Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Rape/Non-Con

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Past Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort

Language:

English

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-07-27 Completed: 2026-07-31 Words: 18,593 Chapters: 3/3

Don't feed that

Summary

Ilya's life is already at a low ebb, having chased Shane Hollander out of his house and into the arms of American's sweetheart, Rose Landry. Things get even worse when his former coach dies, and a secret Ilya has been avoiding for over a decade is suddenly shockingly, horribly public.

Or,

"You heard that Lipovsky died?"

Lipovsky. The name has the usual deadening effect on Ilya's emotions. He can feel his face going blank as everything drains from him until he's as empty as a bathtub with the plug pulled out. "Yes, of course."

Notes

Timeline wise, the fic starts between episode four and five, with the assumption that there is a gap of at least a few days between the club scene at the end of episode four, and Rose gently coming out for Shane at the beginning of episode five. As far as I can tell, it is technically ambiguous if Shane and Rose waking up together is the morning after the club or just a different awkward morning after, so I am going with the interpretation that works better for my story.

Trigger warning: This is a fic in which Ilya has previously, as a teenager, been sexually assaulted. The assault is only described indirectly, because the fic is about the impact of the event in the present day, but please do still be careful. Ilya is also both passively and actively suicidal at various points.

At various times Ilya talks around the issue, downplays and mischaracterizes what happened (e.g. referring to a "sex scandal"), and blames himself. This is not intended to be an accurate, fair, or healthy way to discuss the sexual assault of a minor, it is intended to reflect Ilya's trauma and negative self-perception.

Spoilery details of potentially triggering elements

At fourteen, Ilya is groomed and sexually assaulted by his coach. He is unaware that his coach has filmed the assault. After the coach commits suicide, the videos are uploaded to the internet. The assault and existence of the videos are referenced throughout the fic.

Ilya has suicidal thoughts and eventually plans to kill himself by jumping from a tall building, but is prevented.

• Inspired by the hand on the back of your neck by Anonymous

Chapter 1

It takes Ilya an embarrassingly long time to clock that something is up with Svetlana.

In his defense, Svetlana turning up at his house without warning or invitation is just another Friday evening. Arriving with takeout from his favorite Eastern European restaurant instead of bullying Ilya into ordering expensive sashimi is unusual, but not unprecedented. Svetlana hides her fussing under a veneer of teasing and hockey talk, but she is a good friend who always tries to be there for Ilya in the way he needs, even if that means stooping to carbs, and right now, Ilya really fucking needs some comfort food.

For weeks, every screen in America has been bombarding Ilya with images of Shane and Rose-fucking-Landry, which Ilya thought was the deepest circle of hell, before he went to the wrong club and had to watch them grind against each other in person. After that, Ilya is in such dire need of consolation and distraction that he entirely forgets his nervous breakdown is a secret and Svetlana should have no way of knowing it is happening. He accepts the warm paper bag she thrusts into his arms unquestioningly, smells the rich scent of barberries, garlic and lamb wafting from it, and feels grateful enough to cry. There exists at least one person who has never fled from his company.

The clear and present danger of grateful, embarrassing tears prevents Ilya from looking Svetlana in the eye while he sets out plates, cutlery and one of the nice bottles of wine he only gets out for top-tier visitors, and he's still not ready to be scrutinized by the time they're dishing up. Between one emotion and another, Ilya is several mouthfuls deep into his plov before he looks up and sees that Svetlana is also battling tears and, for once, doing much worse than him at something. Her eyes are huge and glossy and sad. Ilya drops his fork with a clatter, immediately alarmed. Svetlana is not a crier.

“What's wrong?” he demands. A little tactless perhaps, but Russian is dangerously free of English's split-second processing delay.

Svetlana looks up at the ceiling and dabs the corners of her eyes with one fingertip, careful with her face out of habit, even though she is wearing barely any make-up, which, now Ilya comes to think about it, should probably have been the biggest warning sign of all. Fuck. This is serious, and Ilya has been so busy wallowing in his own shit that he hasn't noticed.

"Sveta?" Ilya asks, forcing himself to sound calm this time. They cannot both be losing it at the same time. He walks round to Svetlana's side of the kitchen island, so he can put an arm around her shoulders, and wracks his brain for things that might have upset her. "Is it your father? The business?" He is more than willing to buy a new car or two if it will help.

"No, no, I am well, Papa is well, men love to buy Bugattis from me." Svetlana takes a couple of deep breaths, spins her chair to face Ilya, and takes both his hands in hers. Confused, Ilya lets her. Who is comforting who here? He is losing track. "I have difficult news to tell you," Svetlana says.

"Okay," Ilya replies, slowly. Svetlana's lips tremble and it takes a concerted effort not to jump out of his seat. "What is happening? Do I have a brain tumor?" Ilya asks, only half joking. He doesn't think American physicians would keep that kind of news from him, but if they did, it would be just like Svetlana to somehow find out and be the only one willing to tell him.

He does not expect her to say, "You heard that Lipovsky died?"

Lipovsky. The name has the usual deadening effect on Ilya's emotions. He can feel his face going blank as everything drains from him, even worry for Svetlana, until he's as empty as a bathtub with the plug pulled out. "Yes, of course."

It had been quite the topic in the Russian MLH players Whatsapp group, eighty-two messages in less than half an hour. None of the rest of the group had had Ilya's dubious privilege and been personally mentored by Lipovsky—he was picky about his favorites, always thinking of his kingmaker reputation—but several had been on one of the various youth teams he'd coached over the years, and every Russian player over seventeen had at least heard of him.

This cannot be the difficult news. Ilya assumed—was glad to assume—that they weren't going to talk about the death, but if they were going to talk about it, he would have expected Svetlana to get out the celebratory top-shelf vodka and propose a toast before he expected her to cry. Over Lipovsky, of all people. Svetlana had met the man, she knew better.

"Did you know that he killed himself?" Svetlana asks.

"No." That Ilya hadn't heard. When he'd read the first message saying Lipovsky had died he'd recoiled instinctively, as from a hot stove, backed out of the chat with eighty-one of eighty-two messages unread, and tapped Mute Always before any more could announce themselves.

A mistake, clearly. It would have been better to get the basics, for just this situation.

Since further details have tracked him down and found him, Ilya gives the suicide revelation a moment to settle and finds that it doesn't upset him. If anything, it is satisfying to know that demons tormented the man. Ilya hadn't given him so much credit for human feeling.

It is plausible, if a little surprising, that Svetlana might think a suicide would upset Ilya. Perhaps she has divined, in that barely explicable way she does, that he is going through something, and only misidentified the cause. "You do not need to worry about me because of this," he tells her.

"I know. You are strong." The compliment, so much more straight-forward than the way they usually tease each other, lands almost as hard as Svetlana's distress and squirms uncomfortably under Ilya's skin. He is about to change the subject when Svetlana's face twists in sudden, unexpected anger. "Stronger than him. He took the coward's way out," she spits.

The word coward makes Ilya flinch. He tries to pull away, but Svetlana holds tight to his hands.

"No, I didn't mean it like that." She does look sorry, but Ilya cannot help but wonder if she didn't mean it, or regrets giving her real opinion about people who kill themselves. "But it isn't the same. He was running away from," Svetlana's voice cracks, "what he did."

What he did. Ilya's stomach turns heavy and cold and his face prickles with heat, blood panicking and rushing to and from all the wrong places. Of course, Ilya should ask what Lipovsky did, that is what anyone would ask. He doesn't.

"Ilyushka," Svetlana whispers. Her eyes fill with tears again, and she does not let go of his hands to wipe them away, even when they spill over. "You never told me. You could have told me."

"What, did he leave a detailed note or something, confessing all his sins?" Ilya asks, like a fucking idiot, instead of what he should have said, which is obviously 'told you what?' "It does not matter. Whatever he said will be half fantasy."

"He," Svetlana's voice falters. She swallows and forges on. "He made videos, had been making them, for many years. Of him. And boys. After he died, someone put them on the internet."

The news, Svetlana explains a little while later, when Ilya has himself under some semblance of control, has spread slowly.

"Slower than the average sex scandal," Ilya mutters.

"Don't call it that," Svetlana says, and because her wounded tone is all on his behalf, Ilya does not argue back.

The story is spreading slowly for several reasons. The Russian establishment is embarrassed and repressing it in the home press, and the Western media do not understand the Cyrillic tweets that make it through the net. Perhaps the biggest factor, however, is that the videos exist in a netherworld of uncertainty when it comes to the names and ages of the people involved. Given Lipovsky's predilections for boys on the cusp of becoming men, it is likely illegal to watch or own or distribute most of the footage, and not illegal like downloading the latest episode of Westworld off Pirate Bay, illegal like decent people do not watch these kind of things, and sensible ones consult their lawyers before they publish anything officially.

This reprieve cannot last forever. Even decent people gossip, and not everyone is decent. The American media love a story about evil Russians, and failed Russian coverups, and unlike the media back home, they have the freedom to print whatever the fuck they want. Ilya's face has always been distinctive, and he is the most famous Russian player in the US. The story will break, and here, it will be Ilya's story.

Already, despite Minsport's pressure to keep it quiet, the whispers are widespread enough that Svetlana's father had felt the need to call her and check on how Ilya was handling his public humiliation, and if Sergei Vetrov, who according to Svetlana, does not know how to unlock his iPhone and has his secretary read all his e-mails aloud to him, knows, the KHL players know. And if the KHL players know, they will tell the Russian players in the MHL, who will tell the rest of their teams, who will tell everyone, because they all fucking hate him. If the muted Whatsapp group of Russian MLH players isn't already talking about it, it's only because they've made another group without Ilya.

At fourteen, Ilya had been tall and strong for his age. His videos probably don't look illegal. People can probably tell themselves they're okay to share. That they can pass their phone over in the locker room. That they can laugh about it, and judge him for not fighting harder. For barely fighting at all.

Svetlana doesn't make fun of Ilya when he throws up in the kitchen sink. She rubs his back and strokes her nails up the nape of his neck, into his hair. For the first time in a decade, it makes Ilya's skin crawl. The ruin sets in that early.

At first, Ilya thinks that not knowing when the story will boil over is the worst feeling in the world. For two and a half days, he is constantly on edge, struggling to find the English to answer the simplest questions from journalists, unable to tell if Marleau's searching looks are evaluating Ilya's shitty mood or evaluating if Ilya is the one from the sex tape everyone was watching before he came in the room. Ilya is scared to open notifications on his phone, or look up into the crowd at a game, or answer his goddamn door. It is like being a child again, poised all the time on the edge of fight or flight, his body too stupid to understand that all his reflexes are pointless, that he is small and powerless and has nowhere to go.

Speak to your lawyer, speak to your agent, Svetlana urges him. Hire a PR person, hire a therapist. She may as well tell him to build a time machine and stop this all happening. It's impossible.

So yes, Ilya thinks the uncertainty of the gathering storm is the worst feeling in the world, right up until TMZ runs the headline HOCKEY PLAYER'S TRAGIC ORDEAL. That's worse.

