against, what he’ll allow, what he’ll relax under. If he’ll raise the bottle to his lips and take another sip if Ilya tells him to drink more.

There’s nothing but danger down that path.

And for once, maybe Ilya is feeling smart, because he bites his tongue and reaches out for the bottle without another word.

Hollander’s eyes are still smoldering, latched onto Ilya’s face like he can’t imagine looking away. But then, a second later, he does, blinking down at Ilya’s hand.

No—his arm. 

“Is that a tattoo?” Hollander asks, leaning forward and catching Ilya around the elbow, water bottle completely forgotten as he studies the edge of the tattoo just peeking out of the gap of Ilya’s tank top.

Ilya freezes, instinctive, prey. The bear in his chest begins to grumble, excited. It stands and stretches, claws out. He tenses his arm, jerks away slightly. “Is private.”

But Hollander doesn’t let him go. Why the fuck doesn’t Hollander let him go?

“You have a tattoo,” Hollander murmurs, almost to himself. The heat of him radiates towards the soulmark, the stupid fucking soulmark that Ilya should have put a fucking bandage over. He should be wearing a fucking tee-shirt. He’s never going to go out in public in less than a double-breasted suit after this, he promises, so long as Hollander doesn’t touch the bear. Ilya doesn’t know what will happen. Can’t imagine it will end well. Needs to leave. Needs to rip his arm away, but it’s like his body isn’t his own. It belongs to Shane. This is Shane’s mark. 

Of course Shane should touch it, it’s his bear. It’s just on Ilya’s skin. It’s just Ilya’s burden to bear. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong to Shane, first and foremost.

Shane’s fingers, that hand that Ilya’s taken in his own in a stiff handshake, that hand that he’s watched in hours of game tape curled around his stick, tapping his teammates’ helmets after a goal, twisting around jerseys in celebration, that hand brushes feather-light against the inside of his bicep. 

It’s just a small touch, knuckles barely dusting across his skin. Still, Ilya flinches so hard that it must startle Hollander back to himself, because a moment later the touch is gone. Hollander is gone, back on his side of their little alcove, eyes wide like he can’t believe his own daring and definitely, definitely blushing.

“Is just a tattoo,” Ilya says into the suddenly heavy quiet. Hollander isn’t looking at him, staring over his head and then blinking back down to the thin line of ink he can see, the edge of the bear’s fur, and then away again like he can’t help himself. 

Maybe he can’t. It would be nice for someone else to feel that way in this relationship for a change.

“Oh,” Hollander clears his throat. “Uh, cool. Bro. That’s cool.”

Indifference looks terrible on Hollander, or maybe it’s just something Ilya cannot bear to be on the receiving end of. “Is ugly,” he says flatly. It sends a little sick thrill down his spine, even though he can’t be sure whose soul he’s insulting here. It doesn’t matter, not really. Cornered animals lash out at anything they can reach. It’s just in their nature.

Hollander’s nose wrinkles. “Why’d you get a tattoo you think is ugly?”

Ilya works his jaw, chewing through words he doesn’t think he should say. He sort of wants to punch Shane Grayson Hollander right in the mouth. He sort of wants to kiss him. 

 “It was stupid mistake,” he finally grunts, swallowing everything else down. “Very stupid.”

The bear roars out its disapproval, but it’s not like Ilya’s going to start listening to it now of all fucking times. 

“Oh,” Hollander says. He looks away then looks back at Ilya’s shoulder, like he’s magnetized. “My mom would kill me if I got a tattoo.”

“Yes, well,” Ilya snaps. My mother is dead. 

But he has enough sense to bite his tongue before those words slip out too. He shakes his head, sharp and automatic and draws his legs up, away from Hollander so he can rest his arms on his knees. It’s the closest he can get to running away. 

Hollander blinks at him, confused maybe.

“I keep it hush hush,” Ilya finishes lamely, and Hollander nods like that makes sense. Like anyone would get a chest tattoo and then want people to not look at it. Especially athletes, who spend large parts of their day shirtless around other people. Maybe this is Hollander offering him an out the way he offered him his hand six months ago: out of kindness. 

Ilya doesn’t know what to do with that, especially now that the heat has begun to fade from Hollander’s eyes. Now he’s just looking at him, like he’s trying to pinpoint something, pin down Ilya and pull him apart. “I should go,” Ilya says, tensing his legs.

Already, at just the words, his chest twinges. The bear rebels.

“Oh,” Hollander says. Like he’s disappointed. 

This should be the moment where Ilya reminds him that he beat him. That one of them was chosen before the other and it wasn’t Shane Grayson Hollander. Hollander is acting like he’s forgotten. Hollander’s acting like he wants Ilya to stay, like he doesn’t find Ilya rude and mean and an asshole.

But what comes out when he opens his mouth isn’t some scathing indictment about Montreal or being the second best draft pick. It’s just. An excuse. “I am feeling unwell,” he hears himself say. “Is the travel, I think. Or the exercise.”

Hollander’s mouth twists up into a half-smile, but his eyes are dark with misplaced concern. “Oh, yeah, then you should definitely—you know. Go to sleep. It’s late.” 

“Yes,” Ilya agrees because Hollander has to be offering him an out now. He sounds genuine, but he has to be lying through his teeth, analyzing every movement Ilya makes and storing it away for later. “Is late, and I had very busy day.”

“Oh yeah? Did something happen?” Hollander asks blandly, blinking at him with his wide onyx eyes, and he’s so—he’s so—it catches Ilya off guard. It makes him laugh. He thinks maybe this is the first time he’s laughed on American soil. Of course this too would belong to Hollander.

Hollander, who looks quietly pleased at his joke, the tops of his cheeks flushing red as he stares at Ilya’s mouth like he didn’t know he could do that.

“Okay,” Ilya says, pushing himself to his feet.

“Are you playing in October?” Hollander asks, scrambling up as well. He rubs his hands on his thighs, like he’s wishing for pockets on his exercise shorts. “Like, this October? I asked around, but no one could tell me.”

Ilya blinks. Hollander has been asking after him? And no one has informed Ilya of this? “No,” he tells Hollander, watching the way the word hits him. “I have half a year contract with coach in Russia my father tells me to complete. I play there until World Juniors, then fly from Canada to Boston. Is because…travel things. Papers. Tch,” the word is escaping him; it’s annoying. 

His father had made it clear that he expected Ilya to finish out his current contract with the team in Russia—Rozanov men do not go back on their word once given—and any hope he’d harbored that Boston would step in and demand he start over the summer when rookies usually begin training with their teams was useless. The Bears’ front office needed a good six months anyway, the GM had said jovially this afternoon, to ensure his visa was approved by the American government and his papers were in order before his employment could officially begin. 

So he is free, a Boston Bear, first overall draft pick, and he is going back to Russia anyway.

But only for half a year. Only for six more months. Then he’ll be in America, training alongside the team when they’re at home and the AHL team when the Bears hit the road. 

And in October next year, 2010, he’ll make his debut as a rookie with the NHL. 

“Is too bad,” he allows with a shrug of his shoulders. “Media has built up big rivalry between us, but you will have whole year on me when I start. Make sure you play good though, Hollander. Would be embarrassing to beat you in overall points in my rookie year.”

“I’m not,” Hollander blurts out. The blush is back, if it ever left. “I’m actually–uh, I’m not playing. In October.”

“What?”

“I’m doing the college circuit for a year,” Hollander says, rubbing at the back of his neck. “We talked with the Voyageurs about it, they’re supportive, and it’s important to my dad? I think? He played, for McGill, if you’ve—”

“I know McGill,” Ilya says, because Sveta decided not to go there, thank god, but he'd had to hear about it for months beforehand. “You are playing for McGill?” 

“It’s a great school for college hockey,” Hollander snaps, defensive. “My dad’s an alum. What, would you have preferred I went to Boston?” 

Ilya blinks and shakes his head. He hadn't known there was hockey in Boston outside of the NHL. It'd never been important enough to learn. “What is alum?” he says, sounding as mystified as he feels.

“Oh, it’s, uh, like he used to go to school there. It’s where he graduated. And I know it’s important to him, that we could both do college hockey, so—”

“But you are second overall in the NHL draft,” Ilya points out, frowning. “This is much better than McGill hockey, yes? You say no for now to NHL because your father was athlete forty years ago?”

“I mean, yeah, well, not forty years ago, Christ, but—” Hollander scowls suddenly and crosses his arms. An animal backed into a corner and prodded into lashing out. They have this too in common, it seems. “Well, I mean, aren’t you delaying your rookie season because of what your dad wants?”

Ilya stares. He wants to tell Hollander that his father does not want so much as he demands, but maybe Hollander’s father is the same. He’d seen him crying into a handkerchief during the draft when Hollander walked up on stage, arm wrapped around Hollander’s mother’s shoulders, but maybe that does not mean what Ilya thought it meant. Maybe fathers are complicated for Hollander too. 

“So we will both start next year,” he says, ignoring Hollander’s pointed question entirely. “That is very funny, no?”

Maybe someone who doesn’t know the power of words would even call it fated. Not Ilya though. 

But, apparently, Hollander. “Sorta like maybe we’re destined, you know,” Hollander says, and he’s smiling again, bright and expectant like he’s waiting for Ilya to laugh. Like it’s his due.

Except all Ilya feels is cold, inside and out, down to the bone and through that too. Down to the soul. “What?”

Hollander blinks. “Destined, like. To be rivals,” he says, tilting his head and studying Ilya. “You look like shit, Rozanov. What’s up with you?”

“I say already, I am not feeling good,” Ilya snaps, too brusque and too sharp, turning his head away and running a hand down his face. The words are too choppy, too steeped in his accent, but it is late and he is tired and his soulmate is exhausting or maybe it’s just this farce Ilya’s dragged them into that’s exhausting. Maybe it’s just Ilya.

“Oh, right,” Hollander says like he’s just now remembering why they stood up in the first place. Because Ilya wanted to leave.

Ilya still wants to leave. The bear in his chest has started pacing. 

“Okay,” Ilya tells both of them. “Bye, Hollander.”

Go fast, like ripping off a band-aid. It hurts less if you keep moving. Ilya is at the door to the gym. His legs ache, but the sore muscles have nothing on the way the bear has begun to roar out its fury as it realizes Ilya is leaving and Hollander is not coming with him. He is pushing the door open. He is almost free, for a given value of the word.

“Wait, Rozanov, hold up!” Hollander calls, and it’s like suddenly Ilya’s feet can’t move. Every muscle in his body rebels against his mind, drags him to a standstill like a dog taught to stop at the sound of his owner’s voice.

This, Ilya thinks, closing his eyes for a second, does not bode well for hockey. Not if Hollander can trip him up on the ice just by asking politely for him to slow down.

“What?” He grunts, turning around.

“You forgot this,” Hollander says, holding out his water bottle. The kindness is back in his eyes. Ilya isn’t sure if he likes it. Maybe he just doesn’t know how to swallow it.

“Thanks,” he replies shortly, taking it from Hollander’s hand. Their fingers brush. When he pulls at it, Hollander pushes forward a bit, keeps it in his grasp. His knuckles are raised and scarred beneath Ilya’s fingers. His soulmate has hockey hands; of course he does.

“Grilled cheese,” Hollander tells him, apropos of nothing.

Ilya stares. They’re standing half out of the gym, half still inside it, but no one’s around at this time of night. No one can help him if Hollander’s having a fucking stroke. “I do not know this thing," he says slowly. "Girl cheese? Is this Canadian thing? Do you have boy cheese too?”

“What—no, Rozanov, like—grilled cheese. Cheese you put on the grill so it melts. And two pieces of bread, like. Around the melted cheese. Bread and cheese. Oh, and butter, for the toasting. And I guess sometimes vegetables. Or protein? Like tuna or chicken or ham.”

“Hollander, you are having stroke,” Ilya says delicately. “What are you saying.” 

