Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov/Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Ilya Rozanov/Svetlana Vetrova

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Svetlana Vetrova, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Hayden Pike

Additional Tags:

Soviet Union, Russia, Cold War, Alternate Universe - Historical, Rivals to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Anal Sex, KGB, Spies & Secret Agents, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rough Sex, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Anxiety, Mental Health Issues, Oral Sex, First Time, Communism, Comfort Food, food insecurity, Culture Shock, Slow Burn, Unsafe Sex

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-09 Updated: 2026-04-05 Words: 110,364 Chapters: 19/35

The Vocabulary of Exile

Summary

At twenty-one, Ilya Rozanov is the Soviet Union’s most perfect weapon, a soldier of the Red Machine who has spent three years locked in a silent, jagged war on the ice with Canada’s golden boy, Shane Hollander.

When the Montreal Metros claim him as a "wasted" mid-round draft pick, the rivalry transforms from a professional grudge into a desperate lifeline. On the final night of the 1988 Calgary Olympics, he risks everything, his family, his career, and his safety, to start a new life in the West. Forced into a high-stakes billet under the roof of his bitter professional rival, Ilya must navigate a world where freedom feels like a new kind of prison.

As Ilya struggles to adapt, the crumbling Soviet empire reaches across the ocean, searching for leverage to help pull him back.

OR: What if Ilya fled Russia in 1988 to play for the Montreal Metros?

Notes

Chapter 1: Rivalry

Chapter Summary

Ilya Rozanov is a masterpiece of Soviet precision, but the static in his head is starting to crack the machine.

Chapter Notes

This chapter occurs during the 1987 Ice Hockey World Championships.

Disclaimer: The Soviet Union is my special interest area, but I am 1000% not some kind of expert, nor do I have any secret insider knowledge. I'm reading and researching a ton, but I would take any inconsistencies with reality with a grain of salt. Maybe we can just pretend that's part of the AU. To keep things fun and moving with a specific amount of pacing and drama, I couldn't obsess over every single detail. My search history has been pretty wild though.

Rivalry (noun)

1. Competition for the same objective or for superiority in the same field.

2. A state of prolonged mutual hostility. 

Example: "Hollander, lose. Rozanov, win." - Ilya Rozanov, April 1987

Vienna was gray. Ilya was used to the gray. The barracks he lived in eleven months of the year were gray. The slush on the Moscow streets he'd soon see again was gray. The faces of the men deciding his future…also gray.

Inside the locker room of the Wiener Stadthalle, the silence was absolute besides the occasional barking of the coaches. Ilya Rozanov sat on the wooden bench, his head down, staring at the floorboards. He was twenty-one years old, and according to the Western scouts whispering in the tunnels, he might be the best hockey player on the planet. But according to the men in the room holding KGB-issued briefcases, he was a socialist ideal.

He felt like a bomb. His chest was tight, a band of iron constricting his lungs. He felt the high-frequency vibration in his bones that told him he was about to shatter. He looked at his hands. They were steady, but they didn't feel like his. They felt like tools borrowed from the Central Sports Club of the Army.

"Rozanov," the coach barked.

Ilya stood. He didn't think. Thinking was dangerous. He simply let the Red Machine take over.

The ice was a blinding, pristine white under the arena lights. On the opposite side of the red line stood the Canadians. They were loud. They were messy. They leaned against the boards with a casual, arrogant ease that made Ilya's stomach turn.

And there was Hollander.

Shane Hollander wore #24. He was skating in small, effortless circles, his jersey fluttering behind him. Ilya didn't need to look at the roster to know his name. He had been looking at Shane for three years. They had met in the freezing rinks of Quebec during the '84 tour, in the humid, salt air of Helsinki in '85, and under the watchful eyes of the Kremlin in Moscow in '86. For three years, they had been the twin suns of their respective empires. Every time they met, the world held its breath, waiting to see which version of perfection would prevail. 

Shane looked like he had never known a day of hunger, never known the fear of a correctional interview, never known the crushing weight of an entire empire's reputation resting on his shoulders. He looked like he was playing because he liked it.

Ilya hated him for it. It was a sharp, acidic jealousy that burned through the gray fog.

Hollander was there, on the face-off dot. He looked perfect. It was disgusting. His Team Canada jersey was bright, his hair messy, and his eyes shifted around the arena with an individualistic hunger. Ilya couldn't stop looking at him. 

But then the puck dropped, and the world became a blur of red and white. Ilya moved like a demon. He glided, his edges biting into the ice with a precision that was terrifying. He scored the first goal at the six-minute mark. A lightning-fast snap shot that the Canadian goalie never even saw.

But Hollander was there. Every time Ilya turned, Hollander was his shadow. The Canadian was fast, matching Ilya stride for stride.

The 1-0 lead Ilya had carved out in the first six minutes felt fragile. In the Soviet system, a goal was the expected outcome of a correctly executed algorithm, a box checked, never cause for anything so indulgent as celebration. Ilya skated back to the bench, his heart hammering in a rhythm that felt disconnected from his body.

The Canadians didn't play with algorithms. They played with a chaotic, desperate energy that Ilya found both baffling and offensive. Midway through the first period, Shane Hollander stripped the puck from a Soviet defenseman who had hesitated for a micro-second too long, looking for the correct pass.

Shane didn't look for a pass at all. He drove the net with a reckless disregard for his own safety. He took a heavy slash to the shins, stumbled, and somehow scooped the puck into the top shelf while falling.

The stadium erupted. Shane punched the air, screaming something at the rafters. Ilya watched him from the bench, the static in his brain spiking. How are you allowed to be that loud? Ilya wondered. How are you allowed to be that messy and still win? Still be loved?

Ilya caught the puck at center ice. He saw Hollander coming. A freight train of Canadian entitlement. Ilya didn't swerve. He wanted the impact. He wanted to feel something real, something that wasn't the static in his brain.

The crash was seismic. Hollander's shoulder drove into Ilya's broad chest. They slammed into the boards with a sound like a gunshot. For a second, Ilya was pinned against the glass, Hollander's face inches from his. He could see the fury in Hollander's eyes, the sweat dripping off his chin, the sheer life pulsing through him. The static in Ilya's head cleared, replaced by the sharp, electric heat of Shane's proximity. It was the first time in weeks Ilya had felt like he was actually inside his own skin.

The feeling lasted about two seconds. He felt his soul hovering above the ice, looking down at two boys fighting over a piece of rubber. He gripped Hollander's jersey, his fingers digging into the expensive fabric. He wanted to scream. How is it so easy for you? Hollander shoved him back, his mouth moving in a string of English curses Ilya couldn't translate, but the tone was clear: Get off me.

The second period was where the pressure began to cook Ilya from the inside out. He could feel the eyes of the minders in the luxury boxes. Every time he touched the puck, he felt the weight of his father's career, his future, and the glory of Russia pressing down on the back of his neck like a hand.

The static became a physical fog. Ilya saw a lane, but his body felt five seconds behind his brain. He fumbled a simple cross-ice pass. A mistake he hadn't made since he was eight years old. Canada pounced. A quick transition, a scramble in front of the net, and a Canadian winger, not Hollander, but someone just as boisterous, poked it home.

Ilya stood in the face-off circle, his vision blurring. He felt like he was looking through a telescope from a great distance. He saw Hollander skate past him and give him a little shove. A cocky, capitalist taunt.

"Wake up, Rozanov," Shane chirped.

Ilya didn't know the words, but he knew the smirk. It was the ease of it that hurt the most. Shane was allowed to fail, allowed to try again, and allowed to mock his opponent. Ilya was only allowed to be a machine.

The 2-2 goal was a moment of pure, terrifying focus. It came from desperation, not joy. Ilya took the puck in his own zone. He accelerated through the neutral zone, his edges screaming against the ice. He saw Hollander coming for the check. He pulled the puck through his own legs, a move that was strictly forbidden by his coaches for being showy and unreliable, and left Hollander grasping at empty air.

He knew where the net was by heart. He fired a backhand that seemed to defy physics, tucking it into the microscopic gap between the goalie's pad and the post.

The arena went silent for a heartbeat before the Soviet section let out a measured, rhythmic cheer. Ilya didn't pump his fist. He didn't scream. He simply turned and skated to the bench, his face a mask of cold, porcelain perfection. Inside, he was screeching. His hands were shaking so hard he had to tuck them under his armpits. He looked across the ice and saw Hollander staring at him, breathing hard, his face a mix of shock and renewed competitive fire.

The game was a stalemate until the final minutes. The 2-2 tie was a failure. Ilya could feel the coach's eyes boring into his back. The air in the arena had grown stale, heavy with the sweat of forty men and the mounting desperation of an empire. With less than three minutes on the clock, the static in Ilya's head reached a deafening pitch. It was a rhythmic pounding that matched the blood thrumming in his ears.

He saw the Canadian defense shifting, a momentary lapse in their aggressive posture as they looked toward the clock. Shane was deep in the Soviet zone, fighting for a puck that wasn't there. He looked tired. Humanly, beautifully tired.

Ilya didn't wait for the coach's whistle. He intercepted a lazy clearance at the red line, and for the first time in his life, he didn't look for a teammate. He didn't look for the correct pass. He looked only at the narrow, shimmering lane of white ice between him and the net.

He exploded.

His strides were long, predatory, fueled by a jagged hatred for the silence they expected of him. He felt Hollander's presence before he saw him. The familiar, heavy thunder of #24's skates pursuing him from behind. Hollander was closing the gap, desperate to fix the mistake of the turnover. Ilya could hear his labored breathing, a frantic sound that made Ilya's own heart ache with a cold, triumphant jealousy.

Twenty feet from the net, Hollander lunged. It was a desperate, diving poke-check, the kind of move a man makes when he has everything to lose and no system to catch him. Ilya felt the wind of the stick blade move past his ankle. He didn't swerve. He leaned into his edges, his body carving a trajectory that felt like it was tearing the world in half.

He pulled the puck to his forehand, lured the goalie into a split-second commitment, and then, with a flick of his wrists that felt like snapping a bone, he dragged it back. The puck hit the crossbar with a sound like a pistol shot and deflected straight down, burying itself in the netting before the goalie could even blink.

USSR 3, Canada 2.

The final buzzer was a mercy. Ilya didn't celebrate. He stood there, his heart hammering against his ribs, waiting for the humming in his head to stop.

He watched the Canadian bench. Hollander was slumped over his knees at the blue line, his stick snapped in two across the ice. A violent, physical manifestation of a loss he was allowed to feel. Ilya watched him, the static in his brain finally, mercifully, falling silent. He had won. He had proven the system worked. As he looked at Hollander's broken stick, he realized that the win felt less like a victory and closer to a stay of execution. The tournament wasn't over. The medal ceremony was over a week away, and there were more games to be played. Ilya didn't wait for his teammates to finish their post-game rituals. He turned toward the tunnel, his skates echoing on the rubber matting.

The tunnel was a throat of damp concrete, swallowing the sounds of the arena. Ilya waited in the shadows, his breath catching in his chest. When Hollander appeared, looking battered and radiating a loud, Western fury, the static in Ilya's head transformed into a cold, singing triumph. Ilya didn't wait for him to pass. He stepped out of the dark, blocking Shane's path.

He drove a finger into the center of Shane's chest, right over the embroidered maple leaf.

"Hollander," Ilya poked. His voice was a low, raspy scrape, but there was a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. A razor-thin expression of pure, unadulterated vanity. "Lose."

Shane's eyes widened, flashing with a bewildered anger. "What? You got lucky, Rozanov. One bounce and we would have buried you. You played like a robot for two periods—"

Ilya didn't let him finish. He pointed to his own chest, his thumb hooking into the collar of his jacket with a possessive flare.

"Rozanov," he corrected, his voice dropping low. "Win."

His English was clumsy, garbled, but the blow landed. He saw the flicker of doubt in Shane's eyes. Ilya savored the silence.

"Next game," Ilya croaked, the English words tasting like iron and honey. "Hollander lose."

He walked away. Behind him, he could feel Shane's stunned, heated silence. As Ilya walked toward the Soviet locker room, he felt like a king, even if only for this moment.

That kingly glow lasted about forty seconds. It died the moment he walked into the locker room. Two men in gray overcoats stood in the corner, their faces expressionless, their presence pulling every molecule of warmth out of the air. 

One of them, a man with a thin, sharp nose and eyes like chips of flint, stepped forward. "Rozanov. Come."

And the static was back. A violent, high-pitched whine. He was still vibrating with the adrenaline of approaching Hollander, giving him a taste of his own arrogance. That adrenaline was fading quickly as he followed the men into a small, windowless office at the back of the arena. 

His coach was there, standing by a desk cluttered with Western newspapers, smoking a cigarette.

"Sit," the man with the flinty eyes directed.

Ilya sat. He kept his back straight, his chin up. If he was going to get chewed out tonight, he was going to take it like a man.

"A victory tonight," the official said, though his tone suggested he was discussing a spreadsheet error. "The State is...satisfied. For now." He leaned forward, sliding a newspaper across the desk. It was a Canadian broadsheet. Even without knowing the language, Ilya recognized the jagged logo: the Montreal Metros.

"There are reports," the official continued, "that this team—these Metros—intends to use one of their draft selections on you this June. They are making a public spectacle of it. They call it a bold gamble. We call it a declaration of war."

The official tapped the newspaper with a nicotine-stained finger. "They know you cannot leave. They know you are a soldier of the Red Army. They are choosing you as a joke, Rozanov. To show the world that they can own a Soviet hero on paper, even if they never see him in the flesh. They want to turn you into a publicity stunt."

"A wasted pick," his coach barked from the shadows. His voice was like grinding stones. "They will say your name in June and forget you by July. A ghost in their system. A name in a ledger that never hits the ice."

Ilya stared at the logo. Montreal Metros. Inside the gray fog of his mind, a single, illicit thought flared. What is Montreal like? Less gray? To the men in this room, Ilya was a symbol. To the Metros, he was a prank. For one fleeting, terrifying second, the idea of being a wasted choice felt better than being used. If he was a ghost in Montreal's system, at least he existed somewhere else besides this room.

"You will remain silent," the flint-eyed man said. "The Western press will try to find you to speak to you about this honor before the tournament ends." He spat the word honor like a curse. "You will say nothing. You are an argument for the power of the Soviet Union, and tonight, you won that argument. Do not make us regret your talent, Ilya."

The meeting was over. Ilya stood, his legs feeling like lead. As he walked out, back toward the locker room where his teammates were quietly packing their gear, the word Metros echoed in the static of his brain.

He wasn't a king anymore. He had never really been one.

He felt the pressure of the empire tightening around his throat again, and realized that if he was going to be a wasted pick in June, he might as well make sure he was the best one they ever made.

The second meeting between the USSR and Canadian teams was five days later. It was a sixty-minute exercise in mutual distaste and exhaustion. It had none of the fire of the first game. A cold war playing out on the ice, it ended in a 0-0 stalemate. 

Ilya skated through the game in a state of total dissociation. The static was so loud it felt like physical pressure against his eardrums. He moved through the motions. The perfectly angled checks, the clinical passes, the defensive positioning, but he wasn't there. 

Across the ice, Shane Hollander was fighting the puck, fighting the system, and fighting the fact that he couldn't break through the Red Machine. Every time their eyes met, Ilya saw a raw, simmering frustration in Shane. Shane was used to winning, and this tournament was stripping that from him, layer by layer.

After the final horn, the walk to the locker room was a gauntlet. The Western reporters were like sharks scenting blood in the water. They had heard the rumors. They wanted to know if the best player in the USSR was ready to become a Montreal Metro.

"Ilya! One question about the draft!" 

"Rozanov! Do you want to play in Canada?"

Ilya kept his head down, his gaze fixed on the rubber matting. His minders were a physical wall around him, their shoulders broad and their faces set in stone. One reporter thrust a microphone toward his face, and Ilya felt the urge to strike out, to scream, to say anything that wasn't a rehearsed line about Soviet collective glory.

He said nothing. He didn't even blink. He let the reporters see exactly what the Soviet authorities wanted them to see: a robot. A socialist ideal with no interior life.

The tournament ended quietly, with a cold, hollow thud. Sweden took the gold. The USSR, failing to secure the top spot, was relegated to the second tier of the podium. Canada sat in fourth, the cruelest position in international sport, watching from the sidelines, empty-handed.

Ilya stood on the silver tier, the medal feeling like a lead weight around his neck. In Moscow, silver was just a polite word for failure. He looked down at the Canadian team standing near the boards, waiting for the ceremony to end so they could escape to the airport.

He found Shane.

Shane was looking at Ilya. His face wasn't full of capitalist ease anymore. It was hollowed out, dark circles under his eyes, his Team Canada jersey looking heavy and wrong. He looked at Ilya's silver medal with a mix of envy and loathing. As the teams filed off the ice, their paths crossed one final time near the player entrance. 

Ilya slowed his pace. Shane was leaning against the concrete wall, his gloves tucked under his arm. Ilya didn't have a smirk today. The static was too heavy for vanity. But he still had the need to anchor himself to the only person who had made him feel any kind of sunshine in this gray city.

He stopped in front of Shane. The air between them was electric, charged with the shared trauma of a tournament that had broken them both in different ways. Ilya reached up and touched the silver medal around his neck, then pointed a gloved finger at Shane's empty chest.

"Hollander," Ilya rasped. The English felt like glass in his throat. "No win."

Shane's jaw tightened. He stepped closer, his breath hot against Ilya's face. "Yeah? Well, you got the wrong color, Rozanov." Ilya got the gist of that one, what with how Shane was gesticulating at the Swedish team. 

Ilya didn't flinch. He leaned in. He didn't mention the Montreal Metros. He didn't mention the June draft. He just gave Shane a look of such profound, arrogant pity that it felt like a physical blow.

"I win," Ilya said. It was a lie. They had both lost to the Swedes, but in the private war between #24 and the Red Machine, Ilya was the one standing on the podium. He didn't wait for Shane to retort. He turned and followed the gray coats into the dark of the tunnel.

The June draft was less than two months away. The Calgary Olympics were ten months away. The bus back to the barracks smelled like diesel and damp wool, and Ilya sat in the last row and stared at the window and thought about Hollander the whole way home. He realized the thing he was looking forward to the most would be beating Hollander in his own country.

Chapter End Notes

Some notes and other bits from my research on this chapter:

Ilya probably could not speak more than a few English words, definitely not fluently, due to his limited interactions with foreigners or foreign media. Essentially every minute of his life would have been managed. During trips outside of the USSR the hockey team would have KGB escorts everywhere they went.

Canada and the Soviet Union had a really hideous rivalry all through the 80s when it came to hockey. There was a fight on the ice during the 1987 World Junior Hockey Championships that cleared both benches -- every player was involved -- for twenty full minutes. All the players involved were suspended for 6 months from play.

Thoughts? Questions? Leave me a comment!

Chapter 2: Defection

Chapter Summary

Beyond all reason, the Montreal Metros are trying to draft Ilya Rozanov, and even more surprisingly he’s actually entertaining it. But the road to leaving the Soviet Union is difficult, and Ilya only knows a few sporadic words of English.

Chapter Notes

Sexual content in this chapter.

Defection (noun)

1. The abandonment of one's country or cause in favor of an opposing one.

2. The physical crossing of an international border to seek political asylum.

Example: "Whatever it takes, I will go to Montreal." — Ilya Rozanov, August 1987

June in Moscow was a suffocating, dusty yellow. But at least it wasn't gray. The air in the Central Sports Club barracks was thick with the smell of boiled cabbage. It was supposed to be comfort food, they said. The kind of thing your grandmother would have made for you.

Ilya sat on his narrow cot, staring at the ceiling. Since Vienna, the static had settled into a low, jagged thrum at the base of his skull. This life wasn't new. He had been recruited into the Red Army before his 18th birthday, and he would be twenty-one in just days. In those three years, he had learned that excellence was the only thing that kept you safe, and even that was a fragile shield. 

He thought of Maksimov, their veteran defenseman, who had been forcibly retired after a poor showing in Prague. No one saw him anymore. He thought of Kiselyov, relocated to a factory team in Siberia for ideological inconsistencies. The locker room was getting quieter. Every season, the faces changed, not through trades, but through erasures.

Ilya was getting nervous. He was a senior lieutenant, but he couldn't shake the deep, sinking feeling that his rank would not protect him. He could feel the eyes of the minders even when he was alone. He was a socialist ideal, but even ideals could be discarded if they started to crack.

When the summons came, it was to the administrative wing. Heavy oak doors and the rhythmic, aggressive clicking of typewriters. Major Ivannikov sat behind a desk cluttered with intelligence reports and Western newspapers.

"Sit," Ivannikov directed. He didn't look up. He slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. It was a translated telex from North America.

NHL ENTRY DRAFT – JUNE 13, 1987 ROUND 4, PICK 82: ILYA ROZANOV (RW) – USSR TEAM: MONTREAL METROS

"They are fools," Ivannikov said, his voice hard and cold. "The Montreal Metros have used a fourth-round selection on you. A wasted pick. They know you live in the Soviet Union, not Canada. They know you are a soldier. But they want to show the world they can claim you on paper."

Ilya stared at the name: Montreal Metros. He felt a jolt of sharp, acidic clarity. Shane Hollander had been playing for the Metros for three years. Shane was a star there. They could be teammates. For three years, Ilya had watched Hollander from across the red line, and now, he belonged to the same colors.

"They are mocking us," Ivannikov continued, finally meeting Ilya's eyes. "They want to turn you into a publicity stunt. You will remain silent. You will not answer questions from the foreign press. You are not a 'Metro.'" He spat the word.

As Ilya walked back to the barracks, the word Metros felt like a brand on his skin. He realized with a terrifying shudder that the draft hadn't just made him a prospect. It had made him a target. If the minders thought he was even considering the Metros, he would end up like Maksimov, or worse.

Yet, the thrumming in his head began to reshape itself around a new, impossible image. He imagined the locker room in Montreal. In his mind, it was bright, noisy, and chaotic. The opposite of the grim, silent halls of the CSKA. He saw himself pulling on a jersey that was blue, not the red that had been assigned to him before he was old enough to choose. He saw Shane Hollander sitting in the stall next to him.

