Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow & Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander & Yuna Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Cliff Marlow, Hayden Pike, Yuna Hollander, Scott Hunter (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Outing, Coming Out, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Good Parent Yuna Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, POV Ilya Rozanov, POV Shane Hollander, POV Third Person Limited, Good Friend Cliff Marlow, Yuna Hollander: Momager extraordinaire, Homophobia, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike Friendship, Relationship Reveal, no AI ever, just in case that needed to be said

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of The body aches when you tell it to quit

Collections:

Hockey Boyfriends, Relationship Reveal HR, HR, Subscriptions:Tracking, Hollanov Hall of Fame, heated rivalry for the soul, My heart is full, Read & Loved Heated Rivalry Fics, MCF (My Comfort Fics), Heather rivalary Fics, Best of Hollanov

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-16 Completed: 2026-03-07 Words: 28,998 Chapters: 5/5

This is heaven and I'd die for it

Summary

For one, singular, blissful moment, nothing is wrong when Ilya wakes up.

And then the bubble pops.

With something less like a pinprick and more like a gunshot.

--

After Ilya is outed he has to deal with being the only openly queer player in the league, being Russian, and being in love with Hollander even after he ran away all at once. It sucks. He does it anyway.

Notes

Quick note on housekeeping: I am not American, Canadian, or Russian and I know nothing about hockey. if you notice me getting anything glaringly wrong about any of these things please correct me and I will do my best to fix it.

I have read Game Changer, Heated Rivalry and The Long Game but I haven't gotten round to reading the other books yet. If anything I say contradicts them then oops and oh well. This is neither strictly show nor book canon and more of a hybrid of the two, but should be without TLG spoilers and you'll be fine just knowing one or the other.

At least for now, that should be all!!

Chapter 1

For one, singular, blissful moment, nothing is wrong when Ilya wakes up.

The curtains are just barely open, bright morning sunlight filtering through; his sheets are freshly washed and soft against his skin; he has woken up two minutes before his alarm, not long enough to be tempted to go back to sleep but to an approximate silence that is infinitely better than the blaring alarm he hates; he is about as bruise-free as he ever is, barely even sore if he’s still enough. He blinks blearily against the light, shifts his body in experimental ways, savouring the brush of fabric on skin, establishing a baseline of all the places he hurts and all the others he needs to push harder.  He stretches his arms above his head and his shoulders, well-used to the abuse, hardly even protest.  There is no game today but he’ll skate well in practice anyway, unimpeded.  It will be a good day, he can feel it.

And then the bubble pops.

With something less like a pinprick and more like a gunshot.

He keeps his phone on silent at night so is blissfully unaware, until the moment that he unlocks it, that there are new notifications coming in every second, almost faster than the system can keep up with.  A notification from Twitter appears at the top of the screen as he stares, bewildered.  It is replaced with one from Instagram before he even gets the chance to read the preview.  Then a text.  Then another.  An email.  Twitter again.

He turns them all off because they’re making his phone slow, and then deliberates.  The texts seem like the right place to start, more personal than social media, less serious and official than email.

The first one he reads is from Marlow.  Simply, it reads: Fuck, Roz. That’s definitely you in the video.  And okay, so this is a scandal.  Ilya isn’t half-asleep anymore, not really, roused into wakefulness by whatever the fuck is going on, and still it takes him a moment to muddle through what this might be about.

He hasn’t done any drugs since he was a teenager—thinks, distantly, somewhere outside of himself, of a version of Sasha a few years out of date, not different enough from the version he had been at sixteen, calling Ilya boring for growing up—and he doesn’t dope, doesn’t cheat, earns his wins like everyone else.  He is annoying on the ice, he knows this, everybody knows this, nobody would waste their time blowing up his phone over something like a less than ideal hit or an especially impressive penalty.  This isn’t that, then.  It has nothing to do with hockey.  It feels like ice water down his spine when he realises.  There are plenty of bad guys in the league—who are bad in different ways to how Ilya is, who hurt their wives and take what is not offered to them, and get into bar fights.  But Ilya is not one of them; he gets his aggression out on the ice, doesn’t throw punches off of it, takes care of the people he sleeps with.  There’s only one thing this could be.

Fuck.

Fuck.

There’s a video.  He doesn’t know when from or who of or what he’s doing specifically, but there’s a video.  He scrolls until he sees Jane in his contacts.  Holy shit, Ilya.  Are you okay?  And three missed calls.  It almost doesn’t register that he is Ilya again, for the first time since the night that wasn’t.  That Hollander—maybe Shane today, or maybe never again—is talking to him now and not too caught up in Rose Fucking Landry to remember he exists.  He’d take more pleasure in that if anything were normal, if he wasn’t suddenly aware of his heartbeat and his breathing and the way his entire body feels like it is being puppeted from a distance.

He thinks, instead, about the levels of Hollander’s panic, because they are a thing Ilya is too well acquainted with.  How this one is almost subdued—a fourth call, Ilya wants to answer but the puppeteer will not let him—and more concerned than anything else.  Shane isn’t in the video.  The evidence is flimsy but Ilya is sure of the fact.

And that’s… something.  Not enough.  The league will still care, though not as much as they would if they knew, and the fans obviously care too, and Russia-  But it’s something.  He holds onto it, white-knuckled.

He doesn’t know who else has texted—he scrolls and scrolls, and the cyrilic stands out but he doesn’t absorb the content.  He cares more than he should but not enough to keep looking.  He opens Twitter instead, where everything is less personal, where people mostly aren’t talking to him directly, are concerned with things other than how he’s doing or how he disgraces all the things he loves by being associated with them.

He scrolls twice, doesn’t register the words, then finds the video without even having to search for it.

And yeah, Marley was right: it’s definitely him.  He figures the league is going to tell him to deny deny deny when he finally gets round to reading their emails, and he is going to laugh in their faces at the ridiculousness of it.  Denial will get them nowhere.

That’s obviously his face on his screen, a few years younger—he doesn’t remember precisely how many, the specifics of this memory blurred by time and booze—but undeniably his, his hair a mess and his cheeks flushed and his eyes glassy every time they look up from the task at hand.

The task at hand being blowing a stranger in a filthy gay bar bathroom stall.  It’s all pretty unambiguous.  He’s on his knees, there’s spit spilling over his chin, the version of him on the phone breathes in, sinks down until he is nose to pubic bone, is clearly enjoying it.  Shit.  He pauses the video and throws the phone at the wall.

He’s angry.  He wishes he could be angrier, incandescent, ready to burn the whole world down.  Mostly he’s just upset.  Terrified.

He tries to remember the night.  It was somewhere warm, he’s sure, he thinks probably Florida but the city escapes him.  He was maybe twenty one and scratching a dangerous itch, breaking curfew somewhere he didn’t think anyone would recognise him, letting only Marley know he was going anywhere at all because they were sharing a room, and waiting until he knew Marley was too close to asleep to want to join him.  He can assume the version of this night he relayed the next morning ended with him getting blown in a bathroom stall rather than the other way around.

Anybody who has ever seen his face before could probably tell it is Ilya in the video.  Nobody who doesn’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every dick in Florida—straight pubic hair, mousy brown, pale skin, large freckle by the base, thick enough to make his jaw ache but not too big to take all the way down—could even guess who the other guy is.  Ilya doesn’t know either.  Doesn’t know why he’d post it, why he’d choose to do it now.

Doesn’t know why he let the guy record him.  Well, he can assume whatever he was drinking that night probably made him easy to convince, but even in what little of the video he managed to watch, he’d seen himself glance up at the camera enough he had to have known it was there.  It’s a crappy video, shaky and poorly lit and recorded on an old camera phone.  That didn’t stop him showing off for it, putting on a show for it, letting it ruin his life.

He desperately wants not to care. He is Ilya Rozanov who is loud and flamboyant and European and sleeps around and really, when you think about it, you should have expected something like this from him. He is bisexual. The label fits him like a glove. It isn’t his fault people are too stupid to put two and two together.

But he isn’t just European, he’s Russian. And he’s queer and he knows what happens when those two things come together. He reads, follows along, finds the tiny opposition papers in their weird little corners of the internet that actually report on that sort of thing, and he knows.  He knows what happens to people like him in Russia.  It hadn’t been his primary motivator when he decided to leave but it had definitely never hurt.  And then he watched from outside as everything started to get worse and thought selfishly thank God that isn’t me, thank God I’m safe.

He isn’t safe now.  He doesn’t know how the League will react but he can assume they won’t be very happy with the whole thing.  Nobody has set any sort of precedent for this; Ilya is going to be the first, and he knows there is a reason for that.  He knows that hockey is not an inclusive sport, that Hollander and anybody else who isn’t white is constantly reminded of that fact, that he has been called a cocksucker and a faggot more times than he can count and that’s before anybody else even knew it was true.

He is at the top of the league.  His face is basically part of its branding.  He isn’t some anonymous bench-warming washout in Buffalo, his absence will not go unnoticed.  None of that means they won’t get rid of him.  And if they get rid of him he loses his work permit and gets sent back to Russia where his very existence will break the propaganda laws, where he will be a national pride turned national embarrassment, where it will almost be lucky if he gets arrested before he gets attacked.

There is a knock at the door.  It does little to stop him spiralling.

“Roz!  Open up!” That’s Marlow.  He sounds loud which Ilya’s brain interprets as angry.  He’s friends with a lot of the guys on his team, Marlow most of all.  And he’s loud with them, unabashed.  They share a locker room, showers, the close unashamed camaraderie of teammates.  They’re going to hate him now.  Maybe if he ignores the knocking Marlow will go away.

“Rozy!  Come on man, I’m getting worried.”

Maybe answering the door isn’t as bad of an idea as he thinks.  Maybe he isn’t giving Marley enough credit.  He forces himself to his feet, wraps himself in his blanket as though detergent-scented sheets are going to save him from ridicule, and ends up standing across from Marley in his doorway, staring at his best friend and waiting for the moment everything changes.

“You look like shit,” Marley says because apparently Ilya isn’t the only one who is full of surprises today.  He’s probably right.  His blanket and his boxers aren’t one of his better outfits, and his hair is surely a mess, and if he looks anything like he feels then shit is a very gentle word.

“Yes,” he says, “is shitty thing.”

“It’s real.”  It’s almost a question.

Ilya grimaces and does not say no.  “Is not news I am…promiscuous.”  It takes him a moment to remember the word but he has heard it often enough that it has stuck.

“You’re gay,” Marley says flatly.

Ilya rolls his eyes, pulls his friend into his house, shuts the door behind them and is infinitely glad the press does not know his address.  “Obviously I am not.”

“I saw the video, dude.”

“You watched?”

Marley goes suddenly very red.  It’s as good as a yes.

“Whole thing?”

“Roz.”

“Maybe you’re a little gay too,” he reasons, shrugging and trying a little too hard to act in a way that is supposed to come to him naturally, like breathing.  Marlow isn’t running away, he reminds himself, which counts for something.

“Rozanov.”  He says it like a warning, the stress on the wrong syllable the same way it always is.  He has never corrected anyone and he isn’t going to start now.

“I am bisexual.”

“Oh.”  And then, “I guess that maybe makes sense.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees, “it does.”

“Everyone is freaking out, you know?  Most of the guys are worried about you and I think Coach is going to have a heart attack if you don’t get back to him or the GM soon.”

“They hate me.”

“I think they just want to hear whether or not it’s really you.”

Ilya presses his lips into a line.  “Obviously is me.  Was not trying to hide face at the time.”

“You could still deny it.”

“Nyet.”  The Russian comes out the way he wants it to, sharp and familiar and without the boxiness of English.  “Anyone who believes is not me is idiot.”  He lets out a long breath and shakes his head.  “Could not go home anyway.”

“What?”

“Hockey players,” Ilya says, fondly exasperated, falling back onto his couch and into something that is not quite a familiar rhythm but that does run parallel to one.  “Not the smartest people.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No interest in international politics,” he goes on.  “Russia,” he says slowly, like Marlow is actually stupid, “does not like people like me.”

“This is a big deal.”

“I had not noticed.”

“Like a really big deal.  You really need to get back to management, man.  Has your agent said anything?”

“Probably that I am fired.  Agent is from Russia, won’t want to be associated with me.  I did not read emails.  Or most texts.”

“We’ll go through them together,” Marlow promises, putting a hand on Ilya’s shoulder.  Their friendship usually doesn’t look anything like this but extenuating circumstances, he supposes.  Marlow cares about him and today this is what caring about him looks like: nothing like it did yesterday.  “Who’s the guy?  In the video?”

“No idea.”

“You suck many guys off in public bathrooms?”

“What do you think?”  He’s done it a few times, not that many, when he was wound-up enough for the risk to feel worth it, or when the risk felt momentarily like the only thing worth living for.  When he was thinking about Hollander, mostly, but not running after him.

“You were pretty good at it,” Marlow mutters, more or less to himself.  Ilya’s eyebrows shoot up and a painful laugh rips its way out of his sore throat.

“You did watch whole thing!  More than once?  You take notes?  Wish for demonstration?  I am flattered but you are not my type, Marley.”

“Fuck you, Roz.  Your type is anything with a pulse.”

“Is problematic, I think,” Ilya says, delighted enough by the panic-stricken face Marlow makes to forget for just a moment that his life is over.

“Shit, really?  I’m not homophobic, you know that.  I just, I don’t know how to do this or what I’m supposed to say-”

“You do fine.”  He rolls his eyes.  “Thank you.  For coming.  For being… normal.”

“I guess the surprise is gone.  Like I said, it kinda makes sense.”

“Da.”  It does.  Ilya knows that.  Alexei always seemed to be able to tell, or at least to be able to guess.  Before Ilya had ever even spoken a word to Sasha.  Before he had figured it out for himself.  Sasha could tell too, without the same insulting sting.  But most people don’t think to look past the women he takes to bed, don’t stop to think about it.  They’re going to now.  Everyone is.

“So… are guys really better at it?”

“What the fuck?”

“It’s just that I heard gay guys were better at giving other guys head than women were…”

“Who told you this?”

“I don’t know dude but you did seem like you were into it.”

“You keep talking about video, I am going to assume you jack off to it.”

“Glad to see you’re as annoying as ever.  I just don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl look like she enjoyed doing that so much.”

“You are having bad sex.”

The official advice—which is a friendlier label than it deserves—is, in fact, deny deny deny.  Ilya does, in fact, laugh at it.  Not happily, probably.  Manically, more like.  Like his sanity is spilling out of his mouth.  Marley looks terrified of him.  Or for him.  He hopes it’s the first one.

He says, on a phone call Marley very much bullied him into answering, “This is stupid and you are all idiots.”

Management continues with the same vapid nonsense as before, as though they haven’t even heard him.  Something like “your image is important and iconic and this is entirely incongruous with it.  It’s beside the point that we all know it’s you, Rozanov: people will believe what they want to believe.  They don’t want to believe this.”  The words wash over him and they don’t mean anything.  He thinks he gets the gist: this won’t go away but eventually, if he gives them nothing, people might get tired of asking.

The damage is done already.  “It is me and I will look like asshole if I say it is not.”

That does make them pause.  He can feel the brand new steely coldness in the room through the phone.  “What does that mean?”  The way they ask it is cautious, weary.  The way Marley looks at him is almost proud.

He rolls his eyes.  “Everyone knows already.  I will be the only one not talking about it.”  He wants some modicum of control back.  His phone pings with a text from one of the few numbers he hasn’t blocked for the time being: Hollander’s.

Ilya, it says again, please.  And Ilya is weak to this man with his stupid freckles and his weak backhand, even if he ran, even if he is fucking Rose Fucking Landry so he writes the first response he has written all day.

I am okay, it says, because he still doesn’t feel like being honest.  Out now, I think.

You’re really going to come out?

No other choice.

There are emails.  Shock, disappointment, anger.  His agent is gone, his manager is gone, Boston’s PR team is cursing his name.  He asks them to draft him an honest statement.  It calms them down a little, surprisingly, when they know they aren’t being expected to do the impossible.

They just need to dress up the truth in fancy language.  I am Ilya Rozanov.  I am bisexual.  I am just as good at hockey as I was before you saw me with a dick in my mouth.  Simple.

He’s scratched for at least the next game.  He thinks that’s unsurprising but unfair, seeing as he hasn’t actually broken any rules.  He hopes it isn’t the start of the league trying to kick him under the rug, trying to make people forget his name, his face, the monster he is on ice.  The way they loved him yesterday.

Marley reads an email from Commissioner Crowell over his shoulder, parsing the dense, conspicuously neutral language Ilya isn’t even trying to translate in his head.  It’s stiflingly polite and irate beneath the surface.  He gets the idea and figures the individual words are just a waste of his time.

Marley sucks in air through his fake front teeth.  “Crowell is out for your blood.”

“I’m sure is not the only one.”

“Crowell is a powerful man, Roz.”

“So am I.”  He isn’t sure if he means it.  He doesn’t know if that matters.

“What happens if…?”

He applies for asylum somewhere like Canada maybe, where there is precedent queer Russians being kept safe.  He loses hockey, loses the league, loses the challenge and the only thing he has ever been good at.  He loses the thing that defines him.  He loses his mind.  And that’s the best-case scenario.  “I don’t want to think about it.”

He posts the PR statement without proofreading it.  He keeps his notifications turned off.  Marley had to leave eventually and nobody else has shown up.

