Rating:

Mature

Archive Warnings:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Connors & Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau & Ilya Rozanov

Character:

Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau

Additional Tags:

Suicidal Thoughts, Hurt No Comfort, or very little comfort anyway, Angst, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Transphobia, Gender Themes, may or may not be taking out my bad day on the creature but i assure you i do it with love, complicated family dynamics

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of for years or for hours

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-07 Words: 2,073 Chapters: 1/1

Have I Crossed the Line

Summary

2 AM Cliff is not thinking clearly. Or maybe he's thinking extra clearly. He can't decide, but either way he's upset and he's buying makeup on Ebay.

Notes

Roughly sandwiched in between the second and third part of Chapter 5 of I Have Never Known Hunger. Not sure if anyone wanted Cliff's Ebay Spiral, but he had some things to say so here it is.

It does eventually gut him, and maybe it has gutted him his whole life but Cliff hates that he can’t just live. That he will always, always, always be in that little dark section of just safe enough. That it doesn’t really matter what he wants, or thinks he wants, or could want if he was allowed to.

Bottom line: he wouldn’t be hurting anyone. Amendment: that does not matter.

Patty drags him to the mall every few months to haul things around for her and her friends, because she likes to bully him and make him do things for her but also to spend time with him, and they both pretend that’s not really what it’s about. She likes making him squirm. She likes bullying him, and letting her friends bully him to a lesser extent, and he pretends not to like it. Because it’s easy, when Cliff is so wrapped up in his own stupid meathead bullshit, to forget that his big sister loves him and she likes it when he’s around.

Patty would be upset if he wasn’t.

He wonders now if she’d see a difference. If Cliff goes through with buying the shit that keeps popping up as he’s scrolling Ebay, if he wore any of this in front of her, would that be the same to her? Similar enough not to matter?

She’s the only one he can think up a reaction for. His parents just conjure up a big blank. Maybe that’s partially because the question itself is a big blank, because he just doesn’t know what he’s even looking for. Looking at.

It’s kind of a funny thing, a joke, that if Cliff had been born a girl his name would have been Catherine. He’s never been sure why it’s funny, because it’s true-he’d apparently surprised his Dad on the second ultrasound because they’d been expecting another girl for no real reason. He’s always been glad it didn’t work out that way. He likes his name, big red dog associations aside.

The shortened version is better, though. It’s always sounded lonely to him. He hears his name and thinks about a tall dark peak that waves crash and froth against, the sound of rushing water on rock. The moment between standing and falling. Cliff.

He’s dumb, and he knows it. He gets away with it because he’s a man, and he’s a hockey player, and he has lots of money. He’s white and he has an intimidating frame and he’s handsome. He’s fine. Messing with the parts of that he could hypothetically ruin isn’t just stupid, it’s probably selfish. It feels selfish. Other people struggle with so much because the stupid horrible world fucks them over, again and again, and he can’t even be satisfied with how good he has it?

If Cliff isn’t a man, isn’t straight, isn’t the kind of handsome you don’t have to look at or think about...then he’s asking for too much. He’s being demanding. Being gross. Entitled. Asking for more, more, more, like he doesn’t have enough already.

It’s greedy.

He looks at the underwear in his cart. He doesn’t know why he clicked on it.

Cliff doesn’t want to...not be who he is, he’s pretty sure. He wants to be more of it. He wants to open up the things that are being strangled and throttled inside of him and let them breathe. Maybe they’ll suffocate in daylight. Maybe they’ll ruin him.

He wants. He wants so badly that it’s going to kill him. He’s wanted before, he thinks, and he used to-

He clicks buy now and types in earrings in the search bar.

Cliff used to dick around with needles. He was never good at it and he never told anybody. The evidence is stashed in a box in his house, taken between two homes, an apartment, and the nerve wracking year he lived in someone else’s house. The results are ugly, clumsy, proof that nothing that came from his hands could ever be beautiful.

Nobody ever found it. He’s thought about burning it, from time to time. The stupid, hideous thing with mismatched eyes and stiff legs he destroyed a pillow to stuff.

You can’t make something from nothing. He’s pretty sure that’s some kind of physical law, but he doesn’t know which one or who figured it out. But it’s true enough. Maybe the equal value thing comes into play here, maybe Cliff is already just not nice enough to destroy himself and end up with anything good, in the end.

When he imagines himself, his actual self and not what he is now, Cliff is something pretty and quick and clever. Something with teeth. Something that wanders, because it knows it isn’t wanted, but allows the world a quick glimpse every once in a while so they know what they’re missing out on. It’s not ashamed of being hungry, of being sly, of being something else.

The distance sometimes makes him ache. He longs to leave. He’s not sure what he’s leaving, entirely, but he wants to get away. To walk and walk until there are no more people and nothing around him and finally, finally, he can just stop. Just rest. Sleep, maybe.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe Cliff can finally go to sleep if he walks for long enough, far enough. He could take his poorly knit abomination with him, and bury them both in the same open grave.

Fuck it. He searches for clip-on earrings and scrolls through the results. He’s getting angry, he thinks. Pissed off. He doesn’t deserve this shit.