In this fantasy, they weren't crashing into boards or snarling insults in broken English. They were a unit. Ilya could see himself flying down the wing, knowing exactly where Shane would be without looking. He imagined the ease of Shane's game rubbing off on him, softening the rigid, mechanical edges of his own. To play with Hollander would be to finally stop fighting the ice and start living on it.

The thought was a fever dream, beautiful and lethal.

Ilya needed out. He waited until the rhythmic breathing of his teammates became heavy and synchronized. Slipping out of the barracks required a sequence of movements that he had perfected over months of reckless necessity. He avoided the main gate, instead choosing to scale the chain-link fence behind the equipment shed. 

Sasha was waiting for him in the shadows of a crumbling apartment block three streets away. Ilya had met Sasha when they were very young. Twelve? Thirteen? A lifetime ago. Sasha's father was one of the assistant coaches at CSKA, and had been very involved in Ilya's early training, and still now. 

Sasha gestured at the idling Zhiguli and Ilya moved to hop in. Sasha didn't keep the car idling near the barracks. As soon as Ilya was inside, Sasha threw it into gear. "How long do you have?" Sasha asked.

"An hour, maybe two."

"Someone covering for you?"

"Volkov," Ilya nodded. "He thinks I'm with Sveta." Living in the barracks was required year round, except for a few short breaks, even for married players. Ilya's teammates were always willing to cover for each other if it meant the opportunity to get laid. Everyone assumed he was seeing Svetlana Vetrova when it was Ilya's turn to escape, which was true sometimes. Svetlana's father was a hockey legend who had retired and now worked for the government. A match between Ilya and Svetlana was the dream of both of their fathers, and Ilya genuinely liked her. Maybe even loved her. She was smart. She was beautiful. With her, Ilya was building a state-approved life. With Sasha, he was burning it down. 

Sasha drove to his own walk-up, a cramped, third floor flat. As the son of one of the Soviet Union's most loyal achievers, Sasha was provided a little more privacy than most, but the walls were still very thin. Nevertheless, as soon as the door was shut, Ilya grabbed Sasha roughly by the face and began kissing him. Devouring him. It was pure adrenaline. Ilya didn't have the patience or the time to go slow tonight. The static in his head demanded a physical outlet, and the proximity of the KGB agents who were always watching just a few miles away only sharpened the edge of his desire.

He didn't wait. He didn't ask. He reached into the pocket of his thin summer tunic, his fingers brushing against the cold, metal edges of the Vaseline tin. He flicked the lid open with a practiced thumb, the medicinal, heavy scent of the jelly cutting through the smell of Sasha's cheap tobacco.

Ilya spun Sasha around, forcing him over the edge of the small wooden kitchen table. The wood groaned under the weight. Ilya's hands were large, calloused from years of gripping a stick, and they were none too gentle as he pushed Sasha's trousers down. He worked the jelly hastily, opening Sasha up, his mind a blur of wasted draft picks and the sharp memory of Shane Hollander's eyes in the Vienna tunnel.

"Ilyushenka," Sasha gasped, his forehead pressed against the scarred tabletop as Ilya started to push inside him. "Slow down, you're—"

Ilya froze. The word slow blindsided him, momentarily cutting through the roar. His heart was hammering against his ribs, but he forced his muscles to unlock. He didn't pull away, but he stilled, his large, calloused hands softening their grip on Sasha's hips. He took a ragged, shuddering breath, burying his face in the crook of Sasha's neck.

"I am sorry," Ilya rasped, the apology sounding raw and unpracticed. He waited until he felt Sasha's tension bleed out. Even in his most desperate, danger-fueled states, he wouldn't hurt Sasha.

Sasha reached back, his fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of Ilya's neck, pulling him down. "Don't stop," Sasha whispered, his voice thin but steady. "Just...stay with me. Don't go to that place in your head."

Ilya nodded against his skin. When he moved again, the punishing edge was gone, replaced by a slow, heavy deliberation. He moved with a rhythmic, bruising honesty, every thrust a silent acknowledgment that this heat, this vulnerability, and the terror of discovery were the only things that made him real.

He kept his eyes open, watching the way Sasha's fingers gripped the edge of the table, making sure he was present for every second of it. When the end came, it was a quiet, mutual shattering. Ilya slumped over him, the slick Vaseline and their shared sweat cooling in the stagnant air.

Ilya stayed there for a long moment, feeling hollowed out, as if he had left a piece of his soul behind.

He buried his face in the crook of Sasha's neck, the smell of soap and fear grounding him. He thought of Svetlana. The polite, choreographed life they shared. With her, it was a performance for the future. With Sasha, it was different. Dangerous. Exhilarating. Ilya liked them both. The sharp, athletic wit of the woman and the thrilling vulnerability of the man. But the Soviet Union only had room for one version of Ilya Rozanov.

"Volkov thinks you are with her," Sasha said, his voice returning to a cautious whisper as he adjusted his clothes.

Ilya stood up, his joints aching. He didn't look at Sasha as he pulled on his boots. "Let him think it. It is the only thing keeping us both out of a cell."

Sasha hesitated, his fingers fiddling with Ilya's shirt. "My father was shouting on the phone. The draft. Ilyusha...would you ever consider it? Actually going?"

The lie was instantaneous. "No," Ilya said, the word cold and final. "It would be suicide."

Sasha exhaled in relief, but Ilya held him tighter, his fingers digging into Sasha's back. The lie tasted bitter. In reality, the danger of wanting Montreal was the only thing keeping him alive.

Sasha didn't speak as he drove Ilya back to his barracks. The car's engine hummed a low, mournful tune against the silence of the Moscow outskirts. When they reached the shadow of the equipment shed, Sasha kept the headlights off. "Ilyusha," Sasha whispered, his hand trembling as he reached across the gear shift to touch Ilya's knee. "Be careful. My father… he's looking for reasons to be proud of you. Don't give him reasons to be suspicious."

Ilya didn't answer. He couldn't. He just leaned over, pressed a hard, lingering kiss to Sasha's mouth. It was one last hit of the adrenaline that came from being inches away from a military patrol, then he slipped out of the car.

Scaling the fence was easier this time. The friction of the wire against his palms felt like a grounded wire, bleeding off the excess charge of the night. He dropped into the dirt, moved like a shadow past the floodlights, and slipped through the side door of the barracks. Volkov was sitting on his cot. He looked up, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across his face.

"Back already?" Volkov teased, his voice low enough not to wake the others but sharp enough to sting. "What happened? Did Sveta find her father's stash of Western perfume and knock you out? Or did you just finish before she could even unbutton her blouse?"

Ilya pulled off his tunic, the smell of Sasha's cigarettes clinging to his skin like a second uniform. "The Major wanted me back," Ilya lied easily. "Security sweep."

"Right," Volkov snorted, rolling onto his side. "Next time, tell the Major to let you stay for round two. You're vibrating, Rozanov. You're going to burn a hole through your mattress."

Ilya lay back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Volkov was right. He was vibrating. But it wasn't because of Sveta, and it wasn't because of the sex. It was because the world had just cracked open, and he could see the light on the other side.

The announcement of the Pre-Canada Cup Exhibition series, two games on Canadian soil in August, hit the Central Sports Club barracks like a physical shockwave. For the State, it was a chance to humble the NHL stars on their own ice before the tournament officially began. For Ilya, it was a countdown.

The humming in his head had reached a fever pitch since the draft notice. He was nervously excited, a neurotic energy that made his hands twitch during drills. He was going to stand across the red line from Shane Hollander again, but this time, he'd be in Shane's territory. He realized with a cold clarity that he was currently mute. If he was going to survive, he needed to speak the language of the enemy.

A week before the team was set to fly to Canada, Ilya used a rare four-hour officer's pass to disappear into the heart of Moscow. He shed his uniform for a stiff, ill-fitting civilian button-down and a pair of trousers that felt like a costume.

The Arbat District was a labyrinth of crumbling history and whispered exchanges. It was the only place in the city where the black market breathed in the open air. Ilya moved through the crowds with his head down, his instincts screaming at him to turn back. But the danger was a narcotic. Every time a militsiya patrol glanced his way, he felt that dark, electric spike of arousal lodge itself behind his sternum.

He found what he was looking for in a narrow, damp alley behind a bakery. A man with skin like yellowed parchment sat behind a folding table covered in approved Soviet poetry. Beneath a heavy, grease-stained tarp, however, lay the real commerce.

"I need English," Ilya whispered, leaning over the table. The smell of yeast from the bakery mixed with the metallic tang of Moscow's industrial lungs.

The vendor didn't look up. "Dangerous. English is for spies and traitors."

"I am neither," Ilya lied, his voice low. "I am a student."

"Students go to the state libraries." The man's eyes flickered to Ilya's hands. Calloused, powerful, the hands of a soldier, not a student. "It will cost you."

Ilya reached into his bag. He had spent days scavenging. He produced three cartons of Kosmos cigarettes. The filtered, high-quality kind only available in the officer's commissary, and a small, precious tin of imported Maxwell House coffee he'd swiped from a diplomatic reception.

The vendor's eyes sharpened. He reached under the tarp and pulled out a tattered, 1968 edition of an English-Russian Lexicon. The spine was held together by layers of yellowed tape, and the pages were the color of weak tea.

"Take it," the man hissed, swiping the cigarettes into a crate. "And if you are caught, I have never seen your face."

Ilya tucked the book under his arm, the weight of it against his ribs sending a surge of heat through his body. He walked back to the barracks with his heart hammering a heavy rhythm.

Back in his bunk, he realized the dictionary was a death warrant if found during a snap inspection. He needed a place where the minders would never look—somewhere so steeped in dogma that it became invisible. He reached for his Field Manual of Soviet Infantry Tactics. It was a thick, olive-drab tome that sat on his bedside table, a symbol of his rank and loyalty.

Using a sharpened skate blade, Ilya spent the next three nights in the dark, listening for the rhythmic boots of the sentry in the hallway. With surgical, soldierly precision, he carved out the center of the manual. He sliced through pages of troop formations and Marxist-Leninist theory, hollowing out the heart of the book. He slid the dictionary into the hollowed-out space. It fit perfectly. He could sit on his cot, apparently studying the tactical superiority of the Red Army, while actually memorizing the words he would need to survive the West.

The irony of it, hiding his treason inside his duty, fed the dark arousal that kept the static at bay. He traced the letters of the first word he looked up, his fingers trembling. Defect. The translations seemed…dark. To desert. To betray one's country. To commit treason. He closed the manual and lay back, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He would be ready for Canada. He would be ready for Shane Hollander. 

The air in Ontario didn't taste like Moscow. It was thick with the scent of diesel, lake water, and something sickly sweet, popcorn and caramelized sugar, that Ilya would later learn was the smell of a North American arena. To Ilya, it was the smell of excess. It was the smell of the enemy. He had been to Canada before, but this felt different. 

The Soviet delegation moved through the Hamilton airport like a single, multi-headed organism. They were surrounded by minders in ill-fitting suits, their eyes scanning the crowds for anyone who looked too friendly. Major Ivannikov walked at the front with Coach Tikhinov, his presence a silent reminder that every Senior Lieutenant was a soldier first, a hockey player second, and a person not at all.

Ilya clutched the strap of his duffel bag. Inside, buried beneath his damp skates and spare laces, was the Field Manual of Soviet Infantry Tactics. The weight of the hollowed-out book felt like a live grenade. He was terrified, a cold, rhythmic trembling in his knees, but beneath the fear, that dark, addictive heat was blooming. He was a spy in a city of glass.

The arena was a riot of color. Red, white, and the deep, haunting blue of the Montreal jerseys in the stands. Ilya stood on the blue line for the anthems, his heart hammering against his ribs. The static was being drowned out by the electric boom of being here.

He played with blind intensity. Every time he hit a Canadian, he felt the friction of the risk. He wasn't only playing for a win today. He was playing to prove he was worth the effort.

The interaction happened in the second period. Ilya and Shane Hollander collided at the red line, a bone-rattling hit that sent them both spinning into the boards. Shane was up first, his gloved hand catching Ilya's shoulder to steady him, or to keep him from moving.

The minders were watching from the glass, but the roar of the crowd provided a wall of sound.

"You staying in Canada?" Shane hissed, his words simplified and enunciated. His breath was hot against the side of Ilya's helmet.

Ilya's pupils dilated. He looked at Shane, seeing the intense, focused shine of his eyes. The danger of the moment, of being seen speaking to the Metros' star, made Ilya's blood turn to liquid fire.

"Rozanov from Soviet Union," Ilya replied. "Not Canada."

Shane's mouth twisted into a grim, knowing smile. He leaned in closer, his visor nearly touching Ilya's. "Until you defect."

The word defect hit Ilya with the force of a cross-check. He had spent hours in the dark of the barracks, tracing that word in his hollowed-out manual. He knew that word.

Recognition flashed in Ilya's eyes, followed by a wave of terror. He pushed Shane away, his hands shaking, and skated toward the bench. He could feel Ivannikov's eyes burning into the back of his neck.

The Soviets won 9-4, a complete dismantling of the Canadian defense, but Ilya felt like he was the one being taken apart. After the final whistle, as the team was being ushered toward the locker room, a man in a Montreal Metros polo shirt stumbled into the line of players. In the brief, chaotic moment of the collision, he shoved a small, thick envelope into the pocket of Ilya's tracksuit.

"Wait for the Olympics," the man whispered in Russian.

Ilya walked into the locker room, the weight of the envelope against his hip feeling like a live wire.

That night in the Hamilton hotel, Ilya waited until Volkov's breathing was heavy and rhythmic. He slipped into the bathroom, locking the door and turning the shower on to its highest setting to mask any sound.

He pulled the envelope from his pocket. Inside were three high-gloss photographs. The first photo was a locker room stall. It was pristine and empty, but for the nameplate at the top. In bold, sharp Latin characters, it read ROZANOV. The second photo was a blue Montreal Metros jersey hanging in that stall. The crest, the stylized 'M', looked like a shield. On the back, the number 81 was emblazoned above ROZANOV again. The final photo was an image of the Montreal skyline at night. 

Ilya stared at them until his eyes burned. The Metros were building a life for him while he was still trapped in a cage. The sheer, ruinous risk of holding these photos sent a wave of heat through his chest. Ivannikov finding them during a room sweep would mean the end of everything. he reached for his Field Manual of Soviet Infantry Tactics, opening the hollowed-out center to slide the photos beneath his tattered dictionary.

He pressed the manual tightly to his chest. It felt like the weight of the future. He looked at his reflection in the steamed-up mirror, his eyes wider and brighter than they ever were when he was at home. He knew what it would cost. "Whatever it takes," he whispered. "I will go to Montreal."

Chapter End Notes

Some research notes and other bits I found while working on this chapter:

Svetlana's father is very loosely based on Vladislav Tretiak, who was a hockey player for CSKA Moscow from 1968-1984. He was also drafted by the Montreal Canadiens in 1983, but did not defect to Canada at the time. He did join Chicago as a coach starting in 1990. I assume he's the same inspiration that Rachel Reid/Jacob Tierney used.

Ilya and Sasha don't use a condom because it would have been fairly hard to come by them, unless you were purchasing foreign, imported condoms on the black market, or, potentially if Ilya was able to purchase them abroad. There were some very thick, low-quality condoms available but they were not great. I've seen one in person and I can't see Ilya being really jazzed about using them. Due to attitudes around homosexuality and the time period, they probably wouldn't have thought about HIV/AIDS much either. It was largely considered an "American Plague". They would have had a lot of access to vaseline though! The amount of research I did on this was frankly embarrassing.

CSKA Moscow, under coach Viktor Tikhonov, required players to sleep in the army barracks due to needing to practice six to seven days a week, eleven months of the year. Tikhonov was notably incredibly concerned about defection, especially later in the 1980s and early 90s...and rightfully so...because some of his best players were defecting.

Sending images of customized jerseys or locker room stalls to convince players to defect was a real thing. It was supposed to be a “See? You’re part of the team!”

Questions? Thoughts? Leave a comment and I'll reply!

Chapter 3: Asylum

Chapter Summary

Ilya wasn't expecting a surprise gift from the Montreal Metros, but as he takes his place on Team Russia to battle it out in the Canada Cup, they make sure he receives one. Defecting is a death wish, but why does it seem more and more possible by the day? And why can't he stop thinking about Shane Hollander's charmed Canadian life?

Chapter Notes

Asylum (noun)

1. Protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee.

2. A sanctuary or place of safety for a person who is being pursued or is in danger.

Example: "He traced the word for asylum with his finger. In Russian, the translation was supposed to evoke feelings of sanctuary. Of a calm peace." - August, 1987

Calgary was a punishingly higher altitude than Hamilton. Ilya felt the sting of the thin air in the back of his throat, a dry, metallic rasp that made every breath feel insufficient. The team bus pulled up to the Saddledome and Ilya pressed his forehead against the cold glass. The building was a concrete marvel. It was a sweeping, hyperbolic paraboloid that looked like a giant horse had dropped it onto the landscape. Ilya shuddered. In six months, he was hoping to walk out of this building and not look back, assuming the West would still want him.

He was practically exploding with nerves. He felt the weight of the Field Manual in his lap like a physical burden. He had spent the flight from Ontario silently repeating the English words he had been studying in his head, tasting them like contraband. He didn’t need the dictionary to know the word for what he was doing: Treason. But he needed it to find the word for what he hoped to find on the other side, assuming there would be an other side for him.

The Saddledome was a maze. During the pre-game warmups, Ilya could not focus on the puck. He skated wide, lazy circles. His eyes tracked the red EXIT signs and the heavy metal doors that led into the bowels of the arena. He was mapping the distance from the visitor’s locker room to the loading docks. That’s how he would escape, right? To his new life? Or maybe just the route to his own execution? He told himself it was reconnaissance. He told himself he wasn't scared.

Ivannikov stood by the plexiglass. He was a silent, dark shadow in a gray suit. He was watching Ilya, his gaze dissecting him. Had Volkov tipped him off? No, couldn’t be. Ilya had helped Volkov sneak out last week. He wouldn’t betray his trust, unless the fear had finally broken him too. Ilya hammered a puck into the boards, a gunshot-like sound in the cavernous rink. He knew that Montreal would try to make contact again. The adrenaline of waiting for that moment was a hot spike in his veins. It was a dangerous arousal that made his skin feel tight. The risk of being caught looking, of scouting an escape route, made Ilya’s heart race with an addictive, ruinous heat.

The contact happened during the second intermission of their game. The Soviet line was being marched back to the dressing room like prisoners to a block. A man in a blue janitor’s jumpsuit with a wide dust mop was working the concrete floors. The man accidentally bumped into Ilya. A sharp, quick collision of shoulders that sent a jolt of electricity through Ilya’s spine. “P2,” he said in low, guttural Russian, his eyes never leaving the floor. “Gray sedan, February.” He walked away, pushing the mop, leaving Ilya standing in a wake of sudden, terrifying clarity.

Ilya’s heart leapt dangerously. He repeated the letters and numbers like a prayer, anchoring them to the map he was drawing in the back of his mind. What would happen when he disappeared? Would they denounce him? Make an example of him? Pretend it never happened?

The game was a blur. Canada played with an intense Western hunger, trying to win on their land, and they were successful. The score was 5-2. Ilya tried his hardest, using the game to vent the pressure building in his chest. His hits rattled bone, his eyes searching for Shane Hollander.

Ilya was obsessed with him. There wasn’t any other word for it. It wasn’t just the rivalry. It was how Hollander moved with a reckless grace that Ilya had never been allowed to experience. He watched Hollander and saw endless possibilities. Maybe he too could enjoy the charmed, uncomplicated existence of just playing hockey for fun. Hollander didn’t know about P2 or about the gray sedan that would be waiting. But he had to feel the way the air was pressurized between them, the way the oxygen seemed to vanish when they were together, right?

They tangled late in the third period. Shane pressed his forearm against Ilya’s chest, holding him against the boards for a moment too long. "Back to Soviet Union, right?" Shane panted, his voice a low rasp behind his visor. “Not staying in Canada?” 

Shane wasn't part of the logistics, but he could feel the specter of Ilya's intent. Ilya looked at him. His pupils were blown wide with recognition. He didn't have the English to explain the janitor or the elevator or the suffocating panic that was now part of his daily life. He only had the name of the place where they stood.

"Calgary," Ilya rasped, his eyes darting to the minders on the glass. "February. Olympics. I...see you."

That night in the hotel, Ilya sat on the floor of the bathroom with the shower running. He opened the Field Manual. He moved the photographs to the side and reached for the dictionary. Basement. Podval. Asylum. Ubezhishche.

He traced the word for asylum with his finger. In Russian, the translation was supposed to evoke feelings of sanctuary. Of a calm peace. He thought about the silence that had claimed his mother. It would claim him too if he stayed here. He was supposed to feel overwhelming pride about the Soviet Union, and he didn’t. He was suffocating. He didn’t know if Canada was any better. It was very possible he was trading one cage for another. Maybe in Canada the air would be cleaner, or maybe it would just be different.

After Calgary, the team was back in Hamilton. Ilya envied Hollander with a deep bitterness that seemed to radiate from his very heart. He was sure Hollander went home to his family between games. Probably a mother who cooked for him. Maybe even a wife who slept with him on silk sheets? Someone who called him sweetheart and ran their fingers through his hair.

Ilya did not get to go home. It was too expensive and too logistically difficult to return to Moscow in between games. Instead, they were sequestered in a series of roadside motels as far out of town as they could, specifically to keep them isolated. Ilya loved it.

Compared to the barracks, these hotels were a luxurious gift, even as the rooms were stripped down. Televisions removed. Newspapers forbidden. Phone lines disconnected. But his shoulders didn’t touch both edges of his bed, so that was something. The Canadians probably considered this place a dump, but he had his own bed that didn’t creak, a bathroom that was his own, and occasionally an hour or two of tenuous privacy. 