The subheading on the article is Boston center remains silent on abuse scandal rocking Russian hockey, which Svetlana, incandescent with rage, says will read like complicity to the casual headline skimmer. It is one of many things Ilya should bring up with his hypothetical crisis management team. The actual article, however, is full of a cloying false sympathy that Ilya detests even more, simpering over a victimhood Ilya doesn't feel. At least the subheading is fucking accurate. He is remaining silent. Silence is how you get through this kind of shit.

TMZ publish their story in the evening, and Ilya is summoned to a Raiders crisis meeting at 7am the very next day. It's small and low key, just LeClaire (pale, sweaty, avoiding eye contact) and the Raiders' PR manager (almost vibrating with the level of sympathetic understanding she is trying to project) in attendance, which is tactful, but doesn't prevent the meeting from being extremely unproductive.

A rejected suggestion of a friendly journalist Ilya could give an interview to ("nothing tasteless or sensational, you'd have input on the final edit"), becomes an offer to workshop Ilya's own statement with him ("this is our area of expertise, you can use us as much as you need, we want to help"), becomes a request for a quote to go in the Raiders' statement ("Abigail will disseminate it through the official Twitter account, you won't have to deal with any of it"), becomes a borderline desperate plea for ratification of their draft statement ("the wording would be 'and Rozanov', nothing specific"), and Ilya cannot do any of it. If he looks directly at what happened and opens his mouth, he doesn't know what will come out.

Ilya doesn't even have the decency to shuffle off the ice into the shadows like they so desperately want ("take as much time as you need, Rozanov") because if he stops, if he pauses long enough for any of this to catch up to him, he has a horrible certainty it will crush him and he'll never be able to start again.

And so, defeated, confused, exasperated, they release Ilya to practice. What else can they do? Technically, or at least as far as they can say without being strung up in the court of current public opinion, Ilya has done nothing wrong. It's still too early for anyone else to be in, but Ilya gets into his gear, puts his headphones in, and waits for the rest of the team arrive, head down so that the shuffling feet surrounding him are the only clue to the awkward fucking atmosphere. When Marleau puts a tentative hand on his shoulder, Ilya figures it's time. He stands, shrugging Marleau off, and the locker room falls silent.

"New rule. If anyone talks to me about anything other than hockey, I will rip their tongue out," Ilya announces. And whether it's fear, pity, disgust, or the fact that as soon as he's on the ice Ilya skates faster and harder than he has since the last time his father came to a practice session and he physically cannot hear them through his dust, no one does.

That is the one blessing. Ilya's hockey doesn't suffer.

It turns out that you can channel the sense that you're being actively pursued by a searing inferno of all your mistakes into some incredible skating, and that a suffocating glass wall coming down between you and the rest of the world is helpful for both ignoring jeers and laughs, and severing you from physical sensations like exhaustion and bruises.

Before their first game after the article, Ilya is surrounded by worried glances and hushed cut off sentences. Deep down, he's maybe a little worried himself.

Three minutes into the first period, Ilya scores a goal so beautiful and unlikely that it temporarily wipes his tragic ordeal from the entire arena's mind. The crowd cheer, Buffalo curse Ilya's name exactly as fervently as they always do, and Marleau slams in for a congratulatory bro-hug.

"You beauty!" Marleau crows, face alight with the innocent joy that maybe Ilya is alright after all, and when he claps a hand on the back of Ilya's neck and squeezes Ilya doesn't punch him, which is its own victory.

If Ilya is strong enough to harness it, this could be productive, the humiliation a fire even greater than the Olympic failure that propelled Ilya to his first cup. Wouldn't that be ironic? Lipovsky's tough love and firm, unyielding hand pushing Ilya to excellence one more time, even from beyond the fucking grave.

"You want me for press?" Ilya asks LeClaire, after they've trounced Buffalo 5-2, almost forgetting for a moment that he'd rather be castrated than stand in front a journalist.

"Hah!" LeClaire doesn't bother to look anything other than incredulous. "Go home Rozanov. Get some sleep, you look like shit."

Ilya goes home, but he doesn't sleep. He settles down to watch a recording of the night's triumphs.

"Few players respond to adversity like Ilya Rozanov," says one of the commentators after his spectacular first goal. Ilya watches the rest of the game on mute.

Once the story has broken containment, no can fucking shut up about it, even in the Russian press, who give up on denial and move onto blame and distraction. Two active KHL players and one retiree issue brief, eerily identical statements, denying as much as they can deny, liberally conflating homosexuality and whatever it was Lipovsky was doing, and pivoting to the importance of protecting children by promoting traditional family values.

Reading the statements is surreal, like Ilya's most private horrors have been poorly plagiarized for everyone else to see. Next Marleau will be telling everyone about how he found his mother's corpse and Connors will be dishing about Shane Hollander breaking his heart. Fuck.

To add to how warped the whole experience feels, the retired player is Sidorov. Sidorov! He had been one of the greats in Ilya's youth: power and accuracy perfectly balanced, a player Ilya modeled himself on, and the biggest reason he'd been excited when Lipovsky approached Ilya's father about private coaching. Now here Sidorov is, the statuesque god who owned the ice for a decade, reduced to bleating nonsense about weakening modern morality, issuing the statement the full weight of the government would be pressuring Ilya to issue if they had him in their immediate power.

It is stupid, so stupid, but right up until he heard the word "boys", plural, fall from Svetlana's lips, Ilya had truly thought it was just him. Sure, Lipovsky was not a good person, but Ilya's failures contributed. If Ilya had been better—stronger, cannier, manlier, good enough to succeed alone, or have other people to turn to for help—it wouldn't have happened. He would have found another way, or more likely, Lipovsky wouldn't even have thought of doing it.

Over a decade later, yes, Ilya knows that there are predators out there who don't need an excuse and do not simply stop at one victim, but it seems impossible that that is the case here, that such a generic platitude can be applied to his situation. There has always been something wrong with Ilya, something in him that makes people terrible. This is a core truth of his existence.

And yet, the platitude must be true, at least for some of the boys Lipovsky targeted. It didn't start with Ilya, and it didn't end with Ilya. Three Russian players have issued statements, and they are just the three famous enough to be identified from the videos and pressured into talking about it. There are more people out there, praying their face is generic and their legacy weak enough that their phone won't ring and drag them into this.

All of it, the knowledge that he was just one of many, the vileness of the Russian statements, only serves to make Ilya feel even more wrong. He was stupider than he knew back then. He enabled a monster. And now, he is standing uselessly while the government weaponizes what Lipovsky did against queer people in Russia. Ilya should say something, he knows he should, but all he hears if he tries to imagine what that might be is static. If he came out as bisexual would that be helpful or counterproductive? Is he willing to do it, even if it would help? Is it better if he lies about what happened to make it more palatable? Every option is a pitfall, so he doesn't do anything.

The night Svetlana told him, Ilya's first question, once the vomiting had run its course, had been, "Did you watch it?"

He was still hunched over the sink, unable to turn around. The idea of Svetlana—the only person Ilya could plausibly claim both knows him and loves him—seeing him like that, doing those things, was so awful Ilya couldn't actually hold it in his mind.

Svetlana hugged him, despite the awkward side-on angle, arms around his chest and cheek pressed against his shoulder.

"No. No of course not," she said. "I would not do that to you. I will never watch it. I promise."

The thing is, whether they watch the video not, whether they think you are a victim or a pervert, people do treat you differently after something like this. They can't help it.

Svetlana tries, but Ilya makes her sad now, all their old ease and laughter dried up. Ilya's agent back in Russia fades away almost immediately, unwilling or unable to handle a crisis this huge and politically sensitive. LeClaire is constantly assessing if Ilya will be a liability in any given situation, and judging by his frown, finding Ilya wanting. The team only look at him when it's time to pass the puck. The internet talks about Ilya in a new way that he can longer pretend he is in on, split between pity and disgust.

Even Alexei, the one time he calls, doesn't demand money with his usual verve, like he isn't sure he wants it anymore. That really fucks Ilya up. If he is no longer something his brother despises and rages against, the crab at the top of the bucket Alexei will do anything to drag down, what is he?

The only one who doesn't behave any differently is his father, which sets the bar for just how medically fucked you have to be. Alexei, the fucking snitch, will have run eagerly to him with the tale of Ilya's disgrace, but in a rare win for dementia, it doesn't stick. Never has Ilya been so grateful to have his father bellow down the phone that his mother must have been out fucking other men all day like the whore she is because she's not there to make her husband dinner. Not only does his father not know, the version of Ilya that Grigori remembers is truly free of it, has a mother to run to and a part-time coach that's only half playing attention to him. It's positively nostalgic. Ilya doesn't want it to end and for once, his father is one who hangs up.

Oh, and there's Shane. Shane doesn't treat Ilya any differently. He's already decided Ilya isn't someone he wants to be around.

Ilya doesn’t go to All Stars. Days hanging out with the biggest egos in the league, none of them with a motive to keep Ilya sweet by pretending nothing happened? Endless press opportunities without a coach motivated to keep the journalistic horde focused on the team? Rose Landry in a series of stunning outfits, or worse, her Hollander jersey, blissfully ignorant that she has competed for Shane's affections, let alone won? Shane himself, whose inevitable pity and relief will be as obvious and unaffected as all his emotions always are? No fucking thank you. Fuck that. Fuck all of it.

And the truth is, a few weeks in to his current hot streak Ilya is feeling a bone-deep exhaustion, because there is a difference between a rigorous campaign for the Cup that maximizes performance by encompassing training, diet and sleep schedule, and a blind, desperate sprint that is more from something than to something. If ever there was a year for Ilya to take advantage of the rest break that the vast majority of the league get, it is this one. No problem.

It's actually good that Shane ended things between them before any of this happened. A gift. Ilya is grateful. He never has to endure a moment's uncertainty over how much baggage Shane could put up with, because he already knows it's none. Ilya doesn't have to watch Shane wait for the most sensitive moment to separate himself, or discover if he's selfless enough to make the break himself if Shane won't. Having moved on to America's sweetheart before things got tough, Shane doesn't have to feel any responsibility for Ilya's emotions or actions at all. He's free.

Which is good! The flip side of Shane's freedom is Ilya's freedom. They owe each other nothing. There is one less person for Ilya to disappoint and hurt on a list so short it's barely a list anymore. One less person who might think they should have done something if-

Ilya should have gone to All Stars. He realizes that the first morning he wakes up with no game or practice to go to. Five days of rest sounded great when he was exhausted enough to go to sleep, but now that he has slept, it's five days with no distractions.

Most of his usual options are off the table. Ilya can't play hockey, because there is no hockey. Scrolling social media is off the table, because if the people in Ilya's algorithm aren't talking about his sordid sexual past, they're talking about Shane's blissful romantic future. The awkward discomfort of any teammates who haven't left town for the week will be worse than nothing. Ilya can't text Shane, because he already scared him off, and even if Ilya is willing to accept Svetlana's affectionate, misplaced sympathy, it's too late to ask for it, because she's in Palm Beach for the Cavallino Classic, and he'd rejected her invitation to tag along.