“When I’m not feeling well, my dad makes me a sandwich,” Hollander explains, slowly, rubbing at his neck and looking like he’s regretting having said anything at all. “Like, since I was a kid. It’s always been the same thing, just bread and cheese. And it’s not at all in my diet plan, and there’s literally no, like, nutritional benefit or anything, unless you add some protein or veggies, I guess—”

“Hollander.”

“But it always helps,” Shane shrugs, looks at Ilya and then drops his gaze back to the floor. “It always made me feel better. I don’t know. If you wanted to try.”

“Okay,” Ilya says, and Shane’s eyes dart back to his. “Do I come to your hotel room and your father make me girl cheese, or does he come to mine? Is it like sexy pizza delivery man where I do not have cash but find other ways to pay, or—”

“Ugh,” Shane’s nose wrinkles again, and he crosses his arms over his chest. “Fuck, Rozanov, that’s so gross. Fuck off, never mind. I hope you, like. Choke on your own vomit or something.”

“That is not very nice,” Ilya tells him, and he has to bite at the inside of his lip to keep himself from smiling at the look on Hollander’s face. “And do not get your hopes up, Hollander. If I die, you do not inherit title of first overall. Is not work like that.” 

“I don’t know, maybe it is,” Hollander says, and he’s leaning forward, just slightly. His head is tilted and he’s looking up at Ilya through his eyelashes. Does Hollander know that he’s flirting with him? Can he hear the bear roaring inside Ilya’s chest from where he stands? “Has anyone ever tried it?”

“No, but I will make sure,” Ilya replies, mouth dry. “In my document. My end of life document. My…”

“Will,” Hollander supplies. Is he closer? He feels closer. His eyes are soft and dark again. There’s less heat than there was in the gym, but that’s almost more dangerous. “Your last will and testament.”

“Yes, that. I will ask that Korogyi inherits first overall title.”

Hollander blinks, frowns. “Who?” he asks, like he’s genuinely confused.

Ilya stares back. “He was third, Hollander. Dallas’ new right wing.”

“Oh, right,” Hollander says, and his eyes drop away. “Right, yeah. Korogyi.”

“You forgot about him, didn’t you?” Ilya asks, practically crows. “You just remember me, yes? Korogyi who? I like it, Hollander. You know who is real competition.”

And the worst part is that he isn’t even lying. He does like it. Likes that Hollander apparently has at least a bit of the same tunnel vision that’s been haunting Ilya for six months. Likes that it makes him feel special, like he’s different, like he’s apart from the rest of the rookies up for the draft and competing for Hollander's attention.

“Fuck off,” Hollander mutters, and he’s blushing again. He leans back, steps back into the gym, away from Ilya. “You’re like, the biggest asshole I’ve ever met.”

The bear in Ilya’s chest lets out a mournful little moan.

“Yes, but you are second biggest,” Ilya tells him, and if it were anyone else, he’d reach out and pat Hollander on the shoulder. Or, well. The truth is that if it were anyone else, they’d be kissing by now. But it is important. To not touch Hollander. Ilya does not know what will happen if he gives in to the pull between them. And every unknown that swirls around Hollander scares Ilya to death, so he can’t. He can’t. 

“So at least you are consistent. Second always,” he adds, waving his hand. Because it’s either that or kiss him. It’s either that or say his name. It’s either that or fall to his knees and never get up again.

Hollander’s face screws up in anger. It makes him look like a bedraggled kitten, which makes Ilya’s teeth ache in response. So he says, quickly, “Good night, Hollander. I will see you on ice in December. You should train very hard at McGill hockey, or else it will not be fun beating you again.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Hollander says, straightening his shoulders and crossing his arms over his chest like if he makes himself big enough maybe Ilya will be frightened of him. The funny thing is that he’s right; Ilya is terrified of him, for no reason he’ll ever know.

The entire walk from the gym to the elevator is spent with his hands crossed in front of him, nails digging into his skin. By the time he makes it back to his hotel room and through a quick shower, he has only a few hours before his morning alarm. 

He can’t bring himself to regret it though, even if he’s told himself a thousand times over that the best thing he can do is stay as far away from Shane Hollander as he can manage. 

Still, it’ll be six more months until he sees him for World Juniors, if both of them are selected to compete. And then it’ll be even longer between that competition and their first game against each other as professional NHL players. 

There is so much time stretched out before them, in between their meetings. Most of his life is going to be lived like that, in between the moments he spends stuck in Hollander’s orbit. It'll be spent floating adrift save for those days he'll be pulled into Hollander's gravity. It’s an objectively terrifying thought, but for some reason it’s the only thing that makes the bear in his chest calm down. Maybe it's just the knowledge that there'll be more. That he'll meet Hollander again, if not soon then eventually. Within ten minutes of his head hitting the pillow, he's on the edge of falling asleep, blinking slowly at the silhouette of the water bottle on his nightstand until he’s pulled under and away. 

Chapter End Notes

notes i made while writing this chapter:

-so just overall anytime ilya's talking about the bear in his chest he's talking about his heart btw in case that was confusing he's just a dramatic little bitch baby who has to distance himself from his emotions in order to be able to name them and it's much easier for him to believe that any pull he feels towards shane hollander is from something external and uncontrollable (a soulmark) vs his natural inclination towards shane hollander

-i spelled korogyi's name wrong literally everytime i tried to use it until i just started CTRL+V'ing the spelling i took from the show on the back of his jersey into every place i used it. this poor guy. forgotten by both ilya and shane and also even the writer who is writing a joke about how forgettable he is. im so sorry koroygi. korrogyi. korogy.

-dialogue lifted from the show: photographer saying 'where's number two?'; the beginning of ilya and shane's conversation in the gym, from 'what a fucking day' to 'no, you're not'

-i honestly have no idea what shane&ilya do between being drafted june 2009 and playing in the nhl october 2010; my understanding as a casual hockey fan with terrible taste in teams is that rookies who are drafted in the summer usually do dev camp/prospects camp that same summer and train with the team before playing the pre-season and starting the next season. i looked online to try and find out why both shane and ilya delayed starting a whole year, especially because if they've been drafted they're old enough to play and as high draft picks, there would have been a ton of attention on them starting asap, but i couldn't find anything outside of 'training', so i just took the wriggle room and ran with it

-next chapter is going to be the commercial, the showers, the hotel room! good god, finally, am i right

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

so what we've learned is that when i tell someone my tentative update schedule is roughly once a week, immediately the writer's block hits lmao

anyway it's been a month so obviously im back with a 15k long chapter containing exactly what everyone wants to see in this hollanov soulmate fic: gratuitous amounts of paperwork and ☝️ a swede

(but seriously i added the slow burn tag which i can't believe i left off in the first place! i have a lot of this fic planned out and i know it's going to be long and involved, balancing parallels to canon, world-building specific to this au, and moments of complete canon re-write to match how the premise changes the characters and how they treat each other. so please be warned! this is a slow burn with hopefully enough there to sink your teeth into while we build towards the happily ever after)

enjoy!

Chapter Three: January 2010 - Boston, Massachusetts

Rain and wind and traffic greet Ilya the moment he leaves Logan International Airport. The taxi driver helps him stuff his things into the trunk with the air of a man who has a hundred places to be, none of which are where he currently is.

At least Ilya does not have much in the way of things. A large suitcase full of athletic clothes. A duffle bag stuffed with his favorite bits of hockey gear and medical tape and packets of the sports drink mix he likes best but wasn’t sure he’d be able to find in the States. A small carry-on suitcase for all of what his life is off the ice, which isn’t really much.

He gives the driver the same address he gave the border agent at the airport; he has it memorized at this point, has said the words enough out loud and in his head that they don’t even sound of anything anymore. Not words, not homes. Just a jumble of letters and numbers that doesn’t quite belong to him.

The taxi driver makes a noise of agreement, tabs the meter to start it, and pulls the car into the stop-start of post-holiday airport traffic. He doesn’t try to speak to Ilya, doesn’t ask him about the flight, about his destination, about where he’s come in from or how long he thinks he’s staying. Either it’s genuine apathy or a small kindness hidden behind a wall of blunt disinterest. Ilya can’t tell. He’s exhausted down to his bones. Past that. To his soul.

When he closes his eyes, he is back on the ice in Ottawa, silver medal being handed to him by a woman whose eyes are already on the next Russian player in line. The Canadian team’s celebrations are still loud in his ears. They’d drowned out the sound of the jet engines of the plane he’d taken to Boston; they’d been louder than his heartbeat as he propped his hands up on his shaking knees after the game-winning goal. 

They hadn’t stood a chance when it came to Hollander’s voice though. Ilya isn’t sure there’s anything loud enough in the world to stop him from hearing Hollander when the boy turns and speaks to him. It’s a betrayal of his body, every fucking time.

See you in October.

What a simple thing to say. As if Ilya needed the reminder. As if he did not know already, as if he has managed to forget. Ten months. As if a part of him has not been counting down the days since that night in the hotel gym. 

Afterwards, Hollander had reached out towards him with his bare hand, in the line. Ilya had kept his gloves on. It’d felt like the smartest thing he could do, especially when he took stock of himself and realized how much his body was aching to touch Hollander. Like he’d swallowed a hundred magnets that all recognized Shane Hollander as their magnetic north.

What Ilya has to assume is Boston blurs into streaks of washed-out color as the taxi pulls onto a wider road and picks up speed. It is raining harder now. Drops of water hit the window beside Ilya’s cheek and race against each other across the sides of the car. It’s late and dark already. There’s familiarity in that, even though the winter here does not feel the same. 

The bear in Ilya’s chest lets out a mournful sort of noise. It is a petty, stupid animal. It holds grudges. It’d nearly torn Ilya’s chest in two, trying to get to Hollander the moment he’d skated out onto the ice during the tournament’s championship. It’d nearly torn its way to freedom when Hollander offered the bare skin of his fingers and Ilya held out his glove to accept it.

It is a very stupid animal. The months between the Draft and World Juniors had not changed that, though Ilya has spent what feels like ages clawing it into submission in dark corners of Moscow nightclubs, kissing friends who might as well have been strangers and strangers who fancy themselves more.

See you in October, Hollander said, but the bear in Ilya’s chest is a stupid fucking animal. It cannot count, it cannot tell time. All it knows is now and then. All it wants is now, is again.

“You okay back there?” The driver asks and Ilya startles away from the meditative blur of streetlights to blink at him through the dividing glass. “I can turn up the heat. Fucking wicked out there tonight.”

“No, is fine,” Ilya tells him. He hesitates then adds, “I am used to this.” 

It’s mostly a lie. Ilya is used to worse than this. The chill in the back of the taxi is something that can be shaken off, an obedient dog that will come to heel if given a firm enough command. Russian winters never leave so politely; they tend to bite and lock their jaws around their mouthful of flesh and hang on.

He surprises himself by how much he suddenly wants to tell this to someone, even just this driver. He thinks—wildly, for the first time, like a realization and a lightning strike and something that can’t be undone—if everything goes the way he wants, he may never be back in Russia during her winter. Maybe—hopefully—for the Olympics, but nothing more. Nothing beyond. The next time he steps foot on Russia’s soil during the winter, he will be a guest. He will have a return ticket already purchased that will take him somewhere else afterwards. 

“Oh yeah?” The driver asks, glancing back at him in the rearview mirror. “Where you from?”

“Russia,” Ilya says, and the driver blows out the sort of impressed breath he probably gives everyone he picks up at the airport when they tell him where they’ve traveled from, even though technically Ilya has traveled from Ottawa to Boston tonight. 

“Whoa,” the driver says. “What was that like, hey?”

Ilya feels his mouth tick up. The past tense hits him unexpectedly square in the chest, a one-two punch. What was that like. As if it is over now. It is, in some ways, because Russia is very far away now, except for all the pieces of it he carries with him. He has a Russian bear living in his chest that tells him no matter how far he runs, his soul will always remember its first home.

But still. Ilya has two suitcases and a duffle bag and a new address that he is hurtling towards down this highway, seventy miles an hour.

“Cold,” Ilya tells him. He means to say more, but he doesn’t know how. The conversation peters into nothing and the car pushes forward through the darkness.