Ilya’s not good at being alone.  Even as a kid, when his family fell apart, lost the warmth at its centre and became icy and isolating, he was never alone through it.  Svetlana was always there back then.  Sveta with her wild hair and wilder eyes and the way she has always been able to see right through him.  Sveta who steals attention in every crowd, who treats every room like she owns it, who belongs in every space she enters.  Sveta who he has never actually told but who has always seen right through him, since Sasha and right the way through into Jane.

And when there wasn’t Sveta there was Sasha, and when there was no Sasha either there were practices and training camps.  Coaches who looked at a group of talented kids and only saw him, what he was and what he could be, who shouted and commanded respect and made him do drills when the power cut for the thousandth time even though there was no light to see by, until he knew the game and the rhythm of it with his eyes shut.  And then there were the other kids, who resented him for it even if the only attention the coaches had to offer was harsh and bruising and relentless.  Who could not hate him because he was still fun.  Shared dorms and hotel rooms, shared space on the ice, an elbow in his ribs, a tooth slicing into his fist.

And yesterday there was Boston, his city where he was never anonymous, where people knew his name and revered it.  Where his teammates thought he made for good company.  Where there was never a shortage of women who wanted to go home with him.

Today there is still Boston, he supposes.  But it isn’t his.

He feels like an alien, sitting in his own home drinking his own imported vodka, fiddling with his own half-empty pack of cigarettes and deciding not to smoke another one.  He feels like an alien a lot of the time.  In a country where the trees aren’t quite right and the buildings are even worse, where nobody speaks his language and it takes a constant, concerted effort to understand and be understood and the nuance gets lost in translation anyway.  Where he holds his tongue in the wrong part of his mouth and his body language isn’t right either.  Rozanov is a thing he performs.  In varying shades but always a performance.  The ladies’ man.  The hockey captain.  One half of Hollander-and-Rozanov: the unpredictable one, the wild card, that everyone loves but nobody really likes.

There is no one to perform for now.  Even if there was, everyone would know, suddenly, that there is an artifice to it, even if they can’t tell where.  They would know that he was hiding something so he’s probably hiding more.  They’d poke and prod and turn him over and they’d see.  Hollander is a hockey robot, everybody knows this, and Rozanov is a shitshow, an animal, a monster.  Shane, all desperate and breathy and honest, and Ilya, spoken in that same way when they had been able to stop pretending for a moment before they remembered with world-shaking clarity who they were supposed to be, are none of those things.

His notifications are still off.  He’s sure plenty of people are seeing, liking, commenting on his statement.  He’s sure some of them are kind and some of them have choice words for him he has heard too many times before.  The guys have stopped texting, which is something.  He doesn’t know what.

The hockey of it all is as dealt with as it can be right now.  Not dealt with enough.  He is still vibrating out of his skin at the uncertainty, at not knowing if he will still have a job in a week, a month, a year.  He tries not to think about it, finishes his vodka and lets himself feel just a little bit heavy, a little bit slow.

He gets an email.  It’s weird immediately, starting with the fact it addresses him as Mr. Rozanov without then going on to imply, however subtly, that its sender would quite like to see his head on a stake.  It’s not news that people are going to want to talk to him now, now he is the only out queer player in league history and this is more, suddenly, than a video everyone was expecting him to say wasn’t him, even though nobody would believe him.  

It’s different now.  Or it isn’t, at all, but everyone wants it to be. It means something.  To people who don’t give a shit about hockey and have never heard his name and wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup 24 hours ago.  To the people from some talk show he has never heard of who are emailing him because they want the first chat with hockey’s cocksucking superstar now that everybody knows about his proclivities.  He should say no.

He doesn’t want to talk to people he has never met about anything at all, let alone this.  But, he thinks, I want to be undeniable.  If people outside of the hockey world know about him and care about him then there will be more pressure on the league and the commissioner than he could create himself.  Then this will be bigger than him and bigger than the rug they were already going to have to wrestle to sweep him under.

So, half drunk and a little bit delirious and no longer under the thumb of management that would, perhaps wisely, tell him absolutely not if he was even stupid enough to ask about something like this, he agrees.

It starts with lewd jokes, a locker room that is too excited when Shane walks into it, a team that is more vulgar than usual which is already a pretty high bar.

“Did you hear about Rozanov?”  There’s something weirdly joyful about the way JJ says it.  Shane shakes his head and is then treated, all at once, to three different guys spinning their phones around like they’ve been waiting for the chance, to a video of dim lighting and sound muffled by the reverberation of music outside, to a face he knows well in a familiarly compromising position.

“What?” he basically squeaks, turning away from the screens as soon as he has registered what is on them.

“I know!” one of the guys says emphatically, awed and delighted.  He gets it now, that they all think Rozanov is ruined by this, that the grudging, hateful respect they had for him is all gone now.  He isn’t a better player than them anymore, he’s just some guy on his knees who doesn’t belong in the sport, who obviously can’t stay in it anymore.  Shane swallows, feels his hands shake and his head swim.  They’d think the same if it was him

It wouldn’t be him, because he doesn’t do casual hook-ups or gay bars or admitting to anyone but Rose Landry that sometimes he almost wishes he could.  But it would be him, because he is gay even if nobody knows it, and he likes being on his knees as much as Rozanov does.  Everything his teammates say to demean his rival falls flat against the back of his skull, sinks into his skin and into his bones.  Even if they don’t know it, they’re talking about him.

He texts Rozanov as soon as he can—calls him Ilya like it fixes anything—and catastrophizes and catastrophizes and catastrophizes as the others shriek and laugh and chirp and any other time maybe it would occur to Shane to shut down someone calling someone else a faggot in his locker room, but they’re going about it with gusto today and he just needs to leave.  He doesn’t shower, just changes even though his skin is sticky with sweat and he smells bad and feels worse, and basically runs back to his car.

Hayden is basically the only one who notices.  He follows Shane out, calm and not cruel, and he casts a glance back at the door as it closes behind him, his nose screwed up.  “They’re dicks,” he says, achingly sincere.

“Huh?”

Hayden shrugs.  “I don’t like the guy but it sucks, you know?  That something like this would happen to anyone.  Even Rozanov.  And they’re all just-” he waves a hand, makes another face, and steps closer to Shane and further away from everyone else.

“He must be terrified,” Shane says.  He knows he is, and this has nothing to do with him.

“I don’t want to have to feel bad for Rozanov.”

“But…?”

“I feel bad for fucking Rozanov!  It’s not like he did anything actually wrong, y’know?  And I hate playing him, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a good player.  He’s earned it.  I wouldn’t have guessed he was gay, but…”

Shane squints at him.  “What’s happening?”

Hayden groans.  “I like to think I’m a decent guy, and Jackie would never have married me if I wasn’t, but it’s hard to have principles when they mean defending Ilya Fucking Rozanov.”

Shane laughs at that, just a little bit.  It’s cold enough he can see his breath curling up into the air, wispy and ephemeral.  Part of him can’t help but wonder what might have happened if that had been him in the video, or if someone had put pieces he didn’t even realise he had left lying around together and figured out that there was something—or had been something—between him and Rozanov.  But Hayden is still Hayden anyway.

He wonders, as he all but falls into Hayden and hugs him in a way they absolutely do not hug, if maybe he is giving himself away.

Shane had told his parents about the break up not long after it happened.  He hadn’t meant to but they were very invested in his life—overbearing from time to time, maybe, if he wasn’t feeling especially generous—and they’d asked about her and he hadn’t felt like lying more than he had to.  He’s been sparse on details and intends on remaining that way, and his mom keeps not quite asking but sending him long, probing glances instead which isn’t very much better.

She has been staying with him in Montreal for the past couple of days, ostensibly for a work thing.  Maybe also to comfort him through the perceived angst of his big break up that hasn’t actually made him angsty at all.  It’s been nice having her there, if he’s honest.  But now he’s dreading having to talk to her.  She never has nice things to say about Rozanov and everyone seems to want to talk about him today.

“Did you hear about Rozanov?”  Her words are the same as JJ’s but the tone is all different.  She sounds upset, maybe, or worried.  Something like that.

He doesn’t want to talk about it.  He says “it sucks for him,” and means it even if it doesn’t come out right, because he knows he has to say something.

She shakes her head, her eyes soft and her brow tightly knitted.  “Nobody’s going to envy him, that’s for sure.”

She is there with him when the statement is released—My privacy was breached and, though my hand is being forced, I am not ashamed to be bisexual.  She cocks her eyebrows and whistles lowly at her phonescreen.  “Not the response I was expecting,” she admits after a moment.

“What were you expecting?”

“You know the league too, Shane.  And Rozanov.  I wasn’t expecting anything.”  She is expecting the interview he announces the next day even less.

She shows it to him, looking more confused than she usually does but a lot less confused than he feels.  The top responses are all from other players, ones willing to step up and call him brave, like he had a choice—none, Shane notices, brave enough to say thank you, at least in such a public forum.  He sees Cliff Marlow’s name and he knows Rozanov is friends with him so it shouldn’t be a surprise but it really is.

He has to say something, he realises.  Because his name and Rozanov’s are always put together.  Hollander-and-Rozanov, always at the top and always battling it out and neither really quite welcome but both always present.  Because everyone from sports journalists to strangers on the street is always asking him about Ilya Rozanov before they ask about anything else.  Because at some point Shane’s silence becomes telling, starts to give off the wrong impression.  Because he does care.

The first tweet he sees when he opens the app says has it been long enough for me to comment on what a throat goat Rozanov is or…?  He closes it again immediately and takes a deep breath, suddenly aware that the video is out there, that he might see more of it than the first few incriminating frames.  He watches videos of Rozanov a lot, studies the way he plays and the way he looks into cameras like he is commanding them, the way he inhabits his body and does all these things Shane has just never been able to wrap his head around.  He doesn’t want to watch this one. It’s out there, of course, and Shane has seen him in even more intimate positions, but Rozanov wanted him there then.  Now he’d probably prefer people stopped looking.  And, Shane can admit, thinking not for the first time about the beers and the way they’d made him fuzzy at the Ciel, about dancing with Rose and staring across a crowd at Rozanov staring back, his lips on some stranger’s neck, he doesn’t want to see Rozanov like that with anyone other than him.

He opens the app again anyway and pointedly does not scroll.  Ilya Rozanov and I have always respected each other as players and it saddens me to see what has happened to him recently.  I want to congratulate him on how well he has handled it so far and remind everyone who is reading this that hockey is for everyone, even if it is hard to feel welcome sometimes.  He should run it past his mom before he posts it but he doesn’t.  It’s all PR-friendly language anyway, and he hasn’t given away more than he means to, or even said anything untrue.  It’s just that he hasn’t really said anything true either.  He can’t afford to.

He sits down as far from his mom as he can on the couch and stares at the TV as the ads play and he counts down to the Rozanov interview.  They’ve been texting for the past couple of days, like people who do more than have sex and run away, but it has been sparse and panicked and there has been a very worrying lack of news in that time.  Ilya is still scratched and he has no idea when he’ll be playing next and he has mentioned the nicest guys on his team by name, which makes the absence of all the others all the more conspicuous.

“He doesn’t have any representation,” he tells him mom, forgetting for just a moment to worry about whether or not that is public knowledge.

He watches her wince.  “Poor kid.”  He doesn’t know what to do with that so looks back at the screen as the talk show intro plays and the dull hosts rattle through their welcomes and the itinerary.

The Rozanov interview is pre-recorded, they say, because they wanted to make the guy feel as comfortable as they could.  One of the two hosts, a young woman with shoulder-length mousy brown hair and a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, makes a point of adding “we wanted to make sure he was okay with all the footage we were sharing.”  To his side his mother hums and he realises that, right now, he doesn’t know how to read her.

The footage fades in on Ilya looking too comfortable in the very pink arm chair he is sprawled across to anyone who doesn’t know how to read the tenseness in the corner of his mouth and the way his eyes are just a fraction too wide.  The interviewer across from him, the woman from earlier, is sitting much more properly, with her feet flat on the floor and her knees together and her back straight.

“Ilya Rozanov,” she says.  He acknowledges her with a nod.  “I’ve been a big fan for a long time.”

His smile is so familiar it makes Shane’s teeth hurt.  “I am a very good player.”

She smiles and, this time, appears to mean it, even if she can’t quite disguise the apprehension.  “Unfortunately that’s not why everyone is suddenly so interested in you.”

“No,” he agrees, his hair practically glowing gold under the stage lights.  Shane wants, more than anything, to hug him, to tell him it will all be alright.  He wants, for the first time, to lie until he believes it too.

“Could you tell us what it was like?  Realising that the video was out there?”

Ilya breathes in deeply and looks right at the camera, his eyes bright and diamond-hard.  “I woke up and everybody knew, suddenly, something I never really told anybody.  Do not tell anybody I said this, but I was scared of what it meant for my career, for my safety.  I can’t go home now.  Some man whose name I do not remember and don’t think I ever knew took that from me.”  It’s not what Shane is expecting from him, not that he knows what that is.  It’s too honest, vulnerable—charismatic, sure, but not a joke like he has turned every other interview he has ever done into.

The interview goes on and Shane watches the way he fidgets in his seat, the way he crosses his arms then uncrosses them, the way he slides the orthodox cross along the chain then lifts the cold metal to his lips and holds it there, gently, between them.

“His English is better than I remember,” Shane’s mom says, leaning forwards with her hands braced on her knees like she wants to get closer to the screen, wants to see the minutiae of every passing moment.

He nods his agreement even though she isn’t looking.  Ilya’s accent is as strong as ever but he is remembering the parts of grammar he usually forgets or disregards.  He speaks to be understood and he thinks, more often than not, that articles are expendable, a sign that English does not trust its speakers not to be idiots.  Shane knows a lot about Ilya Rozanov he can never admit to knowing and he feels more guilty about it now than ever.

“They’re good answers.”  They are.  Interspersed with jokes, sure, because Shane has known Ilya for long enough to know that even when he barely spoke English he had chirping down to an art, but good.  Real.  “If he doesn’t have to be an asshole why does he always insist on it?”

“I think it’s mostly an act,” Shane admits from somewhere outside of himself, staring at Ilya on his TV screen as he pulls on a curl and it bounces stubbornly back into place.  “I remember the first interview we did together, after the draft.  I stepped in because I realised he didn’t understand the question.”

He doesn’t like the way his mom looks at him, seeking eye contact he won’t give her.  “It must’ve been hard,” she admits almost grudgingly, “being so young and alone in a foreign country where you barely speak the language.”

“You and Hayden are both being very nice about him recently.”

She sighs.  “Because it feels like a dick move to be anything else right now.  I don’t like it.”

On-screen Ilya is talking about being the best and not being sure whether or not it’s enough anymore.  He is talking about Post-Soviet Russia and having a father in the military police, about the way he has always been watched, singled out, polished by Russian coaches who’d make the strictest American youth hockey coach balk, about the blackouts and the Occidental allure of the NHL, about the dark and always being first in and last out.  “I wanted to leave,” he explains like it is nothing.  “Everyone always talked about the KHL but if hockey could not get me out of Russia then I needed to be better.  I needed to be best.”  He shakes his head, grimacing at his leather shoes.  “Doesn’t mean I never wanted to be able to go back.  Now in America I will always be The Russian, but Russia will not want me. Ironic, no?”

“He’s smart,” Shane’s mom says, like she’s surprised by it.

He can’t help the withering way he looks at her.  “Of course he is.  You don’t get as good as he is by accident.”

“You’re better.”

“Well I worked for it too.”

“Everyone was always talking about your hockey IQ though.  Nobody ever mentioned his.”

“Because it didn’t fit his image.”  Shane shrugs and watches Ilya undermine his image over and over and over again in a cosy studio under warm lighting wearing nice clothes that don’t look like they’ve ever been worked out in.  “I was the nerdy little Asian kid and he was the feral Russian beast and we were so different in every conceivable way.  Doesn’t matter if it was true, just that it sold.”

“I just can’t believe I fell for it.”

“You get away with a lot when you are foreign,” Ilya says.  Shane spoke over the question the interviewer asked him.  “You can dress wrong and say the wrong things and nobody thinks about it.  I was not good at hiding.  I didn’t need to try.  I know who I am and I am comfortable with it, even if I don’t like that everybody else knows too.”

“What do you think it means to be the first out queer player in the NHL?”

“That is the-” he waves a hand, seeking the words.  From 500 kilometres away, Shane wants to fill them in for him.  Ilya gives up.  “-big question.  Nobody knows and now I will find out.  Next time someone calls me cocksucker I will say yes, this is fact, there is a video.  Next time someone calls me a faggot I will say more or less instead of just thinking it.  After that, who knows.”  The bad words are bleeped for TV but they’re easy to fill in.

“And there will be a next time?”

“Yes.  And I will win anyway because it doesn’t actually make me worse at hockey.  Maybe even makes me better.  Maybe they should try.”

“What do you think about the people out there who are calling you a role model?”

“No no no,” he waves his hands and his mouth forms into a soft sort of shape, one Shane can imagine breathing his name unselfconsciously before reality interrupted the moment.  “I am terrible role model.  Never wanted to be role model.”  The words are faster, less thought-out.  The articles become extraneous again.  “I am asshole on ice and off.  Not someone to look up to.  We are everywhere, yes?”  he gestures to his own chest then away from it.  “Even where nobody wants us, in Russia and in hockey and everywhere else.  Is not just me.  One day someone will do it properly and come out because they want to, because they have beautiful love story to share, and not because they made bad decision when they were drunk.  Wait for them.  They will be better than me.”  Shane doesn’t miss his mom leaning so far forwards she almost falls off the sofa.  Her face does something strange and painful and thoughtful.