All that really leaves is Ilya's old faithfuls: clubs and casual sex. Their appeal may have waned over the course of his preoccupation with Shane, but since that's over, it could be time for a renaissance. All Ilya would have to do is face roomfuls of strangers without knowing if they know, or if they watched any of the videos. Any one of the strangers might ask Ilya about it, or let him pick them up because they feel sorry for him, or reject him because of what he did, or hell, get off to the memory of the video in the privacy of their own head while Ilya fucks them and never even tell him.

Ilya can cope with that, he has to, because he needs something. One by one, his options have been closing off, and as they do it is harder and harder to ignore the one option that is always there.

There is no plan. Ilya has never had a plan, not a concrete one. Just an awareness of a potential exit. A thought. Sometimes he glances at it, and thinks about what he wouldn't let it be—a mess for anyone who knows him to walk in on, something he'd get an innocent person, like a train driver, directly involved in, a failure he'd have to live through and with—if he did it, not that he would.

The frequency and severity of the thought has always waxed and waned. Usually when it comes it's an ankle deep flash flood, fleeting and easily ignored, but sometimes, such as when the summer approaches, it's a wave, high enough to slap him in the face, strong enough that the undertow nearly pulls him over. It gets worse, and Ilya grits his teeth through it, and eventually it gets better. That's how things have always been, and he has always handled it, and he'll handle this too.

The morning of Ilya's 7am crisis meeting, he'd been driving, radio on to fill the silence, when Sports Hub had turned to discussing the fucking scandal. Automatically, Ilya had noted how quiet the road was, free of people nearby who might get hurt or have an opinion on how recklessly he steered into the next corner.

Two games ago, Ilya had taken a hard check from a Floridian giant with boulders for shoulders and the doctor had asked what scale his pain was. It would only have taken a few words to get his hands on some pills.

Countless fucking nights it's been 3am and Ilya has lain on his bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering if the light fixture would support his weight long enough for him to suffocate.

So far, he has done what he always does: braced himself against the wave and let it wash over him. Changed down a gear and turned sensibly round the bend, hands at ten and two. Lied and said, "only a 2". Gotten up from his bed and stared at his living room ceiling instead, where all the lights are recessed. 

At one minute past noon on the first day of the All Star break, Ilya gets the vodka out. Of course it's stupid to drink when he's in a mood like this, and self-control is so important. Ilya knows that. He fucking knows that. But what else is there?

Ilya has a drink, and another. He watches one and half Fast & Furious movies. He drinks more and wonders when he can go to bed, despite the fact that it's so early not even Shane would be contemplating going to bed.

Christ, Ilya has four and half days of this still to go. How the fuck is he going to do it?

He thinks about watching porn, but idea makes him feel slightly sick. And then he thinks, how hard is it to find these videos anyway? Maybe he's been blowing it all out of proportion. Maybe they've all been deleted and only perverts who go on the dark web, whatever the fuck that is, know where to find them. Maybe Ilya can sober up, go out, get drunk again in a less depressing way, and easily find someone who has no idea who he is to distract him.

It takes Ilya less than half an hour to find them on Pornhub, because the world is a goddamn cesspit. At first, Ilya isn't even sure if he'll recognize one of the videos, not in passing in an endless parade of fleshy thumbnails, but the moment he sees it, he knows. A single, small, pixellated still, and it's like Ilya is there. The desk. The filing cabinet. The bench against one wall. The humid stench of sweaty equipment heaped up nearby. Ilya knows, without clicking on the video, the exact set of messy shelves where the camera must have been hidden. The place where he'll drop his gear when he's told to strip.

Ilya closes the tab, closes his computer, flees the room, then his whole house, and is dancing under the pulsing lights of The Grand before midnight. So what if some strangers pity him? Let them. Ilya is pitiable. It's better than being alone with nothing but the video and one exit.

He goes back to the apartment of a woman who laughs a lot with her friends and asks his name like she really doesn't know it, and to Ilya's relief, it's fine. It's fine. She has a Raiders mug in her kitchen, but that could be there for a thousand reasons, Ilya doesn't know the story of every random mug he drinks from. She doesn't doesn't mention hockey, and her bedroom has reassuringly bare, empty walls where not even the tiniest, most discrete nanny-cam could be hidden. She gives up on conversation when Ilya plays up his lack of English, falls asleep quickly after a couple of orgasms, and only rouses enough to grunt "bye" when he slips out at dawn. Perfect.

For two days and nights, Ilya makes it work. He hits the gym like he's Shane Hollander, early and focused, and the clubs like he's Ilya Rozanov, raucously and late. It's not restorative, given it involves about three hours sleep in a stranger's bed, but it's fun. He's having fun.

Late on the third night, just as Ilya thinks he's nearly pulled a hattrick of distraction off, the brunette he's dancing with sweeps her hair seductively over one shoulder, pulls Ilya down so her lips are pressed to his ear and says, loud and wet in his ear, "I think you're so brave."

That night, Ilya goes back to his own home, alone. He has another drink. He watches the video.

The thing is, it shouldn’t make a difference, Ilya knows what happened, he was fucking there. The mainstream opinion pieces, the sympathetic people online, the Raider's PR Department, even Svetlana, all have their idea of what happened, based on them being good, normal people. Ilya hasn’t pushed back hard on the narrative that he’s an innocent victim, however much it makes his skin crawl, because he’s not a fucking idiot. Anything that might give people a way to ignore this, to reach for sympathy not condemnation, is what will keep him in this job and this country, or keep him alive and free if he has to go back to his. That doesn't mean he agrees.

Technically Ilya was a child, but not a normal one. He already had responsibilities and pressures on him, on and off the ice, that meant he had to grow up fast. So he didn't want it. So fucking what? It was one of many times in his life where he only had bad options. He could have fought harder, made more of a fuss. Instead, he chose not to squander his father's investment of time and effort. He chose not to upset his famous, powerful coach. He chose to keep hold of his best chance to maybe, one day, get out of Russia. Ilya chose.

It shouldn't even be that big a deal. If you take a step back, it is just a thing that happened. Another unpleasant physical experience to be got through, worse than a beating the way that a beating is worse than a bag skate, but still on the same scale, if only other people weren't so hysterical about it. A price to pay, later justified by Ilya's success. It's precisely because he made the right sacrifices then that now he gets to be a famous multi-millionaire and play a game for a living. He understood, and he decided, and he was right. It's what Ilya has told himself for a decade.

Except, when he watches the video, that’s not how it looks on screen, like a clear-eyed bargain. That’s a child. Even before he takes off the bulk of the protective hockey padding and shrinks even further, a child. And he’s not stoic, he’s terrified. He cried. 

Ilya stares at the light fitting until dawn fills his bedroom.

Day four slips by in unpredictable fits and starts, like someone has given a toddler the television remote, and they're hitting pause and fast-forward and skip-scene without knowing what any of the buttons mean. Ilya observes himself at a remove as he moves around his house, looking at his knife drawer (messy), his medicine cabinet (unpredictable), his oven (electric), his car collection (messy and unpredictable). Ilya looks at all these things, and then goes online and books a hotel room at a Back Bay hotel known for its excellent views.

Existence is still a first person video game someone else is controlling as Ilya drives to the hotel, checks in, and has a (last) drink at the hotel bar, a vodka good enough that Ilya is almost sorry when he realizes he's downed it without a thought. In some lingering reflex of his former self, he buys drinks for everyone in the bar, but the succession of grateful cheers don't feel like anything to do with him.

It's only when Ilya is finally alone in his Deluxe Junior Suite with Balcony that time seems to settle down into its usual flow and his body returns to him, acceptance of why he's there already settled, fully formed, in his mind. Everything is in place. All Ilya has to do is see it through.

The view is, as advertised, spectacular, a view across to Cambridge bisected by the glimmering ribbon of the Charles river. The more important factor to Ilya right now is the long, steep drop directly below the balcony, but he still appreciates having a last nice thing to look at. A proper city should always have a river.

In fact, now that he's here, now that some kindly higher power or assertive part of his subconscious has made the plan and guided him into place, now that the weight of the future and the paralyzing question of his culpability are lifting, soon to no longer be his problem, Ilya is able to think more clearly than he has in weeks. Perhaps more clearly than he has since he said Shane's name out loud and watched him recoil, the breaking point at which it all started to go wrong.

There are a few final housekeeping tasks he has to complete, if he really wants to do this with a clear conscience. Loose ends to tie up, and if he can, messages to send or a note to write. He'd always wished there'd been a note.

Calmly, Ilya sits with his back to the spectacular view, gets out his phone, and goes into his messages for the first time since the the story officially broke. Ilya deletes his text thread with Jane. He doesn't let himself read the recent messages, a line of gray bubbles that fills the screen. Miraculously, he has been granted executive control of his body without the fear and pain he'd always expected would accompany this decision, which remain behind a window, visible but unable to touch him. But as smooth and clear as the window is, Ilya senses that the right blow could shatter it, and his final tasks are too important to screw up. He knows now how the sins of the dead can come back to fuck the living and he doesn’t want to do that to anyone else, especially Shane.

After some consideration, Ilya also deletes his threads with a few other regular hookups who probably don't want to be associated with him, even though it's been months since he texted, and Alexei, because his wrangling with his brother makes for fucking humiliating reading.

Briefly, Ilya considers deleting Shane’s contact, but he can’t quite bring himself to. Instead he changes it to Hollander, so that no one will connect it to his Jane. It is a little weird to have his rival’s phone number, but not a smoking gun, not without the texts. Next, Ilya deletes his internet history, his tweets, his Instagram, and all his thirst trap photos and dickpics, because they were mostly to send to Shane, and that too feels like something that might one day come back to haunt Shane in some convoluted way.

Then he scrolls back through his photos, looking for any clues he missed. Perhaps, on some level, Ilya is looking for a reason to change his mind. He doesn't find it. What do his photos say about his life? Mainly how hollow and empty it is. The only person he has is Svetlana, and he is only a small part of her life. Other than that it's nothing but parties, and travel to the same thirty-one North American cities, with the same twenty-two men paid to spend time with him, where Ilya sees nothing except bland hotels and ice-rinks, and makes no lasting connections with anyone.

Ilya scrolls and scrolls, back through the years, until he gets to the oldest photos on his phone, the only ones he bothered to transfer from his pre-Cloud phone. Him and Shane, side by side at the award podium, Ilya's hand on Shane's neck, Shane's face tight with disapproval. Despite the way that everything about the photo now seems symbolic of how fucked they always were, Ilya feels a surge of longing, so strong it pushes up against the glassy calm of his resolve. Even if they couldn't be something, they weren't nothing.

Reflexively, Ilya tries to swipe to his conversation with Jane, just to look at the messages. It's something he does more often than he'd like to admit, punishment or reward depending on his circumstance, but of course, he's already deleted the thread. Jane is gone, and under Hollander, there is only silence.

Stupidly, Ilya can't stand the sight. It feels wrong. There should be something.