The Bears Front Office had, firmly, suggested that Ilya spend at least the first year on the team living with a member of the organization. For team unity. For integration. For structure and guidance. 

There were many reasons thrown around in the email thread on the topic. Ilya thinks they all boil down to the fact that no one trusts a nineteen year old kid to look after himself in a foreign city on a new team. Especially one with a reputation like Ilya. Maybe Shane Hollander will be trusted with such freedom when he stops playing at the college level and moves up to Montreal, but not Ilya Rozanov.

Ilya hadn’t offered much in the way of pushback either. Finding his own place in a city he didn’t know didn’t sound appealing. He’d just requested that they find a veteran player willing to put him up for these intervening six months and then his rookie season. It’d felt important, at the time, to stay with a player over a manager. Someone who was actually a part of the team, never against them. Someone Ilya could observe firsthand, find out what that meant for the Bears and what it meant for him.

Henrik Olsson’s a lifetime Bear, drafted to the team nineteenth overall straight from the Swedish National League sixteen years ago and still hanging on. He’s a solid left winger, bounces between third and fourth line depending on the game. Good on the puck, passable two-way play. Not a player who’s going to get his jersey retired up in the rafters of the Garden, probably, but the kind of guy other players always end up mentioning in their post-interviews, like he’s the lynchpin of the locker room and he doesn’t even know it.

Most importantly though, Henrik Olsson, #27, has a spare bedroom in his Chestnut Hill apartment. 

And so Ilya moves in.

The weekend after World Juniors, when Ilya lands in Boston, the Bears are on a roadtrip through the West Coast. They hit the Aces in Los Angeles; the Dukes in Anaheim hit back and leave a bruise that the Sea Lions in San Francisco capitalize on two nights later. Their final game against the Seattle Kelpies is so embarrassing that Ilya turns the television off and sits on a couch that isn’t his until the sun’s entirely gone and he realizes he’s alone in the dark, staring at nothing.

Olsson calls on the second day, sounding out of breath, like he’s just been told there’s a stranger living in his house and he’d run to his phone to check for himself. “Ilya, hello,” he says. Pieces of Sweden stick to his vowels, still after all of these years. “I’m glad to hear you made it to the place okay. How is it?”

Ilya wonders who told Olsson he landed in Boston. It wasn’t Ilya, that’s for certain. “Good, thank you,” Ilya says. “And it is nice. Thank you.” 

It is a nice place. It’s larger than he’d expected when he’d first been dropped off at the apartment complex, taking up probably about half the top floor of what Ilya has been told is a Pre-War building. Someone’s gone to great lengths to highlight every hint of the history in it. That is something Ilya is learning about Boston: they love the ghosts they live with.

The apartment itself has a simple layout. Off the main living area, which is a cavernous amalgamation of kitchen and dining room and television room, there is a hallway with four doors. Three lead to bedrooms, one leads to a bathroom so perfectly spotless that Ilya knows immediately no one uses it save for guests. 

Guests and now Ilya.

“That’s good,” Olsson says. “You are, uh—finding everything okay there? Towels, sheets?”

“Yes, thank you,” Ilya says. This is an unfamiliar situation for him. He has never lived in someone else’s house before. He likes to think that if he hadn’t been able to find towels or sheets after two days of living here, though, he would have forced some sort of solution before now.

“That’s good,” Olsson says again, awkwardly. Maybe this is an unfamiliar situation for Olsson too. After a pause that’s this side of too long, he lets out a breath that’s pure static across the line. “This is weird, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, but at least he doesn’t say thank you again. 

There’s the sound of rustling and then a bitten off word that could be Swedish or English or Bostonian or something in the middle. “Alright, well,” Olsson says and underneath the stiff formality, there’s the kind of exhaustion Ilya sort of recognizes. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Or wait, no—everything but the take-out containers. Don’t touch those. Jacky’s probably let them turn into a bio-hazard by now.”

“Uh,” Ilya says. “Okay. Thank you.”

After they hang up, Ilya gets about fifteen hours to wonder who the fuck Jacky is before he meets him. Very loudly, very early in the morning.

“Yes, hello, what is?” Ilya snarls, half-asleep still as he wrenches the door to the apartment open. It’s not even seven in the morning yet. Ilya knows because he’d checked his phone sometime in between the fourth and the fifth loud bang on the door.

“Hey,” the man on the other side says. He lowers the crutch he’d been using to hit the door and gives him a small wave with the same hand. In his other hand, he’s carrying a tray of coffee. DUNKIN runs up the side of the styrofoam cups in bright pink lettering. “I’m Daniel Dawson. Nice to meet you, man. Welcome to Boston.”

Ilya rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. “What.”

“I play defense for the Bears,” Dawson tells him. Even though he’s probably a good ten, fifteen years older than Ilya, he has a soft looking face, round cheeks. Thick eyebrows. Square chin with a dimple cutting through it and a scar cutting through that. His nose is crooked and flattened, like he’s fallen too many times on the ice for the bones to remember how to heal straight. His hair is dark and cut close to his scalp. There’s another scar on his forehead, vertical and just between his eyebrows. It makes him look a little confused even when he’s smiling. 

One of his teeth is chipped. Puck injury, probably. Or stick. He looks unbalanced with it, like he has two canine teeth in a row on the left side of his mouth.

“No, you do not,” Ilya says, automatic. Dawson’s wearing a long parka coat and a pair of white sweats. He’s still flushed from the outside chill. The black knee brace wrapped around his left leg sticks out, impossible to miss even without the shining silver metal of the crutch propped up next to it.

“I do too,” Dawson says, straightening his shoulders and sounding halfway to offended. “Number 79, you can google me. Everyone calls me Jacky, Jack, whatever. Jack Daniels. Got drafted in ‘98 to the—”

“No, I know who you are. You leave terrible food in refrigerator and you play like you are allergic to puck on your stick. But you cannot be defense for the Bears. Everyone knows Boston has no defensive line,” Ilya says around a yawn, and Dawson blinks at him for a moment before he lets out a scoff. 

“Oh, okay, kid’s got jokes. Hennessy didn’t say anything about jokes,” Dawson says. He’s grinning again, one lopsided dimple popping out next to his mouth. “You gonna let me in, Rookie?”

Ilya looks at him. He realizes, maybe a beat too late, that this is the first person he’s talked to since the taxi driver, in person. In front of him. It feels strangely important, which Ilya blames on the early morning hour. It should never feel monumental to meet an American. “Is that coffee?” 

“Best in Boston,” Dawson promises, waving the tray closer to Ilya’s face. “Got you the classic.”

“Classic.”

“Straight black, nothing in it. Good for the soul, shit for the stomach lining.”

Ilya considers his options, of which there are a handful. He doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that Henrik Olsson called last night and now his best friend Daniel Dawson is at the door.

“I got a key too, so,” Dawson says. He wriggles the coffee tray again. “Easy way or hard way, kid.”

Ilya holds the door open for him.

The coffee tastes burnt, too bitter and acidic even with the splash of almond milk he adds when Dawson’s distracted. Ilya drinks it all. 

He forgets to say thank you, up until the moment Dawson’s throwing his coat back on to leave a handful of hours later. It feels too late, too much, too vulnerable so he swallows the words down. The coffee was shit anyway.

“Hollander to Nomasky, back to Hollander—Hollander makes the shot, it’s good! A four point night for Shane Hollander already and it’s not even the end of the second period. Woody, are you tired of seeing this yet?”

“Frank, to be honest, I don’t think I’m ever going to be tired of watching Shane Hollander play hockey. The kid’s just on another level out there. Hard to find anyone on the college circuit that can match him, play for play.”

“If I was behind the Voyageurs bench, Woody, you know, I think I’d be pretty happy with our choice from last year’s draft. Hollander is going places and he’s taking the game with him—look, let’s run it back now, see how he lets go of the puck through the Concordia defensive man and gets around him?”

“There’s speed on the ice and then there’s that, slow it down, Frank, look at the absolute control he has. Every inch of his body’s accounted for, that’s something I don’t even see in older players all that often. Maybe the thirty year olds, the ones with ten plus seasons in the NHL under their belt. But college age? Never.”

“Never is right, Woody. If I’m the GM for the Voyageurs, my only fear is that one of these players is going to stop chasing the puck and just start trying to hurt Hollander before the season’s over.”

“If I’m the Voyageurs’ GM, Frank, my concern is that McGill is going to run Hollander into the ground trying to use him to win the title this year. 29 minutes of ice time last game, 31 the game before. Down to 24 before that, the game just before the World Juniors break—”

“Shane Hollander getting a rest on the bench, call that a Christmas miracle—”

“But I can see where McGill’s Coach Teemao is coming from, objectively speaking. You have the golden goose. He’s laying golden eggs. You’re not getting him to stick around for a second season, it’s frankly a miracle, to use your word, that you got him for this season at all—of course you’re going to play him. All you can.”

“My question is, though, what happens when Hollander is gone? He’s here now, scoring the points, making the plays and forcing puck turnover in McGill’s favor, but most of the guys on the bench are going to be here for two, three more years. They need development now if McGill is going to be a contender next season.”

“I hear you, Frank, I do, but how can a team start planning for the aftermath of Hollander when they still have him? You know, I think—”

The camera moves away from the commentators’ faces, fixates instead on the bench where Shane Grayson Hollander is sitting, arms braced up on the boards and cage pushed off his head enough that his sweaty face is visible, unguarded. Flushed from the exertion of his last shift. Sometime in between this game and the last, one of his teammates has left a line of a bruise along his cheek—practice accident, he’d told one of the journalists on the college circuit when he’d been asked. Wasn’t looking the right way during a drill, got an elbow to the face and a whole bunch of apologies.

He looks beautiful.

It’s easy to admit it from this distance, miles away and in the safety of his bed, in the darkness of the silent apartment. Ilya is wearing headphones, has the computer’s brightness turned on low, has the covers pulled up over his head.

Like this, it’s easy to face the truth head on. That Hollander is beautiful; that he plays beautiful hockey. That in another life, maybe, Hollander is his. That in another life, maybe, he is Hollander’s and that gets to mean something more than it does in this one.

“This is enough,” he mutters to the bear in his chest as the camera pulls away from Hollander’s face, turns back to the ice as a whole. McGill is up by 3, sitting at 5 against Concordia’s 2. Two of the goals have been Hollander’s. Two more have been off Hollander’s assist. Everyone’s noticed by now, December giving way to January and the college season in its highest peak of intensity. Everyone’s noticed how good Hollander is. No one understands why Hollander delayed his rookie year with Montreal; no one thinks he has any more developing to do at this level.

No one knows how McGill is going to look next season, when the coaches can’t just throw Hollander out onto the ice and assume he’s going to find the puck and get it where it needs to go.

No one knows what the aftermath of Shane Hollander looks like. Least of all Ilya.

The sixth day of the Bears’ roadtrip out west, Dawson turns his head to look at Ilya across the kitchen counter and says, “Shit, Rozanov, have you been on the ice yet?”

Ilya hasn’t. It’s not something he’s purposefully avoiding or anything, but he hasn’t been sure that he’s allowed, if he’s honest. Communications from the Front Office have been sparse since he arrived, mostly two-line emails weighed down by fifty-page PDF attachments detailing the minutae of his contract, his wages, his visa requirements and guidelines. He’s been instructed to register with the same medical team that oversees emergency and periodic treatment for the team, been told most players find it easier to just see the same practice for annual appointments and general check-ups as well. There’d been another email regarding physical therapists, a handful of options in the area that were Bears-approved and came highly recommended by the team. Then another, about dental offices currently accepting patients with a note about which ones could be used in emergencies—and then another note about what the Bears considered an emergency.

So—he has heard from the Front Office many times since arriving in the States. He has had to look up the following English words: dental pulp exposure, alien, principally accrued finances in a foreign country, labor certification, direct deposit, accupuncture, stipend deducted from future wages, return investment.

No one has said anything about getting onto the ice. Ilya isn’t even sure he’d be able to put on his practice jersey with all the bureacratic tape swaddled around him at the moment. 