“Do you know of other queer players in the league, then?”

Shane holds his breath even though he knows Ilya would never tell.  “It’s just numbers,” he says.  “Statistics.  500 players in the league.  I am not the only one.”  He sees the interviewer open her mouth and picks up quickly where he left off.  “I will not speculate about others.  If they want to tell, I will not do it for them.”

“He’s not what I thought,” Shane’s mom says, looking intently at the screen long after Ilya has left it.

“I can’t believe he did that,” Shane says back, because if he were in Ilya’s shoes it would have been one of the last things he would have agreed to.

“It might have been a good idea.”  He looks at her, head cocked to the side.  She shrugs.  “The league has been pretty quiet.  He’s putting pressure on them, escalating the issue.  The more people there are in his corner the worse it looks on the league if they drop him and the harder it is for them to pretend he never existed.”

“You think they would?” He pretends he isn’t terrified of that thought, that everything he has ever worked for could be undone because he just so happens to be wired wrong.  That it wouldn’t all just become that much harder, but instead become impossible.

“I think he’s the first for a reason.”  She looks older than usual, sitting there with her head in her hands and looking at her slippers.  “He needs representation.”

“His old agent and manager were Russian.  They dropped him.”

She scowls at Shane’s hardwood flooring.  “Then he’s better off without them.  Have you been speaking to him?”

“What?”

“He must have told you that, right?  I didn’t see it posted anywhere.”

Shane figures it’s more suspicious if he desperately lies here than if he tells the truth.  “I reached out when it all happened,” he admits, which is honest.  “Figured he should know someone had his back.  I’ve always liked playing against him and I don’t want to stop because everyone is too hung up on who he sleeps with.”

“You have his number?”

“Yeah, I guess.  Why?”

“Could you pass it along to me?  Just for the time being I want to offer him my help.”

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Ilya’s phone has become the centre of his life for the time being.  It’s where people he has barely ever spoken to—like Scott Hunter—send him messages and well-wishes and he pretends to be oblivious to the way some of them ask something more between the lines.  Some of them want to know what it’s like, dealing with the league and the pressure and the fans, if it feels like a weight off his chest, if it’s worth it.  He feels oddly generous, strangely unmoored, and so does not tell them no, it’s not.

It is where randos on social media tag him in the posts of them performatively burning his jerseys.  They bought them with their own money and he’s not the one inhaling molten polyester.  Even so, just a few days ago they were proud to wear his name, proud of his legacy.  The vitriol is unsurprising.  He wishes that meant it didn’t hurt.

It is where others tag him in messages of support, where he sees signs painted in pink-purple-blue and rainbow.  Where people talk about his interview—and here I thought he was just a meathead; I can’t believe Ilya Rozanov just made me cry; watched the interview, googled the guy and immediately watched him punch some guy in the face how is hockey a real sport—and where guys in the league make public statements about their support, whether or not they’ve actually bothered to reach out to him with anything of the sort.  It is where he reads words Hollander never said to him directly because they both already know how it feels to love something that doesn’t love you back.  Where he reads them over and over and reshapes the letters until they say something like me too.  

It is where Marlow checks in like he is afraid Ilya is just going to disappear, where Connors and St-Simon make sure he knows that they know he is still their captain, that they don’t really get it but nothing is ruined.  It is where he avoids the team group chat because he feels oddly like he is eavesdropping by being involved in it, the pervert in the locker room and the text chain, who is never welcome but always watching.  If they want to talk to him they’ll talk to him, not just talk in a chat he has access to.  And apparently they don’t want to talk to him.  Not yet.

It is where he receives texts in incensed Russian from numbers he doesn’t have saved, where he scans the content and figures out that most of them are from Alexei using someone else’s phone, his own name dragged through the mud because he shares Ilya’s.  He blocks them all.  Except for his dad’s.  He keeps receiving texts from The Colonel that are obviously Alexei using his phone, but between them he gets muddled calls, asking where he is, if he can bring milk, if he’s with his mother, if he’ll be back from training camp soon, always jumping through time as though unburdened by chronology.  He doesn’t know what happened; he’s surely been told but the information slips away like loose sand between his fingers and he’s left holding onto nothing but the vague shape of Ilya, who is not there but should be and never can be again.  Every now and then he will hear Alexei shuffling or shouting in the background, and will overhear the fact that their father doesn’t even remember who his eldest son is.

Where he receives text after text from people whose numbers he never saved or deleted too long ago to remember.  An ex-fling or two shouts at him for involving them in his overcompensating, for feeling used in some sort of scheme he was never running, as though their whole agreement was not simply that they used each other then walked away mutually sated.  He blocks them.  He doesn’t read most of those messages but one catches his eye.

Hi Rozanov, this is Yuna Hollander.  I hope you don’t mind that Shane gave me your number but we watched your interview and he mentioned you were without representation and I’m sure you’re overwhelmed enough right now without worrying about that.  If you’re okay with it, I’d like to help.  I’m sure the league and the publicity are no fun to deal with alone and I need you to know that you don’t have to.

He should probably ignore it too, but he’s struck by the Hollander of it all.  The way his mom cares so much she is reaching out to Ilya Rozanov of all people, just because she thinks it’s the right thing to do.  He tries not to be shocked Shane gave her his number, because he knows he definitely didn’t tell her anything—and he should say no just for that, because Shane has Rose Fucking Landry and he has the razor-sharp memory of breathing Shane into the space between their mouths and watching years of not-so-casual investment fall away.  But he also has the razor-sharp memory of those years of not-so-casual investment, of Hollander’s pulse against his lips, the smell of his expensive shampoo, the way their bodies always fit together like they were made for it.

He should say no.  He texts back, short and simple, Okay.

He goes back to practice even if he can’t go back to games yet—not until he has spoken to Commissioner Crowell, and he is under strict instructions from Ottawa that he is not to give an inch when he does.  I’d tell you to record the conversation, Yuna Hollander had said, because she’s apparently part of his life now, but Massachusetts is a two-party consent state.  I googled it.

Practice is weird.  The locker room goes quiet the moment he walks into it and it’s impossible to miss the unashamed way half the eyes in the room turn to him, searching and scouring like they’re trying to see how he’s changed since they saw him last, like he hasn’t been exactly the same this whole time.  The other half are trying very hard not to look at all.

Marley jumps to his feet, puts his arm around Ilya’s shoulders, makes a show of acceptance in the hopes someone will look at their captain and their first alternate acting like nothing has changed and start to play along.  St-Simon and Connors slap him on the back, say hello, are willing to touch him but don’t quite manage to meet his eyes.

He’s never felt like this in a locker room.  Not when he was the youngest, most promising kid at a prestigious camp back in Russia and everyone looked at him like they wanted to scuff him off their shoes.  Not when he was fifteen and wasting time watching Sasha as he stood rinkside and regarded everyone except Ilya with profound boredom until something started to click.  Not when he was a rookie at his first training camp and he couldn’t understand half the fast-paced grammatical mess he was listening to.  He hates it.

“I was exactly this gay when I won Stanley Cup,” he snaps because he can’t do anything else.  The eyes still lingering dart away.  “I wish you did not see video, you wish you did not see video.  So we pretend video doesn’t exist, yes?”

The silence lingers for a moment, out of place.  Then, “You lied to us.”  Fucking Carmichael.

Ilya snorts out a laugh, harsh and mean. Marlow steps just barely closer into his side.  “Eh, barely.  And you can’t act like this then be surprised I didn’t want to tell you.”

“All those women-”

“Real,” he cuts in.  “I know you’re not smart, but should know what bisexual means.”

Carmichael scoffs.  “That you’re in denial about being gay.”

Ilya rolls his eyes and shrugs, already over it.  “Am not arguing about this. Go get dressed.”  They’re still his team and he is still their captain; he watches conversation fall away, watches the room be plunged into a stony silence that doesn’t suit it.  They listen to him like they resent having to do it.  It puts him in mind of being young again, of swanning around locker rooms of older boys like he owned them, of leading teams who didn’t want to listen to him but did because they had to, because that was how they would win.  He doesn’t have to be liked, he’s never needed that—grudging respect is a thing he has always fought for.  Maybe he deserves more but he’ll take what he can get.

The coaches are no better.  They’re awkward and they’re angry and Ilya orders the team to do bag skates because he really doesn’t need to be liked right now, right before LeClaire pulls him over.

“You didn’t think to mention this?”  There’s a certain venom to the way he says it, something that is either disgust or anger clouding his ability to label what precisely this is.

Yuna Hollander, who is either insane or a saint or, perhaps, both at once, has prepared him for this.  “Legally I do not think you can make me.”

LeClaire looks slightly like he wants to kill him.  It’s hardly a novel experience for Ilya so he just blinks back, slow and unphased.  “You’re the captain of this team-”

“Really?  Did not know that!”

LeClaire’s eyes narrow.  “You have a responsibility to them to respect team dynamics and culture.”

Ilya scowls.  “Pretty sure contract does not say I can’t suck dick in free time.”

“Well there is a morality clause…”

“Ha!  Morality clause?  This is not Russia.  Is a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.”  The syllables are awkward on his tongue.  He forces them out of his mouth anyway.  Mrs. Hollander has prepared him well, between promises to visit in person as soon as she is able, to sit down and talk and get everything in order.  He almost doesn’t want her to, because then he has to figure out how to thank her, how to look at Hollander’s mom and see anyone but the son who walked away, how to be around anyone’s mother at all.  He wonders despite himself, if his mother would have been anything like her had everything worked out differently.  He doesn’t wonder if she would have loved him anyway: he can’t cope with the idea that she might not have so rejects it outright.

He watches LeClaire seethe, lets himself enjoy it even if fleetingly.  “You never thought this was worth disclosing?  Even just to PR?”

“You wonder why queer, Russian hockey player did not want world to know?”

“The PR team isn’t the world, Rozanov.”

“No but the more people know, the more people can spill secret.”

“So you knew that and went to gay bars anyway?”

“Are you this invested in other players’ sex lives?  Or I am just special?”

“Obviously.”

“I do not see problem,” Ilya lies through his teeth, “Is legal, was consensual.  New manager tells me I am victim of crime.”  He doesn’t say you can’t touch me, but it’s definitely implied.

“Jesus Christ.”  The sigh LeClaire lets out is long-suffering and only makes Ilya want to see him suffer more.  “The league doesn’t want anything to do with your mess.”

“Me neither.  I want to play hockey.  League pays me to play hockey.  We have a great deal here.”

“Exactly.  They don’t pay you to do this shit.”

“No,” Ilya agrees easily, “that would be prostitution.”

Yuna Hollander gets into her car and leaves Ottawa to drive down to Boston early on a Tuesday morning.  It’s a seven hour drive and it’s winter and Ilya has told her at least five times she doesn’t have to do it.  She does it anyway.  She shares her son’s single-minded determination and, similarly yet in an altogether different way, it makes Ilya want to crawl out of his skin.  It’s the day before his conversation with Commissioner Crowell and, if he’s honest with himself (though admittedly he rarely cares to be) he doesn’t want anyone, much less Hollander’s mother, to watch him panic.

He wants to drink, to smoke.  He doesn’t want to be stumbling and incoherent when Mrs. Hollander knocks on his door, he doesn’t want to smell like cigarettes.  He allows himself one in the morning anyway, standing outside in the cold breeze and hoping the wind will blow the telltale smell away.  He figures he deserves it.  He deserves the whole pack, probably, but he wants to make a good impression.

And that’s just ridiculous.  He’s made his impression already: in Regina when Hollander no doubt told her that he was rude and standoffish; at the draft when he was playing up being happy because the genuine relief he felt seemed harder to explain and his English felt wholly inadequate for the task; over years of interviews and chirps both on the ice and off of it, years of playing the part of Ilya Rozanov like his life depended on it.  It’s not a good impression to make, he knows.

He knows and he shouldn’t care.  She feels sorry for him so she’s helping him, enough so that she is willing to overlook the fact that he’s Ilya Rozanov.  That’s all this is.  It doesn’t matter what she thinks of him because she’ll be gone from his life as quickly as she appeared in it.  She’ll find him an agent, a permanent manager, maybe even someone who speaks Russian but who doesn't have the same ties to the Motherland as his old one, as his old self.  And still she is Hollander’s mother which means something poignant and painful, even if he can’t name it, even if he wishes he could just avoid acknowledging it.

Stone cold sober and craving a cigarette he won’t allow himself, he paces his own home like he is a stranger in it.  He can imagine his footsteps wearing down the hardwood floors, the hardwood wearing holes into the soles of his socks.  He should be wearing house shoes.  His mother would want him to.  He plays fast and loose with the rules of his house, well-aware by now of the fact that the team will manage to break every one he sets.  He’d tried to enforce no outdoor shoes inside for one entire team gathering and then decided he didn’t care enough to go through the hassle again.

He should go outside probably, for a run or a really long walk to get some of the anxious energy out.  But every time he leaves he gets recognised—it wasn’t uncommon before but the new frequency is intense and the things people have to say to him are either sincere enough they become saccharine, hard to hear, or cruel, laden with blame and disgust.  He could go for a drive, he supposes, but the roads are icy and he’s itching to be reckless and he doesn’t think anyone will be very impressed with him if they have to arrange for the meeting to be held around a hospital bed.  Or maybe there’d be no meeting at all.  Maybe there’d be no Ilya Rozanov.  He knows the thought should terrify him but it settles into his gut like there is space for it there, lives comfortably inside him for a few minutes longer than he ought to let it.

He realises, when there is a knock on his door well into the afternoon, that he has forgotten to eat lunch, that all he ate for breakfast was a cup of coffee and an apple.  He is supposed to be a professional athlete, is supposed to be able to take care of himself, is supposed to be someone who doesn’t do half the things he does.  He is supposed to be able to play hockey.  If tomorrow doesn’t go to plan then he is nothing.

Yuna Hollander in the flesh is frazzled and put together at the same time, both diminutive and larger than life as she stands in his doorway, her shoulders narrow but her arms spread wide to fill the rest of the space.  She looks upset and she is smiling and her linen shirt is nice but wrinkled from hours of travel.  Her eyes are warm and wide and beautifully brown and everything about them, from the way they look like Shane’s to the way they look like a mother’s, makes his stomach twist sharply and painfully enough to make him glad it is empty.

He’s much taller than her, broader.  She makes him feel small.

He holds out a hand and she looks at it for a moment like she doesn’t know what to do with it before she presses a leather-gloved hand into it.  “Rozanov,” she says, like she is trying to remind him who he is.  There’s something shaky about it, like she isn’t convinced either.

“Ilya,” he corrects, because he doesn’t think he can stand to hear her say his surname that way again.  Because it’s the one part of his name his mother gave him and almost nobody uses it.

“Ilya,” she parrots, saying it slowly, intentionally, making it assume the same shapes it takes when he says it.  No extraneous syllable, stress in the right place.  He blinks at her.  She doesn’t blink back.  “How are you holding up?”

“Okay.”  They are still standing in his doorway.  His feet don’t want to move.  “Probably not good.  Maybe bad.”

She reaches out for his forearm, squeezes.  He shouldn’t be as surprised as he is that it doesn’t hurt.  She brushes past him, lets herself in, slips her boots off and tucks them away into the same cubbies as he keeps his own shoes in.  “We need a plan.”

A good plan, apparently, starts with cups of tea and a comfortable seat.  It is not his place to question her wisdom so he makes the drinks as she perches on the sofa and pulls her laptop out of her bag.  He makes his own cup too strong and stirs in a spoonful of jam, not because he especially likes the taste but because he remembers that his mother used to.  Mrs. Hollander watches askance, as though seeing something sacreligious.

“Okay,” she says as soon as he sits down, all business all at once, “the important thing to remember is that there is legally only so much they can do and you have set them up to look terrible if they do any of it.”

“Okay.”

“They’re going to try to scare you, but you know better.  You won’t give them anything.”

“Simple plan.”

“Very.”

“Why are you here then?”  He doesn’t mean it to sound so harsh—though he should know by now all his English comes out that way—and, really, he doesn’t mean to say it at all.  He expects Mrs. Hollander to flinch back from it, to flinch back from him, to blink twice and realise she is sitting in the enemy’s house and he is still the same person she has hated on principle since he was eighteen years old.

She leans closer, braces her elbows on her knees and holds her mug tightly between her palms.  “Because otherwise you’d be alone.”

“I am alone a lot.”

“That’s not exactly what I’ve heard.”  He appreciates the joke, the way that it is at his expense, the way it feels normal.  He smiles into his jam-sweet tea.

The thought strikes him suddenly, like a fist to the jaw.  “Did you watch video?”

She actually does reel back at that, violently enough to slosh the tea up the sides of the mug but not quite enough to spill it.  “No.”  He’s tempted to spiral over how she says it too quickly, too sharply, but he knows how to read Shane’s face and hers has a lot of similarities.  She’s being earnest.  He does neither of them any favours by acting like he doesn’t realise it.

“Don’t.”

She makes a face, not like the faces teammates and strangers alike have been making at him recently.  “I don’t want to.  You could press charges about that, you know.”