Maybe Ilya will allow himself a final text. It is late, and Shane will be tucked up in bed by now, so the risk is minor. It's a selfish urge, but isn't that Ilya all over? He goes to all this trouble to fix things up nicely, but can't resist ruining the simplicity of the gesture, setting his greasy fingerprints on the clean window. But what to write? What does he want to say? What can encompass how much and how little they've been to each other, and how much Ilya regrets this fucked up coda to his life, which never should have touched Shane at all?

He considers, I hope you do not think I lied to you. I only wanted to give you the better part of myself and that is such a small part, but that's maudlin as hell.

He considers, The moments I had with you were the best in my life. I will hold them in my heart as long as I can, but what the fuck does he think Shane will do with that?

He types out, Does she fuck you as well I did? before his better angels hit delete.

In the end, the thing he most wants to say is the thing he truly cannot say.

I love you

I love you

I always loved you

Chapter 2

If the rumor was about anyone else, Shane probably would have found out on TMZ, like a regular member of the public. He's always the last to know the gossip, oblivious to which players have fallen out with each other, or how and when they've cheated on their WAGs, until the news has been round the league twice and settled into common knowledge. Which is fine by Shane. He doesn't actually care to get involved in any of that shit, unless the team let it affect their game. A disinterest that, according to Hayden and JJ, his face telegraphs clearly when people do try and gossip with him.

The exception, in this as in in everything, is Ilya Rozanov. No one considers that Shane would be less than rapt at any detail of Rozanov's life, and if Shane looks disapproving, they assume it's of Rozanov, not them. In their defense, they're half right.

All of which means that hordes of gossips race to tell Shane the latest Rozanov rumor, eager and expectant as they say the words "Rozanov sex tape", like Shane might pat them on the head and give them a treat. Shane hopes that his panic, as a person who has had a lot of sex with Rozanov, is not as obvious as his dislike of gossip allegedly is.

It's unlikely to be Shane in the tape. He knows neither of them have intentionally filmed any of their trysts, they're not that stupid, but his mental montage of windows Ilya Rozanov has fucked him near and/or against is longer than it should be, and how safe are hotel rooms anyway? Maybe some enterprising pervert hoping to film random cheating businessmen planted a spycam and hit the motherload.

No, they'd be blackmailing me, Shane tells himself, soothingly.

By the time three separate people mention the rumor to Shane, none of them with a whisper of consciousness that Shane himself might be involved, he's beginning to believe he's off the hook. If it was Shane in the video, if it was a man at all, that would be the headline news, so it's probably not him. Shane is but one of who knows how many Rozanov hook ups, all of who would be a much less dangerous and inflammatory option for a sex tape.

And that's if the tape even exists. As persistent as the rumor is, no one who passes it on actually seems to have watched a real video. It's all "a friend of a friend of some guy on another team said it was some twisted shit", which is exactly the sort of vague, impossible to refute poison that puts Shane off gossip in general.

Shane tries not to let the alleged gnarliness of the sex tape send him back into a panic spiral. There's no reason for it to! If anything, it seems like another sign that there is no video, that this is nothing more than an off-color joke that has spun out of control. Rozanov is a lot of things—tender, considerate, commanding—but "twisted shit" isn't his style. The average hockey players might well class men having sex with men that way, but again, if that was the issue, everyone would already be crowing about it.

It's probably nothing. Almost certainly nothing. And if it is something, it's nothing to do with Shane, who has a girlfriend now. Shane is repeating this mantra to himself after practice, almost convinced, when Comeau and Drapeau form a huddle so intense even Shane notices it.

Or to be more accurate, JJ asks, "What are you two giggling about?" and once it's been pointed out, even Shane can't miss the conspiratorial vibe.

"Haven't you seen it?" Comeau fails to suppress the glee in his voice, but the fact he tries sets alarm bells ringing. Maybe Shane is in the video after all, and Comeau is going to pretend he's sorry? Shane forces himself to take slow, regular breaths, methodically folding his sweaty gear and stacking it in his laundry sack.

"Seen what?" JJ asks.

"It's awful really," Drapeau says, in the exact tone of cloying fake concern that school yard bullies use to pretend they're trying to help when they flay open some private shame in a very public setting. Shit shit shit. Shane folds faster. "I had it from Popov, you remember Popov?"

It's only been a season and a half since Popov was traded from the Metros to the Blackhawks, of course they remember. Shane shoves the sloppiest stack of laundry he's ever constructed into his bag, so he is ready to flee if needed, and lets everyone else confirm the lack of collective amnesia.

"Apparently there's a huge scandal going on in Russia. Some coach, a real bigshot, got caught messing around with his players. And guess who one of his big success stories was?"

Shane has been trying to listen to the conversation without participating, but on one sidelong glance Drapeau catches his eye, trying to draw Shane in.

"I'll give you three guesses, but I don't think you'll need them," Drapeau says. Comeau waggles his phone in the air meaningfully.

"Um," Shane says. He is still trying to parse out exactly what Drapeau is talking about, to close the gap between the expectation of a Rozanov sex tape and a scandal involving some random Russian coach.

Comeau presses his phone into Shane's hand, video already playing.

When he finally makes sense of it, of who is in the video, and what is happening, Shane drops the phone.

"Hey!" Comeau says, trying and failing to grab his phone before it hits the tiled floor.

"Why the fuck are you watching child pornography?" Shane demands, and whether it's the words or the volume he shouts them at, the whole locker room falls silent. For once, Shane doesn't give a shit if he's given the wrong response. It's an important question. Then Shane hears himself follow it up with the less pertinent, "We're at work," and wants to punch himself in the face, right after he gouges out his own eyes out. Or actually, he should go for Comeau and Drapeau's eyes first. They'd been laughing.

"What? No. I'm not. That's not." Finally, Comeau actually looks sincerely miserable. "It's Rozanov," he pleads.

As if Shane could forget that. As if the image of Ilya's face, young and terrified, hadn't just seared itself into his brain. On Comeau's phone, cracked and face up on the floor, the video is still playing. The only reason Shane doesn't stamp on it like a cockroach until it's dead is that his legs have gone strange and shaky, and he's not totally sure he wouldn't fall over if he tried.

"It's disgusting, is what it is." Shane's voice echoes, loud and wobbling, around the silent room. "Delete that sick shit and shut the fuck up about it."

Shane turns to zip his bag up, unknowing and uncaring if he's finished packing it. He can't be here. That had been Ilya.

"Capitane," JJ says, uncertainly.

Shane doesn't look at him, or Hayden, or anyone else. He wants to be sick, and he wants to be alone, and he wants to run out of the building, run straight to Ilya, and wrap him up in his arms. He wants to tell Ilya that he's sorry, and it's okay, even if that's a lie.

Halfway to the door, Shane remembers. Ilya is hundreds of miles of away, and they're not talking.

He turns back around. Comeau has picked up his phone, and stopped the video, and everyone in the room is either staring at him, or staring at Shane. Good.

"Gil," Shane says, and this time his voice is steady and deliberately loud. "I mean it. If you show that to anyone else, if any of you watch that video, or talk about it, or send it on for other people to gawp at, I'll report you to the police." Shane isn't actually up on the minutiae of the law in this area, but he doubts anyone else is either.

No-one, not even Hayden or JJ, try to stop him storming out.

Much as he wishes he could be that comfortably naive, Shane harbors no delusions that his threat will actually contain the fallout of the video. It had been nothing more than the only desperate, hollow gesture towards helping that he could think to make in the moment. He drives home, heart pounding the whole way like he's being pursued, and gives serious consideration to if he should report Comeau and Drapeau anyway. Something should happen to them. They should have their phones and computers seized, and their callousness noted on the official record. They should be the first in a long line of people to fucking pay for this happening.

He hasn't entirely ruled out an anonymous police report by the time he gets home, maybe after he figures out if Ilya knows about this, if Shane needs to warn him and how the fuck he's going to do that without crying if he does, but that evening TMZ run a story about the video, and it knocks everything else right out of Shane's head.

HOCKEY PLAYER'S TRAGIC ORDEAL.

The article is gross. It sounds just like Comeau and Drapeau, concern barely draped over nauseating, prurient glee. The coach in question is already dead, and Shane can't decide if that's a blessing or a disappointment. TMZ speculates breathlessly on about three facts, but what is clear is that a couple of days after this sick fuck blew his brains out, someone uploaded dozens of videos he'd made of him abusing teenage boys to the internet, and that some of those videos are of Ilya.

I'm so sorry this is happening, Shane texts Ilya, since their romantic woes seem rather immaterial now.

Three hours later, the message is still unread. Probably not surprising. Shane wants to have a panic attack imagining the nightmare shitstorm that must be swirling around Ilya right now. Shane isn't directly involved, and he still has a million messages about it, Ilya must be inundated.

If you want to talk, if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know, he sends.

By the next day, there are tens more articles. Most are more thoughtful than the TMZ original, tying the news to bigger, more important questions about safety in sports, and Russia's track record of pressuring and endangering their athletes, but every single one still makes Shane grind his teeth in impotent rage. All this worthiness and concern is cover for the fact that Ilya's suffering sells their papers and gets them clicks online.

On impulse, he does something he's never done before, and calls Ilya. It goes straight to voicemail. Shane listens to a recording of Ilya saying "I will never listen to your voicemail," and feels his stomach clench with anxiety.

The news only makes Shane edgier and edgier, so he does what his mother always told him to do when he gets like this, and channels his anxiety into a more productive action, in this case, research into the impact of abuse and how support victims of it. Truth be told, it is not the most calming choice, but Shane focuses on the impossible dream that one day, if he ever gets to speak to Ilya again, he might not say the worst possible thing, and forges on.

Scott Hunter tweets condemning TMZ's article, and triggers a rash of similarly supportive statements from some of the more prominent, less Neanderthal players in the league. They're well-intentioned, but Shane reads them and thinks about how Ilya has reacted to even the gentlest gesture of curiosity or interest towards his past or personal life. Is this what Ilya wants, or does he hate it?

Is it helpful to release a statement? I'll say anything you want, but not if you don't want me to, he texts Ilya.

No response. Which doesn't give Shane much to go on when his mother gets in touch to discuss the same topic. Since she's not a bad person Yuna doesn't relish the task—it's without a doubt the least she's cursed out Ilya since he beat Shane at the first Prospect Cup—but she does take a detached, Shane-Hollander-centric view of the situation where how Shane's response stacks against other responses is her primary concern. The faint impulse Shane had been harboring to do what he did as a child and run to her with his intractable emotional conundrum withers. Who the fuck cares if some yahoos on social media think he's being petty because of a fake rivalry? Ilya has real problems!

"Okay honey," Yuna says, when Shane's prevarication and refusal to engage has exhausted her patience. "We'll take our lead from whatever his people say."

Except, Ilya's people, whoever they are beyond useless and ineffective, don't say anything. Eventually, the Raiders release a bland holding statement that carefully doesn't claim any direct knowledge of what Ilya is thinking, feeling, or doing, and that's it. Whatever Ilya has to say, he expresses the next day by appearing, to many people's surprise, in his usual place in the Raider's first line, and silently destroying the Sabres.