It wasn’t all great. To help save money and to prevent what Colonel Tikhonov referred to as ideological softening, they had their own food, straight from Moscow. Black bread, hard salami, tinned fish. The motel’s kitchenette was a canteen where they were served boiled salt beef and canned beets. The scent of a nearby McDonald’s teased him like a cruel joke. He could smell the hot tallow and salt. What would it be like to eat their food every day? When he was a Canadian, would he grow tired of it? Would he miss pickled beets? When he was a Canadian. The thought echoed within him, but he quickly tried to shake it away. He wasn't really thinking of going through with it, right?

Ilya spent most of his time at practice watching Coach Tikhonov. The man was unraveling. His hands shook when he held the stopwatch, the metal clicking against his wedding ring. Tikhonov didn’t scream anymore so much as he sounded like he was drowning. His face turned a bruised, alarming purple as he stalked the bench. He didn’t look like a tactical genius to Ilya anymore. He looked like a terrified jailer during a prison revolt.

"You move like old women!" Tikhonov’s voice tore through the rink, the spittle landing on the plexiglass in front of Ilya’s face. "You look at the stands! You look for the shiny cars! You think you are stars? You are nothing without the Union! You are assets, and I will not have my assets stolen!"

Ilya realized that he was likely not the only person being courted by western teams. He saw it in the housekeepers who lingered too long, or the janitors who appeared only once. Maybe Tikhonov had a reason to be panicked. Ilya and his teammates would be jolted awake at 3:00am, pulled into the parking lot, the Canadian air biting through their pajamas. Ivannikov paced the lines, his flashlight beam dancing over the player’s faces while they tossed the rooms, looking for contraband. Ilya would stare straight ahead, the English words he had memorized before bed burning behind his eyes like a brand. The risk of the dictionary was a physical sensation on his skin.

On September 6th, they played the Canadians again. Hollander wasn’t there, much to Ilya’s dismay. In a lot of ways, he was able to focus on the game more, when he wasn’t picturing Hollander’s charmed life. Without the distraction of the dark-eyed star across the line, he was able to treat it as a mathematical exercise. He didn’t wonder if Hollander’s house had a white picket fence. He just worried about the fact the Soviet machine was grinding its gears.

The game was a brutal and scoreless exercise for two full periods. Every time Ilya hit the ice, he felt Ivannikov’s gaze like a physical pressure on the back of his neck. His brain had a low, constant hum, a warning that the walls were closing in.

In the second intermission, the locker room was a tomb. Tikhonov sat in the center, his eyes bloodshot, clutching a clipboard so tightly the plastic began to warp. He didn't speak. He just stared at the floor, his jaw working as if he were chewing glass. The silence was more terrifying than the screaming. It felt like the air was being sucked out of the room, leaving only the smell of sweat and the metallic tang of institutional fear.

The third period was a chaotic scramble. The Canadians played recklessly and the Soviets met them with a wall-like defense. Ilya scored the second goal. It was a blistering wrist shot that felt like a release of all the air trapped in his lungs. He didn't celebrate. He skated back to the bench, his heart hammering against his ribs. In the final minutes, a scrum broke out near the Soviet net. In the tangle of sticks and gloved fists, a Canadian defenseman, a man with a jagged scar across his nose, shoved Ilya into the boards.

"The sedan is ready," the man grunted, the Russian words were mangled but unmistakable. 

Ilya froze. The contact wasn't supposed to be here. Not in a tie game. Not with the minders practically leaning over the glass. The realization that the Metros had "assets on the ice, men who played for the other side but worked for his escape, sent a jolt of pure, icy adrenaline through him. He just pushed off, his eyes fixed on the scoreboard, terrified that Ivannikov had seen the exchange.

The game ended in a 3-3 tie. A stalemate. It felt like a death sentence to Ilya. Tikhonov would make them pay for it. They all knew it.

That night, Ilya sat on the floor of the bathroom, shower running again. He was working on new words. Stalemate. Tupik. Betrayal. Predatel’stvo.

He thought about the janitor in Calgary. He thought about the defenseman with the scar. He thought about his father’s proud uniform in Moscow. He reached for his pen and, in the very back of the manual, he wrote a single word in English, his hand shaking so hard the letters were barely legible. SOON.

September 10th, the bus pulled up to the Montreal Forum. If Calgary had been a concrete marvel, the Forum was an impressive cathedral of wood, tobacco-stained history, and a brand of prestige that didn’t require a government decree to exist. Ilya looked at the bronze statues and the banners of the Metros’ past championships. This could be my home, Ilya thought. God, he would be proud if this was his home. It was beautiful. The air didn’t smell like tinned fish. It smelled like western excess in the best way.

The contact happened during a lull in practice. Ivannikov was ten feet away, distracted by a conversation with a French-Canadian official. Ilya skated toward the boards, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. A teenager in a Metros jersey, too young to be a threat, was leaning over the rail, holding out a program. Ivannikov nodded at him. Permission to sign the autograph. As Ilya reached for the pen, the boy’s hand didn't just release the paper. It pressed something heavy and cold into the palm of Ilya’s oversized hockey glove.

"Welcome to Montreal," the boy whispered in Russian, a line surely coached by whoever had sent him.

Ilya shoved the object deep into the padding of his hockey pants. It felt like a live grenade. It was a Walkman with a pair of tiny, flimsy headphones.

The game itself was a masterpiece of see-sawing scores. 3-2, 4-4, 5-5, as if the universe itself couldn't decide who deserved to leave victorious. Ilya played with a manic energy, the plastic box rubbing against his skin a constant reminder of the treason he currently was in possession of. The Soviets finally clinched the 6-5 overtime win, and the locker room was a place of relief so profound it felt like grief.

That night, Ilya locked himself in the bathroom, turned the shower to a scalding roar, and sat on the cold tile. He pulled the device from its hiding place. It was a sleek, silver Sony. There was a tape already inside. He slid the foam-covered headphones over his ears and pressed PLAY.

The tape hissed, and then a voice cut through the static.

"My name is Shane Hollander." There was a brief pause, then a different, older voice spoke in Russian. Menya zovut Shane Hollander. 

Ilya gasped. It was a lesson. The Metros' front office was teaching him how to speak. Ilya paused the tape. "My name is Ilya Rozanov," he practiced, his voice nearly inaudible. He knew the words were heavily accented even as they fell from his lips, but he could say them. Someone would be able to understand him.

"I play for the Montreal Metros." Ya igrayu za Montreal Metros. 

“We are teammates." My tovarishchi po komande. 

The word teammate in English sounded musical compared to the harsh, militaristic tovarishch. Shane's voice was bright and unaware, but the way he said the words, slowly, as if he were speaking directly into Ilya’s ear, made the static in his brain go silent. He stayed there until the water ran cold, rewinding the tape over and over. He reached for his manual and added a new word to his ledger, his hand trembling. Teammate. Tovarishch.

The move back to Ontario for the second game of the Canada Cup finals felt like a retreat. The high of the Montreal victory, which Ilya was quickly conceptualizing as his city, was smothered by the reality of the obstacles he still needed to overcome. Ilya sat in the back of the bus, the Walkman a hard, rectangular secret pressed against his thigh. Every time the bus hit a pothole, his heart stuttered, terrified the device would clatter to the floor and reveal the treason he was carrying. He kept his eyes fixed on the passing Canadian landscape. Endless trees, the bright neon of gas stations, the freedom of people driving cars to destinations they chose for themselves.

At the roadside motel, the atmosphere had shifted from disciplined to desperate. Tikhonov’s correction sessions became more frequent, his voice a raw, jagged edge that scraped against Ilya’s nerves. Tikhonov looked through them, his eyes fixed on some invisible point of failure on the wall. "If you lose," he whispered, and the quiet was somehow worse than the screaming, "You are not just losing a game. You are losing your right to be called men of the Union."

The game was a brutal three-hour marathon that felt like a slow-motion car crash. Ilya played on the top line, his shifts stretching into agonizing minutes of end-to-end sprints. He was hitting anything in a white jersey until his shoulders throbbed. By the end of the third, the game was tied. It was 5-5. They headed into overtime, the minutes scraping by agonizingly slowly. Two minutes. Then five. Then ten. Then twenty. It was still fucking tied. There were a million close calls. Hollander battled Ilya constantly, but the goaltenders were too good. Too sharp. 

They moved into a second overtime period. This was insanity. Then Shane Hollander. At 10 minutes into the second overtime, he found an opening, passed to another player, and he buried the puck. The arena erupted in a tectonic roar of capitalist triumph. Ilya slumped against the boards, his chest heaving, watching the Canadians celebrate. He looked for Hollander. He was buried under a pile of teammates, his dark eyes bright with a victory that cost him nothing but sweat. They made eye contact and Shane nodded at him. A brief, understanding jerk of the head. Did Shane know the tapes he recorded were for him?

Ilya felt a hollow, aching envy. Hollander was going home. Ilya was going back to a roadside motel to wait for the 3:00 AM rap on his door.

The final game of the series was the death knell for Tikhonov’s composure. He paced the small locker room like a caged tiger, his hands twitching at his sides.

"They are watching you!" Tikhonov hissed, his voice cracking. "The Metros. The Admirals. The Raiders. You think they want you for your skill? They want to peel you like an orange to see how the Soviet heart beats. If you fall today, do not expect a warm welcome at home."

The game was a mirror of the others. A 6-5 war of attrition. There was no overtime this time. With 1:26 left on the clock, Canada scored. The series was over. The Soviets had lost.

As the Canadians hoisted the Cup, Ilya stood on the blue line. He looked at the scouts in the stands and then at Ivannikov, who was already scribbling in his little black book. The soon he had written in his manual now felt like a desperate, ticking clock. At long last, it was time to return to Moscow. They were returning as failures. 

The night before the flight, Ilya had carefully hidden his cassette player, as well as the Field Manual. His heavy, team-issued leather equipment bag had a false bottom. It was a rigid piece of reinforced particle board wrapped in thick canvas. It was designed to protect the fabric from the sharp edges of skates or pads. With a small knife, he sliced a four-inch opening into the seam of the canvas lining. He wrapped the manual carefully with a piece of foam excised from his helmet. The Walkman was a tougher call. He had meticulously unpicked the stitching on the underside of the heavy breastplate of his shoulder pads. He carved a nest into the dense foam and gently nestled the cassette player inside. Using a needle and heavy-duty thread, he sealed his treason into the dense padding. He hoped it would be enough.

The departure from the motel was a hurried dismantling of any kind of privacy. Ivannikov and his minders conducted a final, brutal room sweep at 4:00 AM, tossing mattresses and emptying equipment bags onto the gravel parking lot. Ilya stood in the biting dawn air, his jaw set, hoping that none of his hidden items would be found. He watched as his comrades had their contraband seized. Snickers bars. Condoms. Revlon lipstick. Levi’s jeans. In Ilya's bag, nothing. His secrets held.

The team was marched toward the charter flight at the airport like prisoners to a block. As they reached the bottom of the air stairs, a man in a heavy airport parka fumbled a crate of hockey sticks, causing a momentary scramble. In the confusion, a ramp attendant slipped something into Ilya’s pocket. 

A second tape.

Chapter End Notes

Did I go to my parents' place and dig through their selection of ~vintage~ Walkman technology? Why yes I did. There was more than one from the mid to late 80s for inspo. Thanks dad!

The second final game of the 1987 Canada Cup did end with two overtime periods. Wayne Gretzky had the assist on the final goal, scored by Mario Lemieux, to break the tie. It's considered one of the most important moments in hockey history.

Chapter 4: Erasure

Chapter Summary

The pieces are falling into place, but Ilya is starting to get cold feet. Who will care for the people he loves when he is gone?

Chapter Notes

Erasure (noun)

1. The removal of writing, recorded material, or data.

2. The process of being forgotten or intentionally deleted from history, memory, or society. 

Example: "Ilya could walk out of this door, fly to Canada, and his father might never even realize his seat at the table was empty." — December, 1987

The return to the Soviet Union was a suffocating descent back into gray. The transition from the neon-lit freedom of Ontario to the industrial, soot-stained reality of Moscow was a sensory amputation. Ilya moved through his days with the automated precision of a man who had already given up. He was a phantom in a green tunic, performing the duties of the hockey captain he needed to be while his soul was currently being held for ransom by two plastic cassettes stitched into his gear.

The barracks offered no privacy. Every breath was logged, every letter was opened before it reached his hands, and every glance felt like a deposition. Ilya found his only sanctuary in the communal showers of the CSKA training facility at 2:00 AM.

He sat on the damp, concrete floor, the roar of the hot water masking the rhythmic click-hiss of the Sony Walkman. He had retrieved Volume Two from the lining of his equipment bag with extreme care, using the edge of a coin to unpick the stitches. He slid the headphones over his ears and pressed PLAY on the second tape.

It started with that voice. Shane Hollander. It was clear the recording had been made in a studio. Shane sounded bright, professional, and utterly unaware that he was participating in a clandestine extraction. To Shane, he was likely just recording a "Welcome to Montreal" PR package for the team's new prospects.

"The city is very big," Shane said, his voice light and friendly. Gorod ochen' bol'shoy

"I need to find a taxi," he continued. Mne nuzhno nayti taksi, the Russian translator followed, his voice dry and devoid of Shane’s warmth. 

"Help me, I am lost." Pomogite mne, ya zabludilsya.

“Can you take me to the Canadian embassy?” Vy mozhete otvezti menya v kanadskoye posol'stvo?

Ilya’s breath caught in his throat. Asking for the embassy. If anyone knew he had this tape, he was dead. Shane didn’t know that “I am lost” was the first step towards abandoning his home forever. This was the script of his disappearance. The way Shane said lost as if were temporary made him feel a strange sense of longing, like this would be a quick detour and not a permanent removal from his whole world.

Ilya repeated the words until his throat was raw. He was obsessed with the cadence of Shane’s voice. He didn't just want to learn the language. He wanted to inhabit the ease of his life. He imagined Shane in Montreal, sitting in a warm kitchen, eating food that didn't come from a tin, blissfully unaware that a man in Moscow was listening to his voice on repeat. Ilya looked at his own calloused hands and wondered if, once he crossed that line, he would soften into that effortless Canadian grace too. 

On the ice, Coach Tikhonov had not forgiven the loss in Canada. Practice was no longer about hockey so much as it was about systematic punishment.

"You are soft!" Tikhonov would scream, his face the color of an overripe plum. "The Canadians fed you their poison and you swallowed it! You think you are stars?"

He pushed them until they vomited, then pushed them further. Ilya took the abuse with a mechanical stoicism that seemed to infuriate the coach even more. Ilya wasn't there. He was at P2. He was in a gray sedan. He was a Metro. 

Ilya usually looked forward to the early December break. It was an opportunity to sleep in a room by himself, on a real bed, and have sex as much as he wanted. It also meant a formal dinner held by his father, Colonel Grigori Rozanov, who insisted the Soviet Union was a granite mountain that could never crumble, despite Ilya’s growing body of evidence to the contrary. 

Ilya stood in his dress uniform, the gold stars on his shoulder feeling like sharp lead weights. Thank God Svetlana was there. He was also grateful when she could serve as his buffer between himself and his father. It was perfect, until Svetlana’s father pulled her away to talk to some of his friends. 

Grigori was pinned with more medals than anyone in the room but his eyes were vacant. He sat in a velvet armchair, his hands trembling with a fine palsy. He lifted one and beckoned Ilya over, his face contorted in a mask of fury. 

“She’s late again,” Grigori hissed, pointing a shaking finger at the door. “Your idiot mother. She thinks I am a fool. She thinks I don’t know where she goes.” 

The inside of Ilya’s head was humming. “Papa, mother isn’t out right now.”

“Don’t lie for her!” He slammed his fist onto the chair. “Always lying for her. I know she’s out fucking the butcher.” Ilya’s throat went dry. His mother had been dead for nine years. He remembered the funeral. The biting wind. The way his father had refused to shed a single tear.

“Papa, look at me,” Ilya said. “Mama died. 1978. Remember?”

Grigori blinked. His rage evaporating. “In the winter. It was very cold.”

“Yes, Papa. In the winter.”

Ilya walked away then, finding his brother in the narrow hallway. He was leaning against the floral wallpaper and nursing a glass of expensive cognac. Alexei looked every bit the rising star of the Moscow police force. His uniform was pressed with a severity that mirrored their father’s old silhouette. Alexei was always the good son, following in Papa’s footsteps. Not like Ilya, who spent his youth playing games. “He needs a doctor, Alexei,” Ilya muttered, his voice low and urgent. “He thinks Mama is alive. He is coming apart.”

Alexei didn’t look up from his glass. He swirled the deep liquid, watching the light catch in the crystal. “Papa is tired. The winter has been long.”

“It is barely December,” Ilya insisted, a spike of frustration cutting through his practiced stoicism. “He didn’t recognize Sveta.”

“He doesn’t see her as much as you do.” 

“We can’t ignore this Alexei!” Ilya’s temper was getting the best of him.

Alexei met his eyes, his gaze cold and harsh. “We can, and we will. Do you have any idea what it would do to the family if people knew? Do not mention this again.”

Alexei pushed past him, a dismissive shoulder-check that reminded Ilya of the minders at the roadside motels. Ilya realized then that he was truly alone in this. Alexei wouldn't help their father because there was nothing in it for Alexei. That was the whole of it.

Ilya’s father called to him from the main dining room. Dinner. Grigori sat at the head of the table. His medals clinked softly every time he spoke. He told stories of when he was a new officer, reliving the glory days, his voice booming with a confidence that didn’t match the dead-eyed stare he gave the empty air.

"To the Olympics," his father toasted, raising a crystal glass. "To the gold that will wash away the shame of September."

"To the Olympics," everyone echoed.

Ilya raised his glass, the liquid burning like lye. In the hallway, just ten feet from the table, sat his equipment bag. He had brought it home under the guise of needing repairs. Really it was to come up with a more impenetrable place to keep the Walkman. 

Alexei played the part of the devoted son perfectly, nodding at the right intervals and refilling glasses. Ilya sat across from him, barely tasting his meal. He looked at the empty chair at the end of the table and wondered if his father was seeing his mother sitting there, or if she was still out with the butcher in his mind.

"Papa, I’ll take Svetlana home," Ilya said as the meal wound down into a haze of cigar smoke and half-finished vodka.

Grigori didn't even look up. He was busy tracing the pattern of the tablecloth with a fork, his brow furrowed as if he were mapping a power play from a decade ago. "Yes, yes. Tell your mother to lock the door when she returns."

Ilya’s heart felt like it was being squeezed by a cold hand, watching his father's finger trace the flowers in the cloth. He looked at Alexei, but his brother was already standing. The erasure was already beginning. Ilya could walk out of this door, fly to Canada, and his father might never even realize his seat at the table was empty.

Ilya liked staying in Svetlana’s apartment. It smelled like imported perfume and surrounded him like a hug every time. They had grown up together, children of the elite. It let a comfortable, weary honesty live between them. Svetlana understood his life. She was more like a sister than a lover, and was frequently his co-conspirator. He knew her secrets, and she knew his. Occasionally, that closeness turned into a casual physical intimacy. The best way to ward off the crushing expectations of their fathers.

“What is bothering you tonight, Ilyushka?” Svetlana crooned. They had made it inside of her flat, and she had draped her long arms around him in a sensual embrace. 

“My father thinks that Mama is still alive. He thought she missed the dinner because she was out fucking the butcher we used to get our pork from.”

Svetlana pulled him to sit on the bed. She shifted, propping herself up on one elbow. “He is an old man who has lived a hard life. Sometimes things slip through.”

“This isn’t slipping, Sveta, and you know it. How do you forget your wife is dead?”

“Where was your stepmother tonight?”

Ilya sighed. Polina. She was only twenty four, younger than Alexei. “I doubt she is even in Moscow.” He flopped back onto the bed. “I’m worried, Sveta. I’m worried that he’s going to wake up one day and the world won’t make sense anymore. And I...I’m concerned I won't be here to help him find his way back."

The admission hung in the air, heavy and dangerous. Ilya wasn't talking about the long hours at the rink or the trips to international games. He was talking about a permanent absence, and she knew it. 

“You’re doing it then?” Svetlana’s voice had dropped it’s teasing lilt.

“I don’t know,” Ilya lied. He did know. He couldn’t tell her about the Walkman or the plan for the Olympics. Svetlana didn’t push him for the truth. She knew the truth of it. Instead, she reached for the buttons of his uniform, pulling his body onto hers.

Sex with Sveta was familiar. Safe. It was like coming home. Ilya made sure it was good for her. He knew what she liked. The speed. The places he should touch, kiss. She arched beneath him, moaning his name, and he…wondered what Shane Hollander was doing at this exact second.

Was Shane is his fancy bed with silk sheets? Ilya imagined him in a cavernous Montreal mansion, where every room smelled of maple syrup. Sleeping peacefully surrounded by beautiful women. Was Shane’s life as effortless as his skating? Did he ever have to lie just to live his life?

Ilya closed his eyes, feeling the visceral shame of his own thoughts. He was disgusted by the way his mind had fled to Shane Hollander like a dog seeking a master. Here he was, with a beautiful woman who loved him, a woman who was the only person in the world who truly understood the weight of his uniform, and he was thinking of a Canadian he hardly knew.

Svetlana felt the shift. She always did. She was the only one who could hear the static hum beneath his skin. She tightened her grip on his shoulders, her nails digging in just enough to anchor him back to the room.

"Ilya," she whispered, her voice sharp enough to cut through the fantasy of Montreal. "Look at me. Not the ceiling. Not the window. Look at me."

He forced his eyes to meet hers. She was flushed, her hair fanned out across the pillow. She looked at him with a fierce clarity that made him feel exposed.

"Stay here," she commanded, her breath hot against his jaw. "You are in my bed. Be here with me."

It was the same pull Sasha had used, the same tether to the present. Ilya exhaled, a ragged sound of surrender, and let the image of Shane's mansion dissolve into the gray shadows of the flat. For a few more minutes, he allowed himself to be nothing more than a normal man in a room with a woman he loved.