Vaguely, he knows the plan is to have him split his time between training with the Bears in Boston and the affiliated AHL team out in Providence, Rhode Island. But the Bears are currently getting thrashed out on the West Coast at the moment and Ilya isn’t even sure he knows where Rhode Island is, so he’s spent the last week splitting his time between working out in the apartment building’s gym, exploring the streets of Boston, watching Shane Hollander dominate the college circuit in Montreal, and taking turns entertaining Jack Dawson and being entertained by Jack Dawson like they’re sharing a jester’s hat.

He isn’t sure who’s meant to be entertained more now, when Dawson drags him out of the apartment and into his car, and the uncertainty has him quiet throughout the trip to the Warriors rink where the Bears practice outside of game days. It’s a twenty minute commute from Olsson’s Chestnut Hill place, and Dawson spends the whole time tapping his fingers along the ridge of the wheel and singing along to the radio. His shit leg is as extended as it can get in the well of the seat. 

It’s his left, at least, but Ilya isn’t sure he’s supposed to be driving either way. When he asks, the car idling at a stop light, Dawson grins over at him and scratches the ball of his shoulder lazily. “Probably not,” he admits. “But if he really didn’t want me to drive his rookie around in his car, Henny would’ve taken his keys with him, eh?”

So that’s that.

At least Dawson isn’t stupid enough to get out on the ice with his knee brace. Instead, he sends Ilya off to change into his gear after a short tour of the facilities and meets him rink-side with a bucket full of pucks. 

For the first five minutes, Ilya thinks it’s going to be some strange amalgamation of practice and trial by fire. That’s what he’s expecting, what he’s had his shoulders braced against since Dawson brought it up. It wouldn’t be the first time an older player got it into his head that Ilya represented a threat to his position on the team and decided to put him through his paces, play a little dirty, take him out onto the ice and try to make him bleed.

And Ilya thinks he likes Dawson. Yes, it may just be stockholm syndrome after four days of the man forcing himself into Ilya’s space with shitty coffee and even worse jokes, but there’s a new budding sort of fondness in Ilya’s chest when he wakes up to the sound of familiar banging on the front door, metal crutch against thick wood. It’s probably nothing. A combination of isolation, unfamiliarity with the city, and heartburn stemming from the now daily cup of Dunkin classic blend Dawson foists on him every time he’s stupid enough to open the door and let him in.

But it’s not. Or not just. Ilya likes him, which feels novel enough that he doesn’t want to look straight at it yet with both eyes open.

So if Dawson wants to observe him as a hockey player, bring him to his knees and bruise him to the bone—Ilya thinks he can do allow that. It is expected. There is a strange sinking feeling in his chest whe he thinks about it, but that is his fault for temporarily forgetting the way of things. 

Once, when he was thirteen years old and already the best player on the roster, an older boy from the U18 team had held him back after practice under the guise of working on his physicality. He didn’t fight enough, Pyotr had told him. Not stubborn enough, too quick to wriggle out from the boards and lose the puck.

Ilya had skated til his feet were bleeding within the confines of his skates, again and again around the rink under Pyotr’s direction. Had been pushed into the boards until both shoulders ached from it, til his body was flinching away from the connection without his brain’s permission. Again and again until the edges of his vision went fuzzy with encroaching blackness and he had to hobble off the ice with both hands on the boards.

Six years later, he’s still not sure if Pyotr got what he wanted out of that afternoon. Ilya hadn’t broken for him, but he had bled. That probably counted for a lot when you were trying to wound a legend in the making. 

“Warm up skate, c’mon,” Dawson orders, swinging his leg up to rest length-wise on the players’ bench. “You even been on the ice since World Juniors?”

“No,” Ilya says. He turns in a lazy circle around the blue line before drifting back towards Dawson. “You will not join? You have not been on the ice since Buffalo broke your knee, yes?”

“Your form’s rusty as hell,” Dawson tells him, tossing a puck—nice, easy, underhanded—onto the ice in front of him. “I was promised a Great One. This is Average at best.”

“You have been rusty on ice since you won Norris trophy eight years ago,” Ilya chirps back. “I have seen your game tape.”

This earns him another puck, tossed a bit harder. But Dawson is smiling, shaking his head, and rolling his eyes. 

“Alright, Rookie,” Dawson says. “Show me what you got.”

And Ilya braces for the hit. Doesn’t know what it’ll look like when he’s the only one on the ice but willing to let the blow land if it means Dawson knocks at the door again tomorrow, crutch beneath his arm and coffee in his hand. Jealousy’s a language everyone who’s really good at something knows how to understand when others speak it, even when the words change. The refrain’s the same.

Except five minutes pass and then ten minutes trickle by. Ilya puts himself through the usual warm-ups, glancing only ocassionally over at the bench where Dawson’s watching him with a puck spinning between his fingers.

Finally, Dawson tosses him another puck from the bucket and jerks his head towards the far end of the rink. “Five hole,” he calls, and Ilya collects the rubber against his stick to send it to the  center of the net and low, right between an imaginary goalie’s legs.

“Bar down,” Dawson tells him next when he skates back to the center line, and Ilya takes the puck from him and pings it off the center of the goal post. Textbook perfect. “Again,” Dawson calls, and he does. 

Top shelf—to the left—then again, from the center line. Then again, backhand. Bar down again and again until Ilya thinks maybe Dawson just likes the clanging sound it makes when the puck hits the crossbar of the goal. Ilya’s thought it’s one of the best sounds in the world since he was nine years old, so he can’t blame him for it.

 It’s somewhere in between his twentieth shot and the twenty-fifth that Ilya realizes he’s having fun. No hockey player in the league—in any league—would call this practice. Ilya is doing little more than trick shots, skating slow up to the net and firing the puck past no resistance. There’s no defensive line to stop him, no goalie to catch the saucer. Just net.

It’s not practice; but it’s fun. 

It’s fun when Dawson stacks up a pyramid of pucks onto the cusp of the boards next to him and orders Ilya to take a shot at it from the far side of the rink. It’s fun when Dawson lobs a puck at him from the bench and Ilya instinctively bats it out of the air with his stick. It’s not practice, despite the way Ilya’s jersey starts sticking to his pads from drying sweat. It’s something far more novel than that. It’s so fucking fun that Ilya doesn’t even notice his shoulders have relaxed up until the moment Dawson swings an arm around them when he’s leaning up against the boards.

“Alright, I get it, I get it,” Dawson says when he lets Ilya wriggle out of his hold. “Savior of the franchise. I can see it now.”

“No one is calling me this,” Ilya replies, embarrassed because some of the fans are saying that, or at least something similar. It’s one thing to read the words; it’s another thing entirely to hear someone say them out loud and like he believes them.

“Uh huh,” Dawson says. “Well, I am, Rookie. You shoot like that during a game, I’ll even say it to the cameras afterwards.”

Ilya ducks his head, looks around the rink. It’s littered with discarded pucks he’ll be the only one cleaning up. He can’t even pretend to mind though. “It will be different, in game. In a game, there will be goalie, maybe even defensive line. I know this is foreign concept for Boston.”

Dawson yanks at his hair, snort of laughter making him sound ten years younger. “Punk,” he says, sounding fond. “Take this with a pinch of salt then, Rookie, coming from the league’s worst defender, but I think you could score sixty goals this season easily.”

Hockey players are suspicious creatures by nature, Ilya knows this. Better to not talk about games you think are in the bag, better to not think any games are in the bag. It’s a stupid risk to take, speaking of your own future in the show. How many games you’ll play, points you’ll score, odds you’ll beat. Hockey players are very big men, most of the time, who are very afraid of seeing their own shadows. 

Still, Ilya glances up at Dawson and then away. He doesn’t correct him or knock his stick against the boards to warn off bad luck. He thinks maybe he should, the monstrous what if already taking shape in the back of his mind, but he can’t bring himself to. Ilya cannot remember the last time someone told him they believed in him. He thinks—maybe it has never happened. And this isn’t that, not the exact words, not the exact sentiment, but it’s close enough to hit him hard and heavy, right in the center of him. 

So he asks, quieter than he intended, more honest than he ever meant to sound, “Really?”

“Well,” Dawson says. “Maybe fifty.”

Ilya shoves at his shoulder.

“Forty?” Dawson suggests. “I mean, assuming every other team in the league’s got a mediocre D-Line for you to blow past like they’re not even there.”

“Shut up,” Ilya tells him, shoving at his shoulder again, even though Dawson doesn’t even have the decency to pretend to move. 

“Aw, look at you, Rookie. You’re blushing.”

“I am not,” Ilya says, skating away from the side of the rink to bend down and collect a few of the pucks. He doesn’t even have anywhere to put them afterwards; he just wanted something to do with his hands. “Russians do not do this.”

“You’re rosy-cheeked, Rookie,” Dawson crows. “That’s fucking adorable. Look, c’mon, gimme a smile, lemme take a picture. Hennessy’s gonna love this.”

Ilya chucks a puck at him. He gets a bucket tossed his way in return.

“Spoilsport,” Dawson says cheerfully. When Ilya glances at him, he’s moved to stand behind the plastic barriers of the boards next to the bench, out of range and protected. “C’mon, Rosie, hurry up, pucks aren’t going to collect themselves! We’ve got places to be, rookies have lunches to buy veterans!”

“No,” Ilya protests automatically. At the nickname. At the idea of paying for Dawson’s lunch. At being told to pick up the mess Dawson helped create faster. 

It doesn’t matter in the end. Ilya picks up the pucks; after stripping out of his gear, showering, and changing back into clothing thick enough to withstand January in Boston, Dawson drives them to a deli back in Chestnut Hill. He orders two sandwiches and a large cup of black coffee, then turns to look back at Ilya already wearing a smile that shows off all his pointy teeth. “Rosie, what’d you like to try? He’s paying too, by the way.”

Later, when Dawson’s balled up the pieces of wrapping paper his sandwiches came in and all that’s left of Ilya’s grilled cheese is the burnt crusts, Ilya asks him pointedly whether the guy on the Buffalos who rammed into Dawson’s knee with his stick did it on purpose. “I am starting to understand why someone would want to,” Ilya adds.

The deli’s hot, heater working overtime to chase away the city’s chill. Dawson sits back in his chair, stripped down to just a tee-shirt that puts all of his tattoos on display. Two full sleeves of ink, so many that Ilya isn’t sure Dawson could give him a number if he asked how many he has. He wonders if one of them is a soulmark, but it is not something one asks about. Ilya doesn’t know how to sound the question out, wouldn’t be able to verbalize it even if Dawson spoke fluent Russian. 

What he really wants to know isn’t which tattoo of Dawson’s is his soulmark, if any are. He wants to know which came first. If the soulmark came second and bloomed across a miraculously bare stretch of skin. Or if it came first and then the rest of the tattoos followed after it, if they existed to try and cover up the importance of that first piece of ink.

If Ilya is being very honest, what he really, actually wants to know, is if he is sitting across from a future version of himself. Older, debatably wiser. Covered in ink that stretches out over his arms, down his sides, maybe even to his legs. Maybe that is the way it will go for Ilya. Maybe after enough years beating the bear into submission, he will fill his body with other tattoos until he catches sight of himself in the mirror and can’t remember how many he has and which one came first.

Beneath the table, Daniel Dawson kicks him lazily with his good leg. “Brat,” he declares and then looks just as caught off guard as Ilya must when it startles a laugh out of him.

It’s not really funny and it is not something Ilya wants to explain, so he just waves away Dawson’s expectant eyebrows and crumples his own paper up to toss onto the tray next to his.

Really, it is not funny. It is just—there is a Russian word that sounds very similar, is all. It is their word for brother.

“Yeah, um, I really think Kody’s getting us to the tournament this year,” Hollander tells a local journalist who’s cornered him outside McGill’s locker room. It’s a good shot on video: McGill’s trophy case is behind him, glittering golden prizes accentuating Hollander’s promise even as he’s talking about the team’s captain, a senior player who won’t be playing past graduation. “We want it.”