He shakes his head.  “Damage is done and I don’t need money.”

“It’s a matter of principle.”

“It is a lot more of this-” he waves a hand at her open laptop, at the scrawling expanse of jargon he is happy to let her read on his behalf.  “I am already sick of it.  I just want to play hockey.”

She nods at that, slow and hesitant but mostly just understanding.  “Hockey made me feel Canadian,” she tells him.  Somehow her hand finds his.  For some reason he lets it stay there.  “Even when nobody wanted me there.  And then Shane got drafted and the Voyageurs told us they were glad to have an Asian-Canadian player on their roster and they wanted him there because he was good and he made them look inclusive.”

“You will organise photoshoots and they will paint me like rainbow.”

“You’re good,” her hand squeezes his, reminding him it is there, “and you’re queer.  When they accept that you aren’t going anywhere they’ll realise it makes them look good.  And people who are like you will start to believe hockey is a place for them too.”

“Careful,” he pulls his hand back, uses it to push away hair that isn’t falling into his eyes, “you make me sound like role model.”

She presses her lips into a line and takes his hand back before he can even return it to his lap.  Her hands are small and soft and still warm from the tea, and her grip is tight enough to make sure he knows she doesn’t intend to let it go until he has listened.  She’s a mother.  He’s a son—or was.  She knows what she is doing and he plays along because he is an alien who doesn’t want to give himself away.  “Nobody wants to be a role model.  It means you’re an outsider.  And other outsiders are going to look up to you because you make them feel like people like them are wanted in places like this.  It’s unpleasant, important work, Ilya.”

“They do not want me.”

“Then prove them wrong.”

Shane bounces a baby on his lap and watches Ilya skate out onto the ice for the first time since the day before the video leaked.

The crowd’s reaction is loud, garbled into incomprehensibility.  It’s probably mostly good, Shane figures, based on the flags and the signs he can see in the stands and the fact that these are the fans who paid to be there, but it’s hard not to spiral.  Even with Arthur babbling at him, with Hayden sitting slightly too close like he has figured out this means more to Shane than his rival being good at what he does and deserving the accolades he has, with Jackie in the kitchen with the twins, making too much noise, laughing and dropping things.  It’s still so easy to think that there are people here who hate Ilya, and Shane too, even if they don’t know it yet, that resent him for being good at everything he does—not in the same way Shane sort of wishes he still did—because he sullies everything he touches.  Because his hands are dirty and he is dirty and he is pulling the entire game down into the muck.

Boston is playing in their own barn against Ottawa of all teams.  Any other night it would be a guaranteed win.  Now everyone—Shane, Hayden, the announcers who are speaking slower than usual—is waiting to see what Ilya is going to do, how he is going to hold up under the pressure, if the whole debacle of getting him back on the ice was worth it.  Nobody is outright asking if he is still good now that he’s gay but Shane knows at least a few of the guys on his own team are thinking it and he doubts that they’re alone.

Ilya still moves over the ice like he was raised on it.  The sharpness of his skates and the violence of the game and the utterly bizarre way he tapes his stick all suit him.  He is right where he is supposed to be.

“He looks good,” Hayden says, not even trying to hide that it hurts him to admit it.

“He looks focused.”  He does.  From the moment he steps onto the ice and all the way through his warm-up.  He keeps his head down, moves so fluidly even Shane is struggling to predict where he is going next, has only a few words to spare for his own team and the Centaurs, and nobody even comes away from those conversations looking pissed off.

Well, maybe Carmichael, but he sort of looks like an old boot all the time so it’s hard to tell.

The Ottawa Centaurs definitely have a reputation in the league.  Not like the Boston Bears do.  Not for playing dirty or winning by any means necessary or being led by a man who is almost feral.  The Centaurs lose a lot.  A lot.  They’re one of the worst teams in the league, an easy win, an embarrassing loss.  And they’re nice.  In a way hockey players often aren’t.  They aren’t the people who are going to skate up to Ilya and say something targeted and specific and awful.  Shane takes a deep breath, in and out, and pretends Arthur’s sticky hands don’t bother him.

Ilya takes the first face off and doesn’t even say anything to Ottawa’s centre.  He keeps his eyes fixed, his breathing even, his centre of gravity low and stable, and he wins.

There’s something wrong about the way the Bears are playing.  They’re a good team most of the time, even if nobody who isn’t rooting for them can ever really be a fan of the way they play and throw their weight around.  Now they aren’t coming together right, aren’t gelling properly.

Jackie walks into the lounge with a twin under one arm and another still calling from the kitchen, flour smeared on her forehead.  “Some of them are trying to play like he isn’t there.”

But he is there.  Every second he gets with the puck is one he fights for and refuses to waste and Shane can’t even feel the moment his jaw goes slack, his mouth opens, and he forgets to shut it.

Ottawa sucks and Tanner Dillon can’t get a shot on-goal even though he is quite literally paid to do it, but their one saving grace is Wyatt Hayes in goal, who is massive and fast and solid and much better than he was when he joined the Centaurs or else he never would have been traded to them.  He probably gets a lot of practice considering how often the opposing team’s offense breaks through Ottawa’s defense.

Even playing against him, playing a team sport almost on his own, battling with his own team, Ilya gets a hat trick.  He plays like a man possessed, one with something to prove.

“He’s playing like he did after the Olympics,” Hayden says.

“He’s playing better.”  Shane is confident of that fact, watching the game more closely than almost anyone else will bother to, trying not to blink during Ilya’s shifts even if it makes his eyes dry enough to start to sting.

“He’s making a point,” Hayden says, like it is a revelation and not something everyone else figured out the moment the game started.

It ends in a 4-0 shut-out for the Bears.  St-Simon scored the fourth goal, off of an assist from Ilya.

The media scrum is overenthusiastic and more than a little prying, and Shane is watching closely enough to see the way Ilya’s eyes flit to the sides just a little too quickly.  The way his shoulders and jaw are tense.  The way he looks like he did all those years ago when Shane stepped in on his behalf.  There is nobody to do that now, just Ilya and the wolves who want more from him than any other player is ever expected to give.

He ignores most of the questions, and Shane watches the way his breath heaves and the Orthodox cross against his sternum moves with it.  They probably aren’t allowed to ask him about his sexuality outright but that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying, asking questions about locker room culture and team showers that they’d never ask anyone else.  Today Ilya doesn’t rise to the challenge.  He doesn’t snap back, lash out, shout or make a spectacle of himself.  He’s been going to the Yuna Hollander school of media training, probably.

Finally there is a question about the game, the only one of the many Ilya actually deems worth answering.  It’s about the shut-out and the hat trick and the way he played a game he was sure to win like it was the Stanley Cup finals.  “I was aiming for Dick trick,” Ilya says back, because he obviously isn’t very coachable.

“He’s such an asshole,” Hayden says.  He sounds strangely happy about that fact.

“Rose and I broke up because I’m gay,” Shane responds, which is almost definitely not what he wanted to say.

Chapter End Notes

I have a sneaking suspicion that the final chapter of this is going to be very long. Either that or there will be a surprise fourth chapter. We'll see. In my head it cut down neatly into three, but in practise I always seem to end up writing more than I think I'm going to.

Also I need to mention how amazing all the interaction on this fic has been. The comments are all lovely and I know I sat down and spent a not insignificant time responding to most of them, but my kudos emails have also looked absolutely insane since I posted this so thanks for that too :)

(edit 22/01/2026) Just jumping back in because, fun fact, I posted this at 3am and was coherent enough to proofread but not coherent enough to remember to find and replace all the double hyphens I use as stand-ins for em-dashes when I type, and also I needed to fix a teeny tiny formatting thing that got a teensy bit screwy when I pasted the chapter into Ao3. I have not changed a single word of this chapter, I just made it look a bit better, basically.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

“Care to repeat that, bud?” It takes Hayden a few moments of wide-eyed staring to force the words out, but when they eventually come into being they are soft.  Too soft.  Like he is talking to an upset child.

Shane stares silently back, hand to his mouth, wondering if he can swallow the words back down or maybe just rewind time and say absolutely anything else.  “Crap.”

“Shane?”

But the words are out there.  Hanging in the air and much too honest and impossible to take back.  “Rose and I broke up because I’m gay.”

“I thought that was what you said.”  Hayden’s face does something strange.  Shane doesn’t meet his eyes.  “So… are we gonna talk about it?”

“Do you want to?”

Hayden shifts his eyebrows all the way up.  “Uh, yeah.  Obviously.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve been trying to make sense of why you’d break up with Rose Fucking Landry for weeks, dude!”

“Swear jar.”  It sounds weird to Shane’s ears, the way his own voice is still his own voice and the world is still intact.  Hayden sends him an unimpressed glance and waits for him to say more with all the patience of a toddler who’s been promised dessert.  “There isn’t much to say,” Shane lies.

“Bullshit.  You had to date Rose Landry to realise.”

“Rose Landry had to tell me for me to realise,” Shane corrects.  Hayden doesn't scooch all the way across to the far side of the couch like he’s disgusted.  He presses his knee solidly into the side of Shane’s thigh and cackles at his expense.  Shane doesn’t laugh but he does crack a smile.  The Earth keeps spinning.  The Bears beat the Centaurs.  Hayden knows and doesn’t seem to mind.  At least not this part of it.

“Oh man.”  The laughing makes it sound less than sympathetic.  Shane’s face flushes.  “That bad, huh?”

“Uh, definitely not good.  Kind of a disaster, really.”

Hayden shakes his head slowly in blatant disbelief.  “Not even for Rose Fucking Landry.”

“Not even for Rose Fucking Landry.”

“Well you’re definitely gay then.”

“Yep.”

“Have you ever…” Hayden goes quiet, waves a hand, goes pink about the cheeks.  For as long as he’s a little awkward and embarrassed, Shane has the upperhand, can keep pretending that he doesn’t know there is a moment coming when the conversation shifts and Hayden connects the dots or Jackie, who is being kind enough to let them have this moment to themselves (and Arthur, who is still burbling away in Shane’s lap, unperturbed), gets impatient enough to do it on his behalf.

“Have I ever…?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

Hayden’s sigh is long-suffering, understatedly fond.  “Been with a guy?”  Straight hockey player is awkward about gay sex.  The news is as far from shocking as it possibly could be.  Hayden is asking anyway, which earns him some credit.  He doesn’t really need any more.

Shane presses his lips together and nods.

“Not a disaster?” Hayden guesses.

Shane actually does laugh at that.  “No,” he confirms, “not a disaster.”  He watches Hayden roll words around his mouth, getting a sense for the taste and shape of them before he says them out loud.  Shane wishes doing the same thing had occurred to him before he blurted the secret out.  Except Hayden is still there, kneecap to thigh, close and sturdy and normal and nothing is falling apart.  The secret is out and maybe it feels good, in this room and this company and this house where he never hasn’t been welcome.  “Whatever you’re planning on asking,” Shane warns slowly, “maybe think twice about whether you want to know the answer.”

Hayden chokes on his own tongue.  “Noted.”  A pause.  He uses it to pick at his nails, which are always just a little bit dirty.  “You and Rozanov,” he remarks with outright awe.  Next to him Shane stops breathing.  “Maybe he was right: being gay actually does make you better at hockey.”  Shane splutters his next exhale but does stop holding his breath.  He’d like to laugh but the sound he makes is more of a hiss.  Hayden turns to him slowly, like he’s seeing Shane for the first time.  “Did you know?  About him?”

“Um.”

“Or—shit—is that a bad thing to ask?  Is gaydar a real thing?  I don’t-”

Because Shane is speaking before he thinks today, and because he is a benevolent enough man to take pity on Hayden as he watches him fumble, he says “yeah, I knew.”

“You did?  Since when?”

“Rookie year.”

“Rookie year!  Do you think he knew too?”

“Pretty sure he figured it out first.”

“How-?”

Shane cuts him off, feeling bold or stupid or just too wrung-out to keep lying.  “You know what I said about questions you probably don’t want me to answer?”

It becomes weird, to be around Hayden and have him know.  To watch him get simultaneously more and less shy about his questions, because they’re about Rozanov so he has to know but, by God, does he not want to.  Shane reminds him of this fact ad nauseum.  The questions keep coming regardless and at some point he starts answering them, the details scant but not inaccurate.

“So,” Hayden broaches the topic one morning, when Shane offers him a lift to practice, “the video.”

“No.”

“It’s just-”

“I’ll barf on you,” Shane threatens.

Hayden nods inappropriately sagely.  “So you have a gag reflex.”

Shane punches him hard on the arm.  The road is empty enough he only feels a little bit guilty about getting distracted momentarily.

“Did you watch it?”

“No.  I couldn’t.”

“I can’t believe you had to stand around and listen to the team when it came out.”  It’s the first time Hayden has recalled that awful day.  Shane glances at him in the rearview mirror.  He looks like he’s sucking on a lemon.

“Thank you,” Shane says.

“For what?”

“For being nice about it.”

“I still don’t like him.”

“Because he’s an asshole, not because he’s a cocksucker.”  Shane uses their word on purpose but it sounds worse, somehow, in the flinching form it takes when he says it.

Hayden winces, probably at the whole thing.  “Please stop making asshole sound like a compliment.”

Shane shrugs.  “I didn’t hook up with him for so many years for no reason.”

“I was happy to assume I already knew the reason from the video Comeau forced me to watch, and we were never going to talk about it because you’re too much of a prude.”

“Probably not as much of a prude as you thought.”  It’s an oddly freeing thing to be able to say.  He is an adult who has sex.  He is a person with a body, who exists off the ice, and not an android who powers down in the corner of the locker room between games.  He cares about things that aren’t hockey, even if they are necessarily hockey-adjacent.

“What are you going to do next?”

“Not be the second openly queer player in the league.”

Hayden shakes his head.  “I mean about Rozanov.”

Shane sighs and realises, suddenly, that he hasn’t told him, that he doesn’t know.  He still thinks Rose is in the picture because the tabloids still think Rose is in the picture because not one of them can comprehend a world in which the two of them are just friends.  He realises, with a slow, burgeoning clarity that is anything but sudden, that he wants to set the record straight, needs to.  It’s been easy to be distracted by everything recently, to forget he ever meant to do more than check in and check in and check in until everyone stopped caring.  “Will you kill me if I say I really want to kiss him?”

Hayden makes a face.

“Don’t be homophobic,” Shane warns with a levity he never thought he’d be able to afford the topic.

Hayden holds up his hands in mock surrender.  “It’s just Rozanov of all people.  I mean, come on!”

“To be fair,” Shane defends himself without any weight in it, without caring how it lands, “you know exactly who I am.  Doesn’t it make sense it would have to be a hockey player?  And if it had to be a hockey player it would have to be the only one giving me a run from my money.”

“So everything is about hockey,” Hayden summarises, “except for hockey, which is about sex.”

Are you still going to All Stars?

A simple, innocuous text from Jane.  Ilya pans it for hidden depths, ponders motivation after motivation for Hollander wanting him there.  Overthinks the way this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being outed, with dragging his team along behind him—it hasn’t changed too much when he tries not to think about it, because he’s never had any option but to be the best anyway.

The air around him is perfumey in a chemical way.  The hairspray is cloying in his throat and crunchy in his hair.  They’ve dressed him in clothes he would probably wear on a night out, that no other hockey player would be caught dead in because they are too scared of the impression they’d give off.  He might steal them after the photoshoot.  He’d told Yuna when she booked it that he definitely didn’t need more money but he supposes this can be a payment he actually wants.

She’d said it wasn’t about the money at all, really.  He had squinted.  Visibility, she had explained, was the goal.  He’d said he was too visible already, everyone had already seen much too much, and her gaze had turned gooey and sympathetic in that way he couldn’t remember what to do with.  Controlling the visibility, then.  Being seen how he wants to be seen, being seen everywhere and over and over, being blown up on a billboard until he is ten times larger than the rug.  He said yes because she looks too much like her son.

He says yes to her son too, because he doesn’t really have much choice.  Because he doesn’t have it in him to say no.  Because the reason behind the question is foggy and opaque and he can’t parse it without a little more help.

He’s sure lots of people don’t want him there, but he’d received the invite nonetheless, and nobody has tried to revoke it, so he’s going.  So he’s doing all the things he usually does to the extent that he can, and he is ignoring the way that people are hostile and trying to become comfortable with the way that they aren’t.  Lots of people are very sorry for him, he has learned.  This is a very difficult thing for him to deal with.  He’ll be flying South and wearing a gaudy, ugly shirt, and drinking beer by the pool, and he’ll be playing good hockey with people who are playing sort of subpar hockey because they don’t care about the All Stars Game.  Because they don’t need to be the best like he does.  Like Hollander does.  Like air and water and circulating blood.

I’m sorry, Hollander replies.  Ilya’s well-aware that it isn’t an appropriate response to his confirmation.

What?  You have already said sorry too many times, none of it is your fault.

For freaking out, I mean.

I don’t want to talk about that.

I do.  I can’t stop thinking about it, about you.

Ilya wants to say ‘me neither’ but he doesn’t.  His fingers twitch above his phonescreen with the effort of not pressing those keys.  You will make Rose Landry jealous.

I doubt it.  I want to talk about this all properly in person but Rose and I aren’t a thing.  I need you to know that now.

What am I supposed to do with this, Hollander?

I don’t know, Ilya.  Forgive me?  Please.