When it was over, Svetlana curled into his side, her breathing slowing into a satisfied rhythm. Ilya lay there in the dark, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He felt like a traitor twice over. Once to the State he was planning to abandon, and once to Sveta, holding tight to him. He would be leaving her behind too, he thought with a pang. Would they speak again?

"Ilya?" Svetlana’s voice was a soft whisper, breaking the silence of the room. She reached up, her fingers tracing the jagged scar on his shoulder. "Have you seen Sasha lately? He’s been...quiet."

The mention of Sasha hit him like a cross-check to the throat. If Sasha was quiet, it meant he was scared. If Sasha was quiet, it meant the walls were closing in on both of them.

"Not in a few months. I am sure he is laying low," Ilya rasped, his voice thick with a sudden, crushing guilt. "He is being careful. We all are."

Svetlana didn’t push further. Ilya exhaled in a ragged sound of surrender, allowing the image of Shane’s mansion to dissolve into the gray shadows of the room. 

The break always felt too short. Before Ilya knew it, he wasn’t in the warm arms of Svetlana. He was inside the Luzhniki Palace of Sports. The Izvestia Trophy was a round robin with just six teams, so he would only play each team once. He was high off of the first two wins, a 10-1 slaughter of West Germany, and a more modest 4-1 against Finland. But this was the game he was really interested in. Canada. 

The Ministry had spared no expense for the visitors. As Ilya skated his warm-up laps, he could see the performative opulence every corner of the arena had been given. The ice was perfectly white, the boards scrubbed of every single puck mark. The air in the VIP boxes smelled impossibly of fresh oranges and expensive French tobacco. It made him feel ill. The abundance was a fragile shell of prosperity designed to trick everyone into thinking the Union was flourishing. Ilya had received one single orange last year on New Year’s, and he knew how much better off he was than so many others. And there was a pile of two dozen of them, right there. Every time Ilya saw a Canadian official biting into a piece of smoked sturgeon, he felt a wave of moral vertigo. It was a theft. Taking the best of a starving nation to buy the respect of the rest of the world. 

This tournament felt more intense. Ilya had been given his very own attendant who behaved like his shadow, never leaving is line of sight. A new and intensifying paranoia took root in his chest. Did they know about the tapes? About the plan? About his father’s failing mind? The hum in his brain peaked when the Canadians took the ice in their bleached white jerseys, a stark contrast to the crimson of his own. 

Hollander looked pale, is dark eyes shadowed. They briefly crossed paths at the red line, a deliberate collision of their respective orbits. The minder was watching from the bench, but the roar of the crowd gave them a momentary veil. Shane skated close enough that their jerseys brushed, his voice a low rumble. 

“Ready for the Olympics?” he asked. Ilya’s heart felt like it was going to explode. How much did he know? Was this a test?

“Olympics, very good, yes. Rozanov to win gold.” He managed a smirk.

Ilya was pleased that Shane seemed to understand him, but the fear still gripped his stomach like a vice. He had a thousand questions for Hollander. Do you have to hide your books? Your cassettes? Does your father know who you are? Does the air in Montreal always smell like candy?

“Maybe Canada will win.”

“Maybe,” Ilya repeated. “No.”

Shane grinned at him. It was gorgeous. Carefree. 

“Canada Cup,” Ilya asked. "Why…not play?” Where had Hollander been? Shane’s grin didn't vanish, but it shifted. The carefreeness flickered, replaced by a momentary flash of professional bruising. He looked surprised that Ilya had even noticed, or that he cared enough to ask months later.

“Injured,” Shane said, his voice dropping as he matched Ilya’s pace. He gestured at his shoulder. “Coach said no.”

In Shane’s world, a shoulder injury was a reason to sit out, a temporary setback managed with ice and rest. In Ilya’s world, an injury was a vulnerability to be hidden, a crack in the armor. Ilya had played on broken bones and sprains more than once. To hear Shane say it so casually, as if his body belonged to himself, made Ilya’s stomach turn.

“Injured.” Ilya swirled the word on his tongue. “Good now?”

“Yes, good now. Ready for Calgary.”

“I see you there.” He wanted to ask Shane about the tapes, about the way his father’s mind was turning into a snowstorm, about the shadow-minder currently burning a hole in his back. Instead, he just skated away.

The game was brutal. Canada played with a hungry energy that didn’t suit the script the Soviets were trying to follow. Ilya struggled to keep up, constantly tracking number 24. The score sat at 2-2 late in the third, but the feeling of impending failure was creeping in. In the final minutes, one of the Canadian wingers passed the puck to Hollander, and the puck hissed past the Soviet goaltender. The buzzer seemed to shatter the arena. 

3-2, Canada.

The Soviet team lined up for the post-game handshake. The Machine had been broken on home ice, and the air in the Luzhniki felt thin, as if the oxygen were being sucked out of the room by the Ministry's disappointment. When Ilya reached number 24, he searched Hollander’s face for a sign. A wink, a meaningful grip, a hidden package. But he just looked like a kid who had won a hockey game. He looked tired, sweaty, and genuinely thrilled.

“Good game, Rozanov,” Shane said, his voice bright and easy. He shook Ilya’s hand with a firm, uncomplicated grip. No secret handoff. No whispered instructions. He just moved on to the next player, leaving Ilya standing in the middle of the ice with his heart hammering against his ribs. “See you in Calgary.”

The handshake line moved on without him for a half-second before Ilya collected himself and followed. Had he imagined it all? Did Shane know about the secret plans? Apparently not. Ilya felt…abandoned? Had he hoped that Hollander was part of the plan?

It wasn't until they were back at the barracks that Ilya found it. He was pulling his gear into his bag, when his fingers brushed something stiff inside his spare glove. His handler would have tossed his bag, his locker, his coat, but maybe would have avoided the disgusting, sweat-stained hockey glove.

He didn't look down. He waited until he was under his blankets at 3:00 AM to pull out the items. There were two things. First, a third tape. Ilya’s heart soared. Second, a tight roll of paper, held together by a thin rubber band. Ilya felt the texture with his calloused fingertips. It wasn't the rough, flimsy paper of the ruble. It was smooth, crisp, and had a distinct, linen-like quality. American Dollars. Five hundred of them. This amount of money was enough to get him ten years in a labor camp. If he was caught, his life was over. But it was a miracle. It was the power to bribe a border guard, to buy a car, to disappear. It was the most dangerous thing he had ever touched. He tucked the money into the hollowed-out heel of his dress boots and padded to the shower to listen to what he suspected was his final tape. The firing squad, he thought, was starting to feel very real.

The tape started with a sharp click-hiss. Then, the voice. It was Shane, but he sounded bored, as if he were reading from a dry textbook in a small, cramped room. It lacked the professional polish of the previous tapes. You could hear the distant scrape of a chair and the faint sound of a television in the next room.

To anyone listening, it was perfectly, painfully innocent. It was just a list of phrases for a tourist who didn't want to get lost in a new city. But to Ilya, who had spent months mapping out the geography of his own disappearance, every word felt like a coded instruction.

"The weather is very cold today." Segodnya ochen' kholodnaya pogoda.

"I have lost my group." Ya poteryal svoyu gruppu.

"Where is the nearest taxi stand?" Gde nakhoditsya blizhayshaya stoyanka taksi?

"Can you take me to this address?" Vy mozhete otvezti menya po etomu adresu?

Ilya’s breath hitched. I have lost my group. Shane read it with a flat, clinical cadence. He likely had no idea that for Ilya, those five words weren't a traveler's mishap. They were a declaration of war. The ambiguity made the room feel as if it were spinning. Shane sounded so casual, so helpful. He was probably just being the good guy the Canadians always were, reading a list of phrases for the Russian captain who wanted to learn English. He didn't know he was providing the soundtrack for a treasonous escape. He didn't know that "Can you take me to this address?" was the question Ilya would ask when he finally reached the gates of the embassy.

And the last sentence.

“I am afraid.” Mne strashno.

The phrase hung in the steam of the shower room, vibrating in the foam of the headphones. Unlike the previous lines, which Shane had read with the flat, tired cadence of a man checking items off a grocery list, this last one was different. There was a microscopic catch in his throat, a softening of the vowels that sounded less like a lesson and more like a confession. A cold sweat broke out across Ilya's skin under the hot spray of the water. Did Shane know? Or was the script-writer, whoever was behind this clandestine gift, a master of emotional manipulation?

He thought of his father, tracing patterns in a tablecloth because he couldn't remember his own wife’s death. He thought of Svetlana, sleeping in her bed just a few miles away, dreaming of a future that Ilya was currently planning to delete. Sasha, who had so few people to confide in. To save himself, he had to leave them in the gray.

The door to the showers creaked open.

Ilya froze, the Walkman disappearing into his towel in a single, practiced motion. Through the swirling steam, a silhouette appeared. Tall, thin, and wearing the unmistakable shape of a civilian suit. One of the KGB attendants. The man didn't speak. He just stood there for a full minute, a dark pillar in the white mist, watching the water fall. Ilya didn't breathe. He kept his eyes on the floor, his heart hammering against his ribs with the rhythm of a trapped bird.

Finally, the shadow turned and walked away, the click of his shoes echoing on the concrete like a judge's gavel. He knew. Or he suspected. In Moscow, there was no difference.

Chapter End Notes

All Russian translations are from Google Translate.

Some thoughts on Article 88. I don't think a lot of people in the west know that US dollars were illegal to own without express state approval. Having only a few dollars could get you up to five years in a labor camp, and $500 would be punishable by 15-20 years in prison. If you were smuggling foreign currency in, it was punishable by death for "economic interference". Ilya would have been put in a VERY difficult position by receiving this money. There is also some precedent: Detroit notably smuggled sums of cash to the tune of a few thousand (1980s!) dollars to their players pre-defection.

Chapter 5: Dissonance

Chapter Summary

Shane can't stop thinking about Ilya Rozanov. His life of caviar, furs, and beautiful blonde women. Or at least that's what Shane imagined his life to be. Whatever Rozanov's home in Russia looks like, it has to be better than the crippling pressure to be Canada's Golden Boy.

Chapter Notes

This chapter is Shane's perception of events from the first chapters.

Dissonance (noun)

1. A tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.

2. The psychological discomfort felt by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.

3. The agonizing vibration felt when your public perfection does not match your private anxiety.

Example: "He watched his teammates win the trophy without him. He wasn't playing. He wasn't the hero. If he wasn't on the ice, he didn't exist at all." — December, 1987

What Shane would remember most about Vienna on that April day was the light. The overexposed, blinding white that made your head ache, and your palms sweat inside your gloves. Inside the locker room at Wiener Stadthalle, the air was a thick soup. The pressure was so heavy that Shane felt like he was breathing through a straw. He sat on the bench. His jersey, the heavy, storied wool of Team Canada, sat heavy on his shoulders. He felt like a fraud. Every scout in the building was talking about his natural talent, but Shane knew the truth. He was barely held together by sheer, agonizing will-power. He never missed a curfew. Never missed a pass. Never let anyone down. 

"Hollander," his coach barked. "Lead 'em out."

Shane stood, the persona of the perfect captain clicking into place. He didn't feel like a hero. He felt like a porcelain doll waiting for someone to swing a hammer.

Facing the Soviet team was always an exercise in withstanding psychological torture. They played aggressively, but as one. They passed frequently, the puck flying between players, the shifts long. It was harsher and such a marked departure from the Canadian team’s own, more individualistic style of play. It felt like they were everywhere, and Shane always felt like he was playing catch up. Their faces were stone cold. No wasted emotions there. No emotions at all. And in the center of it all was Ilya Rozanov.

Shane had been following his career for years, a twin flame to his own. They were the same age. They had crossed paths across the countries, across the years. Every time, Shane felt the same, sickening jolt. Jealousy, sharp and corrosive. Rozanov was bigger than him, with broad shoulders that seemed to block out the light. He was faster. He was the better player. Shane hated himself for knowing that. He hated how much he knew about him.

Beneath the jealousy was something else. An odd electric spark that made Shane’s throat go dry. Every time he saw Rozanov, he felt a magnetic pull he was terrified to name. Shane had never understood the locker room. He’d sit on the bench while the guys swapped stories about getting laid. Graphic, tall tales that were the currency of their brotherhood. He would nod and grin, performing the role of the appreciative teammate. He was horrified that they would discover his lack of interest in sex, like a defect that would eventually be exposed. 

He thought of Lisa, his girlfriend back home, and the way he felt nothing but polite boredom around her. Lisa didn’t seem all that interested in sex either. She always apologized about it, but to Shane it had been a relief. He got to play the good guy, telling her he didn’t want her to feel pressured, when in reality he was having a hard time summoning up the interest. She had blown him a few times in the back of his car while he stared at the headliner and counted the seconds. They had tried to have sex on a few rare occasions, but he had gone soft halfway through, filling the moment with apologies about the stress of the game and overtraining. 

Lisa was nice. He liked talking to her. He didn’t feel the electricity that was between him and Rozanov. He’d felt that spark before, briefly, when he was sitting in a movie theater in Montreal with Lisa last year watching Tom Cruise play volleyball. He had shaken it aside. What he had felt must have been admiration, not arousal. Fighter pilots were cool. Elite hockey players were cool. It had nothing to do with how muscular they were. Shane thought of the way the guys in the locker room used slurs in every breath, and he knew he couldn’t be that thing. But he did go see Top Gun two more times.

Their first game together of the series started as a high-speed blur. Rozanov was everywhere, and six minutes in, he scored with a shot so perfect it felt insulting. Shane felt the failure in his marrow. I’m a step behind. Again.

The Canadian game was chaos, and Shane was the engine of that mess. Midway through the first, he saw a microsecond of hesitation from a Soviet defenseman. He pounced. Shane drove the net with a reckless, frantic energy. He took a slash to the shins that turned his vision white, but he scooped the puck into the top shelf as he fell.

He screamed at the rafters, his heart trying to punch its way out of his chest. Then came the hit.

Shane saw Rozanov at center ice and didn't swerve. He wanted to break him. He wanted to prove he was still the Golden Boy. They slammed into the boards with a sound like a gunshot. For a heartbeat, they were chest-to-chest, the glass vibrating behind them. Shane’s face was inches from Ilya’s. He saw the sweat on the Russian’s lip, the gray fire in his eyes, and he felt it again. The electric heat.

The spark hit him again. Rozanov was all angles and sharp corners. Shane shoved him back, his mouth spitting out curses he didn't mean, terrified that if he stayed in that proximity for one more second, the world would see him for the fraud he was. The rest of the game was a slow-motion car crash. Shane watched as Ilya pulled the puck through his own legs. It was a move that was pure, arrogant magic, and left Shane grasping at air. 

Of course Canada lost the game. Shane could not compete with Rozanov. Shane slumped over his knees at the blue line, his stick snapping under the weight of his own fury. He had lost. He had let everyone down. The disappointment felt like it was carved into his forehead.

He was heading for the tunnel, radiating a loud, desperate anger, when a shadow stepped out of the dark. Rozanov. The Russian looked porcelain-perfect, a smirk playing on his mouth that made Shane want to scream. Shane could have looked at him all day, and that was the problem.

Ilya poked a finger into Shane’s chest, right over the word Canada.

“Hollander,” Ilya rasped. “Lose.”

Shane’s vision tunneled. "What? You got lucky, Rozanov! One bounce and we would have buried you—"

Ilya hooked a thumb into his own collar. “Rozanov,” he corrected, his voice a silk-wrapped threat. “Win.”

Shane stood there, stunned and heated, watching the Russian walk away. It wasn't just the loss that stung. It was the way Rozanov looked at him, like he knew exactly how much Shane was performing, and could see straight through it.

Five days later, the rematch was a 0-0 stalemate. Shane fought the puck, fought the system, and fought the way his eyes kept drifting to Rozanov. He felt like he was being stripped of his talent, layer by layer, in front of a global audience.

The tournament ended in a hollow thud. Sweden took the gold. Canada sat in fourth. The loneliest place on earth. During the ceremony, Shane watched Ilya stand on the silver tier to represent his team. The Russian looked like he was wearing an anchor around his neck, not a medal. As they filed off the ice, their paths crossed one last time.

Ilya stopped. He touched his silver medal, then pointed at Shane’s empty chest. “Hollander,” Ilya rasped. “No win.”

Shane’s jaw tightened, his breath hot against the Russian's face. "Yeah? Well, you got the wrong color, Rozanov." He gestured toward the Swedes, his voice shaking with a mix of envy and loathing.

The Russian didn't flinch. He gave Shane a look of such profound, arrogant pity that it felt like a physical blow. “I win,” Rozanov said. Shane loved the way the w came out closer to a v. It lodged itself somewhere in his chest and stayed there.

Shane watched him disappear into the tunnel, wishing they could have talked more. What was Rozanov like when he was off the ice? It didn’t matter. He didn’t speak Russian, and judging by Rozanov’s conversation with him just now, he wasn’t quiet, as Shane had suspected. He didn’t speak English. Maybe Shane could learn Russian? No. That was a stupid idea. Why would you learn Russian for someone you’re only going to see a couple of times a year?

Shane returned home to Canada and tried to put Ilya Rozanov out of his mind.

He was at his parents’ lakeside cottage when he got the news. Shane had desperately needed to get out of the city. His face was plastered across billboards everywhere he turned. The perfect athlete, a chaste captain with no scandals. 

The Metros had spent one of their draft picks on Ilya Rozanov. Shane knew that it was primarily symbolic. Other teams had tried this in the past. You draft top players from the USSR, but they are unwilling or unable to move. Shane knew Rozanov was an enlisted member of the army. He couldn’t just go to Canada. It was mostly meant as a show of faith. We acknowledge you are the best player and you can come play for us any time. 

Shane knew Rozanov wouldn’t be on his team, logically. He was a star in the Soviet Union. His family was there. Probably, anyway. Shane didn’t actually know much about him. But Shane kept imagining his locker room, filled with the sound of Rozanov’s voice. His hulking body in the showers. He told himself it was about what they could do on the ice together. He was mostly convincing. But what…what if it was great? He saw himself flying down the wing, Rozanov as his center. What would they be like together? They could be unstoppable. He shook it away. Impossible.

The news acted like a catalyst, making the weight of his own life feel unbearable. Lisa was there, sitting on the dock beside him, talking about throwing a party in West Island. Shane looked at her, pretty, kind, easy, and felt a wave of visceral nausea. He couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't keep pretending that this was the life he wanted while his brain was screaming about a man in a red jersey thousands of miles away.

"I can't do this, Lisa," he said, his voice trembling.

She looked at him, confused. "Do what? The party? Shane, it's just a–"

"No. Us."

He dumped her right there under the pines. He used the Olympics as an excuse. The pressure, the focus. Needing to be the best captain Canada has ever seen. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it also didn’t ring of truth. When she left, crying quietly into her sweater, Shane felt like a villain who had just cut the last anchor keeping him in the real world.

Hamilton wasn’t all that far away for Shane, but it still felt foreign. It had the heavy scent of lake water and arena popcorn. Usually Shane loved that smell, but today it was making his stomach turn. He was anticipating meeting the Soviet team again. 

He stood on the blue line for the anthems, the maple leaf on his chest feeling like a brand. He could feel the weight of the eyes of the fans on him, expecting him to be the fastest, the strongest, the best. He looked across the ice and saw the Soviet delegation, like one multi-headed organism. Rozanov was looking at him. Was this intimidation, or was it the same thing Shane was doing? Shane felt that familiar, acrid jolt of jealousy. If anything, Rozanov had gotten better since their last game together. He moved with synchronized grace that made Shane’s own skating feel like a series of desperate stumbles. Every time they collided, Shane felt the friction of a rivalry he was losing. 

The interaction happened in the second period. They collided at the red line, a bone-rattling hit that sent them both spinning into the boards. Shane was up first, his gloved hand catching Rozanov’s shoulder. He felt the heat radiating off the Russian's jersey, the tension in his frame.

“You staying in Canada?" Shane hissed, the words simplified and enunciated. He didn't know why he said it. Maybe it was a taunt, or maybe it was a probe to see if the robot across from him was actually human. "Until you defect," he added, leaning in closer until their helmets nearly touched.

He saw the recognition flash in Rozanov’s eyes, followed by a wave of terror that made Shane’s heart stutter. He watched Rozanov push him away and skate toward the bench, looking like he’d seen a ghost. Shane stood there, his own hands shaking, wondering why the word defect felt like it had been pulled from his own lungs. Rozanov steered clear of him the rest of the game. 

Shane eagerly anticipated seeing Rozanov in Calgary. If only to apologize for chirping him about defection. Maybe that was a step too far. Something that couldn’t be joked about. They had just announced that Shane was going to be the captain for Team Canada at the Calgary Olympics in February. This was an incredible honor to get to lead his team to victory on home soil. If he could lead them to victory, that is. He told himself that was why his hands were shaking when he thought about it.

Shane was practically exploding with nerves. He spent the warmups skating wide circles, his eyes tracking the red EXIT signs, wondering what it felt like to actually want to run toward them. He saw Rozanov across the ice, he looked like he was mapping the arena too, his eyes darting toward the loading docks and the heavy metal doors.

During the second intermission, Shane was headed back to the tunnel when he saw it. A janitor in a blue jumpsuit accidentally bumped into Rozanov. It was a sharp, quick collision, but Shane saw the jolt go through the Russian’s spine. He saw the janitor whisper something, and he saw Rozanov’s face go pale with a terrifying clarity. What was that about? A janitor. Or not a janitor. Who knows? Shane shook it off, trying to get his head in the game.

The game was a 5-2 win for Canada, but Shane felt hollow. He played with a reckless Western hunger, his hits rattling teeth, his eyes constantly searching for Rozanov. He was obsessed. He watched Rozanov and saw a man living with intensity, the best at this game. He was everything Shane wanted to be. Yet, the oxygen seemed to vanish whenever they were together.

They tangled late in the third. Shane pressed his forearm against Rozanov’s chest, holding him against the boards. "Back to Soviet Union, right?" Shane panted. “Not staying in Canada?”