The reporter nods like this is the very first time she’s ever heard an athlete say that he wants to win something. Maybe Hollander is a special player on the ice, but his media performance is anything but, even if no one is willing to tell him this. Ilya can’t look away. It is almost three in the morning. He is very tired.

On the laptop screen, Hollander rubs the back of his neck while he listens to the reporter’s question. He has new bruises up along his forearm. The bruise on his cheek from a week ago has mostly faded, nothing more than a green-yellow smear over his skin. 

“Yeah, I mean,” Hollander says. “I’m excited to watch this year’s draft for sure. It’ll be good to meet the guys in prospects’ camp over the summer. I’m not—you know, we’ll see where we go from there. Obviously, it’s my dream to play in the NHL, with the Voyageurs. But we’ll see how camps go. I’m not trying to get ahead of myself or anything.”

As if the Voyageurs would see Hollander play during their prospects’ camp in July and decide to send him to the AHL for further development. As if Hollander’s place with his draft team is anywhere but on the roster. First line before the end of October. C by his sophomore year, depending on what they decide to do with Briake’s contract at the end of the regular season.

“Fresh from a tense rematch in World Juniors where Canada won over the Russian team, are you excited to face off against Ilya Rozanov on NHL ice this coming autumn?” The reporter asks.

Hollander blinks at her, slow. His hand drops off his neck, disappears beneath the cut of the video, tucking into his pockets if Ilya had to guess.

“I’m not trying to get ahead of myself or anything,” Hollander says, careful and measured and so far away from the boy he’d been in the gym in the bowels of that hotel in Las Vegas. “But, you know, I think it’d definitely be an interesting game. Rozanov’s been playing really well in the VHL. It’ll be interesting to see what he does in America.”

“You’ve been keeping up with Ilya Rozanov’s game in Russia?” the reporter asks. 

Hollander’s hand is back in his hair, carding the strands out of his face. He looks off to the side of the camera and shrugs in a jerky movement. “I sort of have to,” he says, glancing back at the reporter. His mouth tugs up at the edges. “You guys keep asking.” 

The bear in Ilya’s chest groans, shifts and flexes its claws, refusing to settle. It is impossible to know if Hollander is lying or not. It is impossible to pin down the feeling expanding in Ilya’s lungs. Starved, maybe. Breathless. Burning, if that were more an emotion and less a sensation.

He pauses the video and drags the progress bar back ten seconds, fifteen seconds, thirty. For the tenth time, for the fifteenth maybe.

“—think Kody’s getting us to the tournament this year,” Hollander says. “We want it.” 

Henrik Olsson is taller than Ilya and broader too. He holds himself like he’s on the ice, body tilted forward and chin tilted down, even when he’s standing in his kitchen with a tea towel slung over his shoulder and a coffee mug in his hand. He has long hair, the kind of blond so light it’ll hide the white when it starts coming in in ten more years or two more first round playoff losses. His eyes are tired, but kind. His face is lined with the beginnings of wrinkles, still so faint that they look like laughter lines. Maybe they are; maybe his body has not yet decided how it wants to age and it has just now realized it is running up against its own deadlines.

“Ilya, hello,” Olsson tells him that very first morning. The Bears had gotten back late in the night. Ilya had been asleep or whatever counts as asleep these days, hadn’t realized. Had heard movement in the kitchen and padded out of his room this morning expecting to see Dawson finally making use of the key he keeps insisting he has. Instead, Olsson is there, barefoot in his own house, wearing tired eyes and a loose t-shirt and sleep pants. 

He has a tattoo, just the one, down the length of his forearm. Ilya notices it the moment he raises his hand to scratch at his eyebrow. It’s an instrument’s bow, long and elegant, black and white. A soulmark, Ilya thinks immediately, even though he’s hardly an expert on the topic.

 “How are you settling in?” Olsson asks him after Ilya grunts out a hello of his own.

Ilya is settling in well, especially when no one asks him to prove it to them. “Good, thank you,” he says instead, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Find the towels okay?” Olsson asks, mouth quirking up into a smile that he hides behind the rim of his mug. 

Ilya squints at him, trying to decide if Olsson is laughing at him or not. His mind feels slow still with early morning fog, made denser by the scant amount of sleep he’d managed to convince his body to catch. This is your fault, he tells the bear in his chest. But the bear is a very simple creature, really; it cares about only a very limited amount of things. Henrik Olsson is decidedly not one of them.

“Yes,” Ilya finally says. “Thank you.”

Olsson nods his head then cants it to the side as he looks at Ilya across his kitchen island. “I could have sworn Jacky told me you were very talkative.”

Ilya blinks. He’d known in an abstract way that there was a very, very large chance that Dawson and Olsson talked to each other about him. It’s different, hearing the confirmation instead of just expecting it. 

 “Yes, but Jacky usually brings coffee,” Ilya says.

Olsson snorts and pushes an empty mug across the expanse of marble towards Ilya’s hands. “That’s because Jacky doesn’t know how to use my coffee maker,” he says, nodding to the bit of counter next to the fridge, where a chrome and glass machine is bubbling away. “Drink up, Rookie. Then tell me what you think about our penalty kill against the Kelpies in the second period. I am assuming you watched?”

“What I could stomach,” Ilya agrees, and Olsson’s mouth curves up into a smile.

“Hm,” he says. “I think I will miss your good’s and thank you’s,” but he pours him a cup of coffee too. And then he opens the fridge, pulls out the carton of almond milk, and sets it on the counter.

The first few months in Boston go like this: Ilya meets the team, and he lets his shoulders relax, and he settles into the city. His time is split between the Bears and the AHL team, schedule a twisted up mess of car and train rides that Jacky and Henrik laugh themselves sick over when they see it penciled out on the calendar in the kitchen. “At least the Front Office is preparing you for the hell that is the NHL travel schedule,” Jacky says, poking at a series of highlighted days in late January, Monday-Wednesday-Thursday underlined in Boston Bears yellow, Tuesday-Friday-Saturday marked with a ‘Rhode Island’.

“So, what,” Cliff Marleau asks some time mid-February. They’re in some basement of a Boston University house party like they belong here. Marleau knows someone, apparently, who knows someone else who knows someone else. Marleau’s twenty and his fake ID was confiscated out in Ohio back in December, so they’re here instead of at a bar with the team celebrating their victory against the Toronto Guardians. “Do you have to take a boat to get to practice with the AHL guys?”

Ilya shakes his head. “It is not an island,” he yells back. The music is shit and loud. The floor is sticky and the air smells like sweat and cheap cologne. He’d wrapped his left shoulder and upper torso in bandages before going out, just in case, even though it’s still cold enough to wear a long-sleeved shirt and get away with it.

“Yeah, on Rhode Island!”

“No, Rhode Island is not an island, is just the name! I take car.”

Marleau frowns, busted lip in danger of re-opening as he blinks at Ilya in dizzy confusion. He’d taken an elbow to the face and then taken his chin up to the boards during their match up against New Jersey, but Henrik said he’d passed concussion protocol. Dawson said with guys like Marleau, it was always a little hard to tell what’s head injury and what’s latent natural selection, which Henrik said was rich coming from the man who’s one more concussion away from early retirement.

“That’s fucked up,” Marleau decides, and Ilya nods in agreement, clinking their plastic cups together the way he used to raise his glass of champagne in Russia. Somehow, the orange, acidic mixture of Gatorade and juice and alcohol and hopefully nothing else tastes better. Or—not better, objectively. But it warms him to his toes, leaves him feeling like he’s burning inside out.

Boston, those first few months, is like this: cold but not the kind of cold that makes you think of survival, of counting toes and extremities, of fangs and frostbite. It’s cold, but fireplace cold. Shot of whisky smuggled into hot chocolate when Olsson’s looking the other way kind of cold. There are massive gray piles of ashy ice and packed-down snow on each side of the street until late March, and Henrik and Jacky have no less than three screaming matches regarding who’s tracked snow-salt footprints into Henrik’s apartment and who should be the one to clean them up before they ruin the hardwood floor.

Even then, sometimes, Ilya blinks and looks around at the right time of day and finds himself thinking that Boston is…pretty. Golden light refracting off of glittering snow and red-bricked buildings, quiet public parks dotted with bare trees whose limbs shake in the wind and glow bleach-white in the streetlights. Pretty, but not the kind of pretty that Ilya grew up around. Nothing gilded about it, nothing ostentatious. Boston is pretty in a lived-in kind of way. The kind you can get your hands around, smudge your fingerprints over.

In March, or maybe a little later, Ilya is tapped to play a game with the AHL team down in Providence. He’s allowed on a technicality and after about ten more emails weighed down with paperwork from the NHL that he has to sign and send back. They win against the New York Railers, get two points in total and one of them belongs entirely to Ilya, puck on his stick like it’s magnetized til it sails into the back of the net. 

It’s not NHL ice, but it’s close—so close he can taste it. When he gets back to Boston that night, about half the team is crammed into Henrik’s apartment and waiting for him despite the way it’s pushing midnight. 

Coleman passes him a beer and then Mekker gives him another one before the first one’s even halfway empty. Jacky throws his arm around his shoulder and rubs his rough palm down across his face, then up and tugging at his curls. “Fucking A, Rosie,” he says, “Practice for that forty you promised me, eh?”

“I say fifty,” Ilya tells him, grin so loud in his voice he’s honestly impressed Dawson can understand him. The bear is quiet; it lets him have this, maybe. Maybe it is learning coexistence, or maybe his heart just feels big enough in this moment that his soul has tricked itself into believing it still resides fully within his chest. 

In the morning, Ilya has optional practice with the Providence team and the Bears all have to drag themselves into the Warriors rink for mandatory early morning skate. He skips out on the commute down to Rhode Island and drives to the practice rink with Henrik instead. What he’s learning about bears is that they celebrate their kills together and they lick their wounds the same, even just the self-inflicted kind that stem from too many beers.

“Thanks, Rosie,” Dawson tells him around a yawn that breaks the godforsaken nickname into a strange and unfamiliar shape as Ilya hands him an orange Gatorade from the storage room. They’re testing out lines for a game against the Minnesota Yonder tomorrow, so Ilya’s been relegated to coach’s assistant’s assistant, passing out electrolytes to the players and picking up pieces of tape they flick at him instead of the trashcan. 

“Yeah, thanks Rozy,” Marleau echoes, accepting his own bottle. Dawson smirks but doesn’t correct him, and Rozy sticks in the locker room like snow on the pavement outside the rink. 

What happens in Boston, those first few months, is: Ilya gets lost four times trying to navigate the T. He goes to a handful of house parties with Marleau and a few of the other younger guys. He gets his very first hangover on March 18th and spends half the day vomiting green-tinged bile in the guest bathroom at Jacky’s place and cursing the Western Catholic church for ever canonizing Saint Patrick in the first place. He plays two more games with the Providence team. He spends half his monthly stipend to fly Sveta down during a seasonal break in her classes, and he mostly lets her tug him around Boston for a few days. He sleeps with seven girls and one boy, only when the Bears are on a roadtrip and Henrik’s apartment is his. He never takes his shirt off. They never spend the night. Five hundred kilometers away, Shane Hollander is playing beautiful hockey, carrying a team on his shoulders and putting up points that won’t mean anything when he gets to Montreal in September. He gives interviews though, sometimes, when he’s too slow leaving the locker room or the reporters are too fast; Ilya watches them all. 

He eats a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches. He’s getting better at making them. Mostly these days, he doesn’t scorch the bread. Mostly these days, he counts that as a win.

Early April, Henrik leans over his shoulder and squints at his laptop screen. “Oh, yes, I suppose that’s right,” he says. His English is always more stilted in the mornings, the Swedish vowels clinging to his words up until his second cup of coffee. Ilya is starting to wonder if anyone is going to be able to understand him in the media scrums next season. He will be a Russian, speaking shitty, fractured English colored with a dab of Swedish and a sprinkling of Bostonian.

“I don’t understand why I have to choose,” Ilya says, gesturing at the laptop screen and the email from his agent before turning around to look at Henrik. “I do not care.”

“You should care a little,” Henrik says, but there’s no censure in his voice. “They will want to sign you for a very long contract. It will be your hockey equipment for ages. Maybe your whole career.”