Featured word: silent. Shane watches the game at home, rejecting an invite from Hayden to watch over at his house, so he is free to focus unselfconsciously on Ilya for every possible moment. Which is a lot of moments, since the camera spends every second that the puck isn't actively in play with someone else tracking Ilya. Ilya at the face-off, his finely-carved face fixed into its sharpest lines. Ilya flying across the ice at a speed that makes everyone else look like they're in the slow-motion replay. Ilya on the bench, unnaturally still, lips gone thin with how hard they're pressed together. Ilya, who as far as Shane can tell, doesn't open his mouth to say anything for the entire game.

Having threatened his teammates, confused his mother, and alienated himself from Ilya in Ilya's greatest hour of need, the one nice thing left to Shane is hanging out with Rose, which may be why, even though his excuses for not having sex again have grown so flimsy he blushes thinking about it, Shane pulls himself together to at least try and salvage the last, semi-believable scraps of his heterosexuality, and join her for dinner the next night she's free.

Unfortunately, the aim of the dinner, from Rose's perspective at least, turns out not to be pleasant conversation about non-hockey topics, but gently prying the last scraps of heterosexuality from Shane's hands and watching them dissolve at the lightest touch of air and light.

More out of habit than anything else, since he has already given up on pretending to himself that he isn't thinking about Ilya most of his waking and a significant proportion of his sleeping hours, Shane briefly resists. He does like spending time with Rose. He doesn't hate kissing her. More than that, he doesn't want to talk about it.

Rose won't settle for his lukewarm protestations. She asks Shane if he's ever been with a guy, and all he has left to offer is the truth. He nods.

"Was it different, with a guy?"

The question is so preposterous Shane could laugh, if everything wasn't also so deadly serious. Memories well up, as irrepressible and gutting as sobs. Ilya in the shower, wet and shockingly beautiful. Ilya sliding his denim jacket off, with that smooth confidence that wipes away Shane's own worries. Ilya in Shane's stairwell, slinky and clinging. Ilya being brave, waiting out Shane's fear again and again, when he has always had so much more to be afraid of. Yes, it was different.

"Was it better?" Rose asks the question tentatively, but it still wraps around Shane's heart and lungs and squeezes tight. Of course it was. Ilya made it better. Ilya made everything better.

"Yeah, it was better," Shane whispers. Ilya, always looking out for him. Gentle and good when Shane needed to catch his breath, tender and undeniable when he needed to be pushed. "The thing is I…"

The thing is, Shane walked out on the person who made it better. Froze the moment that they showed a hint of vulnerability, even though his own vulnerability had been carefully cradled, even though Shane had asked for more openness so many times. He ran away, abandoned Ilya at the worst possible moment, over a name of all the stupid things, and now he can't find a way back in. He feels so fucking stupid. Ilya, who deserves nothing but the best, is all alone, the scariest and most painful moments of his life ripped open for all the world to feast on, and Shane, yet again, is being coaxed and coddled to a realization that should have been obvious. That he should have had months or years ago, in time to be useful.

He shakes his head, all the words of regret backing up in his throat, and feels water splash down his face.

"Shane," Rose says, stricken. "It's okay, really, you don't have to say anything else. I won't say anything else, not if you don't want me to."

"It's not that," Shane manages to say. "It's just, I fucked it all up." Fucked it up even more than he's let himself realize until this moment.

"Fucked what up? Us? Because if you think you're getting out of being friends, you're wrong. I'm not going to stop texting you, not now I know how funny you secretly are."

Shane tries to smile, tries to return the offered lightness and move them on, but he must do a terrible job, because Rose still looks worried.

"Is it that you've been with uh, someone else… recently?" she asks, already tactfully backing away from gender identifiers, since she must think Shane is too delicate to handle that level of scrutiny, and she's one of the kindest people Shane has ever met. "Because yes, a bit of a dick move, but technically we never did have the exclusivity conversation, you don't have to-"

"No." Thankfully Shane is able to shut down that avenue before he accidentally guilts Rose into unnecessarily forgiving him for being a cheating bastard. "Nothing like that. There's only ever been-" Shane cuts himself off, overwhelmed suddenly by the impossibility of explaining anything to do with Ilya, but desperate, now that he's glimpsed the possibility of it, to try. There's just so much, and it's not his secret, and they're in public. He looks around, checking that the restaurant is still maintaining their celebrity privilege privacy zone.

"Do you want to get out of here?" Rose asks.

Since that question has recently heralded the beginning of the humiliating bedroom portions of their evenings together, Shane can't help but wince.

"Just to talk," Rose adds, "only if you want to, perhaps somewhere more private?"

Rose's driver drops them back at Shane's apartment, and accepts the request that he hang about for another hour or two with a professional nod, like he's neither annoyed by the wait, or onto the reason why Rose is not planning to stay the night and about to run to the tabloids with tales of Shane's sexuality. Still, by the time they're seated on his couch, Shane is regretting keeping the evening going. What is he meant to say? Where does he even start?

"Truly, you don't owe me any explanation," Rose says, "but if you do want to talk, I'm here. It's my duty as your new best friend. Or we can have a nightcap, I can tell you about the insane rewrites the studio sent over this afternoon that entirely undermine the core motivation of my character, and we don't have to talk about you at all."

The easy acceptance is just what Shane needs. "You asked if there had been any guys."

"Right." Rose nods, and assumes an active listening pose.

"There's been one guy. Only ever one guy."

"One can be enough to be sure."

Shane laughs, hollow. "I wish it had been." If Shane hadn't been so deep in denial that he needed someone else to force him to think about what now seemed so obvious—that Ilya has been a singular, vital part of his life since they first touched and anything else is a waste of time—everything would be different.

"Was it good, with this guy?"

Shane feels his eyes grow hot again, and doesn't blink. "So good. It was so good that last time we were together, and he tried to make it more serious than it had been, I freaked out. I. I ran away, literally, because I couldn't face what it might mean about me."

"I'm guessing you don't like how you left things with him?" Rose asks, when Shane doesn't say anything else.

Wordlessly, Shane shakes his head, unable to speak around the image of Ilya on his couch, looking imploringly up at him. Ilya on the ice the next time they played each other, refusing to so much as look at him. Ilya, his arms wrapped round a girl as he danced, staring so deeply into Shane that he still feels the impact like a wound. Ilya, in that horrible video, being hurt. No, he doesn't like how they left things.

"Well, you can reach out to him," Rose suggests. "Even if he's out-"

"He's not out."

"In that case, he'll probably understand exactly why you freaked out."

"Maybe." Technically, it was neither the first nor the lengthiest wobble they'd got through, but it felt orders of magnitude worse. "The thing is, I think I hurt him, a lot. And since then something really terrible has happened, like, to him. I don't think he has many people, and if we were still talking, if I hadn't fucked it all up, I could be there for him. But I did fuck it up, over nothing, and now he won't answer my texts, or my calls, and no one else even thinks we're friends, and what if he's all alone? With this big, awful thing-"

"Hey, hey," it's only the soothing tone of Rose's voice and the gentle grip of her hands on his arms that tell Shane he's been getting loud and worked up. "Let's slow it down, okay?"

Shane nods.

"What terrible thing happened?" Rose asks. A perfectly reasonable and logical question that Shane absolutely can't answer.

Slowly, Shane shakes his head. "I can't tell you." Not without revealing Ilya's identity.

Rose accepts this with her usual grace. "How do you know he doesn't have many people?"

That's less specific, Shane might be able to answer that one. "His family are far away, and I don't get the feeling that they're very supportive, even if they weren't." Another thing it had taken years for Shane to understand. "He's upset after he talks to them. And I know how hard it is to let people close when you're immersed in…" Shane waves a hand at himself to encompass the whole enmeshing machine of hockey and celebrity and homophobia, before realizing that again he risks getting too specific if he parallels his and Ilya's situations too much, and trailing off.

"Is he another hockey player?" Rose asks anyway. Fuck. This is exactly why Shane's secret keeping strategy is to not ever start talking about his secrets.

"Maybe," Shane hedges. He knows that's as good as a yes, but he's pretty sure his attempt at a 'no' would have been equally useless.

"And to confirm, you have tried just calling him?"

"I've called. I've texted. I've texted him every day since-" since TMZ declared open season on his trauma, Shane can't say, "-since the thing."

"The terrible thing you can't tell me."

"Yes. He hasn't replied. He hasn't even read them. But I don't know if that means he definitely doesn't want to hear from me, or if he's afraid, or too busy, or he blocked me, or he doesn't think I'd care, which is reasonable given I walked out on him."

"Will you pla-" Rose course corrects on her hockey-player specific verb a little too late, "er, see him again anytime soon?"

"We just played against each other," Shane admits, since the hockey player cat is out the bag, "not long before the thing happened. We won't play each other again for months. And it was awful, he wouldn't even look at me." Well, not on the ice. He'd looked plenty in the club afterwards, but that had been worse.

Rose mulls this information over, and Shane's stomach swoops with the sickening realization that he's made another slip. Rose is well aware of exactly what teams he has played over the course of their brief relationship. Hell, she'd already known who he was going to play next the first time they'd met, before they were anything to each other.

Desperately, Shane tries to think of a distraction he can offer, but his mind has gone blank, and he can think of nothing to dislodge the little frown of concentration from between Rose's eyebrows as she no doubt runs back over Shane's recent schedule, the teams he's played, the members of the teams. He knows, when her face goes absolutely blank with shock, the exact moment she reaches a player enduring a recent, very terrible public crisis.

"Shane," Rose asks, in a faint, distant voice, "are you talking about-"

"Don't," Shane cuts her off. "Don't say it, please. I can't out him, not on top of everything." He folds over, burying his face in his hands, breath suddenly coming too fast and too sharp. Are there no ends to the ways he's going to fuck Ilya over?

Rose scooches over and rubs a hand over soothingly over his back. "Hey, hey, it's okay. I won't tell anyone. Not about you, and not about anyone else. I promise."

Shane believes her. It helps, a little, but not enough to stop his rising panic.

"Firstly," Rose says, "and purely theoretically since I don't even know anything for sure, none of this is your fault. You weren't trying to hurt anyone when you freaked out, you were in a difficult situation, doing your best. And I love that you want to be there to support your, uh, friend, but you definitely aren't responsible for the evil things evil people do. None of what happened to him is on you."

Shane does feel responsible for a whole other load of things, including outing Ilya in this very conversation, but he doesn't have the breath to express them. Rose waits Shane's panic out, keeping up the slow, firm strokes on his back till he's calmed down, even though that takes an embarrassingly long time.

"Normally I'd say that if someone hasn't texted you back when you're texting them every day, you should respect their space and leave them alone, but I can see that this is not normal circumstances." Rose bites her lip, thoughtful. "If he's gone off grid, you can try making an approach in person," she suggests. "Will you see him at any, you know, special, slightly less formal than usual upcoming events?"

Baffled, Shane stares at her.

"Maybe in Florida?" Rose prompts.

Ilya doesn’t come to All Stars. It shouldn't have been a surprise given the givens, but Ilya has been so determinedly present and undeniable at every single game since the story broke that Shane hadn't stopped to considered he might drop out.