He saw the Russian's pupils go wide. Rozanov didn't have the words to explain, and Shane knew it. "Calgary. February. Olympics. I...see you."

Shane replayed those four words on the bus back to the hotel. He replayed them getting ready for bed. He replayed them staring at the ceiling at 2:00 AM. He was living for their next game together. This year, he luckily was playing the Soviet team more than typical. Anything for those few precious moments in Rozanov’s orbit. Learning from him. Trying to play like him. Becoming the elite player he should be. 

The injury happened in November, and it was born entirely of Shane's obsession. They were playing an exhibition game in Ottawa, and Shane was trying to push himself into the same level of play Rozanov used. A terrifying, high-speed crossover that defied physics. He wanted to be bigger, stronger. He wanted to prove that he wasn't just a step behind. He overextended on a turn, his center of gravity shifting an inch too far, and caught a hard check from a defenseman he should have seen coming. The shriek of his AC joint separating was the loudest thing Shane had ever heard. He hit the ice hard. 

"I'm fine," Shane gasped in the training room, his face flushed. "Tape it up. I can play."

But the coach, seeing Shane as a national investment rather than a person, wasn't having it. "You're done for the month, Hollander. You play through this now, you're useless to us in February. You rest. That's an order."

The forced rest was a special kind of torture. Shane sat in the stands during the final games of the Canada Cup series. He watched his teammates win the trophy without him. He sat at home in Montreal, watching the grainy tapes of the Soviet team, the dissonance in his head growing louder. He wasn't playing. He wasn't the hero. If he wasn't on the ice, he didn't exist at all.

While his shoulder healed, Beaulieu, one of the Metros' office managers, asked for the favor. Shane sat in a sterile studio in downtown Montreal, the silver Sony recorder spinning in front of him.

“We are expecting quite a few players coming from Europe who may not speak English. Can you help us record some travelers’ phrases that will help them when they are in Canada?”

"My name is Shane Hollander," Shane began. He read the script, but as the sessions went on, the phrases started to feel...specific. 

"I need to find a taxi."

"Help me, I am lost."

"Can you take me to the Canadian embassy?"

Shane’s stomach twisted. He wasn't an idiot. These weren't for just anybody. They were for a single person. He thought of Rozanov. He began to fantasize about Ilya's life while he spoke into the mic. He imagined Ilya living a charmed, aristocratic life in Moscow. Ballet, caviar, grand apartments with high ceilings. Draped in furs, surrounded by ice-blonde women draping their long limbs around his chiseled frame. He felt the stab of jealousy again. 

"Is this for him?" Shane asked during a break, looking through the glass at Beaulieu. "Rozanov?"

Beaulieu just smiled. "It's for anyone who needs it, Shane. Just read the line."

Shane looked down at the last sentence: “Help me. I am afraid.”

He swallowed hard. He thought of the billboards with his face on them, the way his parents looked at him when he played hockey, and the terror that he would eventually fail them all. He thought of how uneasy he felt in his own skin. The way his own body felt like a secret he was barely keeping.

If this was for Ilya, why would he need this sentence? Ilya was the Machine. Ilya was the winner. The thought that he might need these words, that he might be just as hollowed out by his country as Shane was by his own expectations, made the room feel like it was spinning.

When Shane finally spoke the line, it wasn't a performance. It was the only honest thing he had to give. “Help me. I am afraid.” His voice was a raw whisper. He was recording a lifeline for a titan, but as the tape hissed in the silence, Shane realized he was the one who was drowning.

When Shane arrived in Moscow in December, he was struck by the overwhelming beauty, even in the drab winter. The Canadians were funneled into the Kosmos Hotel, a sweeping horseshoe of glass and steel that felt like a palace. At the arena, the opulence was equally staggering. Shane walked through the VIP corridors and saw tables groaning under the weight of smoked sturgeon, crystal bowls overflowing with fresh Moroccan oranges, and the thick, expensive haze of cigar smoke.

He must be treated like a god, Shane thought, a sharp, bitter pang of envy blooming in his chest. He looked at the red carpet and the ornate wood paneling. He thought of his own suburban life. The station wagon, the grocery store runs, the constant, low-level grind of being relatable to the Canadian public. Here, Ilya was a hero. A soldier-prince.

He doesn't need my help, Shane thought as he laced his skates. He probably lives better than the Prime Minister.

Then he saw him.

They met at the red line during warmups. Shane looked for the prince he’d been imagining, but the man in the crimson jersey looked...beaten down. Ilya’s skin was sallow, his eyes shadowed with a fatigue that went deeper than hockey. A man in a gray suit stood behind the bench, watching Ilya with a predatory stillness that made the hair on the back of Shane’s neck stand up.

“Ready for the Olympics?” Shane asked. His voice felt too loud for in the heavy silence of the arena.

Ilya’s smirk was there, but it didn't reach his eyes. It was a jagged, desperate thing. The opulence in the corridors suddenly felt like a stage set, and Shane felt like an idiot for ever believing it.

Winning the game 3-2 felt like a betrayal. Shane stood on the ice, having just defeated the local hero, and felt a wave of visceral complicity. During the handshake, he gripped Ilya’s hand hard.

“See you in Calgary,” Shane said, his voice a low, desperate rumble. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to communicate, but he hoped Ilya understood him. 

As he walked off the ice, Shane caught the scent of an orange someone had peeled in the front row. The smell, once sweet, now made him want to gag. He had spent months imagining Ilya’s perfect life, only to realize that the better Ilya was at hockey, the tighter the cage became.

Chapter End Notes

Liking the story? Leave me a comment! Writing this chapter was a challenge. Did we like getting Shane’s perspective? Or not so much?

Chapter 6: Transgression

Chapter Summary

The stakes have never been higher, and the days are ticking down to the Olympics. Ilya needs to make his final arrangements to leave home for the final time.

Chapter Notes

Transgression (noun)

1. An act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense.

2. The act of crossing a boundary or limit: physical, moral, or political.

Example: "My life has been a series of lines drawn by other men, and for the first time, I am crossing one of my own." – February 1988

The retreat was announced at 3:00 am. Why can't we ever do anything at a normal time? Ilya thought. But he knew why. It was all to keep them on their toes. The team was loaded onto a bus with blacked-out windows and driven into the silent birch forests. Novogorsk was a concrete prison. Ilya had been here many times. It always started the same way. The coaches got nervous that the team would lose, so they needed to go somewhere with zero distractions. For four weeks, the world was reduced to the shriek of skates on hard ice and the watchful, predatory eyes of Coach Tikhonov. 

The twelfth day was the worst. Ivannikov and his men moved through the barracks. Ilya stood by his cot, completely expressionless. A soldier with a shaved head and cold eyes dumped Ilya's gear bag out in front of him. He picked up items one after another, shaking them, feeling them, one by one. He picked up the shoulder pads, his hands roaming over the seams where Shane Hollander's voice, the Sony Walkman, was nestled in the foam. The soldier paused. He felt a rigid, unnatural lump in the breastplate.

Ilya's heart hammered, the blood roaring in his ears. This is it, he thought. I'm fucking dead. Firing squad tomorrow morning.

The soldier pulled a small, wicked-looking utility knife from his belt. The blade hissed as it caught the light, moving toward the heavy stitching.

"Is there a problem, Private?" The voice came from the doorway. It wasn't the Colonel, but it was one of the senior minders. Ilya had spent the last few weeks preying on his vanity, talking down about the Western teams and how they would fall under the Soviet discipline. How much he loved being here, at Novogorsk. 

"The padding is irregular, sir," the soldier muttered.

"Everything about Rozanov is irregular," he snapped back, bored and wanting to finish the sweep. "He is the best player in the world. This is custom gear. Do not damage it because you are bored. Move to the next cot."

The soldier hesitated, then dropped the pads with a heavy thud. The Walkman remained silent and undiscovered. Ilya didn't breathe for what must have been a full minute, the screeching in his ears so loud it felt like his skull was splitting. I need to get the fuck out of here.

If the training was intense before, it was completely abusive the last weeks before the Olympics. Tikhonov was obsessed with purity of movement. They were on the ice for seven hours a day, followed by three hours of dry-land drills that left Ilya's muscles screaming and his vision tunneling into a gray haze. Every meal was a silent, hurried affair under the buzzing fluorescent lights, everyone trying to cram in as many calories as possible to get through the pain of the workout. Every morning began with the scale. A medical officer in a white coat would record their weight to the gram. If a player dropped even half a kilogram, Tikhonov would accuse them of weakness. It made Ilya sick. Elsewhere in Moscow, there were food shortages, but in here, they were eating victory porridge of oats and lard, more beef than a normal person would see in a year, and imported vitamins, all while being carefully watched.

Ilya no longer felt like himself. He stopped trying to learn new English words. The risk was too high. The watchers were everywhere, their shadows stretching across the barracks walls like ink stains, all day, every day. Even the tapes in his shoulder pads felt like they were vibrating, humming a frequency of treason that surely someone else could hear. He didn't dare touch them. He didn't dare think of Shane Hollander's warm, Canadian voice. He only thought of the ice, the puck, and winning. He became the machine they wanted him to be. He could do this. 

They were released, finally, back to Moscow for 48 hours before the team flight to Calgary. A short leave to settle any final affairs. For Ilya, it was a race to his escape. Sasha's apartment was a place that Ilya felt comfortable, but standing in there for what was probably the last time made it feel somehow alien. There were no minders here, no hidden microphones in the floorboards. Just the quiet hum of a radiator that barely worked. Ilya didn't wait for Sasha to offer him a drink. He didn't have time for the ritual of being a guest. He needed him, just once more, before everything changed.

The intimacy was frantic, Ilya's attempt to memorize the shape of Sasha's shoulders and the way the light from the streetlamp filtered through the thin curtains. They didn't speak. In the silence of the room, Ilya dropped to his knees, his hands finding the familiar line of Sasha's waist. He tried to bury the screeching dissonance of his looming defection beneath the physical reality of the people he was leaving behind.

Sasha's hand rested on the back of Ilya's head, his breath hitching as he leaned back against the edge of the small wooden table. For those minutes, Olympics were a world away. There was no gold medal at stake, no Shane Hollander waiting across an ocean. There was only the salt-skin taste of a goodbye that Sasha didn't even know he was saying. When they eventually pulled apart, the room felt colder. Ilya sat on the edge of the narrow cot, watching Sasha adjust his clothes. Sasha looked soft in the dim light, his eyes wide and full of a quiet, unearned hope that Ilya was about to shatter.

Ilya reached into the inner lining of his heavy wool coat. He pulled out a small, thick envelope. Inside were two hundred American dollars. It was a fortune, but less than half of what Ilya had been given. There was also one single sheet of paper. A letter. A farewell. He pressed the envelope into Sasha's hand, his fingers lingering against Sasha's palm.

"Do not open this," Ilya rasped, his voice a low, jagged scrape. "Not tonight. Not tomorrow."

Sasha looked down at the weight in his hand, his brow furrowing with sudden concern. "Ilyushka, what is this?"

"It is a letter," Ilya said, gripping Sasha's jaw, forcing him to look up. "And some...protection. But you do not read it yet. You keep it hidden. Under the floor, in a book, I do not care. Just keep it safe."

"When do I open it?" Sasha's voice was barely a whisper.

"You will know when," Ilya said. He felt the words leave his mouth like something physical, like pulling a splinter out by the root. Sasha swallowed hard, the envelope crinkling in his grip. He didn't ask again. He saw the finality in the set of Ilya's jaw. This was the end.

Ilya adjusted his clothes and walked to the door. "See you after the Olympics, then?" Sasha called out, trying to sound light. His voice cracking.

Ilya's hand hesitated on the doorknob. He turned to face Sasha, trying to sear the image of Sasha's messy dark hair and tired eyes into his mind. He was worried about what would happen to him when Ilya wasn't around to keep him safe. He was leaving him in the middle of a storm with the tiniest umbrella possible. When Ilya was gone, they would try to find everyone who could possibly have known. They would almost certainly find Sasha. Ilya couldn't help it. He let go of the latch and crossed the room in three strides, crushing Sasha's face to his own. It had never been love. Just lust. Companionship. But Sasha was his friend, and he would never see this face again.

"Goodbye, Ilyushka," he said softly.

"Goodbye, Sasha. Take care of Sveta while I am gone."

Ilya didn't look back. He couldn't. Every step away from Sasha's door was a step toward a world where he had no history, no friends, and no safety net. 

Sasha,

By the time you read this, the world will have told you many things about me. I will either be dead or starting a new life in Canada. They will use words like traitor and coward. They will tell you I have been kidnapped or that I lost my mind. Do not believe them. But do not defend me, either. In the eyes of the Soviet Union, I am dead. You must let me stay dead.

In this envelope is two hundred dollars. It is American. Buy what you need to survive the winter. Buy a heater. If things get worse, and they will, save as much as you can and use the rest to leave Moscow. Do not stay. 

I am sorry I could not take you with me. I am sorry I am leaving you. My life has been a series of lines drawn by other men, and for the first time, I am crossing one of my own. Forget my face. Burn this paper until only the ash remains. Live a long, quiet life, Sasha.

— I.

Before returning to the apartment, Ilya took the Metro to the edge of the city. The Vagankovo Cemetery. He walked until his lungs burned from the cold, finally reaching the simple stone that marked his mother's rest. He knelt in the snow, his gloved hand brushing the frost from her name. There were no minders here, just the wind whistling through the bare branches.

He didn't come here often, but sometimes he just wanted to talk to her. 

"I am going, Mama," he whispered, the words puffing into white clouds. "I am going to Canada, to play hockey there. They will say I was a bad son. They will say I was a coward." He leaned his forehead against the cold granite. "Do not believe them. I am doing it so I can finally be who you wanted me to be. I wish you could come to my games again." He kissed his fingers and pressed them to the cold stone.

He left a single, small coin on top of the marker. A Russian kopek he had carried for years. Mama had given it to him to buy some candies at the store. He had saved it, to buy her some flowers for her birthday. She had not made it to that birthday. It was the last gift he could ever give her.

The walk from the Metro station to the apartment block was a blur of gray slush and flickering streetlamps. Ilya's legs felt like lead. When he finally turned the key in the lock, the sound felt like a gunshot in the quiet hallway. The apartment was home, a place he had spent years trying to escape, and now, the only place he wanted to stay. Svetlana was here. He knew she came to check on his father when Ilya could not, and she had wanted to be here for his last night at home. She looked thinner, her shoulders hunched with the invisible weight of the life he was about to leave her to manage alone. "Ilyushka," she said, not turning around. "You are late. I thought the bus might have been delayed by the snow."

"It was," Ilya lied, his voice sounding thick to his own ears. He crossed the small space and leaned his forehead against her shoulder.

"You are so cold," she whispered, turning to cup his face with her damp hands. "Go. Have a nap. We will talk later."

He went to his bedroom, and for the last time, she followed him. In the narrow cot that was too small for him, they found each other, tangling limbs, Ilya burying his face into her neck, smelling the soft perfume of her hair. There was no romance in it, only the need to anchor themselves against the coming storm. To Ilya, she was everything. The loyalty of a sister. The heat of a partner. The care of the mother who had left him too young. He lost himself her, trying to drown out the screeching static in his head.

Ilya woke to the sound of the radiator's rhythmic clanking and the low murmur of voices from the kitchen. The nap had been heavy, a temporary escape into a darkness that felt safer than the light. When he walked into the dining room, the table was set for three. 

After four weeks of high-calorie force-feeding, Ilya was delighted to have something that looked like it was made with care. Ilya wasn't sure where she found all the ingredients. There was proper borscht, deep crimson and thick with beets and potatoes, topped with a dollop of real smetana that she must have stood in line for hours to find. There was black bread, crusty and smelling of rye, and even a small plate of salo, cured pork fat, sliced thin and sprinkled with salt.

It was a meal meant for a hero. It was the best thing Ilya had tasted in months, and every bite felt like a stone in his stomach.

"Eat, Ilyushka," she said, her voice soft but firm. She looked at him with an intensity that suggested she was trying to memorize his face before the light changed.

At the head of the table, Colonel Grigori Rozanov sat in his high-backed chair. He looked small in his wool sweater, his hands trembling as he tried to navigate his spoon. He was a shadow of the titan who had once commanded regiments. "The Americans," the Colonel muttered, his voice a dry rasp. "They think they can skate. But they have no soul, Ilya."

"I will remember, Father," Ilya replied.

Svetlana stayed. She wouldn't have let him spend his last night alone even if he'd asked. As she finally fell into a heavy, exhausted sleep beside him, Ilya stayed awake. He watched the rhythmic rise and fall of her shoulders, the guilt sitting on his sternum like a stone. He was leaving her to care for a dying man. He was leaving her to answer the questions that the KGB would inevitably ask.

Before the sun rose, Ilya was writing. He finished three more letters. One to Sveta, one to his father, and one to Alexei. He hid the two to his father and Alexei under a book. It wouldn't take long for them to find, but undoubtedly they would be uncovered when the KGB came to toss his room after they realized he was gone. Before Ilya tucked the letters into the greatcoat, he pulled a small, thin booklet with a tattered green cover from his desk. It was his sberknizhka. It contained his officer pay from the past years, plus the accumulated bonuses from his years with CSKA. Money the State had given him for being a good soldier, a good player, and a good symbol. It wasn't as valuable as the American cash he'd hidden, but in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, it was the only legitimate money he had. He opened the book to the last page. He had already signed it in the three places required for a transfer of funds. He tucked the booklet inside the envelope with the letter to Alexei.

Alexei,

I am not going to sugar my words for you. By the time you find this, I will be gone and you will be the only son the Rozanov name has left. 

I am staying in Canada. Don't be a fool and try to find me, and don't be a martyr and try to defend me. If you open your mouth, you are dead, and Svetlana is dead. You tell them I am a traitor. You tell them you spit on my name. You say I am dead to you. This should not be a hardship for you. You survive.

But hear me, Alexei—if you let our father die alone in that apartment, or if you let Svetlana carry his weight until she breaks, I will find a way to make you regret it from across the ocean. You are his son first. You were my brother first. I am leaving you everything. All of the money in my accounts, all of my things, the shame of my departure. Use the money for his medicine. Keep him fed. Do not spend it on vodka and women.

I am a coward for leaving, and you are a hero for staying. That is the way the world has decided it will be. Live with it. Take care of them, Alexei.

— I.

He stepped into his father's room, leaving a sleeping Svetlana behind. 

"Father," Ilya whispered.

The Colonel turned his head, the fog in his eyes clearing for a heartbeat. "The flight. Today?"

"Today," Ilya replied. He took his father's hand. It felt like dry parchment over bone. "I am going to win. I will play with the strength you gave me."

"The Union expects it," the old man rasped.

"I know," Ilya said, leaning forward to press his forehead against his father's hand. "Forgive me. For letting you down."

"You will win. You will not let me down."

"Yes, sir." Ilya turned to leave, but hesitated. "Papa, I love you." He couldn't remember ever saying those words before.

"Your mother made you soft," his father replied, his voice harsh. Ilya stood, gave the shadow of his father one final, rigid nod, and walked into the hall. 

Father,

You told me once that a soldier's life is not his own, that it belongs to the State and the soil that birthed him. I have tried to believe that. I have worn the uniform, I have played the games, and I have carried the weight of your medals on my own shoulders.

I cannot breathe anymore.

By the time you find this, I will be gone, and I will not be coming back. I am going to find out what it is like to be a Canadian. I am going to play for myself, for the first time in my life. I know what they will say to you. They will say I am a traitor. They will say I have disgraced the Rozanov name and the uniform of a Senior Lieutenant. I am sorry, Father. I am so deeply sorry for the shame this will bring to your door. I am sorry I cannot be there to hold your hand when the fog in your mind grows too thick to see through. I am sorry I am leaving you in the care of Alexei.

You taught me to win at any cost. I am taking that lesson with me. I am going to win the gold medal in Calgary. I will play with every ounce of strength and discipline you beat into me. I will give the Union their victory, but I will not give them my life. I am keeping that for myself. Do not hate me if you can help it. Try to remember the boy who used to skate on the frozen ponds behind the barracks, before the world became made of concrete and ice. I am doing this so that boy can finally grow up to be who he should be.

Forgive me, Colonel. Forgive me, Father.

Your son,

— Ilya

Svetlana was at the door, her face a mask of weary endurance. Her heavy winter coat was draped over the chair. As she went to fetch his gear bag from the kitchen, Ilya moved. He pulled the thick, envelope from his inner pocket. The letter to her and the $200. Maybe he would regret giving so much of the money away, but he didn't think he would. He would feel better knowing that he had left them with something to guard against the months to come. He slid it deep into her coat pocket. It was a time bomb of truth that wouldn't go off until he was safely over the Atlantic.

She walked back in and pulled him into a crushing embrace. She didn't say don't go. She didn't ask when are you coming back? She only held on a little too long.

"Do not look back, Ilyushka," she whispered. "Just go."

He turned and walked out the door, the sound of the latch clicking into place echoing like a gunshot in the stairwell. As the Aeroflot jet banked to fly northward, the cabin lights dimmed. Ilya looked out the window at the receding lights of Moscow. This was it. He was really doing it. He was an Olympian. He would soon be a defector. 

Sveta,

I am writing this because I do not have the courage to say it to your face. If I looked at you while I said these words, I would never be able to leave. I would stay in this gray apartment until the walls closed in on us both. By the time you find this, I will be gone. I think you know already that I am not coming back, Sveta. Not after the games. Not ever. I am crossing the line. I know what this means for you. I know the weight I am dropping onto your shoulders, and it is the greatest cowardice of my life. In the lining of this envelope, there are two hundred American dollars. Do not go to the state bank to change them. Use it wisely. Go to France like we always talked about. Meet a rich American and move to New York. Live a beautiful, spectacular life.

You have been everything to me. You were the sister I needed, the partner who kept me warm when the world was ice, and the only person who loved Ilya, the man, instead of Rozanov, the hockey player. You are the best of us, Sveta. You deserve a life that isn't lived in the shadow of anyone else. When they come, and they will come, tell them I am a traitor. Tell them you hate me. Tell them I was a cold, selfish man who used you. It will be the truth, because only a selfish man could leave you like this.

