Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Kip Grady/Scott Hunter, Scott Hunter & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Kip Grady, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

past Scott Hunter/Ilya Rozanov, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Winner's Room (Sports RPF), Trauma Recovery, Moral injury, complicity in fucked-up systems

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of winner's room

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-20 Words: 3,624 Chapters: 1/1

a not admitting of the wound

Summary

Five years later, Scott breaks down.

Notes

Whoops, I took a porn premise too seriously and wrote an unsexy sequel. Nothing explicit, but it does still revolve around the winner's room premise and all the fucked-up consent issues inherent to that setting. It won’t make much sense without reading the previous story.

The timeline is pretty loose in this one. I figure it’s technically an alternate universe on account of the winner’s room, so I just kind of did what I wanted. Scott hasn’t come out yet but Kip is living with him, and Ilya is at a location that may or may not be the cottage, open to interpretation. I think the winner’s room would fuck with interpersonal relationships enough to make things shake out differently from canon.

Title from the Dickinson poem of the same name.

Scott tells Kip about it in passing. They’re on the couch, lazy Sunday afternoon, halfway through the offseason. They’re talking about locker room traditions. The Statue of Liberty foam crown for the game MVP. Don’t step on the logo. The winner’s room. All the classic stuff.

“Wait, what?” Kip says.

Scott falters a little. “It’s just an old-school thing, a guy from each team, you meet each other in private after the game.” He shouldn’t be talking about it. He signs an NDA every year. It’s fine. Kip can keep a secret.

“To what, like, shake hands?”

Scott had hoped, somehow, that he’d just say the words winner’s room, maybe sketch out the concept a little, and Kip would get it. He’d just put the pieces together and nod solemnly and then he’d know, and then they’d never talk about it again. But instead Kip is looking at him with those sweet brown eyes, trusting and completely puzzled.

“I’m sorry, baby, you know I’ve never been a sports guy. You’re going to have to spell it out for me a little.”

“It’s, uh --” Scott’s mouth is dry, suddenly, and his throat hurts. “Well, a lot of times there’s some. Sex, stuff. Involved.”

Kip stares at him. “Wow.” He cracks a little smile. “You know, I always heard pro sports were gay, but I didn’t think hockey got that freaky with it. That’s pretty hot, actually.”

Scott sobs. One sharp, ragged noise that cuts through the afternoon sunlight. Then he folds over on himself, head between his knees. Crash position. Knuckles hard against his mouth. Shut the fuck up, he thinks, shut the fuck up and play the game. The voice of his juniors coach, for some reason.

Kip’s hand is on his back, rubbing slow circles. “Baby, baby, hey, shhh, it’s okay.” His voice comes from far away. Like he’s at one end of a long subway tunnel and Scott’s at the other, in the damp wet dark.

“It wasn’t good,” Scott says, and then his throat closes up. Somebody is crying, somebody is making disgusting animal noises. It’s not Scott because Scott isn’t there. Scott’s on the ice, listening to the quiet whooshing of his skates, the easy thump of his heart. Scott is going so fast that nobody can catch up to him.

When he comes back to himself, Kip has pulled him into his lap, his legs tucked around Kip’s hips, his face in the crook of Kip’s neck. “I love you,” Kip is saying. “I’m here, I love you, I won’t let go.”

Kip is so sweet. Kip is so sweet to him and Scott has never, ever deserved it. Ilya Rozanov’s face under washed-out fluorescent light. He’s not going to think about it. He can’t. Kip could never, in a million years, understand the winner’s room for what it is.

Kip is patting his back now, the way somebody might pat a little kid to sleep. Scott lifts his face out of his neck. The sunlight is slanted differently now. An hour’s passed, maybe more. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be,” Kip says, fiercely.

“No, I mean -- I got snot all over your shirt.”

Kip laughs. It sounds kind of watery and Scott sees that he’s been crying, too. “Well, I’m sorry, too,” he says. “I didn’t understand what you were saying, at first.”