The Raiders announce Ilya's absence late enough that Shane has no chance to pull out himself, not without kicking up the kind of fuss he has no bandwidth to engage with. He makes the journey to Florida on autopilot, unable to stop running over the strategies he and Rose had brainstormed for low-pressure approaches that signal his chill and unconditional support, even now they are completely useless.

The game itself, the whole damn weekend, drags like All Stars has never dragged before. Without Ilya to spark against, the events feel as pointless and performative as other players have always insisted they are, and Shane's attempts to approach Ilya's stand-in Cliff Marleau for a scrap of information on how Ilya is doing only serve to remind him that the world thinks he and Ilya actual enemies.

Once the main events are done, and there is nothing on the schedule but media and socializing, Shane loses all heart. He ducks out of the locker room subtly, before anyone can steer him towards a bar or an interview and finds a quiet corner to check Ilya's social media, even though he's already done that, and knows the closest Ilya has come to a statement is retweeting the Raiders announcement that he wasn't coming.

Unsurprisingly, Shane's third cycle through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram turns up nothing new. It does seem like Ilya is in Boston, if @rozanov_sightings' reading of several unsubstantiated tweets about him being in various clubs the past few nights are to be trusted, but that doesn't do Shane much good when he's in Florida, and it won't do him any good when he's back in Montreal tonight either. He'll be right back into his routine of fretting at a distance.

The idea of not going back to Montreal creeps up on Shane slowly as he scrolls. He doesn't have a game for two days. Technically, there's no contractual reason he can't leave right now. Shane has done his time. If he skips a few bullshit minor press things Theriault will be angry, but that doesn't seem as important as it usually does. Shane has built himself up to see Ilya in person, and if Ilya isn't willing to meet Shane in this neutral third location he didn't know Shane had planned to meet him at, Shane will just have to go to Ilya. Ilya will probably tell him him to fuck off, but at least they'll both know Shane tried.

It's late by the time Shane lands in Boston, feeling furtive. He tugs his toque low and pulls his hood up for extra insurance—he gets recognized less in the USA than in Canada, but you can't be too careful—and gets an Uber straight to Ilya's house. Which, in a bit of an anti climax, appears to be empty. Shane peers through every single one of Ilya's huge plate glass windows, and sees no trace of him. He can't rule out that Ilya is hiding behind his couch with the lights off, like Shane is a trick or treater he's trying to avoid, but if he is, that's an answer in itself.

Feeling like the world's biggest idiot, Shane sits on Ilya's step and does his increasingly practiced cycle through Ilya's social media, mentions, and fan accounts. If Ilya has gone to another club, perhaps Shane can lurk outside? Is that too weird?

To Shane's surprise, @rozanov_sightings has posted a new photo. It's a blurry, zoomed-in shot of Ilya in a fancy looking but half-empty bar. Shane is the first to admit that he's no aficionado of Boston's nightlife, but it doesn't look like a local hotspot.

He tracks back from the fan account to the Instagram that posted the original photo and discovers that @rozanov_sightings had cropped Ilya from the background of a selfie, a couple brandishing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne and pouting. From the woman's Instagram location tags and recent tweets, Shane pieces together that just over an hour ago Ilya had been in the Raffles hotel bar, alone, and that he sent a bottle of champagne to every occupied table. Apparently, this lady thinks that generosity gives her license to pap Ilya and post it online.

Buying strangers a round is good, right? That's happy, expansive, making friends behavior. Shane sucks on his hoodie string and tells himself that this is all fine. He should go home before he makes a fool of himself. Coming to Boston is already idiotic and embarrassing, and he's lucky no one has noticed him doing it yet. Finding Ilya in public rather than his private residence only increases Shane's risk and general ridiculousness.

Except, it is a weird place to go, if you think about it. Shane has gone down his fair share of Ilya Rozanov rabbitholes over the years, enough to know that his nights out don't usually involve going to five-star hotel bars to drink alone. Hotel bars are quiet and sparsely populated, the opposite of how Ilya likes to party. And Ilya lives in Boston, why go to a hotel at all?

On the other hand, quiet and sparsely populated is how Shane likes his nights out, so maybe this is in fact his best opportunity so far. No need to go into a club wearing a hoodie, or turn up at Ilya's door like he's in a romcom. Public spaces are fair game, and technically Shane could be going to the hotel for a room, because he's from out of town and it's exactly the kind of place he, more than Ilya, has a good reason to be.

Another Uber ride, another crushing anti-climax. Ilya isn't in the bar, or any of the hotels' three restaurants. Shane seats himself at one of the more tucked away armchairs in the lobby and doesn't bother to lie to himself about why. It's nearly midnight and there's no time for denial. He's in Boston, and he's about to to cyber stalk the object of his affection, again, in the hopes of going to a tertiary location. This is his life now.

Shane has Twitter open when the messages arrive.

You did the right thing, Ilya texts.

And then, I should have been strong enough to do it, but I wasn’t. 

Stunned that Ilya is reaching out, unprompted (if you don't count Shane's dozen-plus texts and missed calls as prompting) Shane has to read the message several times before he understands that Ilya doesn't mean that stalking him across the country was the right thing. Which means he either thinks Shane did the right thing when he danced awkwardly with his ex-girlfriend and cried a little, or, more likely, that walking out on Ilya was the right thing. Shane is trying to think of a way to respectfully disagree when the next message comes through.

I have deleted all my texts with Jane, you do not need to worry about that.

Three dots pulse on the screen and a sick, ominous feeling builds in Shane's stomach.

I hope that sometimes it was good, Ilya sends.

Before he can overthink it, Shane hits the call button. It rings, and rings, and rings, and then, to his surprise, someone picks up.

"Ilya?" Shane says, only realizing once he's said it that he's blown back through their first name barrier without a thought, and then quickly de-prioritizing the concern. "Are you okay? What’s going on?"

It takes a long moment for anyone to reply. Shane holds onto his composure only because he can hear someone, who better fucking be Ilya, breathing.

"Nothing, Hollander," Ilya says, eventually. His voice sounds strange, flat and hollow, but he clears his throat, and tries again. "I am doing digital spring clean. It has come to my attention that this is important thing we must all do, or when we die our secrets will be headline news. Now you have high-profile girlfriend, I thought you would be pleased."

And perhaps Shane should be seizing the opportunity to tell Ilya that he's here for him, or to let Ilya know he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but after Ilya's little speech there's only one question in his mind, in big blinking neon lights that cannot be ignored.

"Why would you die?"

There is no reply.

"Rozanov," Shane presses.

"Hollander."

"Answer the fucking question," Shane demands. It's not the conciliatory, soothing tone he planned to strike, but he's also low-key panicking for reasons he doesn't fully understand.

"Anyone can die anytime Hollander. You did not know this? Canadian school system is spending too much time on manners, not enough on Tolstoy."

Ilya sounds more comfortable now they're on teasing territory, but Shane doesn't let himself get distracted. Why is Ilya at a hotel in the same city he lives in? Why is he buying champagne for strangers after weeks of lying so low he's underground? Why is he texting Shane in a weird serious tone he's never used before? Why is he preparing for when he dies?

"Yeah but filthy rich athletes at the top of their game normally don’t. Why would you be dying in this scenario?"

Ilya sighs like Shane is the one acting out. "It was bad example. I might be hacked, this is much more likely fate to befall handsome celebrity."

"Turn your camera on," Shane says. Ilya might be pulling himself together verbally, but Shane remembers how Ilya had sounded when he first spoke, and he's sure it's a flimsy mask.

"Hollander," Ilya says, faux scandalized. "What would Rose Landry say?"

"I don’t care what she’d say, turn it on."

"No." Ilya's voice has gone flat again.

"Why not?" Shane asks.

"I am tired. I look like shit." At least that might actually be partially true.

"Well, where are you then?" Shane asks. The camera is a distraction. He needs to see Ilya in person, ideally, touch him.

"I am in Boston," Ilya replies, wary. "Where else would I be?"

"But you're not at home." There is a lengthy pause where, Shane assumes, Ilya tries to guess how Shane knows that. "Someone took a photo of you at Raffles hotel," Shane explains. "Are you still there?"

"None of your business."

On balance, Shane takes that as a yes. Wherever Ilya is is quiet, so probably not a bar or club. Surely, if he'd gone home, he'd just say, and if he'd picked someone up, he wouldn't be texting Shane and finally answering his calls. The inexplicable fear Ilya's messages sparked is still burning hot, and Shane feels weirdly hopped up, like he usually only does in games, bullish, ready to push and shove and make snap decisions.

"What room are you in?" Shane asks, and for once, the question is entirely unsexy.

"What's it to you?" Ilya snaps, which is notably not a denial he has a room. "You have a girlfriend, Hollander! And we are not even in the same state."

Shane has never considered himself a particularly persuasive person. He's focused and dogged, which gets him a long way, but people also tend to find him a little detached once they're over the initial celebrity dazzle. They don't want to do things for him just because he asks, so he usually doesn't. But then, Ilya isn't most people.

"Please. You’re scaring me," Shane admits, and for once he hopes he sounds exactly as worried and desperate as he feels.

"There is no reason to be scared," Ilya says, after another pause.

"Then tell me what room you’re in."

"I am fine. Everything is fine." He has the gall to sound soothing, like Shane is the one who needs comfort.

"Of course you’re not fine! No one but you expects you to be fine!"

"And yet, I am fine."

"Right. Because suddenly you’re worried about being hacked. Even though…" Shane swallows, wondering if he's actually going to say it, "even though the whole reason you’re not fine is that your old coach committed suicide, and you texted me some kind of weird fucking goodbye, and you literally just said that you might die. Nothing at all concerning there."

"You are-" Ilya's words are interrupted by a sharp little intake of breath, like he might be about to cry, "getting all worked up over nothing."

"Your life is not nothing."

And there it is again, the edge of a breath that's almost a gasp, wet and smothered. The image of Ilya, hand pressed over his mouth as he tries not cry flashes into Shane's head, and his heart clenches.

"Isn’t it?" Ilya whispers.

And oh god, Shane realizes. He’s not denying it. Why isn't he denying it? There's a rising tide of panic in Shane's chest, stronger than anything he has ever felt, stronger than being one goal down in the last minutes of a game seven, or those moments when someone says something that sounds like they’re Onto Him.

"No," Shane chokes out. And in this most crucial moment, of course his throat is suddenly so tight he can barely talk. He has to say more. "You matter. There are people who would miss you."

"Not for long. Boston will have cap space for new center, one with less baggage."

"Your family," Shane tries.

"They will get my money. That is all they want from me."

"That’s not true," Shane says, in instinctive denial. Even if they don't get on, underneath it all, families care about each other, don't they?

Ilya laughs derisively. "Is what my brother has said to me a thousand times! They can all live without me. They don't need me for anything except to pay. If there was another accident, he would be glad, and my father would not even remember I was gone."

Family is not the straw to grasp at then. Once again, Shane has nothing left but sincerity.

"There’s me, I care."

Ilya says nothing.

"Are you gonna try and tell me I’m lying?" Shane asks.

"No." Ilya says. "You are terrible liar. Probably, you would be sad. It would pass."