If there is a God, I hope He watches over you, because I am no longer there to do it. Do not look for me in the news. Just live. Please, just live your life. I hope one day we are able to see each other again, but I doubt it. I will remember every single thing about you, forever, just as you were last night. 

Forgive me. 

I love you.

— I.

Chapter End Notes

Some more fun research facts:

Tikhonov was really freaky about what the players were eating. There were people watching to make sure everyone was consuming ALL the food, usually around 6,000 calories a day. For breakfast, they would eat huge quantities of lard-based oat porridge (I don't want to yuck on anyone's yum, but this sounds horrendous) followed by large quantities of cottage cheese mixed with sour cream and honey. Then omelets, then black bread with actual butter (rare! normies ate margarine) and tea.

Lunch was soup, prime beef or chicken, and lots of carbs -- potatoes or some kind of pasta. Dinner was usually fish and yogurt, but was lighter so the players could sleep.

He also enforced mandatory naptime after lunch. All of this, while in general, the public was standing in lines for hours for basics like milk and bread. It was pretty normal to try to smuggle food home, punishable by beating.

Thoughts? Leave me a comment!

Chapter 7: Severence

Chapter Summary

Ilya is facing the chance of a lifetime. The Olympics. But the pressure is on. Is he moving on to Montreal, or heading back to the Soviet Union?

Chapter Notes

Here we go.

Severance (noun)

1. The action of ending a connection or relationship.

2. The state of being separated or cut off.

3. The point at which something is divided, permanently and without the possibility of reunion.

Example: "He thought of Maks on the other side of that door, probably starting a fight with Fedorov right now, choosing him with a hundred dollars and a look that had cost him something real." — February 1988

From the window of the Aeroflot charter, Ilya watched Calgary materialize out of the dark, a grid of amber and white light thrown across the prairie like someone had upended a jewelry box onto black velvet. After the monochromatic, soot-stained blocks of Moscow, the sheer density of the brightness made Ilya's eyes water. The Red Machine was moved from the pressurized cabin of the plane directly into a fleet of buses with tinted windows. No greeting party. No ceremony. Just the low diesel groan of the engines and the watchful eyes of Dr. Fedorov, the team physician who sat at the front of the bus with his team of physical therapists. These were men who had never, in Ilya's experience, treated a single physical injury. They watched faces instead, searching for the first sign of a wandering mind.

The Soviet quarters in the Olympic Village were engineered to be a vacuum. While other athletes from Sweden, the US, and West Germany mingled in the common areas, traded pins, and flirted in the laundry rooms, the Soviet players were restricted to their designated floor like specimens in a jar.

The most jarring detail was the kitchen. The Ministry had shipped in its own chefs, its own crates of food, and its own water. The West's offerings were, officially, tainted. Every meal was served in a private dining hall, a room so aggressively sterile that the only sound was cutlery on plates, and even that felt surveilled. Ilya sat at the long table, pinned between Dr. Fedorov and Maksim Pasternak. Maks was built like a wardrobe with a face, broad, soft-featured, and seeming perpetually surprised by his own size. He'd taken Ilya's old wing slot when Ilya moved to center. He played like a concrete wall, and, occasionally, in private, made Ilya laugh so hard his ribs ached.

"The sneakers, though," Maks whispered, looking down at his pristine white leather trainers. "Better than the ones we get at home. Do you think we get to keep them? Or is it like the jerseys?"

"State property, Pasha," Ilya said, his voice flat. "Everything is."

Across the table, Dr. Fedorov set his fork down. A small sound, precise and deliberate. He didn't look up. He didn't have to. Don't get used to the leather, Lieutenant. Don't get used to the fresh air.

The day of the Opening Ceremony arrived with a sky so blue it could have been a propaganda poster. Aggressively perfect, the kind of color you only dream about. Ilya stood in the staging area outside the stadium, feeling the familiar, heavy itch of expectation. For the march into the stadium, the team was stripped of their more humanizing tracksuits and dressed in their ceremonial best. The long tan wool trench coat, perfectly tailored and cinched at the waist, a red scarf tucked at the collar, a pale ushanka with its earflaps tied up. The coat was the most expensive thing he'd ever worn, but of course it technically belonged to the State. It fit him like it had been made for a specific body. It had been.

"You look like a movie star, Ilyushka," Maks murmured beside him, adjusting his own red scarf. "Or a spy. Probably both."

"Eyes front, Pasha," Ilya murmured back. His breath came out in a brief white plume and dissolved. Three rows behind him, he could feel Fedorov's gaze like a hand between his shoulder blades.

As the Soviet delegation was announced, they marched into the stadium. A hundred thousand spectators erupted, a sound less like applause and more like weather, like standing inside of a thunderclap. The Canadian delegation ahead of them was a chaos of red fringe and white Stetson hats. The Soviets moved through the noise in a column of tan and white. Ordered, stoic, and profoundly alone in the middle of all that joy.

After the ceremony was over, they were funneled through a series of tunnels back to the transport buses. It was as though a glass wall had formed around the Soviet team in the concrete bowels of McMahon Stadium. Ilya marched at the head of the tan-coated phalanx. Behind him, he could hear the rhythmic rustle of a hundred pairs of white leather trainers on the rubber matting and the heavy, watchful silence of the agents. As they rounded a corner, the line slowed. Ahead, the Canadian team was spilling out of a side corridor. The hum behind Ilya's eyes sharpened.

And there he was. Shane Hollander was leaning against a concrete pillar, laughing at something a teammate said, his head thrown back, throat moving. He looked impossibly at ease in his garish outfit. It suited him in a way that made Ilya's stomach clench with something he couldn't seem to name. 

Ilya's gaze fixed on him with a predatory intensity he couldn't mask. He had never seen Hollander without at least some hockey gear. The hockey equipment did something. Compressed him, made him look interchangeable with the other bodies on the ice. Without it, the specifics of him were suddenly loud. The dark hair. The line of his jaw. The particular way he occupied space, like the room had been arranged around him rather than him having walked into it. For a heartbeat, the static in Ilya's brain went silent, replaced by a raw, piercing recognition. Shane's laughter cut off as he looked at the approaching Soviet line. His eyes locked with Ilya's and he gave him a sharp nod. Ilya kept his chin up and his eyes forward and walked past him.

Once back on their restricted floor, the players were sent into the private dining hall. Ilya sat in his usual spot, pinned between Dr. Fedorov and Maks.

"Roza," Maks whispered, his voice barely audible over the hum of the industrial fans.  "Did you see Hollander in the tunnel? He looked like he wanted to say something."

"He is a Canadian," Ilya replied, his voice flat and robotic, intended for Fedorov's ears. "They are always talking. It means nothing." 

"He looked sick."

"Maybe he is not built for the thin air."

Across the table, Fedorov adjusted his glasses and let his gaze settle on Ilya's hands. Ilya's fingers were still on the table. His pulse, however, was doing something complicated in his throat. He thought of the Sony Walkman nested in the foam of his shoulder pads back in the room. He thought of Shane's voice on the tape saying I am lost with the flat, careful diction of a man reading from a cue card, with no idea what he was actually saying.

That night, in the narrow room, the thin air of Calgary felt like iron around Ilya's lungs. He lay in his stirrup-style tracksuit pants, watching the shadows of the minders stretch across the walls like ink stains. Maks was already asleep, his breathing heavy and rhythmic. Ilya reached into the dark space beneath his bed. He didn't pull the manual out. He just pressed his palm against the gear bag, feeling the hard, rectangular secret of the book. The panic from the tunnel hadn't subsided, but it had settled, packed down into something dense and quiet behind his sternum. He thought of Shane's nod in the tunnel. He thought of the way they had looked at each other. Two captains, two rivals. Maybe two teammates.

February 13. The games began tomorrow. He had fifteen days left as Ilya Rozanov, Senior Lieutenant of the Red Army. After that, he would be someone else entirely.

The Saddledome locker room smelled of damp wool and ammonia and the sharp medicinal reek of the liniment the therapists worked into shoulders before games, a smell so deeply associated with violence that Ilya's body started preparing for contact the moment it hit his nose. He dressed with the automatic precision of someone who had performed this ritual ten thousand times. The shoulder pads felt heavier than usual. The CCCP jersey settled across his chest like a hand pressing down. Across the room, Maks laced his skates with focused attention. Dr. Fedorov stood near the door, his hands behind his back, his unblinking gaze tracking the movement of every player's eyes. He wasn't looking for signs of fatigue. He was looking for a leak in the Machine.

The first opponent was the Americans. Ilya knew that this was supposed to be some sort of corrective measure for the 1980 loss. When they stepped onto the ice, the roar was a living thing. The "USA! USA!" chant hammered, a rhythmic, thumping wall of sound that reverberated, overwhelming Ilya, feeling it in his jaw. He skated his warmup laps, his edges biting into the hard, pristine Canadian ice. He didn't look at the crowd. He didn't look for the red EXIT signs today. He only looked for the dark blur in the VIP section. He looked for Shane.

Shane was in the VIP section in a dark coat, his dark hair sharp against the arena lights, watching the ice with an attention that had nothing to do with the Americans. Ilya did one full lap before he let himself look again. Then he stopped looking and played hockey.

His first goal was a snap shot from the left circle that the goalie didn't move for. A clean, joyless execution. Ilya turned and skated back to center without breaking stride. He thought about what it would cost, just once, to raise his arms. To scream. He thought about Hollander driving the net in Vienna, scooping the puck in while falling, screaming at the rafters like the sound was something he was owed. He was a Senior Lieutenant. He was a hero. He was the Ice King. He needed to keep it up a little longer. How would it feel to scream in victory? Every time he circled the American net, he saw those dark eyes in the stands. He thought of the freckles. He thought of the word teammate.

During the first intermission, the locker room was silent except for Tikhonov's low, rhythmic pacing. "They are weak," the coach whispered, his face a bruised purple in the harsh light. "They are individuals. You are the Machine. Do not let them breathe."

Ilya sat on the bench, his head down. He felt the Walkman pressing against his collarbone through the foam. He realized that the Machine wasn't just the system or the team. It was the skin he was wearing, and it was getting tighter with every breath of Calgary air. He looked up and caught Fedorov's eyes. The doctor was smiling, a thin, blade-fine expression.

"Excellent focus today, Rozanov," Fedorov said, his voice low and even. "It is as if you have nowhere else to be."

"I am where I belong," Ilya replied, the lie sitting flat in his throat.

The game ended in a 7-2 slaughter. The Americans were fast, but the Soviets were inevitable. In the tunnel after, shuddering with the particular adrenaline crash that comes after sixty minutes of controlled aggression, Ilya passed the VIP gate and caught movement in his peripheral vision. Shane at the rail. Not waving. Not calling out. Leaning there with his forearms on the barrier, watching Ilya's face with a concentration that felt like pressure.

Ilya turned the corner into the dressing room.

"Teammate," he said, to the concrete wall. Nobody heard it.

The morning of the 15th began with the rhythmic, metallic clatter of the private kitchen. Ilya woke before the sun, the pants of his tracksuit tugging at his ankles, the white leather trainers lined up at the foot of his cot like a pair of questions he couldn't answer.

Twenty-one years of Soviet breath. Thirteen days left of it.

Someone on the planning committee had scheduled a joint press conference at the Big Four Building. It was a calculated display of "sportsmanship," pairing the captains of the top-seeded teams. It was the first time Ilya had been officially authorized to sit within arm's reach of Shane Hollander.

He wore the team-issue cream wool sweater with the red stripe. It made him look approachable. It made him look like a lie. He sat at the long table, the bright television lights turning the dust motes in the air into glittering sparks.

Then Shane sat down.

He was in a red-and-white Canadian track jacket, and he smelled of soap, something citrusy and clean that didn't exist in any Soviet context Ilya had ever inhabited. It was sharp enough that Ilya registered it before he'd fully processed that Shane had arrived. Shane shifted to reach for his water glass and his elbow grazed the sleeve of Ilya's sweater. Ilya kept his eyes on the reporter's table.

The freckles were worse up close. Not a dusting, a whole atlas of them, scattered from the bridge of Shane's nose to his temples, disappearing into his hairline. Ilya had memorized them at twenty miles per hour on the ice. At this distance they were almost overwhelming.

"Captain Rozanov," a reporter from the Toronto Star asked through the translator, "how does the Soviet team feel about the Canadian home-ice advantage?"

The translator, a man with a voice like dry paper, droned the Russian version into Ilya's ear. Ilya waited the appropriate beat.

"The ice is the same temperature in every country," Ilya said. "A Soviet soldier does not play against the crowd. He plays against the puck."

Beside him, Shane went still, not the stillness of offense, but the stillness of a man processing sound he can't quite decode. He turned his head and studied Ilya's profile.

"Captain Hollander?" the reporter prompted.

"I think Rozanov is being polite," Shane said. His voice had that practiced ease, the Canadian broadcast cadence, bright, measured, built for cameras. But underneath it something was pulled taut. "But this is our house. By the time we meet in the finals, the Soviets are going to realize that the 'Machine' doesn't have a home-court advantage here."

Ilya didn't need the translator for that. He heard Soviets and Machine and felt both land like two fingers finding the same bruise.

Under the table, out of the camera's frame and well clear of Fedorov's sightline in the front row, Shane's foot tapped the side of Ilya's. Once. Twice. Three times. Deliberate. Unhurried. Like he had all the time in the world and knew exactly what he was doing.

Ilya did not move. His pulse drove hard into his throat. He turned and looked at Shane, just for a second, just long enough, and felt his own mask slip. He saw it register in Shane's face, the slight widening of his eyes, the fractional catch of his breath. Then Shane's hand moved under the table and pressed something into Ilya's palm.

In front of everyone? Ilya was drenched in sweat under the cream wool sweater. A thin scrap of paper.

Later, walking away, he unfurled it, the note sitting in his palm like a detonator. Laundry, 02:00.

The bus ride back to the Village was a blur of neon and tan wool. Dr. Fedorov sat in the seat behind Ilya, his presence a cold shadow.

"You were very disciplined today, Lieutenant," Fedorov said, his voice a silk-wrapped threat. "Though you looked flushed."

"The lights were hot, Doctor," Ilya replied, staring at the tinted glass.

Back in the room, Maks was already horizontal, sneakers aligned. "Shane Hollander is very loud," he observed. "Talks like he's already won. Does he know we're going to destroy them?"

Ilya didn't answer. He went to his gear bag and pressed his fingers along the seam of the shoulder pads, feeling the Walkman's hard edge. He thought of three taps. He thought of citrus soap.

Thirteen days. After that, he was going to find out what it was like to live in a house where the air smelled like oranges and the silence wasn't a threat.

The trip to the Chinook Centre was intended as another PR exercise, the Red Machine confronting the bounty of the West, found wanting, presumably returning home grateful for collective austerity. To Ilya it was a mild sensory emergency. The air was too warm. The pop music piping through invisible speakers was too bright. The colors, neon teals, hot pinks, electric yellows, assaulted his retinas like something designed to disorient an enemy.

The Ministry had issued each player two hundred and fifty Canadian dollars. They called this a modest stipend. On Moscow's black market, it was thirteen months of wages, handed over on a Tuesday like it was nothing. Ilya watched his teammates move through the mall with the concentrated hunger of men who had been told their whole lives that wanting things was ideologically suspect. Maks gripped a pair of Levi's and a digital watch like they were artifacts of a better civilization. Even Larionov, controlled, deliberate Larionov, stood in front of a perfume display, tilting a bottle toward the fluorescent light and reading the label with his lips moving.

Ilya stood in the center of the atrium, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his tan trench coat. He felt a profound, freezing paralysis. He looked at the stores, shelves groaning under the weight of things no one actually needed, and felt a wave of nauseous panic. How could you ever decide what to wear, what to eat, when you were surrounded by such abundance? He didn't want anything.

"Roza, look!" Maks whispered, holding up a bright yellow pair of sneakers.

"I do not want those, Pasha," Ilya said, his voice flat.

He walked to a small kiosk near the exit. He didn't look at the electronics or the clothing. He looked at a display of candy. With a steady hand, he placed a single dollar on the counter and pointed to a Snickers bar.

He didn't buy jeans for Alexei. He didn't buy perfume for Svetlana. He didn't buy trinkets to remember his time here. To buy those things would be to admit he was going back to give them. He needed to save the money. He would need it. By purchasing nothing but a single, fleeting bit of sugar, Ilya was finalizing the plan. He didn't need anything to take home if he was never going back. He sat on a bench and ate the bar. Slowly, savoring every bite. It was like nothing he had ever had before. It was cloyingly sweet, the caramel sticking to his teeth. It tasted like the mall: overwhelming, unnecessary, and addictive. He dropped the wrapper in the trash. One of Fedorov's men clocked it from across the fountain.

That night, Ilya sat up in the dark, his heart beating like a drum. Beside him, the synthetic rustle of the bedding sounded like a landslide.

"Ilyushka?" Maks's voice was thick with sleep from the neighboring cot. "Where are you going?"

"Can't sleep," Ilya whispered, getting out of bed.

Maks chuckled, a low, weary sound. "A girl who caught your eye at the gate?"

"Something like that," Ilya agreed.

"Go. I'll cover. Tell them you have a stomach ache."

"Thank you, Pasha," Ilya murmured, the guilt settling in his chest like a stone dropped in still water.

Ilya moved through the hallway in socked feet, past the physical therapists' room where the light was still on under the door and two voices murmured about something in low, satisfied tones. The laundry room was hot and loud, industrial machines churning in the dark, the air thick with chemical soap. A man in a Montreal Metros jacket was waiting behind a bank of dryers. No time for pleasantries. Ilya started in shock. He had expected Hollander, but he was nowhere to be found.

"We need to know if you're willing to defect. One million a year," the man whispered in Russian, sliding a single sheet of paper across a folding table. "Three-year guarantee. A signing bonus of two hundred thousand, deposited the moment you reach the embassy. You will be the highest-paid player on the roster."

Ilya stared at the numbers. The zeros seemed to stretch across the page like a line of soldiers. One million dollars. In Moscow, the official exchange rate was a fiction maintained by the State to keep the people in the dark. But Ilya knew the truth of the streets. He knew a single American dollar could buy a week's worth of food. This was an astronomical sum of wealth that defied the laws of his gravity.

He did the math in the humid, soap-scented dark. A Senior Lieutenant in the Red Army might earn four or five thousand rubles a year if he were lucky and favored. This contract, converted at the black market rate, was equivalent to over eight million rubles a year. It was a figure of such obscene opulence that it felt like a physical weight on his chest. The two hundred thousand dollar signing bonus alone was more money than his entire lineage had earned since the Revolution. What it could buy. What it could protect. His father's medical care. Svetlana studying abroad in Paris. Two hundred American dollars folded into Sasha's hand in a dim apartment in Moscow. He handed the paper back before he finished thinking about it.

"The plan is set," the agent continued, his eyes scanning the door. "We have to know if you are coming."

"I'm coming," Ilya said. “P2.” He returned to his room, the static in his head transformed into a countdown.

The air in the Saddledome was different for the medal rounds. It was electric, pressurized by the collective breath of a nation that treated hockey as a religion and the Soviets as the ultimate heresy. It was time. USSR vs. Canada. The crowd was ten thousand people denser and twice as loud, the Go Canada Go chant a rhythmic pressure that Ilya felt deep in his stomach. Tikhonov sat on a trunk in the locker room and said nothing. His jaw moved. His eyes were the color of old blood. Ilya pulled the CCCP jersey over his head and felt the Walkman shift inside the shoulder pad's foam, a small, traitorous weight over his heart.

When they took the ice, the noise hit like something physical, a wave that pushed against his chest. He skated his circles and found Shane Hollander in thirty seconds flat.

Hollander looked like he was vibrating on a different frequency. His face was pale and tight, the freckles more pronounced for it, his dark eyes moving with a frantic, scanning energy that Ilya recognized. The look of a man tracking too many things at once. They crossed paths at center ice and Shane slowed to match his stride for half a breath. The minders were a wall of gray in the stands, but for this heartbeat, there was only the shriek of steel on ice.

"The mall," Shane said, low and fast. "I heard you bought a candy bar."

Ilya's pupils dilated. How did he know? The Metros had people everywhere. "It was sweet," Ilya replied. His English came out flat and slightly wrong, the way it always did under pressure.

"Will I see you?" Shane asked, his dark eyes locking onto Ilya's with a raw, terrifying honesty. "In Montreal?"

Ilya's grip tightened around his stick until he felt the tape compress. He was wearing a red jersey in a Canadian arena with his country's initials on his chest and Shane Hollander was asking to meet him in another city like it was the most normal thing in the world, and it was, it was the most normal thing in the world, and Ilya had no idea what to do with that.

"Hollander," Ilya rasped, his grip tightening on his stick until his knuckles turned white.

"Yeah?"

"Lose."

Shane's mouth twisted into that gorgeous, effortless grin, the one that cost him nothing. "Not tonight, Rozanov. Tonight, we play."

The whistle went. The world contracted to ice and effort and a countdown of the days.

The game was an algorithm executed perfectly. The Soviets were clinical and relentless and entirely joyless about it. Ilya moved like water finding the lowest point, inevitable, without apparent effort. His first goal at ten minutes was a backhand that the goalie only heard. He skated back to the bench and sat down and said nothing and felt his ribs working hard around the thing inside his chest.

During the second period, Ilya drove the net and Shane stepped up. A full-body collision, two hundred pounds of Canadian obstruction arriving with the particular conviction of a man who had something to protect. The glass shuddered behind them. For a second they were pressed together, chest to chest, helmets close enough that Ilya could see the sweat on Shane's upper lip, the vein moving in his throat, the particular shade of brown in his eyes that photographs had never once captured correctly.

"Soon," Ilya said. "Montreal."

Shane's gloved hand closed around the front of Ilya's red jersey, not pushing, not pulling. Holding. One second over the line in full view of everyone.

"Yes," Shane said. His voice was low and raw. 