Scott doesn’t have anything to say to that. Would prefer to never open his mouth again. He shrugs, instead, and Kip squeezes him tight and then says, “Okay. Okay! Are you hungry, baby, you want something to eat?”

Scott shrugs again. He feels exhausted suddenly, like he spent the day playing back-to-back playoff games instead of cuddling on the couch with his boyfriend.

Kip kisses him on the cheek. “I’ll make mac n’ cheese, that sound okay?”

“Sounds great,” Scott says, and rolls off Kip’s lap to let him up. Watches Kip clatter around the kitchen, pulling out pots and pans and a box of macaroni. “I love you,” Scott says, and Kip looks up, wipes away his tears and smiles.

“I love you too.” His face is wide-open, sunny even when he’s crying. “I love you so much.”

He’s so good. Scott has never deserved him.

*****

Scott fucked up, talking about it. He brought it into their home and now he can’t get rid of it. It’s in the corner of his eye all the time. It’s in their bed.

Kip is sucking Scott’s dick. He’s good at it. He swallows Scott down, takes him into his throat and looks up through his eyelashes.

Scott’s going to be sick. He looks around the bedroom for something he can puke in without doing too much damage. There’s nothing, so he pushes Kip away as gently as he can and sprints for the bathroom, hunches over the toilet. He gags but nothing comes up.

When he stands back up, Kip is leaning in the doorway with sad eyes.

“I’m fine,” Scott says. It comes out harsher than he meant it to.

“Okay, baby,” Kip says. “It’s okay, come to bed.”

They curl up naked under the sheets. Kip holds both of Scott’s hands in his and asks, “Have you ever talked to anyone else about this? A therapist, maybe?”

Scott wants to pull away, say something mean, roll over and ignore him. He breathes in and out through his nose, watches his tone when he speaks. “No. I can’t go to a therapist.”

“It would be confidential,” Kip says gently, like Scott’s an idiot. “Nobody would know.”

“You don’t get it,” Scott says, knows he sounds like a sulky teenager but can’t help it. “You’re not fucking listening to me.”

Kip takes a careful breath. “I’m sorry. I’m trying. What am I missing, baby?”

Everything, Scott wants to say. Knows it’s not fair. Keeps his mouth shut like he should’ve done this whole time.

Kip strokes his thumb along Scott’s palm, slow and soothing. “You’ve been through trauma,” he says. “It’s okay to need help. It was wrong, what happened to you.”

Ilya Rozanov, down on his knees, says, “I do anything.”

Scott slams up from the bed. Grabs his bathrobe. He can’t have this conversation with his dick out. He can’t have this conversation at all, actually. “Don’t follow me,” he tells Kip, and goes out to the living room to sleep on the couch.

*****

In the morning, Kip’s gone. A note on the kitchen counter tells Scott he went for a walk. It’s signed with a smiley face inside a heart. Scott’s chest hurts.

He goes down to the gym on the second floor of his building. It’s a good gym, was one of the reasons he bought the apartment, and he doesn’t feel like going outside to run. He gets on the treadmill and doesn’t bother to put earbuds in. He listens to the pounding of his own feet, two hundred and twenty pounds slamming onto the belt.

There’s no reason he should be thinking about Rozanov. It was five years ago now. Scott had only done what everybody else was already doing, had been on the wrong side of winner’s rooms himself. The first time he took it up the ass was his rookie year, some Florida d-man whose name he no longer remembered grunting behind him.

Rozanov had probably had worse. He’d said himself he got picked all the time. Scott remembered that clearly because of the tug of satisfaction he’d felt picturing it. Scott had gone in with honest intentions. Rozanov was the one who started brawls, who chirped everyone left and right even when he knew where he’d end up after the game. Hadn’t he got down on his knees and asked for it? Hadn’t he started it all by fucking around with Shane Hollander?