Ilya’s traitorous brain misinterprets apology as invitation.  Hollander is sorry, he is thinking about Ilya, he wants to see him, he isn’t actually dating Rose Fucking Landry; it isn’t a confession, isn’t everything going back to the way it was, the situation righting itself.  And still.  Hollander still calls him Ilya.  Hollander still thinks about him.  Hollander is looking forward to seeing him again.

When Ilya closes his eyes he sees freckles.  He sees them dark and obvious on cheeks pink with exertion.  He sees helmet-mussed hair, and sex-mussed hair, and hair wet with sweat or fresh out of the shower sticking to Hollander’s forehead.  When Dallas Kent says something especially disgusting to him especially virulently and he is determined not to throw the first punch he thinks about Hollander looking at him after the fact, clicking his tongue at split knuckles and shaking his head.

When he blinks slowly at Dallas Kent and keeps his gloves on he thinks about Hollander who needs to know that this is possible.  That the intersection he is caught in is a difficult one but not completely impossible.  Dallas Kent is an asshole and Ilya is a better player than him and his opinions aren’t worth Ilya’s time.  Or Hollander’s.  Or anyone else’s—he thinks, as well, about people like Scott Hunter who gave themselves away, or people watching from home or the stands who see themselves in him, who see in him what they could be too.  He thinks about Yuna Hollander, about how he doesn’t want people to look up to him but he’s visible now so they will anyway.  He thinks about what he owes to them about how he has always owed everyone everything all the time.

He likes to think Hollander would be proud of him.  Kent scowls and Ilya rolls his eyes.  “Why are you so interested in gay sex?”

“Faggot,” Kent spits, which is not an answer.  He says it loud enough that the ref must pick up on it, that a handful of Boston and Toronto players must too.  Connors winces.  Nobody else does anything.  Ilya wins the face-off because losing it would prove Kent right.

He scores off it too, because he’s angry in a way he can channel, because anger is only worth his time if it’s the kind he can do something with.  Take what you’re given and make the most of it—Yuna Hollander has a lot of advice on seeing his options and dealing with the ways all of them are inadequate.  She tells him to keep going and going and going and pushing right through if nobody will make a path for him.  The more she talks the more he thinks about her son who never had the choice to pretend he wasn’t different.

Kent does throw the first punch eventually, when Ilya complains he is obsessed.  It gives him permission to hit back, and harder.  He has to, really, because he has never been someone that shies away from a fight.  Because it means something broad and horrible if he’s seen as weak.  Because there are more eyes than ever on him, and he owes them all everything.

Hollander calls him afterwards.  They don’t do that.  That’s not enough to stop Ilya from answering it, breathless and a little sore and feeling good even if he still doesn’t feel like he is allowed to look away from the locker room wall.

“Hi,” he says, pressing a thumb into the already dark bruise on his jaw until he can feel the pain in his stomach.  He thinks he broke Kent’s nose in retaliation.  There’s still blood on his knuckles.

“Are you okay?”

“Not the first time I have been punched.”

“No, but it’s different, right?”

Ilya makes a face nobody can see and scrapes the pad of his thumb across his jawbone.  “Maybe yes, maybe no.  Have heard worse.”

“But isn’t it different now that they know?  They’re doing it on purpose.”

Ilya sighs, feeling the way the English sits like cotton in his mouth.  “They were always doing it on purpose.  I always knew they were right.  Difference is…”

“Immaterial?”

“Sure, whatever that means.  I am okay, Kent is worse player than me, and it wasn’t even a good punch.”  Not true, it hurts like a bitch.

When he hangs up there is an arm—sweat-warm and heavy—around his shoulders before he can even put his phone back into his pocket.  It’s comfortable there, welcome, even if Marlow hasn’t showered and Ilya gets an unfortunate whiff of his armpit at the gesture.  “Someone special?”

“Go away, Marley.”

“Hmm.”  He uses the arm across his shoulders to push Ilya’s head down, like a teenager playfighting.  The knuckles of the hand are split because Ilya is someone he deems worthy of throwing a punch over.  “You know I would’ve thought you’d be sleeping with more people than ever.  Now that the whole, y’know, is out of the way.”

“Get to the point.”  He flicks Marley’s ear.

“I know you and I haven’t heard about you and anyone since the video happened.”

“My own friend thinks I am a slut.”

“You are a slut.  The whole sex tape thing probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”  Ilya grimaces.  “You slept with too many women and had to move onto men-”

“Have been sleeping with men since I was a teenager.  Try again.”

“Okay, fine, so maybe not that.  But you sleep around, dude.  And we’re all in awe of it.”

“Maybe not all of it.”

“No.”  Marlow shakes his head.  “I recognise and respect the game even if the game is gay.”

“Something you want to tell me?”

“I want you to tell me something.”

By now it is just them, in this weird corner.  There are showers running but the room is otherwise empty.  The chatter is dead.  “I will tell you nothing.”  Marlow narrows his eyes anyway, flicks them down to the pocket Ilya slipped his phone into.  He presses his lips together and pulls them flat across his teeth.

“Okay dude.” Then, “I’ll drop it for now but you can’t get away from me that easily.”

By the time Ilya touches down in Tampa the bruise on his face is yellow and has stopped hurting, and presumably the All Stars organisers have forgotten to tell him not to bother showing up, so nobody turns him away but nobody really puts very much work into making him feel welcome either.  He’s one of the first players there, because if he can get an extra sunny day then he’s going to take it, and when he stops to pick up a pack of cigarettes—he’s always trying to quit, except for recently because nobody has felt comfortable enough to badger him about smoking since they’ve seen him with worse things between his lips—he sees himself on the glossy cover of a magazine and wonders if this is how it feels to be Hollander.

He’s shown to his penthouse at the hotel.  Nothing goes quiet but people do slow enough to stare.  He’s dressed in bright colours because he takes an antagonistic sort of pleasure in making a spectacle of himself, in being something to look at before he is something to revile.  He waves to Scott Hunter who is staring miserably into a beer in a dark corner of the bar.  Hunter waves back.

When Ilya leaves his room, having dumped his bags and done some deep, intentional breathing because he is more human than he likes to pretend to be, Hunter is right there in the hallway, shifting weight from heel to toe.

“Wait long?” Ilya says, squinting at him but not wondering what he is doing there.  The dots are not ones he struggles to connect.

“Wanted to check in on my teammate.”

“Mmhmm.”

“No really.  The league is…”

“Not able to touch me.”

“Still-”

“You are scared and I am scared and the league is scared of me.  I know.  Can I tell you secret?”

Hunter nods, bewildered.

“They have always let people get away with things if they are good.  If they are more valuable in the league than outside.  Doesn’t feel good that they think of you like they think of rapists, but they keep you around anyway.  You can be gay and you can be good at hockey, only if you’re really good at hockey.”

“I’m not-”

“You are old and boring and standing outside my door.  I do not care you’re gay or you’re a million years old or if the dick in video is yours and I was drunker than I thought!”  He isn’t angry at Hunter but he is angry in general, under the surface all of the time, and it simmers over just a little bit.  Hunter grinds his teeth.  “You thanked me—for being sacrificial lamb, for not doing what I was told and saying it wasn’t me when everyone already saw my face.  You sent me a message and I got it.”

He sees the way Hunter gives in: his shoulders droop, the corners of his mouth sink, his spine goes slack and his eyes go dark.  “So what do I do?”

“Don’t get caught.  Or do and be good enough to get away with it.”

“It’ll get better.  You’re making it better.”

“Am I?”

It takes a lot of energy to hold himself back.  Hollander will be here soon.  He has asked to meet Ilya in his room practically as soon as he has had the chance to drop his bags off in his own.

It feels familiar but it probably isn’t going to be.  On the surface there is an old pattern here and it is repeating, but reality is messier than that.  Ilya feels hope like a rock in his stomach.  He is smart enough to know this makes him stupid.  He holds himself straight, watches the phone, listens at the door and flinches every time he so much as hears another soul in the hotel shift.  He holds his breath until it hurts.  He inhales and exhales in counts of eight until he is dizzy.  He holds himself together.

Hollander knocks.  He opens.  All business: Russian and stoic and emotionless because he knows how to play the role.  This is the man too feral to be human meeting the man too mechanical to be.

Hollander stares at him for a moment, in the doorway, visible to the hallway.  His eyes are wet.  His gaze is long and probing and Ilya is trapped in it like a fly in amber, the moment preserved.  “Holy shit,” Hollander says, like he doesn’t look the same as always.

Ilya should say something.  Get him through the door and away from prying eyes at least.  He tries.  Hollander collapses into him.  Solid and warm and wrapping his arms tight and unyielding around Ilya’s ribs, holding him in place.  He’s holding his breath again.  Shane is just holding on.  Ilya sighs into his hair and lets his hands find the familiar planes of Shane’s back, the unfamiliar linen of his travel-rumpled shirt.

They cling to each other like limpets.  They stumble through the door and fight to get it closed.  They sit on the bed Ilya actually made this morning and they talk.  Shane is under his arm and in his lap and they are talking.  They are Shane and Ilya when they do it.  They are people when they do it.  They leave the robot and the monster outside.

Shane is gay.  Ilya is laughing because it took him all these years to realise, because it took Rose Fucking Landry to realise, because this is a good moment and if he does not laugh through it Ilya is going to start crying.  Ilya can’t go home.  He has no family.  Shane’s mom is a good woman and so much like him and Ilya says thank you so many times the words run together and the sounds lose their meaning and Shane laughs into his shoulder in a way that darkens the fabric.

They have sex.  It’s the closeness that does it, the history.  The way they have years of knowing that the only place they can go from here is inside of each other.  They go slow, stay pliant under touches that ask rather than take, draw it out until pleasure is tinged with pain because this way maybe it doesn’t have to end.  They come apart and try breathlessly to hold each other together.

Shane lets them bask in the aftermath, in twisted, ruined sheets.  There is sweat sticking his hair to his temples and his cheeks are so perfectly red.  “This is something,” he says.  It isn’t a question.

Ilya bites his lip.  “What is it?”  He should say no.  He knows this.  But there is little he has left to lose and he needs to be selfish.  He strokes his thumb across a vein on Shane’s bicep.

“I don’t know.  But something.”

“Something,” Ilya agrees.  “We don’t know how to be something.”

“We don’t know how to be nothing either.”

“So we figure it out.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Isn’t that how we got here in the first place?”

“I want to stay here forever.”

“Then you need to distract me before I can’t stand how gross we are right now anymore.”

“I don’t know if I can stay in Boston,” Ilya says to Shane at the bar over two Coronas, only after he has double-checked that Scott Hunter is out of earshot.  The lime makes the bottle’s glass rim sour on the first sip.

“They’ve been playing like shit,” Shane agrees, “wasting your good season.”

“Marley has been good.  Connors and St-Simon are trying.  I think maybe others lost respect for me.”

“It shows.”  The hotel bar is full of other players.  They both cut conspicuous figures on their own and together they are hard not to notice.  There is space between their shoulders, but not their knees which are harder to see so long as nobody is trying to look at them.  Shane is still making a statement of sorts anyway, just by being there, by being comfortable there, laughing over a beer he usually wouldn’t drink there.  Ilya feels the eyes on his back and ignores them.  “Did you think you’d retire with them?”

“Probably.”  Ilya shrugs but something hurts.  “I think I thought they’d get over it.  I’d have a home that wants me.”

“The Russia of it all-”

“I don’t want to think about it.  Done now.  Goodbye Moscow.”

“We need a plan.  To be something but also just for you.  If the league turns on you or-”

“Your mom is already on it.”

Shane looks like he wants to say more.  “Cats and dogs!” Carter Vaughn crows right in Ilya’s ear, his arms around their shoulders, pulling them both close.  They’re teammates for now and he is really leaning into it.  His skin is warm on Ilya’s neck.  The touch isn’t overthought or self-conscious.  From all the way across the bar, much too far away to hear hushed conversation, Scott Hunter stares.

Their chemistry on the ice is terrifying.  Their chemistry off it isn’t new but they aren’t denying it now, which makes it terrifying too.

When Ilya’s father dies he gets a call from his number.  Those have been rare until recently, when they became frequent and frantic and so confused they shifted to incomprehensible.  He answers it on the third ring, too guilty to ignore the father he will never see again, even if it is right before a game he knows he needs to play well.

The voice is Alexei’s.  The words are simple.  So is the response.

“I can’t go to the funeral.”

“Like fuck you can’t.”

Alexei wouldn’t even want him there were it not for the money.  Were it not for the fact that if Ilya isn’t paying then he is.  Ilya dreads the thought of going home even though he is already entirely resolved to stay away from it.  He dreads to see the likes of Sergei Vetrov and Polina and every acquaintance of his father’s who would recognise his face for just long enough to decide to spit in it.

The room he is standing in is far from silent.  He can’t hear it at all over the rush of the blood in his ears.

He stands in the corner he has been designated  because the centre of the room doesn’t belong to him anymore, and he speaks in a language nobody else here understands, and one of the fragile things holding him up crumbles entirely away.  St-Simon hesitates for a moment before he claps Ilya on the back, hand firm between his shoulder blades.

“You ready, Cap?”  He says it like he is proving a point by doing it.  The hand lingers because he can’t decide when it is appropriate to take it off without looking like he is shying away.

“I need to go.”

He updates the coaches quickly.  The message, in brief, is passed onto the team so they can scramble to adjust the lines.  Marlow’s eyes are wide but he is too harried to do more than stare at Ilya for a moment as he grabs his things and hurries from the room, sinuses stinging.

Compassionate leave.  Effective immediately.  Family emergency.  This is the sort of thing the league and the people who bow to it know what to do with.  His dad is dead and he is allowed to have feelings about it.  Is allowed to take time to himself about it.  Grief is universal, humanises him no matter how alien he is.

His dad is dead and this, to him, is not an actionable fact.  There is no use in looking for flights to Moscow that leave in the morning, that might cost a small fortune of the money he doesn’t need.  There is no funeral to arrange, no black clothes to dig out, no stilted conversations and condolences to prepare himself for.  His dad will be buried in Moscow next to his mother and he will be right here, thousands of kilometres away.

He feels restless.  Twitching and itching to do anything at all but drive home and mope and crawl into his bed.  He makes a U-turn on an empty road because he can’t stand the thought of it.  Of familiar walls and familiar isolation and the memory of bodies—of one body in particular—in amongst his sheets.  He grips the wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white and heads north.  He cries as he does it, for a woman who is no deader today than she was a decade ago but is suddenly in significantly worse company.  He kicks himself for skipping his father’s funeral for selfish reasons—personal safety, selfish because it is his—and then considering him bad company.  He owes him so much more than that and can give him none of it.

He heads due north and swerves his car to avoid a particularly reckless pigeon and it feels like breathing when the wheels skid.  He considers his hands on the wheel and all the things he could do next.

Chapter End Notes

Sorry for the wait! I have been a wee bit busy but it's here now. Also sorry for not getting back to the lovely comments on chapter 2, I read and appreciated all of them but there were a lot of them and I didn't have time.
You may notice that this is now chapter 3 of 4. It really just was not happening in 3 chapters. I am optimistic about getting it done in 4 but there's always a (small) chance it'll spiral into 5.
Also, because I've forgotten to mention it up until this point, the title of this fic is taken from the American Pleasure Club (AKA Teen Suicide) song of the same name. I am rarely original enough to name things myself.

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

“Did you hear about Rozanov?” JJ says the words differently this time.  Shane is very careful about the way he squints at him.

“No?”

“What about Rozanov?” Hayden asks somewhat less carefully, because he doesn’t have all of Shane’s practice.  Or all of the things he stands to lose.

“He did not play tonight.”

“Is he injured?” Hayden should be asking JJ the question but somehow it lands on Shane.  He wonders how suspicious it would be if he started checking his phone.

“No,” he says, “I don’t think so.”

“Or sick?”

“No.”  He doesn’t say it carefully enough.  It takes Hayden narrowing his eyes at him for Shane to realise.  “I mean,” he says, grasping, “wouldn’t they have mentioned something if he was scratched for illness or injury?”

JJ shrugs.  “I don’t know, ESPN just says he didn’t play.”  He lifts his phone, the screen bright and white and unreadable from Shane’s distance.

“You don’t think…” Hayden starts, looking at Shane too conspicuously.

“That it is the gay thing again?” JJ guesses, looking back at his phone rather than at Hayden.  “I thought everyone was over that?”

Hayden shrugs.  “Isn’t he bisexual?” he corrects, still looking at Shane.  Seeking acknowledgement of his attempt at allyship.

“The bisexual thing then,” JJ waves his hand.

Shane sends Ilya a text and waits until it becomes very clear that he isn’t going to read it before he lets his stomach drop.  He doesn’t try to call him until he is out of the locker room.  He calls three times back-to-back from the front seat of his car, still in the parking lot.  The engine isn’t running so neither is the heating and his hands are cold.  He holds his phone too tightly.

Unread texts and calls that he and Ilya both let ring out, Hi, this is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.  Hi, this is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail.  Hi, this is Ilya.  I will never listen to your voicemail.  Shane listens to the message in full each time it plays.