The final score was 5-0. A dismantling. The crowd went silent in that particular Canadian way, not hostile, just gutted, a whole arena processing grief.

Shane was at the bench with his head down, dark hair plastered to his forehead, chest still moving too fast. He looked like a person. He looked like someone who had wanted something and not gotten it and was deciding how to survive that.

At the handshake, Shane reached Ilya and took his hand in both of his and held it. No good game. No acknowledgment of the scoreboard.

"See you soon," he said.

"Soon," Ilya said.

He turned and followed the gray coats into the tunnel and did not look back.

In the light in the Olympic Village room, Ilya sat on the edge of his cot, the shiny synthetic polyester of his red tracksuit rustling with every shallow breath. Across the small gap of linoleum, Maks was meticulously cleaning his white leather trainers. He was a mountain of a man with the face of a bruised cherub, but tonight, his eyes were sharp.

"You only bought the chocolate," Maks said, finally. Low. Careful. "At the mall. You didn't want anything else?"

Ilya's pulse lurched. "Nothing my family would like."

Maks set the sneaker down. He leaned forward, his big frame blocking the light from the hallway, and looked at Ilya with an expression Ilya had never seen on him before. Something harder. Something that had been watching for a while. "In the tunnel today with Hollander you looked like you were saying goodbye to someone."

The hum in Ilya's bones crested.

"You know what they do to captains who lose focus," Maks said. "Not just the rank. The name. Factory team in the Urals. Is that it? You're giving up?"

Ilya looked at his hands. Found the angle. Let the real tremor in his fingers do the work.

"Tikhonov is a butcher, Pasha," he said. Quiet. Tired. "I am tired of being the machine. I am tired of the weight of it. I look at Hollander and I want what he has."

Maks exhaled, a long, heavy sound of relief. He sat back, the tension bleeding out of his frame. "You think if we don't get the gold, they will use that Montreal report to bury you."

"They're already measuring the hole."

"The candy," Maks said. Not a question.

"For the boy I was. The one who used to skate on ponds for fun." Ilya held his gaze. "I don't want to go back, Maksik."

Maks reached across and gripped his shoulder, fingers digging in, solid and warm. "We win the gold. Colonel is satisfied. Tikhonov stays in his cage. You're the best player in the world — they won't touch you."

"Yes," Ilya said. "We win the gold."

Maks went to bed. Ilya stared at the ceiling until his eyes adjusted to the dark. The lie had stuck. The wall was back. He reached under the cot and pressed his palm against the Field Manual. He thought of freckles. He thought of a warm home in Montreal.

Forty-eight hours left to be a hero. After that, the Machine would finally stop.

The Saddledome was a pressurized chamber of history. For the Soviet team, this was the final hurdle of a four-year cycle of absolute discipline. For Ilya, it was the final sixty minutes of his life as a Senior Lieutenant.

Inside the locker room, the air was thick with the smell of orange-scented wax and the metallic tang of sharpened steel. Ilya sat in his stall, pulling the red wool jersey over his head. The CCCP across his chest felt like a tombstone. Behind the foam of his breastplate, the Sony Walkman was a hard, silent weight against his heart, a physical manifestation of the treason he was about to commit. He reached into the pocket of his trench coat, hanging on the hook above him, and pressed his fingers against the worn spine of the dictionary. He had pulled it from its hiding place this morning. He would need it later.

"Ilyushka," Maks whispered as they lined up to head to the ice. "Stay in the center. I will stay on your wing. We finish this together."

"Together," Ilya lied, his voice a low, melodic rasp.

Finland played with a desperate, northern grit that Ilya respected and systematically dismantled. He was precise and violent and somewhere else entirely, his body running the algorithms while his mind traced the route from the locker room to the loading dock for the four hundredth time.

His game-winning goal in the second period came off a wrist shot from the top of the circle that buried itself in the net with a sound like a door slamming shut. He skated back to center and looked up into the Canadian section and found Shane Hollander at the rail, both hands on the barrier, watching Ilya with an intensity that had no business being visible to anyone who happened to look.

The third period. Finland throwing everything. The Red Machine not faltering even for an instant.

The final buzzer cracked through the Saddledome. He had won Olympic Gold. He was the best player in the world. His hands were shaking inside his gloves and he was already somewhere else.

The stadium erupted. On the Soviet bench, the controlled, rhythmic thump of gloves on boards. No one jumped the glass. They had fulfilled the requirement.

As the teams lined up for the handshakes, Ilya moved through the motions like a ghost. When he reached the end of the line, he didn't look back at the Finns. He looked at the Canadian section. Shane Hollander was still there, his dark eyes wide and unblinking. He didn't smile. He didn't nod. He stood there, his dark hair a messy halo under the arena lights, watching Ilya.

The medal ceremony was an exercise in calculated optics. Ilya stood on the highest tier of the podium. He wore a bright red polyester puffer parka, the high collar zipped all the way up against his chin. He had tucked all the money he had in the world into the waistband of his track pants.  On the left breast, the circular Soviet State Emblem, the hammer and sickle globe, glinted under the arena lights, surrounded by the Cyrillic text for the Olympic Committee. On his head was a white knit beanie, the red and blue striped band and the small pompom on top making him look jarringly young, almost innocent. It was a costume of athletic accessibility, a soft shell for the hardest man on the ice.

When the heavy, gold-plated disc was placed around his neck, it pulled him down, feeling heavier than it had any right to be. The State Anthem began to play. Ilya stood at attention in his dark red athletic trousers, his white sneakers planted firmly on the wood of the podium. The red flag climbed. Around him his teammates sang, their voices thick with real relief. Maks was openly crying, his face cracked open with the kind of joy that comes from genuinely, unconditionally believing in something.

Ilya didn't sing. He looked at the Canadian section. Shane was still at the rail. Still watching. He was a hero. He was counting minutes.

The walk back to the dressing rooms felt triumphant, but the glass wall of security was at its most impenetrable. Dr. Fedorov was a shadow at Ilya's elbow, his silence a localized cold front. Ilya hesitated, patting his bag.

"Bus is staged, Lieutenant. Ten minutes. Plane's fueled." Fedorov snapped. "What is the issue?"

"I left my gloves in the equipment room," Ilya said. His voice didn't waver. "Thirty seconds."

Fedorov's gaze moved across Ilya's face, slow and methodical. Ilya had been a machine for twenty-one years. He knew how to hold a mask. Fedorov nodded. "Thirty seconds. I'll be at the bus door. Pasternak — go with him."

Fuck.

The equipment room was a sanctuary of linoleum and the smell of menthol. The moment the door hissed shut, Ilya grabbed Maks by the arm, dragging him into the corner behind a stack of towels.

"Ilyushka, what—"

Ilya didn't let him finish. The last hundred dollars came out of his waistband. Ilya pressed the cash into Maks's hand.

"Three minutes, Pasha. That's all I need."

Maks looked at the bills. Looked at Ilya. The air between them went tight. "The mall," Maks said. His voice had dropped to almost nothing. "The candy bar. It wasn't about the boy on the pond."

"Tell Fedorov I'm vomiting. Tell him anything. Don't let him through that door."

Maks stared at him. The hundred dollars sat in his open palm like a verdict. A fortune. A car. A life. A future for people in Moscow who needed one.

"They'll erase you," Maks said. His voice cracked down the middle. "Name off the records. Tell us you never existed."

"I already don't exist, Pasha." And that was the truest thing Ilya had said in months. "Please."

Maks's fingers closed around the bills. He didn't look at it. He tucked it deep into his glove and looked at Ilya one final time, a look that cost him something, that Ilya knew he would carry for a long time, that said everything that couldn't be said in a room with thin walls and a thirty-second window.

"I hope you are sure," Maks said, his voice gone flat and military. "I hear anything, I start a fight with Fedorov. Tell him you fainted."

"Goodbye, Maksimka."

"Go," Maks said. "You idiot. Go." Ilya ran, his boots echoing on the rubber matting. 

P2 was a heavy metal door with a faded stencil and a bar handle cold enough to sting through Ilya's palm. He pushed through into the loading dock, damp concrete, diesel exhaust, the thin high-altitude air cutting straight through his tan coat, and stopped.

A gray sedan idled under a flickering industrial light.

He walked toward it. He had expected, somewhere in the irrational back of his mind, to see dark eyes through the tinted glass. To see Hollander.

The driver's door opened. The man who got out was older, anonymous, navy parka, knit cap pulled low, the specific unremarkability of someone professionally invisible. He held the rear door open and said nothing and scanned the loading dock with the practiced attention of a man who had done this before and expected to do it again.

Ilya had never been so alone in his life. He thought of the Walkman. He thought of the freckles. He thought of Maks on the other side of that door, probably starting a fight with Fedorov right now, choosing him with a hundred dollars and a look that had cost him something. He had to trust this man.

He got in. The back seat smelled of cheap tobacco and pine, and the door thudded shut behind him, and the man got back in front and put the car in gear, and the Saddledome's lights shrank in the rear window as they pulled away from the concrete mouth of the loading dock and into the Calgary night.

Ilya reached up and gripped the gold medal. The relief of the embossed crest pressed into his palm. The English words came up slow, like something he'd been holding underwater finally breaking the surface.

"Can you take me to the Canadian embassy?"

The man nodded once and pressed the accelerator. The city opened up ahead of them, amber and glass, a grid of light thrown across the dark, and Ilya exhaled for what felt like the first time in twenty-one years, and watched it come.

Chapter End Notes

Some little bits you might like:
The Canadian delegation's uniforms were famously truly terrible. White cowboy hats and red fringed jackets. Shane would have been a cute little tomato cowboy.

Ilya's story here is inspired in part by Alexander Mogilny, who defected to the Buffalo Sabres in 1989. He had a very similar escape to Ilya here. Ducked into a car on the loading dock at the World Championships in Stockholm, then directly on a plane to the US. His story is pretty wild, in case you want some foreshadowing of what could possibly come in future chapters, or you can let yourself be surprised.

The information on the exchange rate and the proposed salary are somewhat exaggerated. A million dollars a year wouldn’t make him the highest paid player, but most of the Russian Five made less than $400k their first year playing. A million just sounded cooler, and wasn’t outlandishly impossible if they were serious.

Lots of use of nicknames here. Ilya would have likely been Roza to his teammates in the USSR.

Since I got a deeply bad-faith comment about it: yes, I am aware that NHL players were not permitted to play in the Olympics in 1988. I needed Shane there, so he’s there. It was a deliberate decision, because this is fiction and I can make mostly inconsequential changes like that for the sake of the story.

Hope you liked this one!

Chapter 8: Processing

Chapter Summary

Ilya begins the asylum process, only to find that the land of joy and light is not what he was expecting.

Chapter Notes

Processing (verb)

1. To perform a series of mechanical or bureaucratic operations in order to change the status of a person or object.

2. To subject raw material to a series of operations in order to change or preserve it.

3. To acquire and interpret information; to take in data and arrive at understanding. 

Example: "Each time Ilya asked a question, it traveled through the interpreter and arrived at the supervisor and came back as a variation of the same answer: when the process is complete." — February 1988

The gray sedan didn't take Ilya to the embassy. Instead, it descended into a parking garage beneath a nondescript office building on the edge of the city. The transition from the biting, thin air of the Saddledome to the stagnant, fluorescent-lit warmth of the bunker felt like being plunged into lukewarm water.

Ilya sat in the back seat, his fingers white-knuckled around the gold medal in his pocket. He was still wearing the long, tan wool coat over his podium gear. Beneath it, the red parka felt like a suffocating second skin. The dictionary was a hard rectangular weight in his coat pocket. No bag. No spare clothes.

The Walkman was gone. He’d had to leave the shoulder pads behind, the silver device still stitched into the foam. They would find it immediately. He knew they would find it. And when they did, they would tear through every piece of his equipment looking for more. He thought of Maks, who was probably standing at the bus door right now explaining to Fedorov that Ilya had fainted, that he would be out in a moment, that there was nothing wrong. He thought of Maks's face. He thought of what would happen to Maks when the moment never came.

The rear door opened. Two men in dark suits stood in the fluorescent wash of the garage. They didn't have Fedorov's predatory stillness, but they possessed a similar cold efficiency. 

"Mr. Rozanov," one of them said. His Russian was perfect, accented with the soft, rounded vowels of a man who had studied the language at a university, not a military academy. "Welcome to Canada. Please step out of the vehicle."

Ilya stepped onto the concrete. His white sneakers made a soft scuff that echoed in the silence. They led him to a room with no windows. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead at a frequency Ilya recognized from the administrative wings in Moscow. The sound of a machine waiting to be fed. He stood in the center of the room and understood, with a cold and sinking precision, that the machinery here was different only in its paperwork.

"We need to verify everything on your person, Mr. Rozanov."

"Where are we?" Ilya asked, in Russian. "This is not the embassy."

The interpreter translated. The supervisor, a trim man in a gray suit who had the particular stillness of someone accustomed to waiting out other people's discomfort, looked up from his clipboard. "A secure processing facility. The embassy is the next step."

"When?"

"That depends." The supervisor's tone was not unkind. It was simply sealed. He nodded at the table between them. "Your belongings, please."

They asked him to remove the tan wool coat first. He handed it over with a sharp, involuntary sense of nakedness. The coat wasn't his, technically. He would have had to hand it back over after the Games, but it had been his for three weeks and the loss of it felt physical. The official reached into the pockets, finding the battered dictionary and laying it on the metal table. 

"What is this?"

Ilya's throat was dry. "I was learning English."

The supervisor picked it up. He opened it to a random page. He looked at the cramped annotations in the margins. Phonetic Russian, underlined English words, months of secret vocabulary accumulated one word at a time. His face was completely expressionless as he set it aside. 

"We will need to examine this."

"It is a dictionary," Ilya said. 

"I understand. You will get it back." 

Ilya looked at the interpreter. The interpreter looked at the table. The supervisor nodded at the red puffer parka, and the process continued. The parka. The white knit beanie. The white sneakers. Each item placed on the table in a row, catalogued, tagged, set aside. Each time Ilya asked a question, it traveled through the interpreter and arrived at the supervisor and came back as a variation of the same answer: when the process is complete.

"My teammates," Ilya said, as they tagged the sneakers. "The Soviet team. Do they know where I am?"

"No."

"Do they know I am safe?" He paused before saying the word safe. The interpreter paused for a moment before translating. The supervisor listened.

"They know you have not been located," he replied. "That is all."

"One of them," Ilya said. "Pasternak. He was with me when I left. He covered for me. Will they–" He stopped. Ilya didn't know how to finish the sentence. Will they punish him? Erase him? Put him in a room like this one and ask him questions until he gives up the information. Ilya finally said: "Will he be all right?" 

The interpreter translated. The supervisor looked at Ilya for a long moment, the first time he had looked at him instead of a clipboard. He said carefully, "We have no information about individuals on the Soviet team at this time."

"That is not an answer."

"No," the supervisor agreed. "It is not." He nodded to the official beside him. "Now please remove your trousers."

Ilya stood in his underwear under the buzzing lights. He felt the high-frequency vibration in his bones reach a deafening pitch. He was no longer a Senior Lieutenant or a gold medalist. He was just a body. A man in a white lab coat entered. He didn't look like Dr. Fedorov. He didn't look for ideological vibrations. He looked for scars.

"Medical clearance," the interpreter explained. "Standard procedure for the asylum claim."

The doctor was coldly professional, documenting all of Ilya's history. He noted the jagged ridge on Ilya's left shoulder from a high speed collision in Prague four years ago. He noted the surgical line on his abdomen from an appendectomy Ilya had at seventeen. A constellation of smaller marks that mapped the violent history of playing hockey at a professional level. The doctor noted each one without comment. He drew blood, three vials that looked impossibly red against the white sleeve of his coat, and then he was gone. 

Ilya stood in the center of the windowless room and thought, I did this. I chose this. The thought was not comforting. 

They brought civilian clothes in a plastic bag with a swirling yellow logo that Ilya didn't recognize. Jeans, real ones with copper rivets and a leather patch. The kind that would cost a month's wages on the Arbat. A flannel shirt in red and black. A plain white t-shirt to wear underneath. He dressed with fingers that didn't fully cooperate, the denim stiff and unyielding against his skin, the flannel two sizes too large. In his Soviet uniform, every inch had been tailored to project the power of the State. Now he looked like he had borrowed someone else's clothes. He looked like a nobody. That, he supposed, was the point. 

He reached into the pocket of the red parka before they took it away and transferred the gold medal to the pocket of the jeans, feeling it settle against the rough denim of his thigh. Then they took that too.

"It needs to be logged," the interpreter said. "You will get it back."

Ilya watched them seal it into a plastic evidence bag. The embossed edge caught the fluorescent light for a half-second and then it was gone, swallowed by the same clinical efficiency that had taken the coat, the dictionary, the clothes off his back.

"When?" Ilya asked.

The interpreter opened his mouth.

"It depends," Ilya said flatly. "Yes."

The interpreter looked at him. For a moment, something passed across his face that wasn't professionalism. Then it was gone. "Yes," he said quietly. "It depends."

The fingerprints came next. A glass plate, a bottle of black ink. A suited man took Ilya's wrist with a grip that was firm and not violent and rolled each finger across the glass, then onto a white card. Ilya watched the whorls of his own skin become data points on a Canadian government form. Left hand. Right hand. The ink was cold.

Then the camera. A white wall marked with height increments in inches and centimeters. Look at the lens. Do not smile. Flash. Front view. Flash. Profile. The jagged line of his nose, broken three times in the service of the Union, stark against the white background. The supervisor entered again, this time with the air of closing a file. He nodded to the interpreter, who cleared his throat.

"Representatives from your team have contacted the local police. They are claiming you were abducted. They say you are having a nervous collapse and are mentally unwell, and that agents of the West are holding you against your will. They are demanding your return."

Ilya's ink-stained fingers curled against his thighs. He thought of Fedorov's blank, methodical face. He thought of the physical therapists who had never treated a physical injury. And then, underneath that, quieter and more honest: Maks. What are they doing to Maks right now.

"I am not kidnapped," he said, in Russian. Then, in English that came out flat and slightly wrong, "I stay. Montreal Metros."

The supervisor's expression didn't shift.

"What happens now?" Ilya asked.

"The claim for asylum is filed with the federal government in Ottawa. A review period follows."

"How long?"

"Several days. Possibly weeks."

"Where will I be during that time?"

"At a secure location."

"Where?"

"Better if you don't know."

Ilya looked at him steadily. "Can I speak to someone from the Montreal Metros?"

The supervisor consulted the clipboard. "Not at this time."

"Can I speak to anyone?"

A pause. "Not at this time."

"Can I see a newspaper?"

"Not — "

"At this time," Ilya said. "Yes. I know." He looked at the interpreter. The interpreter was looking at the middle distance with the focused attention of someone choosing not to have an expression. Ilya was familiar with that look. He wore it himself frequently.

"I know you have questions," the supervisor said, through the interpreter. "I'm sorry I can't answer them." He checked his watch. "It's time to move. The Soviets have people looking and they're pressuring local authorities to conduct searches. We need to be out of the city before dawn."

"And my dictionary?"

"It will follow you to the next location."

"And you will not tell me where the next location is?"

The supervisor looked at him. Something in his face that wasn't quite a smile. "It's secure," he said. "And it has a bed."

They drove out of Calgary before dawn in a dark blue SUV with tinted windows and a reinforced frame. Ilya climbed into the back with nothing in his pockets. The emptiness of them was its own kind of information. It made him feel profoundly unprepared. 

"Gordie," the driver said, catching Ilya's eye in the rearview mirror. He pointed to himself. Then to his partner. "Benny."

"Ilya," Ilya said.

Benny didn't turn around. Gordie nodded once and faced the road. He was a broad man with a face like weathered oak and a thick mustache that gave him the look of someone who had spent decades being underestimated. Benny, in the passenger seat, was wiry and quiet with the particular stillness of a man who had learned to take up very little space.

They conversed with each other in low, fast English that Ilya couldn't follow. Ilya pressed his forehead against the cold window and watched Calgary recede. The amber grit of it, the same grid he had watched materialize out of the dark from the Aeroflot window, what felt like a hundred years ago. 

He thought about Maks, trying to explain that Ilya wasn't coming. He thought about the moment Fedorov would push past him. The face that Maks would make when everyone realized it was too late, and there was nothing more to be done. He thought about what they would ask Maks. What Maks would say. He thought about Sasha, who had known since Vienna that something was coming and had never brought it up even once. Was he spending the American dollars now? He thought about his father, who sometimes didn't know where he was, watching the television with no understanding of what the men on the screen were saying about his son. This was, in its way, the only mercy that existed.

Ilya's stomach gave a loud, involuntary growl. Gordie reached into a paper bag in between the front seats and tossed something into the back without looking. Ilya caught it by reflex. A granola bar.  Oats and nuts held together by a sweetness so aggressive it made his back teeth ache. Everything in this country was so fucking sweet. He chewed it slowly and watched the green and white road signs blur past in the dark. Words that meant nothing.

The Rockies emerged gradually from the black. Vast, shadowed shapes rising against a sky that was beginning to bleed gray at the edges. Not mountains that belonged to anything. They rose out of the flat Alberta dark. 

The safe house was a low wooden structure in a valley so deep the sun wouldn't reach the porch until noon. Gordie led Ilya inside, his boots thumping on the hardwood. Benny gestured towards one of the rooms upstairs. "You, go sleep." He mimed sleeping. 

Running on pure adrenaline that was quickly fading, Ilya walked up the stairs, his legs heavy in the stiff denim. The room was small, containing a bed with a thick wool blanket that smelled of cedar and disuse, a window overlooking a frozen creek, and a dusty lamp on a bedside table.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and waited. He waited for a phone to ring, for a door to open, for someone to explain that the freedom he had bought with his life didn't feel like a room with a lock on the outside. But there was nothing. Only the low, rhythmic murmur of Gordie and Benny's conversation from the room below. It was a steady reminder of how completely alone he was. It was not the monitored, surveilled loneliness of the Soviet barracks, where at least being watched was its own form of company. This was something emptier. He was in a room in a country that did not know what to do with him yet, guarded by men who had been paid to keep him alive and had not been paid to keep him informed.