There’d been a game against Montreal a couple years later where Hollander had played like a demon. Not so much that he got sent to the box, but pushing the line. It would be just like Hollander to pitch a fit over Rozanov like that. Hollander had a fine-tuned sense of justice, and he could hold a grudge. But if he wanted to punish everybody who ever took Rozanov to the winner’s room, he had his work cut out for him. It was a long list.

Hollander had picked Scott for the exchange after that game, actually. Scott had been sort of impressed when a Metros staffer knocked on the locker room door and called his name. It was ballsy to call on a captain. Not a lot of guys did that anymore. Hollander hadn’t done anything interesting after that, though. He sat in one chair and Scott sat in another, and Hollander just stared at him. When Scott tried to make small talk, Hollander got a look on his face like he wanted to rip Scott’s throat out with his bare hands. “Shut the fuck up, Hunter.”

They’d sat in silence for ten more minutes, and then Hollander got up and left, slamming the door behind him. That was it.

Scott had lied to Kip, breaking down like that on the couch, given him the idea that Scott was some kind of victim. Maybe he had been, sometimes. His first few trips to the exchange were rough. He didn’t like to think about it. But he’d been on the winning side more and more over his career, and it was fine. It was just something you had to do, something that happened to everybody.

Rozanov had turned out fine, anyways. He was captain up in Boston now, was a force to be reckoned with. He still chirped mercilessly but probably didn’t spend much time on his knees for it anymore, because he was captain and because he scared the shit out of a lot of guys, and because Boston didn’t lose much these days.

Scott remembers Rozanov’s bloody mouth, the look in his eyes, and kicks up the speed on the treadmill. He’ll keep it together from now on. He’ll tell Kip he doesn’t want to talk about it. Kip will let it slide. He’s sweet like that.

*****

Kip does not let it slide. He comes back from his walk with a bag of groceries and a list of phone numbers scribbled on a coffeeshop napkin. “I called the RAINN hotline,” he says, which makes Scott’s vision go white, then red. “They gave me some numbers for trauma therapists in the city. You don’t have to do anything --”

“Good,” Scott bites out. “I’m not going to. I don’t want to talk about it.” He can’t believe Kip called a fucking rape hotline.

“I get that,” Kip says, “but --”

“No, you fucking don’t.” Scott knows Kip doesn’t get it, because Kip is a good person. Kip wouldn’t do what Scott’s done. Kip wouldn’t spend five years justifying it to himself. Kip wouldn’t lose control of himself and cry for sympathy.

“Scott,” Kip says, from where he’s backed up against the fridge. “You’re scaring me.”

Scott realizes he’s looming. Takes a step back, then another one. Drags his hand over his eyes. “Sorry, Jesus -- I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” Kip follows him to the counter and holds his hand.

“I just can’t talk about it,” Scott says.

Kip’s eyes are so sad, the line of his mouth so unhappy. “Okay, baby. That’s okay.”

*****

Kip asks, “There’s a farmer’s market in Prospect Park, want to go?”, and “It’s nice out today, maybe we could go down to Brighton Beach?”, and “Do you want to go for a run?”, and “Will you come to the grocery store with me, baby?”, and “I’m just going down to get the mail, keep me company?”, and “Come to bed, Scott, please?”

Scott stops leaving the building. He goes between the gym and the apartment with his hood up, works out at odd hours so nobody looks at him. Doesn’t sleep well, anyways. When he thinks about the preseason in two months, there’s nothing but static.

*****

Scott tries to sleep in the bed again a week later, because Kip had held his hands and cried and said he was worried about him and could he please, please come to bed. Their bed is warm, comfortable, nothing like the beds in the exchange rooms that were always just thin mattresses and easy-to-clean vinyl covers. He still can’t get to sleep. He waits for Kip’s breathing to turn to gentle snoring, then gets out of bed and goes to the couch.

He must fall asleep eventually, because he has a nightmare of Kip in the exchange. In the dream Kip is too sweet to understand what’s happening until it’s too late, and then he starts crying, starts looking around for Scott. In the dream Scott just watches. In the dream Scott’s dick gets hard. When he wakes up, horrified and choking on nothing, Kip is asleep on the floor next to the couch.