He tries very hard not to think about the day the video was posted.  Without fanfare or caption, he has since learned.  Without so much as an announcement that the man in the video was Ilya Rozanov.  Like whoever had posted it had trusted it to spiral into a scandal all by itself.  It hadn’t taken very long for him to be proven right.  Ilya didn’t answer his texts then either.  Didn’t pick up his calls.  Shane spent the whole time worrying.  That Ilya was spiralling until he did something stupid.  That someone was angry enough to seek him out.  That Russia-

Well, Shane didn’t know what Russia would do.  So he googled.  So he spent hours lost in articles about the rapid steps backwards Russia was taking, about the way everything was getting worse.  He spent hours agonising over the broad strokes the articles painted in, the details hidden somewhere in the larger truth because nobody who knew them could speak about them.  He understood enough of the broad strokes to know to be worried.  He ran out of English and French sources and started trying to parse his way through bulky machine translations of Russian ones that were small and shy and quiet and hard to find—that he only found because he was desperate to find them—and so horrifyingly honest because the risk of writing them at all was large enough that they had to be.  There was no point in being subtle or objective or journalistic when the consequences would be the same.  No point in hanging for the lamb when the sheep is right there.

He tries not to think that Russia is doing it now.  Ilya is in the US legally, of course.  His work permit is holding and Boston may not like him too much right now but they haven’t stopped sponsoring it.  There will be no extradition over something like this.  No matter how angry Russia is.  It would be an affront to freedom and the US has to at least appear to stand for something.

And still.  Knowing doesn’t help very much.  Because something is wrong and Shane doesn’t know what it is and has no choice but to imagine.  To imagine a Russian passport that Ilya complains always causes fuss at the airport and the border crossing simply being pulled.  To imagine a version of Ilya Rozanov who can’t travel so can’t play hockey.

Between Shane and Ilya hockey is a shared language, spoken with native fluency in a dialect nobody else is ever quite able to perfect.  The grammar is theirs, the etymology is the same history everyone else knows interpreted differently, the pronunciation is all skates on ice and not tongues that can’t manage the same sounds, not mouths that can’t help but say each other’s names ever so slightly wrong.  Ilya without hockey isn’t something Shane wants to think about.  A home you can’t go home to.  A living room nobody lives in.

Three calls that ring and ring and ring and then the voicemail message.  Ilya’s voice.  Ilya’s name the way he says it.  And then Shane has to go because he’s in the parking lot outside the rink and there’s nothing he can do from the parking lot outside the rink.

Hayden’s car is still there.  Hayden is still sitting in the driver’s seat, not leaving until Shane does.  Shane hears the rumble of the engine behind him as he goes.  He knows neither of them will ever mention it again.

The drive home is one Shane can do in his sleep.  Right turn, left, the long straight road and the trees that crane over it, flimsy branches that hang down like they’re reaching.  This is a good thing because he isn’t paying enough attention to it.  His body knows what to do with the red lights and the traffic and the crow in the road he doesn’t want to flatten.  His brain doesn’t know what to do with the unexplained absence and the subsequent silence so does nothing at all.

And then he’s home.  He doesn’t remember getting there.

He eats a pre-prepared meal.  He drinks a ginger ale.  He sits in a silent room and doesn’t turn the TV on.  His phone doesn’t leave his hand except for the thirty second intervals it spends in his pocket when he needs both hands to do something.  If it rings he won’t miss it.  Won’t keep the caller waiting.

He types a message to his mom—Have you heard from Ilya?—and presses send before he realises he should have said Rozanov.  She responds quickly.  A firm, simple no that doesn’t make him feel any better.  He tries to think about the fact that his mom likes Ilya because it has been something of a novelty recently.  His something and his mother in the same room, in the same space and not clashing.  His mother reiterating once a week since the interview aired that she can’t believe she fell for it.

The thought always turns sour, though, when he remembers he can’t actually tell her, that what he and Ilya are building is too dangerous and too difficult to even give a name.  He doesn’t think that without hockey they could be normal and they would have had years of something that only feels like a fantasy right now, because he knows that without hockey they wouldn’t have a shared language.  Without hockey Ilya would still be in Moscow under the thumb of a family that has always hated him.  Shane never would have seen him, let alone seen him cry in a hotel room in Tampa.

His phone vibrates against his palm.  A short, sudden buzz.  A text.  No guarantee it is even from Ilya but he decides in the split second it takes for him to check that it has to be.

I am at your sex condo.

Shane laughs before he remembers he is supposed to be panicking.  Ilya is alive and okay and in Canada so presumably he still has a working passport.  He is in Montreal when he has absolutely no reason to be.  He’s only a short drive away.  Shane texts him back as he is pulling his shoes on.

I’m on my way.

It’s one of Ilya’s more subtle cars, in that it is black and shining under the streetlights and not violently orange and glowing all by itself.  It’s still expensive, conspicuous, out of place.  Shane can see his bowed head.  Dirty blonde curls falling over his hands and the top of the steering wheel, dull in the dim lighting.  Ilya doesn’t look up at the sound of his car coming closer or the door closing behind him.  Shane knocks on his window, knuckles on glass, and Ilya’s head turns quickly.  The hands leave the hair.  The eyes are wet.  The bottom lip is bloody.  It’s smearing onto the gold crucifix held reverently against it.

He opens the door and climbs out and Shane stands there and waits for him.  Ilya’s hands are warm on his shoulders and his gaze is penetrating, the most intense Shane has ever seen it in a completely different way to how it is always intense.

“What happened?”

Ilya tells him his dad is dead.  He says it almost flatly but the gaze doesn’t waver, doesn’t lose any of its intensity.  The grip on his shoulders tightens.  Ilya’s dad is dead and he can’t go to the funeral.  Shane nods because he knows enough now to know that he can’t; it isn’t a matter of not wanting to, a matter of avoidance.  Ilya goes to Russia and something bad happens.  It’s one of the rare non-hockey things Shane can think and not doubt.  So instead of being in Russia he is here, at Shane’s condo because he doesn’t know his home address.  Ilya’s dad is dead and it is an end, not a resolution.

They don’t go into the condo.  All these years and Shane has never even tried to finish it.  The point of it was never to finish it, he realises now, just to have it.  Just to have a place that was his and Ilya’s because he couldn’t let Ilya Rozanov into his home without the lines blurring.  The lines are beyond blurred now.  Ilya’s car is too nice to leave in this alley so it follows Shane’s across Montreal and every time Shane looks at his passenger seat he wishes it wasn’t empty.

And then Ilya Rozanov is in his apartment.  Ilya Rozanov is toeing his shoes off on the doormat and looking at everything like he has never seen anything like it before.  He smiles at Shane—small and private and honest—and takes a few steps in.  Immediately he takes up the space like he belongs in it, like it belongs to him and Shane knows he was right all along: bringing Ilya Rozanov into his home changes the shape of everything.  Something is already nebulous enough to withstand the shift.

“Is nice in here.  Looks like magazine.”  Optional articles, optional pronouns.  Language spoken to be understood, not to be correct.

“I hired a designer.”

Ilya nods, lips pressed together.  “Never would’ve guessed.”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m sorry I’m here.”  Doubt creeps in, shoulders hunch.  The neck rolls down and the chin presses against the chest, right above the crucifix.  “Just didn’t know where else to go.”

Shane shakes his head and takes a careful step forwards.  He takes Ilya by the elbows and the down in his coat crinkles.  “Here is good.  I’m glad you’re here.  I’m sorry there was nowhere else.”

Ilya makes a face.  Discomfort.  Shane can feel him tense but doesn’t feel him pull away and, at least for now, that is enough.  It’s more than either of them is used to.

Ilya lets Shane take care of him.  Lets him order him something healthy but not macrobiotic because he needs to eat even if he swears he isn’t hungry.  Lets him ask questions until the English runs out and there is something bitter about the Russian even if the words mean nothing to Shane, because of all the dead and dying things it ties Ilya to.  When the English runs out he stops talking and Shane slips into hockey because it’s familiar and it’s easy and Ilya listens.  He nods and shakes his head at the right times.  He finds hockey buried somewhere beneath the washed-out corpse of English and says “Hunter is having great season.  Pisses me off.”

“Maybe he can finally retire on a high note,” Shane says back.

Ilya laughs.

One week.  Ilya spends six days of it in Montreal and the seventh driving back.  Alexei calls just once, to say “The will.”  Ilya doesn’t wait to hear what his father has left him, what was written into the document he had penned years ago, when he was still coherent enough to divvy up his life to inheritors, before anyone knew Ilya didn’t deserve to inherit any of it.

“Keep it.”  There is nothing there he has not already come to terms with losing.  Nothing he doesn’t already know how to live without.  Alexei hangs up without thanking him and Ilya finally blocks his father’s number too.  The chapter ends with nothing resolved.  Shane’s hand is on his thigh at the time, and Ilya is wearing a hoodie that smells like Shane’s detergent, and he doesn’t understand the Russian but the look on Ilya’s face isn’t something that needs translating.

Shane spends the entire time right there with him.  Avoiding his friends because he doesn’t want to have to explain something neither of them is willing to accept that they understand.  Calling Hayden Pike to run interference because he knows the truth.  It doesn’t even bother Ilya that he does, because he doesn’t have secrets anymore.  The door is open and everyone is looking in and Ilya can’t leave the room.

He’ll be right back in Montreal the day after he drives back to Boston for a game.  The border agents who already look at his passport like it is a hastily scrawled-on napkin will be very confused by his comings and goings.  But if he stays he has to come up with some sort of explanation for why he was there in the first place and the only one he has the energy to think of is the truth.

So he drives.  It’s long and boring and cold and his hands on the wheel know not to do anything stupid but his brain can’t help but wonder about the occasional sharp turn he could take straight into a tree or the guardrail or the expansive side of an eighteen-wheeler.  He pulls over to pick up lunch at a rest stop.  He makes good time and doesn’t do anything stupid and never has to remind himself he’ll be seeing Shane again tomorrow because he can’t hold that fact anywhere other than the very forefront of his mind.  He doesn’t have to remind himself he just spent six days in Shane’s apartment because he can still smell his detergent.  Because leaving feels like losing a limb.  They had to sneak him out the front door in the wee hours like a fugitive.

When he gets home Marlow’s car is parked on his driveway.  He’s in it, frowning at his phone.

“Where have you been?”  It comes out sincere, worried.  Ilya wants to go back to when Marley was just someone he laughed with, when Ilya wasn’t a person anyone realised they should worry about.  He stalks across the living room, to the kitchen.  He grabs a can of Coke from the fridge.  He hadn’t planned on leaving so the fridge is gross.  The milk in the door has curdled.  There’s an unopened pack of chicken he’ll have to throw out.  Marlow goes quiet to let him settle back in, then, “Roz, you disappeared and none of us knew where you went.  I thought maybe you’d gone back to Russia, to the funeral…”

“Would not do that Marley.  I’m not stupid.”

“No.  But your dad just died.  And you can’t go home and you weren’t here.”

“Is not really home.  Not if I can’t go back.”  Ilya means it, but Marlow looks unconvinced.

“So where’d you go?”

Home, Ilya does not say and only allows himself to think in a moment of weakness he fails to shut out.  “Away.”

“Not good enough.”

“Marley.”

“I’m not leaving until you tell me.”

“I am grieving.  Leave me alone.”

“I’m worried about you.  The big secret is already out, yeah?  So why not tell me?”

Ilya sucks in air through his teeth.  The big secret is still very big and very secret and Marlow is scratching incessantly at the edge of it.  “To see a friend.”

“Jane?”

Ilya becomes very aware of the weight of his necklace, the pull of the chain at the back of his neck, the crucifix that sits on his skin that he feels deep in the bone of his sternum.  “No.”

“I know you guys have been talking again.”

“You know nothing.”

“I’ve seen her name on your phone.”  Then Marlow goes quiet, which Marlow does not do.  “I always wondered why you got so sketchy about her-”

“Marlow.  Do not.”

“-but then the video…”

“Please.”

“Jane’s a dude, right?”

“Ask me any other question.”

“Roz, I already know.  I don’t care.  You know that.”

“Just stop asking.”

Marlow holds his hands up.  Ilya remains unconvinced by his mimicry of surrender.  “Just tell me you were with Jane and I’ll get back in my car.  Make it believable.”

And Ilya gives up, lets it crumble.  If Hayden Pike can know everything maybe Marlow can know this much.  “Yes,” he admits, “I was with him.”

True to his word, Marlow nods and leaves.  Right out the door, into his car, down the drive and away past the trees.  The entire time he looks like he wants to say something else.

The game in Montreal.  The sound of the Bell Centre.  The smell of the ice, the hum of the crowd, the buzz of a locker room that is treading carefully but still treading.  Ilya doesn’t stare at the wall.  Nobody looks at him like they are planning on asking him to.  Most people just don’t look at him.

“Listen up,” he tells them, and because he is their captain they do, “we don’t win like this.  You ignore me and we lose.  Pull yourselves together and leave it all out there!”  The room calls back, quieter than it used to be but still responding.  Marlow stands behind him, cheering the loudest, thumping him on the back like he doesn’t think Ilya is about to break.

He waits by the locker room door, hovering just outside it with his fist raised.  “I love you,” he tells every Raider who is willing to bump their own against it on their way out, on their way to the rink.  This isn’t like what he used to do after a win, good job, I love you, good job I love you as a celebration, as sarcasm, as something nobody ever bothered to think twice about.  It’s a challenge now.  It’s him being sick of the way he hasn’t changed but the shape the room allows him has.  St-Simon doesn’t hesitate.  Connors grins at him in a way that meets the eyes.  Marlow says it back.  Carmichael scowls and keeps his hands by his sides and is the odd one out.  It doesn’t make everything—or anything—okay, but he knows this team well enough to know they’ll rise to a challenge in a way that means something.

And then the space before the game, where the ice is new and the warm ups are precise routine because athletes are all superstitious by nature, which makes the specific superstition of goalies even weirder.  Where the crowd is not quiet but isn’t yet invested.  Hollander across the ice, head down, stick-handling precise, shifting to Shane the moment he sees Ilya and almost smiles in a way that barely changes his face that Ilya doesn’t possess the self-control not to read.

Shane skates over.  Ilya meets him in the middle.  They speak in low tones and do not touch and they have years of practice at this sort of thing.  At keeping the thrum under their skin secret.  Shane does not tell him the door code or remind him of the address because he already knows them.  There are no room numbers to swap.

“You look pretty today.”  Shane’s eyebrows lift when Ilya says it, at the word pretty, the way his accent wraps around it.

“So do you.”

There is always genuine competition in every moment the two of them share the ice.  They tap their sticks, just a little, enough to get the point across, to make the ref squint but not interfere.  The focus is punctured with a certain excitement: everybody always shows up to see Hollander-and-Rozanov and Hollander-and-Rozanov always deliver so long as there is nothing in the way of them being Hollander-and-Rozanov.  There is nothing in the way now.

Shane wins the face off.  Ilya follows him up the ice, watches the puck leave his blade for Boiziau’s only moments before Marlow barrels into him, unable to stop and process before he is crashing Shane into the boards.  He winces, stays on his feet and keeps moving and, before getting back into the game, Marlow does this weird thing where he looks at Ilya over his shoulder.

Montreal makes a shot on goal. Boston blocks it.  The period keeps moving.  Fast and good.  Both sides wanting everything and neither giving an inch.

It happens in the second period.  Ilya has the puck, he sees a channel opening, he sends it, he keeps moving to wherever he may be needed next.  Everything is exactly as it should be.  The ice feels good.

And then Shane.  And then Shane dropping back to skate at his side in a way that doesn’t seem to make any sense.  And then an impact.  A body in a Voyageur’s jersey crashes into Shane, crashes into Ilya, crashes into the boards.  Everything stops.

In a living room in Ottawa two hours away from the action, Yuna Hollander is sitting on her sofa with her husband and an overpoured glass of red wine—the cheap kind, from her weekday bottle—and the same scarf she has been knitting for six months.  All ten rows of it.  She is leaning over her knees to get closer to the screen.  David is moving her hair so it doesn’t fall into the glass.  The image is a typical one.

Except for the fact that she cares about Ilya Rozanov now.  Which is not to say that she wants him to win.  Not against Montreal at least.  But he’s a smart kid, a good kid, who is a kid in the same way Shane is a kid, who is good in the same way Shane is good.  Whose father just died and who could not go to the funeral because of a video Yuna prefers not to think of in terms more specific than that.

“Come on,” she says to herself, tracing the black of the puck across the white of the ice.  She doesn’t turn to David but she does change her voice in a way that implies she is addressing him.  “Comeau is lagging today.”

Lagging is a nice word for what Comeau is doing.  Playing like shit is more honest but less constructive.  “He seems distracted,” David agrees.  The crossword he has been working on for the past hour sits on his lap, half-filled in.  All in pen.  Always in pen.  He is a careful man in the way that he doesn’t write answers in unless he is confident they’re right.  He doesn’t make his mistakes erasable because, to him, that is just permission to make mistakes.  Yuna loves this about him in the same way he loves the dropped stitches in the knitting she is never doing.

She looks at Comeau again, at the way he is wasting his ice time, wiling away minutes on the outskirts of the action.  She might be tempted to say he is waiting for something.

He finds it.

Ilya has the puck for only a moment before he’s sending it onwards.  Comeau’s trajectory doesn’t change until it’s already gone.

When it changes it changes with purpose.  It changes at top speed.  It changes in Shane’s eyeline and he must understand what Yuna can’t make sense of because he drops back to Ilya’s side.  To warn him maybe.  Shove him away if there isn’t time for a warning.  Comeau gets there only a moment after Shane does.  Top speed.  Eyes narrow.  Unapologetic.  Shane drops back to Ilya’s side to absorb some of the blow.