"It would not fucking pass!"

"Yes, it would." As wrong as he is, Ilya speaks with terrible certainty. "And I do not know why we are even having this conversation, you are right, I am not going to die." Which, no fucking way, they are not taking a step back into pretending nothing is wrong.

"Look, just tell me what room you’re in or I’m going to start knocking on doors, and I won't stop until I find you or get thrown out of the hotel."

This time, the silence manages to be audibly stunned. "You are here?"

"Yes."

"In Boston?"

"In the fucking hotel."

"Why?" Ilya asks, sounding so genuinely confused that Shane doesn't even try for a cover story.

"To see you, asshole. Tell me where you are so I can do it."

Chapter 3

Twenty-one floors above the city, Ilya realizes he is not going to fling himself off a balcony tonight. It is, conservative estimate, a thousand times worse than thinking he will.

As soon as Shane reveals that he is not just in Boston, which would be crazy enough, but in the building, Ilya knows he cannot do it. He imagines Shane being there when his body hits the ground, hearing the commotion, running outside. He would probably beat the crowd, because he is fast and decisive, and get a good, long, uninterrupted look at Ilya's corpse. Ilya hasn't given much though to what state he'll be in then, beyond dead, but inevitably, he pictures his mother, sprawled on the sidewalk instead of a bed. The unnatural shape her body had made. The way her hand was half curled, palm up, like she wanted him to put his hand in hers.

No. He cannot do that.

"2104," Ilya says. He unlocks the door, steps back, and waits.

Shane's arrival is heralded by pounding footsteps in the hallway outside and a shout of "Ilya!" before he even gets to the room. He bursts through the door at speed and it bangs open noisily, bouncing off the wall. Shane, normally so polite and apologetic, barely reacts. His eyes lock onto Ilya and his shoulders slump, just a little. Although the proverbial horse of discretion has long-since bolted, he closes the door gently.

The scene is so reminiscent of the countless hotel encounters they have had that Ilya feels a reflexive urge to say something sexy, to try and take control of the encounter back in the way he usually does, but he is too numb for the urge to translate into action. Besides, Shane is worried and tired, probably angry, not horny, because Ilya fucked that up like he fucks up everything.

In another echo of their past passion, Shane reaches for him, running his hands down Ilya's arms, and raking his big wet eyes up and down Ilya's body. Ilya lets him, even though it's triage, not appreciation. Shane's hands are big and strong and warm, and Ilya has to take his pleasures where he can get them now. Once he is convinced Ilya has no major wounds, Shane looks around the suite. His eyes catch, just for a moment, on the open balcony door. Ilya pulls himself free. He takes a few steps away from Shane, like that will help.

"Have you done anything?" Shane asks. Always so direct.

"I wasn't..." Excuses flit through Ilya's mind. It might still be possible to pretend that none of this is happening. There's a stupid American word for taking a holiday where you live, or he could say he got too drunk to go home, or he had a girl up here that left, or, or, or. "No," Ilya settles on.

Shane relaxes even further. Still, he walks over to the balcony door, slides it firmly closed, and turns the key. Then, just as purposeful, he spins on his heel, strides over, and wraps his arms around Ilya.

"I'm so sorry," Shane says, into Ilya's stiff and unmoving shoulder. "I'm sorry your coach did that to you, I'm sorry he fucking filmed it, and I'm sorry all these fucking awful people are talking about it. I'm so so sorry."

The words is not your fault, Hollander, are on the tip of Ilya's tongue, not his best work, but if he says it in the right wry tone he can deflect the sympathy without denying it, but when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is a choked little breath. Ilya presses his lips together, sealing the noise in. He holds his body still and strong, like a statue. In a moment, Shane will let go, and it will be over.

But Shane doesn't let go. He keeps holding on, tight around Ilya's shoulders, a firm and steady pressure that slowly begins to force Ilya's resolve out of him. Ilya's arms creep up around Shane's waist and his face turns into Shane's neck, nose burrowing past his hoodie to hot, smooth, soft skin. Pathetic. Like some puny, creeping thing.

All Shane does is slide one of his hands up Ilya's neck, into his hair, and tuck Ilya in closer and deeper, like he is offering Ilya sanctuary inside him. And when Ilya is small and empty, when Shane has squeezed all Ilya's pretense at stoicism out of him, a terrible pressure fills his chest instead. Ilya screws his face up against it and tries to push it down with deep breaths, but Shane's touch is making his body softer and softer with every passing moment, and the maelstrom rises and rises, until the only breaths he can only pull in are shallow and panting.

"Ilya," Shane whispers. "It will be okay."

It's a stupid thing to say, incredibly fucking stupid and pointless and wrong because it isn't okay and it won't be okay, but somehow, in Shane's low, sweet voice, it's all that Ilya has wanted to hear, all he has wanted someone to tell him. From one moment to the next, any pretense of control Ilya had over himself shatters, and he is the one clinging to Shane, fists clenched in Shane's hoodie, wet face burrowed as deep it can get into Shane's neck, body wracked with sobs.

Ilya expects, on some deep gut level, that Shane will pull away. He'd be well within his rights, with the display Ilya is making of himself. When Shane pushes against him, a gentle full-body shove, Ilya nearly lets go and retreats, tries to apologize, but Shane's arms stay as tight as ever, keeping him close, and Ilya cannot get the breath to speak. With another push, he realizes that Shane is shuffling them backwards. Ilya goes limp and lets Shane take over, and somehow they end up lying diagonally across the king-size bed without ever letting go of each other, Ilya sprawled on Shane like a human blanket.

The whole time, Ilya can't stop crying, and once they're horizontal Shane doesn't stop rubbing his back, and stroking and tugging on his hair, a firm, rhythmic clench and release that has no right to feel as soothing as it does. He whispers idiotic nonsense into Ilya's ear, "hey, hey, it's okay, we're okay, you're okay," in a constant stream, and it's such lies it should make Ilya laugh, but instead Shane's voice seems to draw more tears up from even deeper inside him.

They stay like that for a long time, past the point of reasonableness three times over at least. It probably isn't hours, but it feels like it. Like years of grief and rage and helplessness are spewing out. But not even Ilya is pathetic enough to cry forever, and eventually the hysteria begins to wind down, until Ilya is just lying on Shane, a hot, wet, used-up dishcloth, throat and head and eyes throbbing, hands aching where they've been clenched in Shane's clothes, with no idea what comes next.

"It will not be okay," Ilya croaks.

"Hmmm," is the best Shane can manage. He's been focusing so hard on trying to read Ilya's non verbal cues, to hold him as tightly as needs, and track the trajectory of his sadness in case it veers back towards suicidal, that actual words take him a moment.

"It will not be okay," Ilya repeats. He has turned his head only enough not to be actively muffled by Shane's chest, so Shane can't see his expression. "Everyone has seen the video, everyone knows what I did."

"What you did? You didn't do anything."

Ilya's head shakes in silent denial.

"It was him," Shane says firmly. "You were just a kid."

"No. I." Ilya falters. "You don't understand."

Shane wants to say that there's nothing to understand, but he's done enough reading over the past few days to suspect that shutting down what Ilya has to say too early will only make things worse. "Tell me then."

"He did not just do it one day, out of nowhere. He. He started small, just looking, and little touches, telling me I was good, staying late with me, saying nice things about to me to my father, so he was not so angry with me when I got home." Ilya sounds ashamed, and Shane has to actually close his eyes and visualize the anger leaving his body, before Ilya senses it and thinks it's directed at him. "He was showing me how he could help me, so I understood."

"Like, grooming you?" Shane asks, before he can consider is this is a term Ilya will have heard. "That's what predators like that do. It's not your fault."

"It was like warning. Or, or question. And I was not stupid, I told you, I understood. If I wanted to be big-time hockey star, if I wanted to get away from my father, and my brother, and Russia, he would help me, but he wanted things too."

Shane finds he is nearing the limit of not-shutting-that-down abilities. "Yeah, he used his power over you to manipulate you, to coerce-"

"He did not force me!" Ilya insists, cutting Shane off. "He gave me choice and-"

Which, no. "Ilya," Shane says, gentle but firm. Some things are not negotiable. "You're wrong. You didn't have a choice. He was powerful, and you were vulnerable. He was a fully grown adult, and you weren't. He was supposed to look out for you, and help you, and get paid with money to do his job, not, not rape a child." Ilya flinches in his arms, and Shane gentles his tone. "He wanted you to think you had a choice so you'd blame yourself, just like you're doing."

For a long moment, Ilya doesn't speak. "He could tell," Ilya says, slowly, like he's dragging it from somewhere deep inside, "about me."

Sadly, although he can tell this is a painful admission, Shane is lost. "About you?"

"That I like boys! In Russia, people can tell about me, especially when I was young. It is only this country that is too stupid. He could tell, and that is why he chose me."

Shane's heart keeps finding new ways to break. "That has nothing to do with what he did."

Ilya makes a scoffing sound. Shane tries to twist his neck to see Ilya's face, but Ilya won't look up at him.

"Did all those other kids, what, ask for it then?" Shane asks, feeling gross even saying it.

"Of course not," Ilya replies, finally appropriately outraged.

"Yeah, they didn't, and neither did you. He was a disgusting opportunistic monster, and you were just a scared kid, doing his best." Inevitably, because it keeps happening when he isn't actively suppressing it, that awful video pops back into Shane's mind. The calm he has managed to maintain for Ilya's sake slips, and his eyes get hot and wet. "You were so young."

Maybe he can taste Shane's tears on the fucking air like a snake, because Ilya finally looks up. His face looks sore, pink from tears and trying to burrow into Shane's chest. He looks steadily at Shane for several long seconds and then says, "You watched it."

Shane can feel his expression crumple. "Only a few seconds." He secures his grip on Ilya, suddenly afraid Ilya might bolt, but Ilya only hides his face again, tightening his own hold on Shane like he thinks Shane might try and get away from him. "I'm sorry," Shane says, "I never would have, but Comeau showed it to me. I didn't even know what it was."

"Then they have all seen. They are passing it round the locker room."

Shane wishes he could deny it, but despite threatening them, he isn't even a hundred percent sure of his own locker room, let alone anyone else's.

"You see." Ilya sounds as small and hopeless as Shane has ever heard him. "It will never be okay. They all know, everybody, that I am a faggot who whores himself out for ice time."

"You're not."

"They will all be thinking it, and saying it, behind my back right now, but as soon as public stops paying attention, they will say it to my face, and the only way it will end is if I retire, or kill myself. And if I retire I will have to go back to Russia, and they know too. I will have to help defend Mother Russia from evil gays, or they will put me in prison, or kill me, or put me in prison then kill me, and then it is all the same in the end, but even more fucking horrible first."

"Ilya, Ilya!" Shane has to raise his voice and shake Ilya a little to halt his spiral. "Of course you're not retiring. You are Ilya fucking Rozanov. You're the best there is. Any player who says you did anything wrong, even thinks it, is scum who can't accept that they'll never be as good you, that you're going to win ten more cups, and be in the Hall of Fame, while no one cares who the fuck they are."