Scott watches him sleep. If Kip ever got within fifty feet of a winner’s room Scott would tear the rink to the ground. Tear the whole league to the ground. How do Rozanov and Hollander live with it?

“Kip,” Scott whispers, reaches down and lays a hand on his shoulder. “Wake up.”

Kip blinks his eyes open blearily. He’s a heavy sleeper, even on the floor.

“Come up here, baby,” Scott says, and pulls Kip up to lay on top of him, tucks Kip’s head against his shoulder. He’s a solid weight. Scott feels anchored by the bulk of him, by his steady breathing against Scott’s chest as he goes back to sleep.

Rozanov had been a rookie. Nineteen years old. Scott remembers being that young. It had hurt back then, when it happened to him. It had hurt Rozanov, too.

Does Rozanov dream about it? Does he wake up in the middle of the night remembering Scott’s hand in his hair, Scott’s dick in his throat? Does Hollander hold him like this and rock him to sleep?

Scott hopes to Christ he hadn’t scared the two of them away from each other. He’d wanted to, then. He got so lucky, meeting Kip. He hopes Rozanov isn’t alone now. He hopes for small mercies.

*****

Scott wakes up to watery sunlight through the window, early morning. He hadn’t thought he’d be able to fall asleep. He’s half-on, half-off the couch. Kip is nestled against him, squeezed between him and the back of the couch. He’s awake, watching Scott with his dark eyes.

Scott kisses him on the forehead. “You could’ve stayed in the bed last night.”

Kip gives him a look. “No, I couldn’t.”

“I hurt somebody,” Scott says. Holds his breath and waits.

Kip lays a hand on the side of his face, strokes the delicate skin under his eye. “I kind of figured, honey.”

Scott’s eyes are blurry. He doesn’t know when he started crying. “I’m sorry.”

“I love you,” Kip says, and Scott tries to pull away but Kip holds him there. “Hey, I mean it. I’m sorry you hurt somebody, and I’m sorry you got hurt. I still love you.”

Scott closes his eyes. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Didn’t ask!” Kip says, so cheerfully that it startles a laugh out of Scott. “Nobody deserves anybody, that’s life. That’s just life, baby.”

*****

Scott gets Rozanov’s number from a teammate who has a friend on the Guardians who has a brother who used to play for the Raiders, and still has all the numbers from the groupchat saved. He calls when Kip’s out of the apartment. It rings for so long he thinks for a minute that Rozanov won’t pick up.

“Hello,” but there he is, out of breath and half-laughing, “this is Ilya, Russia’s greatest sex machine, what do you want -- hey!” There’s a thud in the background, like somebody’s thrown something at him.

“Uh, hi. This is Scott Hunter.”

If Rozanov’s surprised, he covers it quickly. “Ah, Scott Hunter, you are calling to say you are finally retiring? You are having hip replacement? You are dying of old age and leaving your money to me?”

Scott thinks about hanging up, and then he thinks about Rozanov five years ago. How young he’d looked then, how young he still is now. “No,” Scott grits out. “I’m calling to talk about,” come on, Hunter, don’t pussy out now, “I’m calling to talk about the winner’s room.”

Rozanov goes quiet. Scott hears a sliding door open, then close again. There’s birds chirping in the background. He wonders where Rozanov is.

“Okay,” Rozanov says, finally.

“I want to apologize. I shouldn’t have -- it was wrong.”

“Okay,” Rozanov says again. There’s a long pause. “Everybody does it.”

“I’m not everybody,” Scott snaps, then feels bad. “It was still wrong.”

Another pause. “It was a long time ago.”

Scott wishes Rozanov would just shut up and take the apology. “Not that long.” And then, because Scott can’t keep his mouth shut these days, “I have dreams, sometimes.”

He hears the grin in Rozanov’s voice, then. The kid never could help himself. “Sexy dreams? You miss me, Hunter? I understand, I’ve ruined you for all other men.”