They go down together.  Yuna is a mother watching her son so wants to close her eyes but can’t because she needs to know how this plays out.  What happens next.

It’s a bad hit.  Both in that it makes no sense and that it makes both Shane and Ilya crumple.  Shane hits the ice, Ilya’s hand caught beneath his helmet at a bad angle.  She knows logically she can’t be hearing his wrist snap but she feels it in her teeth anyway.

She waits just one more moment.  Long enough to see that Comeau is skating away just fine.  Ilya is wincing but conscious, trying to sit up and being told not to.  Shane isn’t moving at all.

She looks at David, eyes wide, and they rush right out the door and into the car.  Ottawa to Montreal is a two hour drive and the sooner they start the sooner they get there.

All hospitals are the same.  The posters in this one are written in French.  The light is all white and the walls are all white and the floor is squeaky clean against the will of all of the dirty shoes walking over it.  The chairs are plastic and don’t pretend to be comfortable.  The nurses are kind and don’t pretend not to be tired.  They know Shane’s name because this is Montreal and he is Shane Hollander.  They know Ilya’s because they know Shane’s.  Yuna Hollander is on the approved list of visitors for both and they fail to hide that this takes them by surprise.

She sees Shane first.  Of course she does.  That’s her son.  Her baby.

When she saw him last he was sprawled on the ice, not moving.  Now he is laid out in a hospital bed that seems narrow because his shoulders are too broad for it, because his body is built for hockey not for lying in hospital beds.  He’s awake.  Barely.  Loopy on pain meds.  Mild concussion.  Fractured collarbone.  Out for the playoffs.  Could be worse.

She can’t convince herself that he is okay when he looks like that.  Too big and too small and bruised beneath his freckles.  One arm in a sling, cannula in the other hand.  But he will be.  Everyone is reassuring her that he will be, even if they’re doing it in the hedging way doctors do—“the brain can be unpredictable but it is only a mild concussion and we’re optimistic there will be no lingering effects.”  Optimistic isn’t sure but it is good enough.  Yuna has no choice but to let it be good enough.

The concussion is probably as mild as it is because Ilya’s hand bore some of the brunt of the fall.  A tangle of limbs, the pain split between them.  When she walks into Ilya’s room he is scowling at a nurse, left hand wrapped in rough, white plaster like a temporary hold, breathing in the shallow way of people whose ribs are broken, face set in the way of people who are trying not to acknowledge that fact.  “Nil by mouth,” the nurse says flatly, pointedly, before she smiles tiredly at Yuna on her way out.

“Surgery?” Yuna asks him.

Ilya groans.  He’s seemingly on much fewer drugs than Shane.  “They want to put in pin.”  Absent article.  English that isn’t performing for her benefit, simply making itself understood.  She nods and sits down in the chair by the bed because nobody else is and Shane is asleep and David isn’t leaving his side.

“Ribs?”

“Two of them.”

She nods, accepting the fact before moving onto the next question.  “Full recovery?”

“I am Russian.”

“Not an answer.”

“No playoffs.  Back with vengeance next year.”  She pretends not to hear the I am going to kill Gilbert Comeau echoing under the words.  Mostly because she is inclined to agree.

She leaves.  She drinks half a cup of crappy hospital coffee before she gives up and buys a bottle of full-sugar coke from the vending machine.  She does a lap of the hospital.  David joins her.  They let Shane sleep which is a very hard thing to do when he is sleeping in a hospital bed.  David offers to collect some of Shane’s things and Yuna stays.  Does another lap.  Comes back to Shane’s room and sees a body in the chair at his bedside through the window in the door.

Dark blonde curls turned fluffy, rumpled.  Hospital gown.  Too-broad shoulders.  White plaster.  She sticks around just long enough to see her son use his good arm to lift it so, so carefully to his lips, to see Ilya let him.  She does another lap.

She doesn’t say anything to anyone.  Doesn’t ask, doesn’t tell David, doesn’t assume she is wrong or right about what she saw, just tries to accept it, at least for the moment, for what it is.

She watches the collision over and over and over again.  She makes herself keep her eyes open even though the motherly urge is to close them.  She tries to see it.  Ultimately doesn’t have to try very hard.

There is Comeau.  Not lagging, scanning.  Not letting the hockey distract him from the anger.  He watches Ilya.  He waits for something like plausible deniability and he takes the first chance he sees like he is anxious there won’t be another.

There is also Shane, catching on a moment too late.  Wanting to intervene and being able to do nothing but get in the way.  Split the cost of the hit between the two of them.

The fall is a flurry of limbs: Comeau into Shane, Shane into Ilya, Ilya into the boards.  Until Yuna watches it at 0.5x speed and suddenly it is a realisation.  It is Ilya Rozanov understanding what is happening and how hard the ice is and how Shane, moving too fast to fall properly, is crashing into it.  It is his hand under the helmet to cushion the head.  The snap Yuna doesn’t hear and feels in her teeth,

David tries to make her put her phone down.  It’s late.  Shane will be okay soon.  Everything will be okay by next season.  The hotel mattress is too hard.  The decorative pillows were quickly relegated to the floor.  He can’t sleep because he needs total darkness and her phone is a light that is ruining it.

“This isn’t defence,” she tells him.  He loves her enough to listen.  “This is a hate crime on NHL ice.”  She is an Asian woman, mother to one of the only Asian players in the league, current council to the only queer player the league knows they have: she understands as well as anyone can what that means.  This could be a scandal but it won’t be.  It will be a denial.  The league loves those which is why it resents Ilya Rozanov.

She’s not the only one who notices it though.  On this watch-through, the final one of the night, she sticks around to watch what she never saw the first time around: the aftermath.  The ensuing brawl.

Cliff Marlow is the first to punch Gilbert Comeau.  Hayden Pike is the second.

Chapter End Notes

Okay listen it happened again. I don't wanna talk about it. This is five chapters now. I'm at peace with it.

Originally I really was planning on keeping the whole thing sort of locked in either Shane or Ilya's heads, but Yuna's POV was calling out to me so I wrote it. It felt like the best way to deal with that moment.

Also, it occurred to me after I'd written 'No point in hanging for the lamb when the sheep is right there.' that 'to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb' might be specifically British turn of phrase and an obscure and not often used one at that. I like it enough to leave it in and I think you can pretty much figure out what I mean by it, but the choice divorced from the context maybe seems like a weird one.

Also also, I think elements of this chapter slightly contradict canon. I am choosing to ignore this.

One more chapter! I promise. Even if it's 15k words (it will not be, I will not allow it to be), just one more chapter.

As always, the comments are lovely and I read them all and all the bookmarks and kudos also mean the world to me :)

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

Yuna Hollander has been in Ilya’s hospital room since he woke up.  He’d probably have more opinions about it if it wasn’t for the painkillers.  Not enough to make him outright loopy—they’ve given him a button he can press to administer more as he needs it.  He hasn’t clicked it once—but he’s hazy enough not to wonder, at least at first.  The pain in his ribs is dull and distant, as long as he doesn’t breathe too deeply, and there’s a sharp heat in his wrist he can feel increasingly as time goes on and his head gets clearer.

She’s watching him.  Closely.  Carefully.  Not saying anything while she does it.  He lets her stay until he drifts off again.

She’s still there when he wakes up for a second time, with most of the haze gone.  Or she’s there again.  The difference doesn’t matter.  She’s holding his hand.  That does.  There’s a split second when he thinks it might be his mother’s—it is cold and boney in that same familiar way—but it’s too small.  His mom’s hands were always bigger than his.

“Mrs. Hollander,” he says.  His throat is dry.

She smiles but it’s tight.  A hospital smile.  “Hi, Ilya.  How are you feeling?”

He makes a sound rather than a word in response.  The English is slow and sluggish like tar and she’ll understand him without it.  The smile tenses even further at the corners.

“Do you have anyone to look after you in Boston?”

“Don’t need to be looked after,” he says in a way that must sound an awful lot like no.  The smile turns into the thin line of lips pressed together.

“You could come to Ottawa.”

“What?”

“Ottawa.  With us.  You’ve had a rough year and I just-” she doesn’t quite sniffle but it’s a near thing and suddenly Ilya feels wide awake.  He tries to sit up and the pain crescendos and he doesn’t click the button.  “I’m not letting you do any more of it alone.”

“You already have Hollander to take care of.”

“Shane,” she corrects, tone firm but not harsh.  She’s looking at Ilya like she sees him and he feels eleven-years-old again.  Like something catastrophic is about to happen.

“Shane,” he agrees because he doesn’t know what else to say.  He hates that he has never managed to shape that vowel quite right.

“We can manage you both, I’m sure.  You aren’t toddlers.”

“My friend Svetlana would say I am worse.”

“I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge.”  Like his teammates, he supposes.  Like his teammates who are trying varying amounts not to hate him, or to hate him enough to make him away.  He swallows and it feels like there is sandpaper in his throat.

“You don’t need to be nice to me.”

“And yet.  You’re coming.  Agree now or I’ll have to wear you down.”

He sighs.  “Maybe.”

She almost smiles.  “Not good enough.  Try again.”

Ilya Rozanov in Shane’s Montreal apartment was one thing.  A big thing.  A monumental thing.  But still a thing.  Ilya Rozanov in Shane’s childhood home is something else entirely: transcendental, destabilising, utterly impossible and happening anyway.  Ilya Rozanov has never been one to kowtow to rules.  Shane can’t relate but sometimes he watches Ilya in a way that makes him wish he could.

The light in the living room is concussion dim.  They’re both weaning off the painkillers and they slept for both hours of the drive so it only starts to feel real there, on the carpet Shane spilled an entire carton of orange juice on when he was twelve, next to the closed curtains his paternal grandmother made that have always been just on the right side of ugly.  Ilya is sitting uncomfortably in the recliner nobody but Shane’s dad ever sits in because Shane’s mom told him to.  Shane is lying across the sofa and looking at him despite the pressure behind his eyes.  He tries to make sense of the image but these are two disparate pieces that don’t fit together.  That he wants to fit together so much, so desperately, that he can’t envision a world in which they actually do.  Life just doesn’t work like that.  He knows it.

But Ilya Rozanov is in his parents’ living room and wincing because his ribs aren’t quite intact and there is metal holding his wrist together because it broke in a way Shane’s fractured collarbone did not.  Because it broke so maybe Shane would get a little less hurt.  Because he couldn’t let Shane try to save him without returning the favour.

“This is weird,” Shane says, quiet because his mom is in the next room making tea and his head hurts too much for anything louder.

“I am sorry I’m here.”

“I’m not.”  Shane looks through the open door to the kitchen, to the too-bright parallel universe where his mom is stirring a spoonful of raspberry jam from a brand new jar into a cup of tea like that isn’t sacrilege.  “I like that you’re here, it’s just weird.”

“You like weird?”

“Evidently.”

“You wound me.”

Shane tries to shake his head and it feels like his skull is full of loose marbles.  “There’s nobody else like you.”

“Well, would be boring if there was.”  Ilya’s accent is stronger than usual, unselfconscious and heavy with sleep and the last of the medication he is overdue his next dose of.  The ‘w’s aren’t quite soft enough and Shane feels their roughness like stubble against his skin.  He wants to repeat them to Ilya in that same way, with that same heady warmth.  He holds back because he isn’t sure how to mimic the accent without sounding like he’s mocking it.

Shane’s mom waltzes back into the room with a mug in either hand, both steaming.  She passes one carefully into Ilya’s uninjured hand and places the other on the side table above Shane's head.  She’s smiling just an iota too wide, looking just a fraction too close.  He tries to remind himself that she knows Ilya outside of Hollander-and-Rozanov now.  She likes Ilya off the ice now.  It feels unsatisfactory as an explanation.  She hovers between them, one hand on the back of the recliner and another on the back of the sofa.

“How are you boys doing?”  It doesn’t escape Shane’s notice that she has chosen to address them on equal footing.

“Fine,” Shane says.

“Murderous,” Ilya responds.

“I’m going to kill Comeau,” Yuna agrees.

Shane winces, not because he doesn’t want to see Gilbert Comeau dead.

“I’m glad Marlow punched him,” she goes on.  “And Hayden.  People on Twitter have lots of feelings about that.”

“Hayden did what?” Shane asks.

“What feelings?” Ilya says at the same time.

“Hayden Pike doesn’t get into many fights.”  The unlike some people sits between all three of them, unspoken and understood.  It isn’t funny anymore, when you pause for just one moment to think about any of the fights Ilya has gotten into recently.  The very specific way none of them have been his fault.  “He socks his own teammate in the jaw and people take notice.  It was obviously a bad hit.  Hayden obviously thinks it was on purpose.  There are only so many conclusions to reach from there.”

“I can’t believe I have to play with him next season.”  Shane doesn’t let himself fantasise about a world in which Comeau doesn’t play, or at least not for Montreal.  The league and team management will, at most, make him issue some vapid statement and sit out a couple of games and that will be that.  Some people will be angry online.  Shane and Hayden will be angry in person.  Ilya will probably punch him at some point and nobody will be confused as to why.  The status quo will persist with the same stubborn relentlessness it does; it will continue to offer a solidity and comfort the only alternative, a precarious balancing act Shane can’t imagine anybody choosing, cannot.

“Am used to playing with people who hate me.”  Ilya shrugs and tries to pretend it doesn’t make him wince.

“I didn’t realise I was,” Shane says without thinking, most of the words spoken into the couch cushion.  “Not until the video.”  He realises a second too late what exactly he is implying when he says that.  He moves his head too quickly and his skull rattles.  He stares at his mom and she doesn’t react at all and he doesn’t know what to do with that.  He knows her too well to assume that it is because she hasn’t put two and two together.  “Shit.”  He buries his head into the couch.  “Shit shit shit.”

“Shane,” there is a hand on his calf, touching without pressing like it is seeking permission to be there rather than asserting some entitlement.  It’s how his mom touches him, like she is never sure how close he can stand for her to be but she will always take all the closeness he affords her.  He isn’t sure if he’d rather the touch be more confident or simply altogether not there.  This is often the problem.

“Oh my god.”

“Shane.  I know.”   He looks up at that.  The touch gets firmer.  The thumb moves in strokes that are almost soothing.  Across the room Ilya looks ashen in the low light.  “I know.”

You probably aren’t supposed to have big conversations when you’re concussed and on a low dose of opioid painkillers and your something is recovering from minor surgery and refusing the slightly higher dose he is supposed to be taking.  Shane doesn’t get much choice in the matter.

His mom tries her utmost to make it easy.  She says everything.  Apologises for seeing what she wasn’t supposed to.  Apologises for how hard this is all going to be for them.  For how hard it already is for Ilya.  For how she should have noticed and how she suspected and didn’t say anything and everything she missed and everything she inferred without permission.  She calls Ilya Shane’s boyfriend and Ilya doesn’t correct her so neither does Shane.  She tells them this is a difficult choice they’ve made but she won’t let anyone tell them it’s a bad one.

Ilya says it was an easy choice.  That the hard thing was trying not to make it.  Shane drinks half of his green tea in one big gulp.  It’s barely even lukewarm.

She asks how long it has been and Shane grimaces.  Her eyebrows tick up.  “Rookie year,” he says because it’s the only thing that feels honest.

“Summer before,” Ilya corrects, because when all they had for so long was stolen moments, every single one of them matters.

“I haven’t told your dad,” she says, “I won’t.  That’s yours, like this was supposed to be.  You deserve to tell someone of your own accord.  Both of you.  Please forgive me.”  And that’s that.  Shane has a headache.

There is a jar of seedless raspberry jam in the fridge beside three cans of coke and a tub of smetana his mom refuses to admit she went out of her way to pick up from the European grocery store across town.  Shane keeps staring at the collection.  The irrefutable proof of it.  He has spoken to Ilya every day since he has been here, of course, but there’s something about the materiality of it.  The physical proof Ilya Rozanov is in Shane’s parents’ house.  Is welcome there.  Is so welcome there that Shane’s mom is feigning ignorance every time Ilya tries to tell her she doesn’t need to get him anything.  That she’s already doing too much.

She says no.  That he is her son’s boyfriend and it’s no trouble and, as much as a year ago she would have been horrified at this fact, she actually likes him a lot.  He deserves more than what she can give him, but if what she can give him is smetana then she’ll do it.  He asks if she googled Russian food.  She says no comment.  Shane isn’t sure but he thinks maybe she sounds relieved.  Maybe she likes the way boyfriend sounds.  Shane does too, too much to say the word for fear of calling attention to it.  It’s funny—in a way that is not funny at all—that he was so scared of things getting serious a few months ago.  In hindsight he thinks maybe it was more about wanting something he couldn’t have.

He’s not sure if he can have it, even now, not really.  But, God, he wants it.  He wants it even if it looks like Comeau on the ice, disgusted and angry and intentional, like Dallas Kent’s broken nose that healed crooked.  He wants to break his diet by eating a single pelmeni—homemade, folded more like a gyoza than anything else, presented to him with an almost-nervousness he struggled to reconcile with Yuna Hollander’s usual demeanour—dipped in the smetana because his mom did, in fact, google Russian food multiple times.