Shane doesn't say, let's get married just in case you want to retire, an act of great self-restraint, if he does say so himself.

"Ten cups is ambitious," Ilya says, which is fair. Shane will still be out there too, fighting him for every one.

"Loads of players have posted about how they support you and that story was bullshit," Shane says, moving on rather than immediately puncturing his own pep talk. "Marleau, and Hunter, and Vaughn, loads of them."

Ilya groans into his chest, but it's a not-that-dinosaur groan, not a groan of despair, so Shane elaborates, getting fanciful now.

"We'll make a Whatsapp group, the Ilya Rozanov defense squad, and if anyone says anything like that to you, tell us, and one of us will punch their teeth in, you won't even get a penalty."

It's so ridiculous, Ilya actually laughs, small but genuine. "You are enforcer now?"

"I would be. For this." Shane hopes that his complete and utter sincerity comes across.

"Mr Bodyguard," Ilya murmurs.

They lie there quietly for a bit, Ilya's breath slow and steady, Shane trying to hide that's he's fretting.

"You are thinking very loudly," Ilya says.

And failing, apparently. "You said your father and brother… you wanted to get away from them. They wouldn't help you?" Shane asks. Maybe he's an idiot, sliding even a toe onto the proven landmine of Ilya's family, but he can't stop thinking about all the clues that he missed that something was going on there. After years of barging in, thoughtless and spoiled by his own fantastic parents, he at least knows to tread carefully now.

Whether it's the gentler approach, or he's too wrung out to dodge, Ilya actually gives him a straight answer. "They are both police. And they hate me."

Shane feels tears fill his eyes again at the matter of fact statement, and blinks them away before Ilya senses them and gets distracted.

Ilya sighs. "Or, my father would hate me, but he is sick and does not know."

"You mean, no-one has told him because he's sick?"

"I am sure my brother has told him, but he forgets. Dementia. When he calls he thinks I am ten years old and late for dinner."

It's all so unfair. Can Ilya not catch a fucking break? "What about your mother?" Shane asks. He is wise enough by now to dread the answer—it's not a good sign that Ilya has never mentioned her—but doesn't think he'll ever get an answer without a direct question.

Ilya grows heavier on top of him. "Dead."

"I'm sorry." Shane wishes he'd been wrong. "What happened to her?".

Ilya takes a sharp, raspy breath and grinds his forehead into Shane's sternum so hard it's actually kind of painful.

"You don't have to tell me, it's okay," Shane soothes. What the fuck is he thinking, raking all this up on top of everything else?

"She. She swallowed a whole bottle of pills," Ilya chokes out.

It hits Shane like a high-stick to the head. The fear over what almost happened tonight somehow grows even sharper and his grip on Ilya tightens, protectively. "When?" Shane is struck by the horrendous thought that maybe it just happened, that maybe, unbearably, it's because of the story.

"I was twelve," Ilya says, and the momentary relief that it isn't a fresh wound on top of the other fresh wounds lasts maybe half a second before Shane realizes that no, this is worse. Ilya was so young. Younger even than in the video. Which means that when that video was made he was already alone and grieving, with a father he was afraid of disappointing, and a brother he is sure hates him.

"I found her," Ilya adds, and the horror of that steals all Shane's breath away. His poor Ilya. It's too much, too much for anyone to bear. Shane hitches Ilya higher up his chest and drops a kiss on his forehead.

Ilya relaxes a little, and says, "Now you are thinking I am not even original, I am copycat."

"I'm not," Shane says, because Ilya won't be, not if Shane has anything to do with it. "Where did you learn the word copycat anyway?" he asks, more to give Ilya an out to lighter topics than anything else, though it is an endearingly schoolyard phrase, especially with Ilya enunciating every syllable, like he does when he is proud of a new word.

"For all the people always trying to copy me."

"Right, of course. I am gonna get The Rozanov down one of these days. I've almost done it." Under normal circumstances, nothing would have induced Shane to reveal that he not only sometimes practices Ilya's signature fakeout move, but hasn't yet mastered it. Right now he feels ready to admit to embarrassing things he hasn't even done, if it might make Ilya smile.

"You wish," Ilya retorts, but Shane can tell his heart isn't in it.

It feels like Ilya has something more to say, but Shane swallows down the urge to poke him. It also feels like the deep middle of the night on one of the most emotionally exhausting days of their lives, so if Ilya wants to let something lie, Shane is damn well going to let him.

He underestimates Ilya's strength. "I don't want you to think she was a coward," he says.

"I don't think that," Shane assures him.

"She was so funny, and beautiful," Ilya seems to be oblivious that he is describing himself, but the thought strikes Shane hard, even before Ilya goes on to say, "but she was so sad. She had no one. My father was hard on her, and my brother was never home, and I was playing hockey."

Shane memorizes this litany like mission parameters. No matter what he has to do, Shane will never let Ilya have no one. Out loud he says, "That wasn't your fault either, just so we're clear."

For some reason, this statement, which should be true and obvious, upsets Ilya all over again. "You do not think I am coward?" he asks, tearful.

"No, Ilya. You're so brave." Shane thinks he probably would have lost his mind if half of what Ilya has endured happened to him.

"I was going to jump off the balcony," Ilya admits, bleakly.

"But you didn't." Shane tries to focus on this fact himself, so he doesn't start crying again too. "You texted me."

"I did not know you would see them, or that you were downstairs. I thought you would be asleep in Montreal."

"You answered my call," Shane points out.

At that, Ilya falls silent.

"I think," Shane says, believing it even more strongly than he did a few seconds ago, "that you wanted to give someone a chance to stop you, and that are the strongest, bravest person I know."

Ilya snorts. "Yes. So brave that I ignore and run away from everyone, even Svetlana, when she tries so hard to help me, and let everyone talk about me without saying anything, and cry all over you like little baby when this is nothing to do with you."

Nothing to do with him? Shane supposes he can't blame Ilya for thinking this when hours ago he thought Shane had walked out on him forever, but he certainly isn't going to let Ilya go on thinking it.

"I want it to be something to do with me."

"What would Rose Landry say to that?"

Fuck. The question of Rose, as fond of Shane is of her platonically, is so far down his list of priorities he keeps forgetting to address it. "She's not my girlfriend." There. That's as clear as Shane make it.

"Oh."

"I'm uh, gay," Shane says, just to really close and seal that door. It's the first time he has said it out loud, but weirdly, it feels right. Awkward, but right.

"No shit ," Ilya snorts. Which, okay, maybe Ilya isn't realizing the Rubicon Shane just crossed there. He'd be offended, but it's hard to take it in any spirit other than forgiving when Ilya is still spread over him like a blanket, his hands making loose fists in Shane's clothes and his face covered in tear stains.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't so obvious to me, okay? I wish it had been, because maybe then I wouldn't have freaked out last time we were together."

"Freaked out over nothing," Ilya mumbles.

"For the record, I am sorry about that. If I could take it back I would."

Maybe Shane should leave it there. But suddenly, he sees the end of this night together in sight, and he's struck by the fear that if they don't talk about it all, the whole thing will become nothing but a fever dream, and they'll revert, at best, to casual hookups and months between texts. Shane can't risk that.

"But last time… it didn't feel like nothing." Shane braces himself for deflection, willing to take it if they've reached the end of Ilya's rope.

"No. It didn't."

Tentatively, Shane eases another step closer. "And I know this is the worst possible time, so you don't have to say anything." At some point, Shane has got tense enough to stop petting Ilya's hair. He picks it back up again. "But if I could be something to you, and you could be something to me, even if it's only friends right now, that, that would be nice."

Ilya is quiet for a long moment. He turns his face up to look directly at Shane, his bright, beautiful eyes searching. "You want that?"

"I do." Shane does his best to imbue his words with all the solemnity of wedding vows. "More than anything."

Delicately, Ilya leans up and kisses him, a simple, soft, lingering press of lips.

"Okay," Ilya says, and slumps back down onto Shane, boneless.

It's only one word, not even a particularly romantic one, as endearing as Shane has always found Ilya's distinctive pronunciation of "okay", but Shane's heart still swells. For the night they've had, the state Ilya had been in and how vulnerable he has made himself, it's pretty damn good. Almost a miracle. Shane will take it, along with every liberty he can wring from this level of commitment to help and support Ilya.

The first order of business is sleep, since Ilya is clearly beyond tired, well into some feverish nether region of exhaustion that nobody should ever tread. They're already in a bed, which is convenient, and if Ilya gets a solid few hours in now, that will give Shane a chance to marshal his thoughts and plan out the second, third and fourth orders of business.

In the short-term, Ilya mustn't be alone, that much is clear, and if that means he and Shane have to stay together, here or in Montreal, that's what they'll do, but Shane suspects that there are at least a few other people—the infamous Svetlana, for one, but probably Marleau too, if the intensity with which he'd tried to fend Shane off at All Stars is any indication—who want to be there to help Ilya if he'll let them.

Time off would be good, if Ilya will take it. Normally Shane would assume hell would freeze over first, but it hasn't been a normal day, so maybe he can hope. Expert support wherever they can get it is a must. A therapist or a doctor at the very least, because they can and will do better by Ilya than post-Soviet Russia in the 90s did by his mother, but also an agent and a publicist. Ilya should be being protected, not left helpless and hung out to dry. Shane's mother and Farah will get stuck in, if Ilya doesn't mind Shane asking, but if he does, they can find someone else.

Shane plans, and pets Ilya's hair, slowly and yet more slowly, in time with Ilya's breathing, until his hand is barely moving, and Ilya is the kind of limp dead-weight Shane recognizes from Hayden's kids falling asleep on him. Shane waits until he is sure Ilya is under, then a little longer, and gently eases out from under him.

His body aches for Ilya's weight and warmth as soon as it is gone, so Shane doesn't linger or go far. He strips off his outerwear and brushes his teeth, eyes on Ilya for all but the few seconds it takes to locate the toothbrush and toothpaste the hotel provided.

On the nightstand, Shane lines up two glasses of water, because after seeing the sodden state of his hoodie he can only assume Ilya is dehydrated, and his phone, plugged in to charge with an alarm set to vibrate only. Guiltily, he checks the balcony door is both closed and locked, and slips the key in the nightstand drawer. After considering the bed for a moment, Shane gets the spare coverlet out of the wardrobe, so he doesn't have to risk waking Ilya by trying to get him under the covers.

Everything ready, Shane can finally give in to the urge to have Ilya back in his arms. He slides back onto the bed and pulls Ilya close, glorying in the precious weight of him, and the trust it shows when Ilya nuzzles back against his chest.

Maybe it's ridiculous to feel hopeful. Mere hours ago, Ilya was on the verge of killing himself. This strange, long night is at best the eye of the storm, and the furor of public attention will surely get worse before it gets better. But also mere hours ago, they didn't have each other. Shane thought he was locked out forever, that they might not ever text again, or touch, or look at each other, and instead Ilya has let him in so deep, Shane feels like he's pressed against Ilya's heart. And now Shane has seen Ilya's heart, he is going to devote all his dogged focus and energy to protecting it.