Scott sighs. Wants very badly to hang up. “Go fuck yourself, I mean bad dreams. Nightmares.”

Rozanov goes quiet again. Just when Scott thinks he’s going to tell him to fuck off, he says, “Me too.”

“About me?” Scott asks, because he’s a sucker for punishment. He should apologize again, probably. He doesn’t have any right to know what Rozanov dreams about.

“Once or twice. Not often. You were not the worst one.” He says it carefully, almost gently. Scott feels managed and doesn’t like it.

“I’m still sorry,” Scott says.

The sound of the sliding door. Rustling through a drawer or something. The sliding door again. The click of a lighter. Rozanov takes a long breath in, then out. “It’s just the game.”

Rozanov had said that then, too. Is just the game.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Scott says. “It shouldn’t be.”

“You are going to become commissioner, Mr. Hunter? You are going to change the league?”

“You, me, and Hollander,” Scott says. “That’s three captains right there.”

“Okay,” Rozanov says. “You want threesome?”

“Goddamn, you are fucking annoying,” Scott says. It comes from the heart. “Let’s say none of us let our teams participate in the exchange. That’s sixty guys who don’t go to the room. That’s not nothing.”

“You want to break your contract?”

“Fuck the contract,” Scott says. “What are they going to do, take us to court? The league doesn’t want this shit aired out in public.”

Rozanov takes another long breath, considering. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, I will talk to Hollander. Talk to lawyer, maybe. We’ll think about it.”

“Great,” Scott says, only half-sarcastically. He’s exhausted, suddenly. “Great, yeah, think about it.”

Rozanov goes quiet again. Scott pulls the phone away from his ear to check if the call’s still going, almost misses what Rozanov says next.

“I have teammate, he has kids. A little boy, six years old. Wants to be a hockey player when he grows up. I don’t want --” Rozanov’s voice breaks. For once he can’t seem to find the words.

“Yeah,” Scott says. “Me either.”

*****

After Scott hangs up the phone, he slides down to the floor and sits with his back against the kitchen cabinets. Puts his head in his hands, does some deep breathing. Visualization exercises. The puck flying into the net, the flashing red light, good goal. The sound of a solid slapshot.

All these years, Jesus. He feels old. What the fuck, he’s only thirty-two. He has plenty of good hockey left in him. Better hockey, maybe. The old guys always said the player exchange made for more wins, better motivation. Scott had repeated those excuses his whole career. Told the younger players it was just how things were done. Looking back it sounds fucking crazy.

He wants to fall asleep and wake up somewhere else, where hockey is still the game he played on a rickety backyard rink when he was eight. He used to think if he just got up enough momentum he could skate forever.

He’s not going to the room again. He hadn’t thought it through, saying it to Rozanov, but he thinks about it now and realizes he means it. They can fine him, they can suspend him, they can try to pull him up on breach of contract. Fuck ‘em. It’s not worth it anymore. It probably never was.

When Kip comes home, sweating from the summer heat and weighed down with library books, Scott goes to meet him at the door. “Hey, you,” he says, and pulls him into a kiss.

“Hi,” Kip says back, smiling and sweetly startled. He toes his shoes off, puts his books down on the counter. “How’re you doing?”

“Better now that you’re here,” Scott says, catches the quick worried look in Kip’s eyes. “Really, I’m doing okay.”

Kip studies him for a second, seems to like what he sees. “That’s good, baby, I’m so glad.” He leans up to kiss Scott’s cheek. “I was thinking pasta primavera for dinner, what do you think?”

“Sounds delicious,” Scott says. He’s starving, suddenly. He wants to sit at the kitchen island and watch Kip cook. He thinks about Rozanov, outside on a deck somewhere smoking a cigarette, listening to birdsong. Somebody nearby who makes him laugh, waiting for him. He thinks about the back hallways of sports centers, how dim and dark they are after the bright lights on the ice. The late afternoon sun in the kitchen. All the years he can’t take back. When Kip leans over the counter and holds out a spoon, Scott takes a bite.