“Bauer is fine. CCM is fine,” Ilya shakes his head. “If they were not, then the NHL would not have so many deals with them.”

Henrik shrugs and wanders back into the kitchen. “It may be a good endorsement deal for you,” he points out. “Who is offering more money, the better contract?”

These are very good questions. Ilya’s agent hasn’t sent him contracts for either yet, of course, but he represents a handful of other NHL players. Knows the approximation of what a contract would look like, what it’ll net Ilya if he signs.

It doesn’t matter to Ilya, not really. But he can pretend it does, based solely on the money. He’s not an idiot and he doesn’t need anyone else to tell him that he could really become a star player in the NHL; CCM and Bauer will both want him if they’ve been paying attention.

“I would make your decision quickly though,” Henrik calls over the obnoxious roar of his blender turning on, the contents of which always look like wet cement churning around itself. If Ilya decides to move out before the end of his rookie year, it is going to be because of that stupid fucking blender. 

“My agent has not mentioned a deadline,” Ilya says, peering back down at the email and rereading it carefully. No attached files, only three paragraphs in the white text box; it is a bit of a miracle. “It is only April. Surely there is time before they need a response, no?”

“Ja, probably,” Henrik says and he shrugs again as he pours his wet cement into a tall glass. “But Jacky’s supposed to be here in twenty minutes, and he’s going to have opinions.”

Henny is half-wrong and half-right. Dawson shows up in ten minutes. He has a lot of fucking opinions.

“Well obviously the correct choice is Bauer,” Jacky declares, pushing himself up on the kitchen island and tugging Henrik’s coffee closer to his elbow by a few inches. It’s never stealing, in Dawson’s words, if it’s so gradual that you can take what you want before anyone else notices it’s gone. Ilya thinks that Dawson has watched too many high-stakes heist movies and that he has never tried to steal anything actually important to someone else. If he had, he’d know that possession is nine-tenths of the law but memory is the lion’s share of the punishment. 

“Jacky’s been a Bauer ambassador since he was twenty-two,” Henrik says mildly, leaning back against his counter and watching Dawson’s fingers get closer and closer to his mug. Ilya thinks maybe he started making his foul smoothies because no one else in their right minds would ever want to taste them. But then, he isn’t actually sure Dawson’s in his right mind most of the time.

“Which means I got the Norris wearing Bauer gloves,” Jacky argues, wrapping a hand around the cup and tugging it towards himself.

“Eight years ago,” Henrik points out. “Maybe the quality has gone down overtime. Depreciated.”

“Tell me how you really feel, Sunshine,” Jacky says, and he takes a sip of coffee.

“I meant the quality of the gloves,” Henrik says, but he’s grinning because he is never more of an asshole than he is around Jack. They bring out the worst in each other, maybe. Or the best. Or the remnants of who they were years and years ago, when they were kids sharing a team for the first time. Henrik’s wrinkles look more like laughter lines around Dawson. That’s all Ilya knows.

“Listen, Rosie, you gotta think about this logically,” Jacky tells him.

“I already said to consider the money and the contract length,” Henrik calls as he pads away from the kitchen, down the hallway. 

Jacky waves his hand. “That’s important too, sure,” he says. “But you need to consider the brand.”

Ilya blinks. “I thought…that is what I am doing.”

“No, no. Outside of Bauer, CCM. You gotta ask yourself. What will the brand want from you? Wearing the gear during games, sure. But outside of that. Half the guys in the NHL either have endorsements with Bauer and CCM or want them, so you gotta think about who else in the locker room’s got CCM skates on. Cause those are the guys you’re gonna see outside the rink for magazine ads and photoshoots and sponsorship meetings til you’re old and gray like us.”

Henrik leans against the edge of his fridge with his toothbrush in his mouth and shrugs with one shoulder when Ilya glances over at him. “He isn’t wrong,” Henrik says, garbled. 

“Obviously don’t sign a contract based on what stick Scott Hunter’s carrying,” Dawson says, peering into the discarded blender with scientific curiosity. “But consider the whole picture.” 

Ilya raises an eyebrow. “And then?”

“Then sign with Bauer,” Dawson says, sticking his gray sludge-coated finger into his mouth and grinning around it.

Chloe from the brand’s talent management team gets into contact with him almost immediately after Ilya’s agreed to the endorsement. They’re all thrilled to have him join the CCM family; they’ve sent over a few forms that they’d like him to complete at his early convenience so that they can ship him the gear he’ll need for team practices; they’re planning to film the majority of the next season’s ads over the summer so as to not interfere with any game play—they assure Ilya that his new obligations with CCM will never interfere with that beloved sport that brings them all together. They’ve attached the PDF of their projected filming schedule so that Ilya can select a few dates that would work for him to fly to Toronto.

It came down to the money in the end. This is what he told Olsson and Dawson when they’d asked after the endorsement deal. CCM offered more for a shorter time period. Dawson called it a shitty business decision on the company’s part; Henrik thought it made sense. Of course they’d pay more for Ilya Rozanov, even just for a few years. They already had a contract with Shane Hollander—in their eyes, it’d be worth shelling out a few more hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their brand on both of the rookies everyone’s been watching.

It is a coincidence, that Hollander has also signed a deal with CCM. One of those funny little quirks of time and decision-making and unforeseen consequence. It came down to the money and the contract length. All the very important logistical questions Henrik had encouraged him to ask himself. Ilya hadn’t even considered the things Jacky mentioned, the whole picture.  

And if he had, it’d been a passing thought. Something for the off-season in five years. If Ilya had considered the whole picture, he’d thought: maybe it would be nice. To sign the same endorsement as certain other hockey players and perhaps, in a few years, have the occasion to see them outside of the rink for a photoshoot or brand ceremony. 

But he hadn’t chosen CCM because of Shane Hollander. It’d been about the money. He’s young, but he’s not stupid. He’s not about to make business decisions with something as stupid as his heart.

But, the problem is. See, the issue at hand is that. Well. CCM has sent Ilya their filming schedule for the off-season, and they sent it to Hollander first. So Ilya knows when Hollander is going to be in Toronto. 

Early June. 

And he knows that he could be there as well. By the beginning of June, the Bears should be deep within their off-season unless they’re playing in the Stanley Cup Finals, which—well. There’s a larger chance of Boston forgetting to celebrate both St Patrick’s Day and the American Independence Day than of that happening.

Ilya could be available, beginning of June. It would work best for him, actually. Really. If he’s thinking about it. His current visa is only good for the traditional season and work-related short stays over the summer months. He will be asked to return to Russia for at least a good portion of the off-season. It would be better to film whatever advertisement CCM wants from him early so that he does not have to fly back and forth.

The problem is that once Ilya has thought about it, it’s hard to stop thinking about it. Maybe he has just grown too complacent over the last few months. Maybe the bear has gotten good at biding its time, waiting and pacing instead of clawing to get out.

Maybe Ilya has just never had the self-control he thought he did.

He thinks: seeing Hollander, before the season starts, it would be a good test. He will have to see Hollander many times over the next several decades, maybe, hopefully, so he will need to start practicing how to do this. 

He thinks: it would just be one commercial. It would not be—too terrible. It would not mean anything. Not to Hollander. It would be a coincidence. A quirk of scheduling. Scraps for the bear. A kick to the ribs, after.

He thinks: maybe I could congratulate him on winning the Johnston Cup for McGill.

Then he thinks: no. Of course not. Too dangerous. Too fucking dangerous.

Then he thinks: I will send them a few dates, in July. And I will tell them that if they’d be interested in filming something with both me and Hollander, then I am available in June. And then it will be their decision. My idea, but their decision. 

It’s a transparent sort of compromise, the sort of peace deal that leaves no one but the conquerer satisfied. Ilya knows what will happen as he picks a handful of dates at random to send back to CCM. He knows they’re not going to turn down the chance to have both Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov centered in one of their ads, summer before their rookie year starts. He knows they’re going to agree; he lets himself call it a decision out of his hands anyway.

He lets himself think, once: Good.

He thinks about the handshake line in Ottawa, Hollander’s bare hand brushing against the hard material of Ilya’s glove. See you in October.

He thinks: why wait?

June 2010 - Toronto, Ontario

A harried assistant directs him to the locker room to change into his gear the moment he arrives. Someone else grabs him by the edge of his jersey afterwards, steers him into a chair and applies dabs of make-up product across his face in quick, efficient movements. 

Ilya doesn’t think he’s late, but someone tells him Hollander is out on the ice already, filming solo shots on one half of the rink while they set up the cameras and lighting on the other half.

Of course Hollander has already arrived, already gotten dressed, already started skating. 

Hearing this makes Ilya shift in the chair, a surprising amount of nervous energy flooding through him. The bear has been fucking insufferable since the plane, restless and wanting and so fucking hungry that it’d made Ilya feel concaved, collapsing, the entire car ride from the hotel to the rink. 

It’s only gotten worse, being in the same building. It feels like it takes everything Ilya has to keep everything he’s feeling off his face as the woman in front of him finishes up his make-up and directs him towards someone else whose job it is to apparently check to make sure he’s put on all the gear correctly—as if he has not been dressing himself in hockey gear since he was nine years old.

And then, they’re good to go. He’s on the ice, and Hollander is there too. One hundred feet away. Seventy-five. Fifty.

What the fuck had Ilya been thinking.

Twenty-five. 

Hollander stops next to Ilya, almost close enough for their shoulders to brush together. Almost close enough for it to mean nothing if Ilya were to push only slightly to the left and close the gap. 

He doesn’t, of course, but the bear is wide awake and fucking feral with it. The director and the assistant director are both talking through the plan for the shoot, speaking slowly and using very small words. A part of Ilya wonders if this is how they talk to all athletes or just the ones who don’t speak English as their first language. 

The other, larger part of Ilya can see the jut of Hollander’s eyelashes illuminated in the white light of the equipment, and it’s hard to think about anything else. 

Hollander, Ilya is realizing, is like a disease he keeps contracting. Whatever immunity he’d thought he’d built is nowhere to be found and his system is a tailspin, shutting down, ravaged and fractured and riddled with Hollander, so close. 

Ilya’s been too fucking complacent in Boston and now he can see Hollander’s eyelashes. 

The lightning is back, sparking beneath his skin. He’s slept with people since moving to Boston. A handful. Girls, a guy. He’s put his mouth on their skin and put his hands around their waists, hoisted them up against a wall or a counter or a closet door, fucked them and made them feel good. He knows desire. He is not a stranger to wanting or taking or having.

But this is not—that. This is incomparable. 

He’d wondered what it would be like to see Shane Hollander again, in person. He’d met him on the ice in Ottawa, Team Canada Captain Hollander, #24. And he’d met him stripped of all of that, just Shane on that exercise bike in Las Vegas. So he’d wondered what it would be like, meeting Hollander like this. Outside of a game but still wearing protection.

He’d spent—an embarrassingly long amount of time thinking about this since April, if he’s being honest. And still, it’s blindsided him, fist to the kidneys, shoulder to the ribs when the both of them skate towards the face-off circle and stop within a few inches of each other.

Shane’s eyes flick up from the ice to meet his, peering at him from beneath the fan of his eyelashes. He looks older. It’s a stupid thought, but it’s true and it’s heavy. Ilya doesn’t know what to do with the weight of it. With the realization that every time he sees Hollander, four times a year, maybe five, maybe six, he’s going to be older, knee-deep in a life that Ilya will know nothing about by design and by choice. 

The bear thrashes against the bone and sinew of Ilya’s chest; the cage holds. Hollander is going to live and change and collect more freckles from too much exposure to the sun. Laughter lines are going to bloom at the corner of his eyes and he’ll never tell Ilya the jokes that inspired them. This is by design, Ilya’s. This is by choice—also Ilya’s.

Cold fucking comfort.

“Alright,” the assistant director says loudly. “Let’s get back to our marks, try again. That was really good though, good job, guys.”