All Cliff wants is to curl up on his bed, nose to tail, and go to sleep. He can’t ever have that. He can’t ever have any of that. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody. He doesn’t want to ruin anything. He doesn’t even know what the hell is going on or what this is, all he knows is that Cliff Marlow is something, something he’s not supposed to be, and if he ever expresses it he will be punished.

He can’t have the kind of sex he wants. He can’t dress the way he wants. He can’t tell anyone that being a man doesn’t feel complete or finished. He can’t be anything but a big dumb male hockey player.

When Patty drags him to the mall, she likes to shop for clothes and makeup so he sees a lot of stuff. Soft dark sweaters hanging on the racks she doesn’t even look at, the long skirts that pool around the mannequin’s legs like dark water, things that glimmer and shine like gems. Not so delicate that they’d be broken by one wrong touch, but tools of a sort of artistry all the same.

He’s compared himself to chicks. It’s a bad match. It doesn’t fit. Uncomfortable. Cliff can’t even do this right.

He tries to think of what he’d even say, as he’s hitting buy now on every little shiny thing he needs. There’s a spider pendant he wants, a jacket that he wants, a little hair clip shaped like a butterfly made out of bones, a skirt that won’t ship for a week that has dark silk ruffles. No dresses have come up yet, but he thinks he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from at least putting it in the cart.

‘Hey, Patty. Um. So. Hi. Have I mentioned that I love you lately? No, I’m not dying, it’s kind of the opposite maybe.’

Terrible. Definitely not.

‘Hey...you know all that crazy gender stuff? Yeah so it’s actually hell and I think I’m in hell can you help me? Please? I’m scared.’

God no, that’s horrible. No way.

‘I just want to share something that’s been on my mind lately, and I want to ask that you don’t tell Mom and Dad because I know they will react very poorly. No, I didn’t get a girl pregnant. No, I didn’t hurt someone. No, I don’t need a lawyer. No, I promise I’m not a bad person. Please don’t think I’m a bad person. I don’t think it’s bad. I don’t want it to be bad. I know they’ll think it’s bad, I know they’ll hate me, I know everybody will hate me and laugh at me and scream slurs at me and maybe they’ll hurt me but I know it doesn’t matter I promise I’m not an idiot and I know. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll stop. It’s not okay for me to do. Not me, I’m not allowed.’

Cliff turned into the couch and let out a muffled scream into the pillow.

What could she do, really? Call the cops on him? He doesn’t think it’s illegal. Anymore. Despite what a lot of people would vastly prefer.

People he knows, some of them. People he’s related to. People he has to see at funerals and weddings and Christmas and Thanksgiving.

He’s not going to cry. Men obviously are physically able to do that because no one comes out of the womb not screaming, but they learn how to grab hold of it and choke it back and down and stop doing it. Cliff is a man, and he needs to follow the steps very closely.

When he was a kid, a really little tiny kid, he was the type to cry when he was angry. Shit just built up with nowhere else to go, so it leaked out of his face. Boys were supposed to be tiny monsters that broke things and hit people and had to be taught to hold it all in instead. Cliff just freaked out and cried and wanted whatever was upsetting or hurting or confusing him to go away. He learned early that was not going to happen, but at least he wasn’t a fucking asshole.

Hockey taught him other ways to channel it. It taught him how to use the violence he did eventually start craving.

He was still a pussy. He’d known it for sure after the accidental hit he’d given Hollander, after the sick feeling followed him around for days, after what happened in the shower when Roz had looked at him like that.

Cliff had felt so fucking bad about hurting Hollander. He hadn’t meant to. It eventually built up too far and leaked out of his face.

Thankfully, it was only Connors left there at that point. The guy had been embarrassed and awkward about it, but he’d stuck around and given Cliff’s naked shoulder a few good-natured thumps until the silent humiliation ritual his body had decided to force on him stopped. It probably would have been worse without him there.

So he could never be too mad at the guy when he was being a massive idiot. Connors was maybe the only teammate Cliff could confidently say was dumber than him, but he was also the only one he knew for sure it was safe to cry in front of.

He doesn’t think the guy would appreciate a phone call at 2 AM for the sole purpose of silent blubbering, though. Sober blubbering, at that. Gross.

This shit sucks. He can’t even retreat back into little-kid mode and say he wants his mom, because the last thing Cliff wants when he’s this fucked up is his mother. Too unpredictable. He loves her but neither of them trust Cynthia Marlow with an emotion more fragile than a concrete slab.

His Dad just sort of stands by and gives her sad glances if he thinks she’s going too far, saying things she can’t take back. “Cynthia”, he’d say, gentle and coaxing.

Cliff had grown up knowing Mom wasn’t safe, and neither was the world, and there wasn’t really a choice between them so he hadn’t chosen either.

He hates the thought that that’s why he’s like this. He doesn’t want that to be it. It brings him some small, cold comfort to think that maybe this is a part of him nobody else has been able to touch yet, and if he’s smart and careful maybe they never will. Maybe he can protect it. Maybe it’s something worth protecting.

Maybe. Fuck.

He unlocks his phone and goes back to searching. When he finds the eyeshadow palettes, he figures it can’t hurt. Not any more than the rest of it. Briefly, he lets himself imagine what he might look like wearing it. It helps.