And his dad… well.  He’s sort of incurious as a person.  Not so much unobservant as he is unwilling to interpret the things he observes for fear of going about it wrong.  He eats the pelmeni and smiles at Ilya across the table like he only half-remembers he spent half a decade hating him on principle.  He promises to share his good imported vodka as soon as Ilya is off the painkillers he is only still taking because Shane and Yuna have opinions about all the ways he tries to hide that he’s wincing.  He pops the tabs on cans of Coca Cola and Canada Dry alike before he hands them over, ignoring that neither Shane nor Ilya is so injured they can’t do it themselves.

“Wayne Gretzky, for about half of his playing career.  Five letters,” Shane’s dad reads the crossword clue aloud, not because he doesn’t know the answer but because he wants to give Shane the chance to get something right.

“Oiler,” he, his mother, and Ilya all say at the exact same time with the exact same cadence.  The kind that says I know you knew that without saying don’t patronise me.

“Six letters, Russian newspaper founded in 1912?” He reads that one like it is actually a question, tapping the back end of his pen on his chin.

“Pravda,” Ilya says, and David doesn’t spend a moment doubting it before he commits the answer to ink.

And so David accepts that Ilya is there and Shane is comfortable in his company and that is just what it is: a fact.  Like Pravda is a fact.  It isn’t in his nature to doubt it.

And it’s nice.  Except that it isn’t.  Because Shane sits shoulder-to-shoulder with Ilya but can’t hold his good hand or kiss the scar where the pin went in.  Because every night Shane goes to his very blue childhood bedroom and Ilya goes to the white and beige guest room, and at some point Shane creeps on socked feet down the hallway because Ilya won’t do it in his parents’ house, and sets an alarm early enough to make sure he is the first person awake every morning to sneak back out.  He feels like a rebellious teenager in a way that he never had the chance to.  He doesn’t feel scared in the way that he does every time he sneaks out of a room that isn’t his in a hotel swarming with hockey players, but he does feel scared.

Not too scared to sit across from his father at the breakfast bar while his mom is at the store and Ilya is in the shower, and admit to the truth because the way he is skirting it is made doubly painful by the proximity.

“Well,” his dad responds, more measured than shaky but still destabilised by the admission, by the way his day has begun with something other than coffee with cream and sugar and a thirty minute drive to the treasury office, “I can’t say I’m exactly surprised.”

It’s more than a little weird for Shane to be spending so much time in Ilya’s company and having so little sex.  Concussions and broken bones aren’t exactly conducive to getting in the mood; they aren’t used to having to be so careful with themselves or each other.  The hovering parents don’t help either.

Still, there are moments when Yuna and David are both out of the house and they have time to themselves and it feels necessary.  Like Shane is burning without the kind of physical closeness he has spent most of his life lacking and always, since that day outside that rink in Regina, craved even if he didn’t always understand what the craving actually was.  It’s soft in a way that feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.  Neither of them chose a career in hockey because they wanted to be treated gently.

Ilya is, as always, a picture on his knees.  A picture that is all Shane’s and nobody else’s.  A picture that is both so much and so little like the few frames of the video Shane had been subjected to, that is not tarnished at all by the resemblance.  Something about the fact Shane is sitting on the same bed he slept in when he was sixteen, the same bed he and his high school girlfriend disappointed each other in the few fumbling times they had bothered to try getting off together, softens the picture at the edges even as it sharpens the slow-growing sensation.

He tells Ilya in the afterglow “I used to have to close my eyes and think of hockey when my girlfriend blew me.”

Ilya laughs.  “Of course you did.  How did you not know you were gay?”

“I thought it was just hockey.”

“Everything is hockey.”

“Not you.”

“You do know I am hockey player, yes?  Best in the league.”

“You’re not just hockey,” Shane amends.  “To me.”

Ilya cocks an eyebrow and rolls onto his side.  He hides the wince well enough Shane doesn’t tell him he needs to keep taking the pills he hates.  “What am I then?”

Shane speaks two languages fluently, and approximately ten words of fumbling Japanese that made his grandmother sigh the last time he saw her and every time before.  He can’t think of a single adequate thing to say.  “Mine.”

“Possessive,” Ilya remarks, his lips parted and his eyes dark.

With the relative lack of sex there is time to do other things.  Like talk as Ilya labours around the kitchen with one working hand and Shane follows after him with a similar handicap, trying to corral the mess.  “I said I missed Medovik once.  I open pantry and your mother just so happens to have every ingredient.”

“I didn’t know you baked.”

“I don’t.”

“So, the odds of this being a disaster?”

“About 50/50.”

It is a disaster in that it slumps to the side and Ilya keeps complaining that he didn’t make the layers thin enough.  It is a success in that the whole thing disappears very quickly.  Shane eats a single delicious forkful off Ilya’s plate and thinks about taking another every time he opens the fridge to look at the jam that only gets used a spoonful at a time, whenever Yuna makes Ilya tea he never asks for but always drinks.

They play Chel in a cooperative way it was never designed to be played, sitting with a single controller shared between both of their good hands.  They lose every game they play that way except for one, which they win with something that might be divine luck.

“This is the only way I will ever beat either of you at hockey,” David tells them right after insisting they play just one more game—that’s the one he loses, mostly because he is smiling at them and the space they’re sharing rather than looking at the screen at all.

“We make a better team on the actual ice,” Shane says after the fact.

“You have fantastic chemistry,” David agrees, and Ilya turns to Shane to silently, ponderously, mouth the word chemistry back at him.

They share a single copy of the New Yorker that grows continuously more bent and worn at the corners between the four of them.  There is an article in it titled The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge which everyone except Ilya refuses to read.  He finds this out when he tries to talk about it and receives only wide eyes in return.

“I am not from Chechnya,” he tells them, like they might have forgotten.  “This would not happen in Moscow.  Chechnya is like Russia on steroids.”

“I’ve been reading about Moscow police on Human Rights Watch,” Yuna responds, her tone too level because she is schooling it to be that way.  “They aren’t even opening cases for anti-LGBT hate crimes.”

“No,” Ilya agrees, “they are not.  But I am not in Moscow either.”  There’s doubt there.  Of course there is.  Doubt about the longevity of the work permit, doubt about what the consequences would be had the injury been career-ending, about what will happen if the next one is.  Doubt about the Visa and whether the embassy will allow him to keep renewing it, about whether they will mandate he must go back to Russia to do it, regardless or perhaps even because of the very real risk it would pose to him.

Shane bites his tongue and resists the urge to point out that there is something obvious that the league and Moscow police have in common.

The copy of the New Yorker stays on the table for another week.  Shane tries to read the article three times and never makes it past the second paragraph.

It’s bittersweet to watch the playoffs when you have been eliminated from them.  Even more so when you are out on injury.  The fact that it was Shane’s own teammate’s fault—and not even by accident in any way that matters—is salt in the wound.

Ilya, warm and solid to his side, is a balm.

His mom on the other side of the couch and his dad in the same recliner as always still feels a little bit impossible, but it’s happening anyway.  He is drinking ginger ale and not trying to hide the face he makes when he steals a single sip of the supposedly nice vodka his dad and Ilya have managed to have entire conversations about, from Ilya’s glass.  He is wearing his sling and Ilya is still in a splint, but they’re both off the painkillers and the tenderness feels almost familiar in the way that a body adjusted to the way they both use theirs is always at its best when it’s a little abused.  Yuna predicted it would be the Admirals’ year before the final series had even begun and now it is the sixth game and the perfect time to prove her right.  There is more ugly medovik falling over itself on the same faded plates Shane has been eating off his entire life.  The sweet overpowers the bitter.

The first period is nailbiting.  The second is so hard-fought that it feels almost slow, like every move is a wasted one because nothing comes of any of them.  The third is over quickly and everyone on the ice has to pretend they don’t already know it.

Hunter makes a shot that breaks the enduring 1-1 tie of the first period within the first five minutes.  Two minutes after that he makes an assist that doesn’t seem like it should amount to anything but Vaughan strikes the puck out of the air and right into the net before LA’s goalie can even register the threat.  LA tries with reckless abandon to regain the lost ground and return to level footing.  It amounts to nothing.  They end the game with no goalie on the ice and a scoreboard that stubbornly continues to read 3-1.

The celebration commences outwardly at the final whistle.  The helmets and the sticks drop to the ice and the bodies fling themselves from the benches and onto each other and skates slide and voices cheer and chatter and can’t be heard at all over the clamouring of a home crowd on their feet.  Even the commentators are shouting—mostly not out of necessity.

They bring out the cup and Hunter is the first to skate his lap.

“He can retire happy now,” Ilya says.  “Finally did not crash and burn halfway through the season.”

“Asshole.”

Ilya shrugs.  “Established fact.  I embrace it.”

Shane rolls his eyes, understanding well enough that Ilya will not be able to read the gesture as anything other than impossibly fond.  He’s at peace with that fact.  He’s more at peace than he can ever remember being, which is a sad thing to acknowledge when there is still fear in the pit of his stomach.  Perpetual and incessant and always changing shape but never going away.

The other Admirals take their turn and the celebrations continue and the family and friends are let out onto the ice.  Nobody is there for Hunter.  Nobody had been there for Ilya when he had won the cup either, because they were in Russia or dead or secret and the journey was one that was not worth the trouble or one across untraversable terrain, utterly impossible no matter how badly everyone involved might want it to happen.  Shane rests a hand on Ilya’s knee and squeezes and the gesture is intimate and innocent and easy, so naturally Shane is in awe that it is even possible.

Hunter glides across empty ice, chewed up by the desperate efforts of the most important game of the year.  He looks around at the crowd and doesn’t quite manage to smile at the exuberant fans and Ilya starts to lean forwards before Shane even realises anything strange is happening.

“What is he doing?” Yuna says, like maybe she has figured it out but doesn’t want to act sure.  Because this isn’t hockey.  This is a man from the crowd being ushered down to the ice and looking terrified but going anyway.  This is Hunter smiling at him and refusing to make eye contact with any of the multifarious cameras trying to capture the moment.

“Didn’t think he had the balls,” Ilya is grinning, unsurprised.  His hand falls over Shane’s on his knee.  His palm is warm and rough.  He smells like Shane’s shampoo.

Ilya has never been to a gala that he hasn’t hated.  It’s not that he doesn’t like the complimentary drinks—because, no matter how much money he has, he learned the value of a free drink as a teenager and has hung onto it like gospel since—or dressing up for the event.  He likes to be seen.  He likes to judge the expense the organisers spent on the bar.  He likes to look around and enjoy the contrast between hockey players with faces that have taken a few too many hits and no light behind their eyes, wearing suits that do not fit that are always either black, charcoal grey, or navy blue, and their wives and girlfriends, smiling and pretty and dressed to the nines.

A woman he has never seen before catches his eye and smiles at him brightly.  It seems sincere.  Her hockey player husband sneers at him over her shoulder, the intention hard to misread.  He wonders how much her apparent support means when that is the company she chooses to keep.

He leaves for the smoking area about five minutes after he walks inside.  He’s been trying to quit again, because it feels like the sort of thing he is supposed to do as a boyfriend.  Because Shane knows about the video and still bugs him every time he reaches for a cigarette.

Trying is, of course, not the same thing as succeeding.  He manages most days without but not all.  Not today.  Today he is at a league gala, which means he is a spectacle at a league gala, and his well-tailored, sleek suit isn’t making a statement any different to the one he wore last year but people now know how to read what that statement is.  Eyes catch his, linger, give away too much or not enough.  Everyone wants to talk to him, wants his take on Scott Hunter, wants to know what it’s like to have another gay player in the league, wants to know if he knew.  Everyone wants to know if he is jealous about the way Hunter got to choose his moment, how nobody stole the choice from him, but nobody is actually willing to ask it.

There are other people in the smoking area too.  There is one woman who asks for a cigarette and a play-by-play recap of all the worst things players have said to him since the leak in a single breath.  He hands her the cigarette he just lit and leaves for the roof instead.

He isn’t alone there either but the company is more pleasant.  Just barely.

“Congratulations,” Ilya says, clicking his lighter to life and speaking from behind a corner to take a momentary pleasure in the way Hunter’s shoulders flinch at the unexpected sound.

“Jesus.  Rozanov.  Hi.  Thank you.”  Disjointed but sincere.  Ilya cringes to himself and takes a drag from his cigarette.

“Didn’t do anything,” he shrugs.  “In case you forgot, I did not choose this.”

“I didn’t.  I heard you didn’t come back to Boston after the…” he makes a face while he thinks.  Ilya takes a second to really notice him, the way his weight shifts from foot to foot and his hands reach for a stack of cue cards in his pocket just to worry the corners then put them back.  “After the attack.”

“Who did you hear this from?”

“Marlow.”

“You talk to Marlow?”

“Not usually.  He called me after I won the cup.  Asked if I knew where you were.  I can only assume he believes we have a kind of queer telepathy.”

“He is not the smartest man.”  Ilya shakes his head.  “Means well.  He sent you to check on me?”

“You’re the one who found me up here.”

“But he asked you to, no?”

“He did.  You didn’t do anything stupid?”

“Plotted.  Might kill Comeau, have not decided yet.  But I was with my boyfriend and his family.  Safe and sound, healing well, made ugly cakes.”

“What?” Hunter chokes on the sound of it.

“You are so old you have dementia?  You know I am bisexual.”

“I didn’t know you were domesticated!”

“I am a man full of surprises.  Ask Twitter.”

Hunter makes a face.  “No, thank you.”  He pauses.  “Did Comeau say anything to you?”

“Before he decided trying to kill me was more important than the game?  No.”

“And he hasn’t apologised?”  Ilya looks at him, unimpressed.  “Right, yeah.  Of course not.  You know better than I do how fucked the league is…”

“I also know you are more palatable than me.”

“Palatable?”

“Boyfriend’s dad got me word of the day calendar.”

“No, I mean, people haven’t been making me feel especially palatable recently.”

“You had cute coming out.  Family friendly.  Whole world saw me with a stranger’s dick in my mouth.  Not the same thing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.  I’m happy for you.  Is good for me too: you are better role model so people will stop looking at me to be anything more than pest.  I am entertaining, good at hockey, bad person to idolise.”

Hunter doesn’t respond to that but continues to look at Ilya’s face like he might find something new hidden in it.  Ilya drops his cigarette butt to the floor and grinds it under the heel of his dress shoe.  He bends down to tuck it into his pocket then leaves without saying anything else.

He gets another drink and finds his seat and prepares for the whole ordeal of an award show he only came to because he wanted to speak to Hunter in person.  Hunter is going to be rewarded, of course, and Ilya is going to be given nothing, because they have someone who is queer and palatable now.  Now Ilya is not the whole story so people might forget he is part of the story at all.  He tries to pretend that it doesn't make him nervous; he knows the league doesn’t want to keep him under contract if they don’t have to.  If there are not people paying attention they might just have the chance.

The person in the seat next to him is the girlfriend of one of the rookie nominees.  She keeps touching Ilya on the elbow and he is beginning to seriously contemplate the potential risks and rewards of biting her when Hunter finally takes the stage.  He looks awkward under the spotlight, toting his predictable award and his dog-eared cue cards.  Hockey players don’t carry cue cards at award ceremonies.  They barely make speeches.  This is something more, which Ilya is hyperaware of but most of the room is probably oblivious to.

It’s a good speech.  Uncomfortable in a way that is almost charming.  It makes the moment undeniable.  He thanks the Admirals and the people that took him in after the death of his parents, he thanks the idea of love and the specifics of a certain Kip Grady who is good and normal and can have something with Scott Hunter that, even now, doesn’t feel available to Hollander-and-Rozanov.

“And I’d like to thank Ilya Rozanov,” Scott Hunter says from a stage that is being televised across the US and Canada, “who has told me and everyone else that he’s not cut out to be a role model, for being a role model regardless.  To me and queer hockey players and fans who need to believe that there is a place in professional hockey for people like us.  Know that, unless you play for Boston, thanking Rozanov is the last thing anybody wants to do, so I really mean this.”  The crowd laughs politely, more of a titter really.  “He told me once that the only way you could be a queer hockey player was to be the best.  We both earned our places at the top fairly, and I personally can’t wait for him to be back and fully recovered and fighting me for it again, even if he is a player it always sucks to play against.”

It isn’t really okay that nothing is fixed, but he can see from that seat beside the stranger who feels even more entitled to touch him now that things are changing for the better, which is something.  He will be waking up alone in his hotel room tomorrow, then catching a morning flight back to Ottawa, and he’ll still be scared of his passport but maybe there will be occasional blissful moments in which everything will be okay.

Chapter End Notes

And it's done!! On chapter five which was totally the plan all along, and without the chapter being 15k words long!

You may, however, note that this is now part of a series. This is because I have decided to write a companion piece to this fic which is basically gonna be a oneshot of Cliff's POV -- so subscribe to the series if you'd like to know when I get around to posting that :)

I love the way they chose to wrap up season 1 of the show, in that it's a sort of hopeful note but they're still closeted and all the issues of the league and Russia and everything still exist and haven't been overcome. It isn't a happy ending but it's an important step in getting there. I was aiming for something similar with this.

Also, those questions are from an actual NYT crossword from 2017, and that is an actual New Yorker article from 2017. The precise timeline as far as the months go doesn't add up but we're ignoring this. Similarly, there is a Human Rights Watch article about Moscow police's failures to properly attend to attacks on LGBT activists, also from 2017 though the month doesn't make sense.