They reposition themselves under the careful eye of the assistant director, and it’s only after another take, two blades hitting the ice one after the other instead of in perfect snychronity, that Ilya blinks at Shane’s face and realizes something.

He can’t really say, where the fuck did your freckles go? because that would be a very strange thing to notice, comment on, and have opinions about. 

So he says, instead, lesser of a thousand different evils, “You look pretty.”

Shane blinks at him, eyelashes sweeping down and then back up. Surprised, for a moment. That’s fair. Ilya hadn’t known he was going to say that either, not until the words had already left his mouth. Surprise morphs quickly into defensive petulance, and Hollander’s eyebrows twitch downward into a stony expression. “You’re wearing make-up too,” he mutters, breaking eye contact completely and looking down at Ilya’s gloves.

“Yeah,” Ilya says. Then, “but I don’t look pretty.”

This at least gets Hollander’s eyes back onto him. 

It’s dangerous. It’s flirting with fire, sticking his fingers into open flames, bottling lightning and drinking it neat. It should have been enough—more than enough—seeing Hollander. It was already selfish beyond belief, being here. Being this close to Hollander. 

He shouldn’t feel so hungry still. He shouldn’t want to see Hollander blush. He shouldn’t feel starved to see his freckles. None of this belongs to him and there’s danger in allowing himself to want, just in case he forgets all the reasons that he cannot allow himself to have, also.

Shane’s mouth is open. His bottom lip is wet and his eyes haven’t dropped away from Ilya’s face once. The bear is roaring out its approval. It feels, for a second, like the lightning beneath Ilya’s skin has doubled, tripled, left his body completely and has filled the air between them.

“Alright, guys, I feel like we’re so close,” the assistant director announces, and the storm dissipates as quickly as it started. “Let’s give it another go.”

Ilya turns and skates back to his starting mark. If he feels a little unsteady on the ice, it’s nothing more than the nerves of performing under the camera lights. He just really cares very much about giving CCM his best.

Except when he skates towards Hollander, stick coming down to slap into the ice a second too slow, he makes the mistake of looking at Hollander—jaw set, eyes dark with exasperation, eyebrows heavy—and the grin is breaking free across his face before he can bite it back.

It’s just—ridiculous. When he thinks about it. It’s fucking ridiculous. The intensity of the lighting, the face-off, the boy in front of him who is his soulmate and also his rival. The producers at CCM will probably choose some sort of battle music to play in the background, and they’ll edit both of their faces clean of whatever blemishes the makeup wasn’t able to fix, until the picture won’t even look like them.

Ilya has spent two months fucking agonizing over letting himself have this stupid fucking commercial. Over letting himself get so close to Hollander, only a few feet away. He’s thought about it since signing with CCM in April—he’s tried to prepare himself for Hollander, for talking with him, probably shaking his hand at the beginning or end of the shoot like the professional he is. He’s been dreading it and looking forward to it in equal measure, being close enough to Hollander to count his freckles.

And the make-up department covered them up.

It’s fucking ridiculous, and once he’s laughed the one time, it’s hard to bite down the urge to giggle again. It becomes impossible when, after the next take, Shane ducks his head and smiles down at the ice lke he can’t help it either.

It’s small, just a quirk of his lips, but it fills Ilya with a new warmth all the same. What an incredible feeling, making his soulmate laugh. How very addictive.

“Okay,” the director says. “Okay, guys, I know it’s been a long day, but can we just keep it together—”

Shane’s still grinning even as he tries to tamp down the smile. He’s glancing at Ilya and then away and then back at him again, eyes dark with something Ilya doesn’t know how to interpret..

“Okay,” Ilya agrees. “Sorry, yes. Okay.”

Two takes later, the assistant director mutters something about how they have to have a few takes they can split together in post, and Ilya and Shane are dismissed.

“Ilya, we’ll need some solo shots around the rink, but Shane—you’re good to go. Thanks so much for coming in for this,” the director tells them both, holding out his hand for Hollander to shake.

Ilya nods agreeably, can’t trust what his face is doing and so makes himself turn away to the rink’s seats. The bear protests, but maybe it knows the decision is out of Ilya’s hands, because it stays mostly quiet. 

This is already so much more than Ilya probably should have allowed himself to have. He should have waited. He shouldn’t have pushed for more. See you in October, Hollander had said, and it’s Ilya who was stupid enough to need help counting. At least it is only Ilya that will have to deal with consequences. What will it be like this time, distance from Hollander? He has made him laugh now. 

“Uh, so,” Hollander says from behind him, and the suddenness of it almost gives Ilya a heart attack. “Are you—in Toronto for a long time?”

“What,” Ilya says. He sits carefully on the bench and grabs the closest thing he can find—a water bottle—just for something to do with his hands. Only then does he let himself look up at Hollander. Hollander, who is leaning against the boards, helmet off and sweaty hair sticking to his forehead. He’s looking at Ilya again. Maybe in a few years, this will stop feeling like the only appropriate way to conceptualize his life: when Shane Grayson Hollander is looking at him and when he is not.

Hollander’s cheeks are flushed. He bites at the inside of his cheek and shrugs, like he realizes the question is too stupid to be repeated but he’s not going to take it back either.

“I am here to film commercial,” Ilya tells him flatly. “Then I leave. Why stick around Canada when I am not getting paid?”

It’s half-chirp, half-reminder that Shane’s been dismissed already by the production team. Shane can go. Ilya—Ilya doesn’t want him to, of fucking course, but that’s why he has to remind him. That’s why Hollander has to go. If he sticks around longer than he’s been contractually obligated to, the bear in Ilya’s chest might get ideas. It is hard enough to cohabitate with the creature as it is. It would be so easy to confuse the stupid animal.

“Hah,” Shane says. “Whatever, Rozanov.”

But he stays, across from him, ungloved fingers tapping at the top of the boards. Ilya doesn’t understand it, needs to know what makes him linger. So he can do it again. So he can never do it again. 

“When they tell you you do commercial with me and not just alone?” He hears himself ask. It is another thing he does not mean to say. Around Hollander, the list keeps growing.

Hollander blinks at him. “I dunno, like two days ago,” he says like it’s a question. Ilya makes himself nod and drink from the bottle in his hand. Two days. CCM is very clever; two days is not nearly a long enough notice period to reschedule, barring family emergencies or hockey-related ones. It is in their endorsement deals.

“Why,” Hollander demands, eyebrows drawing down and tone turning heavy with suspicion. “When they’d tell you?”

Ilya shrugs and shakes his head like it doesn’t matter. It does not matter. “No, they told me nothing,” he says. And then he adds, impulsive and reckless and the kind of dangerous that’s left him reeling and devastated before, “it was my idea.”

Hollander stares at him, pink slash of his mouth falling open as he processes Ilya’s words. 

What are you thinking when you look at me like that? Ilya wants to ask, but thank God his tongue has grown too heavy to lift. Thank God his body agrees that these, at least, are not things he should say. His survival instincts have kicked in. Thank God. 

Hollander’s throat bobs as he swallows, but he doesn’t have time to say anything else before someone is calling out his name. Ilya doesn’t stare after him as he skates back to the huddle of CCM staff. He does not need to practice watching Shane Hollander moving away from him. He thinks, probably, over the course of his life, he will become very accustomed to the sight.

The rest of filming passes in a blur. He feels—scrubbed over, raw. Full of energy with nowhere to put it. Empty-handed and wounded and dizzy from the blood loss. What had he been thinking. Did it even matter. Did he pass the test he set for himself? He didn’t touch Hollander; he hardly talked to him. He didn’t say his name. He didn’t brush their shoulders together. He never even shook his hand. Did it matter. Does it matter?

It could be another hour or two of skating and resting and resetting and skating before the production team begins breaking down their set-up for the day. Ilya shakes the hands of every person he sees as he’s climbing off the ice. He feels stupid doing it, but Henrik had told him those types of small things were important, no matter how fucking exhausted he is. And he is. Exhausted. He’s tired. He’s aching. He’s cut deep and down to his bones, the absence of Hollander winding tightly around his lungs until it’s all he can think about with every breath he draws. And does it matter. And does it matter. And does it even fucking—-

He’s not alone in the locker room. It takes him—an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize this. He’s already gone through the process of stripping off his borrowed equipment and leaving it where the CCM team can find it, then changing out of his underclothes as well and wrapping a towel around his waist. 

And then he hears it. The pattering of water cascading from a shitty showerhead and hitting against a tiled floor. 

And then he sees him, Hollander, beneath the spray. 

The bare curve of his shoulder and the long line of his back, tipping his head to get his hair wet. The swell of his ass and the muscles of his thighs. He has a smattering of dark moles running over the width of his shoulders, a scar sitting at the top of the left one. Ilya wants to put his tongue to it, trace the length of it, kiss down the line of Hollander’s spine, dig his fingers into the dimples at the small of his back and pull him open. He looks—he is so beautiful, and Ilya already knew that, but it’s different, like this. Under the stream of the water, stripped of everything, shoulders relaxed. Ilya isn’t sure he’s ever seen Hollander with his shoulders relaxed.

It makes him look soft. Unrecognizably so.

Ilya’s feet have forgotten how to do anything but move closer, and he knows—he knows he is staring, knows that it is unforgivable, too obvious, too dangerous. Hollander has stared back at him before, in the gym after the draft and then even today, stared at him with dark eyes and wet lips, but that is not enough to justify how starved Ilya is. How ravenous he must look.

He has spent the past five years learning discretion, learning caution, becoming fluent in the language of men who let their gazes linger on other men in the darkest corners of crowded clubs in cities they'd never escape from if they were discovered by the wrong pair of eyes.

And this—this is nothing like that. The lights above the showers are fluorescently bright. Every small movement makes an echo bounce off the rain-slick walls. There’s only one other person here. There is no room for plausible deniability. There is just Shane Hollander and how much Ilya Rozanov wants him.

Hollander moves, tilts his head up under the spray, turns, and catches Ilya’s eyes.

For a moment, they’re both so still that Ilya can see the way Hollander’s throat bobs with the force of his swallow. It’s Hollander that looks away first, but it’s Ilya who takes a step forward, tossing his towel up and over one of the room’s low walls. 

Hollander’s shoulders are tense again. His eyes are red-hot brands, there on Ilya’s body and then not there just as suddenly. It’s difficult to keep his face blank; Ilya isn’t sure he’s doing a good job of it, but does it matter? Hollander is not looking at his face. Hollander is glaring at the wall in front of him, soapy hands rubbing pink circles into the muscles of his arms, then his chest, then down further.

Hollander is glancing at him, mouth falling open just slightly. Just enough room for Ilya to push his finger into, if that were something he could do. The water from the shower has made Hollander’s eyelashes clump together. Ilya feels like his head is underwater, like he is moving through something stubborn and viscous and intent upon drowning him.

Hollander isn’t looking anymore, but Ilya still is. His gaze keeps falling back to the width and strength of Hollander’s thighs, the length of his dick resting between them—mostly soft. 

But not entirely.

Ilya’s mouth is dry. He wants, and that is the most important thing. That he wants and that the wanting is returned. Hollander is staring at him again. Hollander has never learned subtlety, not if this is the way he glances at boys in the locker room. Or maybe he has, the same Ilya has learned it. Maybe he has just forgotten all of his lessons, the same way Ilya has. Maybe he wants, same as Ilya.

Hollander drags his eyes down the Ilya’s torso, fixate on his cock. They are not standing next to each other; there are two showerheads between them. Even so, Ilya can see the hitch in Shane’s breathing, the way his shoulders jump up with the force of his inhale. 

Ilya lets him look. Ilya wants him to look. Ilya wants him to stay, long past when the lights have turned off and the water runs cold.

There is so much skin on display, so many parts of Hollander to commit to memory. The dusty color of his nipples, the crease of his abdominal muscles, the birthmark just under his ribs. It’s inevitable, the way his dick begins to respond under the weight of Hollander’s attention.

If it’s dangerous, then Ilya has forgotten why.

Hollander is facing him now. A step closer than he had been before. Beads of water cling to his eyebrows, his lips. Ilya wants to lick him dry, everywhere.

“That’s—” Hollander starts to say and then he stops. The word’s jagged and ruined when it leaves Hollander’s mouth. Hollander’s voice, also. 

Ilya waits, both eyebrows raised as Hollander’s run the length of him again, like he’s trying to memorize him as well.

Then his eyes pause. Falter. Linger.

“Big,” Hollander breathes, and Ilya smirks automatically. It is far from the first time someone has told him this, but it is always nice to hear. Especially from Shane Hollander. Especially when they are here, like this. Alone and beneath the showerheads, lightning storm dancing between them.

He is about to say something smarmy and self-satisfied, something like thank you, except then he looks at him. Really looks at him. And he realizes, a one-two punch, that Shane isn’t staring at the jut of his cock, twitching into half-mast between his legs.

He’s looking at his shoulder.

The bear perks up in Ilya’s chest. It has been so patient, but now it is sharpening its claws.

Hollander is closer. Ilya isn’t sure which one of them is moving, but suddenly Hollander is closer. Only one showerhead separates them now and Hollander is staring at the soulmark on Ilya’s chest. His soulmark. Hollander's.

A part of Ilya wants to flinch away, turn around, grab the towel, leave. Hollander’s eyes are white-hot and heavy like a physical sensation on the soulmark, and it’s too much. Too fucking much. How the fuck did Ilya forget about it? The bear, the bandages he should have worn today. A part of Ilya is yelling, slamming himself against the confines of his cage. A part of Ilya remembers the fire and the burning and the danger of smoldering eyes.

But the larger part of Ilya has noticed that the water has washed off the make-up they’d applied to cover Shane’s freckles, and Ilya can count them now. They are standing close enough for this. Does it matter, if Shane sees the bear? It is big, he is right, he is very smart. It is a big tattoo. Maybe Shane will know what it means. Maybe he will tell Ilya. It is very big. It spans over the top of his shoulder, most of his left pectoral muscle. Why does it matter, if Shane sees it? He was always going to, probably. It is very hard to hide.

He thinks it is a tattoo anyway. Everyone thinks it is a tattoo, that Ilya had a choice in the matter, in the design, in the pain of it all. The Bears in Boston had laughed for days the first time they saw it. Svetlana had rolled her eyes and called him impulsive. Hollander had seen the very edge of it in Las Vegas, and he had—

Shane’s fingers brush against the delicate skin stretched between the edge of his deltoid muscle and his pectoral, right along the ridge of the bear’s ear.

And it’s—

It’s like going supernova. Like swallowing a miniature sun. Like burning, but not like being set on fire—like he is the fire, like he is nothing but a cascade of sparks and embers jumping up into the air, caught and trapped beneath bone and skin. 

He doesn’t even realize that he’s grabbed Hollander’s wrist, that he’s pushing him back against the shower wall, until he feels their chests connect, slick-wet from the soap and the water. 

He blinks into focus, and Hollander is slumped against the wall, staring up at him with wide, confused eyes and a wet mouth. “What the fuck, Rozanov,” Shane breathes, and it’s not angry. It’s something Ilya doesn’t know how to name, especially not right now when he can’t fucking think straight. 

He feels as if he’s vibrating. As if he’s burning, As if he’ll never be cold again, as if he’ll never be anything but Shane Hollander’s ever again. One fucking touch and all of his self-control has gone up in flames. It doesn’t fucking matter.

“Rozanov,” Shane whispers, barely moving his lips, barely breathing. His cock is pressed along the line of Ilya’s thigh, aroused and hot with it, his other hand flat against the shower wall. Ilya doesn’t remember putting him here. That’s terrifying in its own way. Did it hurt? Was Ilya too rough? Did Shane’s head hit the tile of the shower, did it hurt, will it bruise, will Shane forgive him for the crime of wanting this so much that he’s losing his mind? 

It’s agony, a little bit, to let go of Shane’s wrist. It’s the very first step in putting space between them. Just—enough. Just a little. Ilya needs to clear his head. If he speaks now, if he opens his mouth and tries to say anything, the only thing that will come out is Shane Grayson Hollander, and—and—and distantly, Ilya knows that that is a bad idea.

So he lets go of Shane’s wrist, the precursor to separation. 

Except then Shane’s hand falls right back onto Ilya’s shoulder, fingers clenching around the muscle there, palming over the soulmark like he can’t help himself, like he needs to touch, like he can’t imagine not being allowed to.

And so Ilya cants his head forward and kisses him.

Fireworks fizzle into constellations the moment their lips meet. This—this is what having a soulmate was supposed to feel like. This is what all the fucking books and movies and songs promised Ilya it would be. Ilya kisses his soulmate and his soulmate kisses him back, and there are fireworks going off in Ilya’s veins, a hand in his hair and another wrapped around his shoulder, tugging him closer. 

The bear in his chest roars out its approval. This is maybe the very first time in its existence that they are on the same page. Keep him close, keep him here, pleasepleaseplease keep him pleasepleaseplease stay pleasepleaseplease—

Shane moans and then jolts like he’s surprised by the sound, and Ilya wants to soothe him so he licks into his open mouth and strokes a hand down the length of his neck and then back up to brush against the shell of his ear. Then he just wants to taste him, so he lets himself get lost in the kiss, in the way Shane melts under his tongue, the way he gives ground and tips his head back, lets himself be explored.

And Ilya is selfish and the bear is a predator at its heart, an expert in taking and taking and taking, and so he does. Learned instinct. It’s all he knows; it is what he is made for, literally, what every atom in his body was crafted to do. Kiss Shane Hollander. Give himself over to him, no holds barred, everything on the table, everything he is in Hollander’s hands. Taking and taking and taking.

Above them, the showerhead creaks, pipes protesting. A moment later, the water runs cold like ice, like frostbite, like winter winds.

It’s terrible; it’s enough, and that's terrible. 

Ilya throws himself back as if two feet of distance now can make up for all the fucking lines he’s allowed himself to blow across. He forces a breath through his lungs; it feels like he’s just now coming up for air, breaking the surface of the ocean and fighting to free the rest of his body as well.

“What the fuck,” Hollander says, but Ilya can’t look at him. 

He does anyway, because in all the myths and the legends, sirens are impossible to resist even when you know they’re going to kill you. Hollander’s mouth is red and wet with Ilya’s spit. His cheeks are stained with a dull flush that highlights the span of his freckles. He’s still pressed up against the wall of the shower, blinking slowly at Ilya like he doesn’t understand what has happened. Like he thinks if he just stays very still, he will get what he wants back. And there’s enough residual heat in his eyes that Ilya knows exactly what he wants.

Fuck if Ilya doesn’t want the exact same thing.

But it’s easier to think like this, standing two feet away. It’s easier to remember. Three things that Ilya needs to remember, always: it hurts, getting your soulmark tattoo and there's probably a good reason for that. It changes everything, afterwards. Even when no one else can know.

The last one is the most important one by far: no one else can ever know.

Ilya takes a deep breath and then another one, rubbing his hand up over his jaw, his mouth, then dropping it to his side. He was never supposed to know what it felt like, to kiss Shane Hollander. He was never supposed to be so fucking greedy. To take what isn’t even his. Hollander wouldn’t want this, if he knew. If he knew Ilya was his soulmate, if he knew—if he knew what the other half of his soul looked like, the pitted, twisted, jagged ugliness of Ilya, he’d never want—

And it wouldn’t matter if he wanted, because it wouldn’t last. Because the wanting would destroy the both of them. The love would balk and falter under the weight of the scrutiny, of the world, of each other’s small inconsequential faults that would grow to feel like salt in the fucking wound every time they were made to confront them. It wouldn’t matter, Ilya’s run the fucking numbers. Ilya has calculated and recalculated this fucking equation, watched Shane Hollander skate circles around ice rinks too small to fit his potential and then laid awake in his bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to construct a world where this ends well and he always comes up fucking short, it’s just—

He wasn’t supposed to know. What Hollander tastes like. He wasn’t supposed to have to give that up too.

“This,” he forces the word up his throat, drags it out kicking and screaming from behind his teeth, “cannot happen.”

The cannot is a slip of the tongue; he’d meant to say did not, but maybe there is a limit to how many lies one person can tell another. This, at least, is true. This cannot happen. It did. It did happen. But it cannot.

“Fuck you,” Hollander bites back instinctively. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t even try to. His eyes fall away from Ilya completely, land on the floor and stay there even as he pushes himself up off the wall and back to the edge of the room where he’s hung his own towel. “Seriously, Rozanov, what’s your fucking problem.”

It’s so fucking weak. So fucking—transparent. Hollander won’t even look at him as he snarls the accusation, but his jaw is flexing and his hands are shaking. Just slightly. Just enough that it almost sends Ilya to his knees.

Suddenly, he is back in that Saskatchewan parking lot, looking at Shane Hollander’s face and thinking that this is a boy who has never known what it feels like to be hunted. A piece of prey. A wounded animal.

He doesn’t—Ilya still doesn’t think he was wrong, then. But he looks at the quiver in Hollander’s fingers as they tie the towel around his waist, and he thinks—maybe Hollander knows now. 

Ilya just never thought he’d be the one holding the rifle.

At least Hollander doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he shoves past him, mouth tight, eyes fixed ahead, eyelashes still clumped by the water from the shower, fingers still trembling. His shoulder smacks Ilya’s, right against the soulmark. It stings; it sings.

Ilya doesn’t follow him. The seconds drag into minutes, maybe into hours. He doesn’t know. The water is so fucking cold it makes his skin feel numb and then like it’s on fire. When he presses his fingers against his eyelids and pushes hard, he can still see fireworks. 

Chapter End Notes

i wasn't sure if we were all understanding ilya rozanov's levels of wet cat pathetic in this fic so i stuck him in the shower for his existential crisis and big boy breakdown

notes i made writing this chapter:

-the problem with writing a bunch of hollanov fanfiction pretty quickly and putting them all in the same collection is that both you and i may have figured out that i default to the same words and sentence structure a lot which is objectively a little funny because sometimes i am trying to write a metaphor and i have to stop and consider when was the last time i compared something to do a dog. was it this fic. was it the other fic. was it this fic but a different chapter. how many paragraphs has it been. has it been at least four paragraphs. can i use the dog thing again. (the answer is usually yes)

-it's normal for a lot of rookies on an NHL team to stay with an older team member or a member of the front office during their first year or so. i decided they'd definitely make the Russian rookie have a flatmate for at least the first year, and since I was already creating one funky guy i went ahead and created two. sure hope they don't have issues that are thematically similar yet slightly off-beat and asynchronous to our hero's in a way that could inform his decisions and opinions going forward

-there are so many hockey nicknames in this chapter, i hope it is both confusing and not at all confusing. hockey nicknames are a thing independent of this fic (Rozy, Hollzy, Marly, Chexy etc), but i just started thinking about the implications of having your full name being tied into finding your soulmate and how that could affect the names you give yourself and the names you call other people. in this chapter, it's dawson that never calls people by anything but the names he's made up for them - and you can see the beginnings of Ilya doing this as well in the latter half of the chapter (except for when it comes to Hollander, who is Shane when he's physically close enough for Ilya to forget to hold him at a distance) (this will be recurring probably, i love thinking about identity and names and being known) (she says, anonymously)

-to spell out the hockey nicknames: ilya is rosie is rozy; henrik olsson is hennessy is henny is sunshine (rarely); daniel dawson is jacky is jack (daniels)

-i began writing this chapter convinced that it would follow canon very closely, in that they would flirt in the shower and ilya would get shane's room number - but when i started writing it out, i couldn't figure out how to make this ilya risk that much when he knows what's at stake here and he'd feel guilty for hooking up with/pursuing shane by getting his number and doing the legwork for the hook up while shane doesn't know that they're soulmates. so i changed it. but hey, shane got to feel up ilya's muscles/bear tattoo so that's a big (momentary) win for everyone involved

-but don't worry. dicks in mouths next chapter or i won't post 🫡 (next chapter is also going to be complete canon divergence before the chapter after that adheres back onto canon) (so that dicks in mouths can happen. amongst other things)