He lay back on the bed and took stock.

He had defected. He had won Olympic gold. He had gotten into a gray sedan in a loading dock and been stripped and fingerprinted and photographed and driven through the dark in a car that smelled of pine air freshener, and his medal was in a plastic evidence bag in a room he could not re-enter and his dictionary was being examined by strangers and Maks was probably at the airport right now, and Svetlana either had the letter or she didn't, and Sasha was watching the news, and his father was sitting by a window understanding nothing.

And somewhere in Montreal, in a house Ilya had never seen, a man with dark eyes and freckles across his nose did not yet know where Ilya was, and could not do anything about it even if he did. The thought was supposed to be a comfort. It arrived instead as a cold, clarifying weight.

He had organized his entire life around a voice on a tape and three taps of a foot under a table. He had burned everything–his rank, his name, his country, his family's safety–for a man he had never spoken to in a shared language, in a country whose language he barely spoke, in a cabin whose address he didn't know, guarded by two men whose last names he hadn't been given.

I have made a catastrophic mistake.

He did not say it aloud. He lay with it, the way he had learned to lie with things in the barracks, still, controlled, giving nothing to the ceiling above him. The not-knowing was the worst of it. Not the stripping of his clothes, or the fingerprints, or the lights. The not-knowing. He did not know if Maks had been taken to a room like this one. He did not know if Fedorov had sent someone to Svetlana's apartment. He did not know if someone had sat across from his father and said his son's name in a tone that would mean nothing to a man who sometimes couldn't remember the year. He had been trained his whole life to function without information. He had not been trained for this. The specific silence of a country that didn't know what to do with him, that had taken everything and locked its own doors and left him alone with the full weight of his choices. Ilya pulled his knees to his chest, hugging them tightly, willing the minutes to tick by.

The sky outside went from gray to pale to the thin, flat white of a Canadian morning that had no interest in being dramatic about it. Ilya didn't sleep again. He stood up, his joints popping. He walked down the stairs, his steps muffled by the beige carpet.

Gordie was in front of the television with a Western on — vast dusty landscapes, men with faces like dried leather. Benny was in the kitchen, the rhythmic clack-hiss of a soda can opening punctuating the film. Ilya stood behind the sofa and watched without understanding a word of the dialogue. It was a barrage of vowels and slang, but he understood the silhouette of the man on the screen. He was a wanderer, a man between worlds, always looking at a horizon that never got any closer. For a moment, Ilya just watched him, this man between worlds, this man the film kept cutting away from before he arrived anywhere, and felt the specific grief of recognition. He wanted to see the news. He wanted to know if Svetlana had found the letter. He wanted to know if his father still remembered his name.

Ilya gestured at the TV, trying to communicate without the words. "Novosti," he pleaded. News. "Gazeta," he said. Newspaper, miming folding a paper. 

Gordie looked at him. Something moved across his rough, lined face, but it was quickly replaced by the blank, professional mask. "No."

Ilya slumped into a chair. This was infuriating. He was stuck here with nothing to do, in a language he had just barely begun to understand the bones of. "Telefon?" he asked, although he didn't know who he would call. He felt like a casualty of a war that hadn't even started yet. Every time he tried to reach out for the world, Gordie or Benny gently, firmly, pushed his hand back. They were his protectors, and yet they were the ones keeping him in the dark.

They watched the movie in silence, the air growing cold. When it ended, Gordie re-loaded the VCR with another one. Late in the evening, a third man joined them. He set a small, brown paper bag in front of Ilya with a kind smile. 

Ilya reached into the bag before the man had finished setting it down. The dictionary was warm from being carried inside the man's coat. It smelled of old paper and the specific damp of the Moscow barracks and something faintly chemical from the photocopying process, but underneath all of it, unmistakably, it smelled of the room where he had learned to want things in secret. He held it in both hands for a moment without opening it. He was aware the three men were watching him hold a battered paperback dictionary with the focused attention of a man handling something irreplaceable, and he didn't care.

He turned to the back pages. The cramped Russian phonetics in the margins. The small careful English words building alongside them. He found the page where he had written SOON in block letters, pressed hard enough to leave an indent in the page beneath.

In tidy blue ink, in someone else's hand: SAFE.

Ilya sat with this for a long time. The fire was burning down to embers. He took the dictionary upstairs, trying to find words to describe his feelings.

Izolyatsiya. Isolation. The physical separation, lack of social connections, or involuntary detachment from others, often resulting in feelings of loneliness. 

He read it twice. The gap between the words and what he was actually feeling was not a gap that any dictionary could bridge. Being alone was not the same as being the only person who knew what you had done, and whether it was the right choice. The dictionary had hundreds of words and none of them were the ones he actually needed. It could tell him what isolation meant. It could not tell him if anyone he loved was safe.

Nadeyat'sya. Hope. A feeling of expectation or desire for a particular outcome. He thought about how long he had carried that feeling without a name for it, and whether naming it changed what it weighed. 

He took the pen from the inside back cover, where he'd kept it hidden for all these months. He opened to the last blank page. Not SOON, not SAFE. Something truer than either, because it was where he actually was.

Waiting. Ozhidayushchiy.

He capped the pen and looked at the word for a long time. He thought about Sasha watching the news. He thought about Maks tucking a hundred dollars into his glove with a look that had cost him something. He thought about a voice on a tape saying I am lost with no idea what it was actually saying, and whether that was the truest thing anyone had ever said to him. He was still looking at the word when the bedroom door hit the stopper with a sound like a gunshot.

Ilya was off the bed immediately, his heart slamming against his ribs in the percussive rhythm of a soldier expecting a raid. Gordie was there, his heavy wool coat already on, his face granite under the harsh hall light. "Move it. Boots on. Now."

Ilya didn't need the translation. He saw the way Benny was already in the living room, a silhouette against the window, his hand resting on a holster at his hip. The static in Ilya's brain surged into a roar. They found me.

"Book," Ilya rasped in English, lunging for the bedside table. His fingers closed around the tattered spine and he clutched it to his chest. 

"Yeah, grab your book," Gordie muttered, a hand on Ilya's shoulder already propelling him toward the stairs. "Go. Davai." Ilya registered the Russian with a jolt, a fraction of a second of surprise before he was hauled through the door and into the cold. Did Gordie speak Russian? Or had he done this before, enough times that certain words had worn grooves in his mind?

The silver Ford was bland and fast, invisible by design. Ilya was in the back before he'd registered crossing the porch, his head forced down by Benny's heavy hand until they cleared the residential street and hit the open highway. 

"Stay low," Benny snapped. Ilya lay across the cold vinyl with the dictionary pressed against his chest and listened to the two men talk, urgent English and French-Canadian slang at a velocity he couldn't begin to parse. The road signs blurred past in the dark. The Rockies fell away behind them. The sky ahead was still black but beginning, at the very edges, to consider something else.

He caught fragments. Edmonton. Soviets. Safe house. Prairie grid. He caught the word Montreal and held onto it like a handhold on a very steep slope. The car took a corner fast enough that the tires shrieked. Ilya braced against the door, the dictionary hard against his sternum. He understood, with total cold clarity, the specific shape of what he had done. 

In Moscow, they put you in the Lubyanka in the middle of the night. They drove you in cars you couldn't leave to rooms with no windows. They gave you men who watched the door and answered your questions with other questions. They took the things you valued and logged them and told you they would give them back. They made decisions about where you would be and did not tell you what they were. 

In Canada, they put you in a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. They drove you in cars you couldn't leave to rooms where you could do nothing. They gave you men who watched the door and couldn't speak to you at all. They took the things you valued and logged them and told you they would give them back. They made decisions about where you would be and did not tell you what they were. 

In Canada, they call these things protection. The distinction, and there was a distinction, was in the direction of the door. In Moscow, the doors locked from the outside. Here, someday, somewhere ahead, the door would eventually lock from the inside. He held onto that. He pressed the dictionary harder against his chest and held onto the idea of a door that locked from the inside, a house in Montreal, large and warm and full of light the way he imagined all Canadian houses were. The car accelerated into the dark. Ilya closed his eyes.

I hope Maks is okay.

I hope Shane Hollander knows I am coming.

He chose those two thoughts deliberately, the way you choose what to carry when you can only carry so much. The highway unspooled ahead of them, and the night deepened, and the edges of the sky considered something that wasn't yet light but was no longer entirely dark.

Chapter End Notes

All Russian translations were confirmed with several translation apps, but I am sorry if they are not accurate.

Some other notes:

I deliberately set this in 1988 so that Ilya would be the first hockey player to defect. This has never happened yet, so the Soviet delegation is notably upset. Alexander Mogilny, who defected in 1989, had several similar parts to his story. He was 20 when he defected. There was a car waiting, a prearranged route, movement through channels that kept him hidden while the Soviet delegation publicly insisted he had been abducted or was mentally unwell and having a crisis. The Soviets filed a formal complaint with Swedish authorities to have him returned "for health reasons."

Mogilny later said he didn't sleep for the first three days after he defected. He said the period immediately after his defection was worse than anything that had happened before it. Terror, isolation due to lack of language, surrounded by strangers he didn't know he could trust, with no way to contact his family.

The Lubyanka building was the KGB headquarters. It had a prison in the basement, and prisoners were often brought in during the night. The processing that Ilya undergoes in this chapter contains many of the same elements that would have happened if the KGB had arrested him, such as cataloguing personal items, medical examination, photography, and fingerprinting, but would end with his being sent to a cell. There is also a dark joke that it's the tallest building in Moscow because you can see Siberia from the basement.

Ilya's processing draws on Viktor Korchnoi, a chess player who defected in 1976, as well as on several Soviet artists who defected in the 1970s and 1980s, who described similar experiences.

Thoughts? Let me know in comments!

Chapter 9: Threshold

Chapter Summary

After a tense few days, Rozanov has gone missing and no one will give Shane a straight answer.

Chapter Notes

Some discussion of the concept of suicide in this chapter.

In honor of the outage making my Sunday MUCH more productive than anticipated, here’s this a few days early. I could have held onto it, but I have no impulse control.

Threshold (noun)

1. The place or point marking the beginning of something.

2. The minimum level required before a reaction occurs

3. A boundary that, once crossed, changes the nature of what exists on the other side.

Example: "He just hadn't known yet what it was the end of, or how small a piece of paper it had taken to help get there." — February 1988

His parents were waiting at the hotel entrance when the Team Canada van pulled up, which was David's doing. Yuna would never have suggested it, would have thought it unprofessional. But David had flown in separately from Montreal the day before and stood in the lobby for forty minutes before anyone told him which entrance the team would use, and then moved to the right one without complaint.

Shane saw him first through the window. Dark coat, gray at the temples, holding a Tim Hortons cup with two hands like it might escape. He was grinning before the van had fully stopped. 

"There he is," his father said, the way he always said it, like Shane's appearance was confirmation of something he'd been quietly worried about. He caught Shane in a hug that lasted a full three seconds. Shane let himself be held. "You look pale. Are you eating?"

"I'm eating, Dad."

"He's pale because it's winter," Yuna said, coming through the door behind David. She kissed Shane once on the cheek, precise and brief, her lipstick leaving no mark. She was in a charcoal blazer and had her planner under one arm. "How was the flight?"

"Fine."

"Good. We need to talk about the press conference tomorrow." She steered him by the elbow toward the elevator. "There are photographers from the CBC and the Globe and Mail already requesting access. The committee wants the captains seated together, which means you'll be adjacent to Rozanov for at least forty-five minutes. I need you to be careful about what you say."

"I know how to talk to reporters, Mom."

"You know how to charm reporters. There's a difference." She handed him a folder. "Talking points. We want respectful competitor, not friendly. The optics of being too warm with a Soviet player right now are complicated."

David appeared at Shane's other shoulder and pressed the Tim Hortons cup into his free hand. "Hot chocolate," he said. "It's cold out. Don't listen to your mother, just be yourself."

Yuna looked at her husband. "That is exactly the wrong advice."

"It has worked for twenty years."

Shane drank the hot chocolate in the elevator and said nothing. Both of them were right, which was the problem. Being himself had never been an uncomplicated proposition.

The Soviets beat the Americans 7-2, and Shane watched most of it from the VIP section with his hands in his coat pockets and his pulse behaving badly.

Rozanov scored twice. The first goal was a snap shot from the left circle that the American goalie didn't move for. No celebration, no raised arms, no look at the crowd. He just turned and skated back to center with that particular stillness he carried, like he was conserving something. The second goal came off a wrist shot at the top of the circle late in the second, and by then Shane had stopped telling himself he was just scouting. He was watching Rozanov the way he watched game tape at two in the morning. Looking for the seams in the performance. Trying to understand what was underneath it.

Nothing about Rozanov's face changed between the moment the puck left his stick and the moment the buzzer went. He didn't scan the crowd. He didn't smile at his teammates. After the handshake with the Soviet bench following the second goal, he skated back past center ice and his gaze dragged along the boards, and for about a second and a half it stopped at the VIP section. 

At Shane.

Shane didn't move. He looked back. The distance was twenty meters and Rozanov was already past him, already taking his position at center, and it was possible Shane had imagined the whole thing. 

He had not imagined the whole thing.

During intermission, a man in a dark Metros jacket materialized in the seat beside him. Shane recognized him. Beaulieu, the same one who had run his recording sessions in Montreal. They both kept their eyes fixed on the ice.

"Don't react," Beaulieu said calmly. He had the tone of a man reading a grocery list. "There's a laundry facility two floors down from the Soviet rooms in the Olympic Village. Tomorrow night, 2am. We need you to tell Rozanov to be there."

Shane looked at the ice where the Zamboni was running large sweeping circles. "How? Why me?"

"You'll have a chance at the press conference. You'll be closer than anyone else. Small note, right into his pocket." Beaulieu stood, buttoning his jacket. "Don't tell your mother."

Shane sat with his hands in his coat pockets and watched Rozanov finish dismantling the American team, and thought about the recording sessions. All those careful phrases he had read into a microphone. I am lost, I am afraid, I need help. Something slotted into place in his mind. 

After the final buzzer, he made his way down to the rail near the tunnel entrance. He didn't entirely know why. He told himself it was about tomorrow, the press conference, getting a read on the energy. He stood at the barrier with his forearms on the rail and watched the Soviet players file off the ice. Rozanov came last, the way he always did. Even in victory, unhurried, like leaving the ice was something he was doing on his own terms.

Rozanov didn't look at Shane coming through the tunnel. He looked at the middle distance the way soldiers look at things, not seeing, but aware. Then, as he came parallel to the rail, he did look. Just for a moment. Shane didn't have words for what he saw in Rozanov's face then, or maybe he just didn't want to. The man looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with a hockey game.

Shane raised one hand off the barrier. Not a wave. A small acknowledgment. Rozanov turned the corner and disappeared.

Shane stood at the rail for another moment and then went back upstairs. He spent the elevator ride telling himself, with limited conviction, that this was a professional interest. He drafted the note in his head during dinner, threw it away, drafted it again at midnight sitting on the bathroom floor with his back against the tub, and wrote the final version on a scrap of hotel notepad in the most careful block letters of his life.

Laundry, 02:00.

He folded it twice, put it in his jacket pocket, and willed himself to sleep.

Shane got to the Big Four Building early, sat at the press conference table, and arranged his water glass twice. Yuna was in the second row with the folder open on her knee. His father had somehow gotten a seat near the back and gave Shane a thumbs-up that Shane chose not to acknowledge.

Then Rozanov sat down.

He was in a cream wool sweater with a red stripe, the kind of Soviet-issue team clothing that was clearly not chosen for anyone's comfort, and he settled into the chair with a kind of contained precision, both hands flat on the table, shoulders squared. He didn't look at Shane. He looked at the reporters, which was the correct and professional thing to do.

He smelled of something Shane couldn't name, something that wasn't quite cologne, more like clean wool and cold air and a particular kind of soap that didn't come from any Canadian drugstore. Shane registered it before he registered that Rozanov had arrived. He shifted for his water glass and his elbow grazed the sleeve of Rozanov's sweater.

A reporter from the Toronto Star went first, directing a question at Rozanov about home-ice advantage. Shane listened to the translator's drone and watched Rozanov's face, which told him nothing. Then Rozanov answered.

"The ice is the same temperature in every country. A Soviet soldier does not play against the crowd. He plays against the puck."

Shane turned his head before he could stop himself. Rozanov was looking at the reporters. His profile was sharp under the television lights, jaw set, the particular blankness of a man who has spent years ensuring his face is not a source of information. But there was something else there too, something running just underneath, the way a river looks flat until you're in it.  They had been close before, when Rozanov or Shane had slammed the other into the boards during a game, but this felt like the first time he was really seeing Rozanov. The hazel eyes that bounced back and forth when he was thinking. Large hands with long fingers that seemed unnaturally still. The curve of his mouth, held in serious neutrality today.

"Captain Hollander?"

Shane pulled his eyes forward. "I think Rozanov is being polite." He heard the tautness in his own voice and smoothed it out. "But this is our house. By the time we meet in the finals, the Soviets are going to realize that the Machine doesn't have a home-court advantage here."

He felt Rozanov register the word Machine. Couldn't have said how he knew. Nothing visible changed. But the air between them shifted.

A reporter from Pravda, filtered through a second translator, asked Rozanov about the Soviet team's preparation. Rozanov answered at length, something about collective training methods and superior conditioning. Shane watched the wall behind the reporters and let the question and answer cycle move through a few more rotations.

Then, keeping his eyes forward, he moved his foot under the table and tapped the side of Rozanov's shoe.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

He didn't look. He kept his face in the expression of a man listening politely to a question about Olympic village accommodations. His pulse was in his ears. In his peripheral vision, Rozanov hadn't moved.

Then a reporter from Le Devoir directed a question at Shane. Something about the pressure of home-ice expectations, which he'd answered forty times in the past month.

"The pressure is real," Shane said, "but it's also what this team runs on. We've been built for this." He reached for his water glass, and his right hand went to Rozanov's side of the table instead, the note folded small between his first two fingers. He set it against Rozanov's wrist, so briefly that the cameras would have caught nothing, and brought the water glass back to his mouth. He did not look at Rozanov.

A reporter near the back raised her hand. "Captain Hollander, there's been a lot of discussion about the Metros having Rozanov's draft rights. Do you ever think about what it might look like if he played for Montreal?"

The room went a particular kind of quiet. Shane heard his mother's pen stop moving.

"I think every coach in the NHL would like a player of Rozanov's caliber," Shane said. He kept his voice pleasant. He did not look at the man beside him. "If that were ever to happen, it would be something. But right now we're focused on the tournament."

"Captain Rozanov," the reporter continued, "does the question of playing in the NHL come up in your mind?"

The translator murmured. Rozanov let the question sit for a beat, the way he did, giving nothing away in the pause.

"I play for the Soviet Union," Rozanov said. "This is my team. This is my home. I go where they need me." Shane pressed his thumbnail against the edge of his water glass.

He goes where they need him. The phrasing, in English, was too clean, too careful, the specific English of someone who had rehearsed it. Shane had heard Rozanov's English in Hamilton, rough and halting and real. This was something else. Obviously Rozanov would be more poetic and clear in Russian, but Shane felt the sudden urge to be able to have a conversation with him. A private conversation. Impossible.

After the translator finished, there was a pause, and then Rozanov turned his head, just slightly, just enough, and looked at Shane. He held Shane's gaze for exactly as long as he could justify, which was not long. Then he looked back at the reporters.

Shane exhaled. The rest of the press conference passed in a sequence of questions he answered correctly and could not have recalled ten minutes later. Yuna's posture in the second row remained perfectly vertical throughout. His father, at the back, had fallen asleep.

Outside in the corridor, Shane's mother intercepted him before he got to the door.

"Good." She closed the folder. "You were professional. The quote about his caliber was generous, which reads well, but don't go further than that. These are complicated times to be expressing admiration for Soviet players."

"I said he was a good hockey player."

"You said every coach would want him." She looked at Shane with the expression she used when she thought he was being obtuse on purpose. "That's not the same thing. The optics are what they are. We have to be careful."

"I've been careful my whole career."

"Yes." She said it without inflection, which was somehow worse than if she'd pushed back. "I know."

David appeared from the direction of the coat check, fumbling with his scarf. "That was great, buddy. You looked really comfortable up there. I liked the thing you said about the home ice." He got the scarf arranged and looked up. "The Russian fellow. Rozanov. He kept looking at you."

Shane felt something happen in his chest. "He was looking at the reporters."

"Maybe some of the time." David shrugged with the cheerful certainty of a man who had spent thirty years noticing things his wife had decided weren't worth cataloguing. "You want to get lunch? There's a place on 8th Avenue that does a good steak."

"I should get back to the team hotel."

"I'll walk you." David fell into step beside him. At the door, he put a hand briefly on the back of Shane's neck, the way he'd done since Shane was small. Just the weight of it. No words.

Shane looked at the sidewalk and let himself be steadied.

Canada got knocked out of the semifinals. It was a fourth place finish. Shane absorbed this with the professional composure his mother had spent twenty years building in him. They stayed in Calgary. The team was expected to be visible, as good hosts. They needed to attend the remaining events. Shane sat in the stands with his teammates and watched the gold medal game.

Rozanov was a fantastic player to watch. The Soviets beat Finland with systematic efficiency, the kind that comes from never confusing enjoyment with purpose. Rozanov scored in the second period, a wrist shot that went in off the post. Shane sat with his hands between his knees and watched Rozanov stand on the podium in his red parka and his white beanie, the gold medal pulling heavily at his neck. The Soviet anthem filling the Saddledome. His teammates sang. Rozanov stood at attention and looked at the flag, his face unreadable from this distance. Shane leaned forward slightly, as if another six inches would tell him something. It of course did not.

The following afternoon, Shane was preparing to leave the Olympic Village, empty handed, when his assistant coach came to see him. 

"Something's going on," the coach said. "The Soviets. There's news coming out. You should turn on the TV."

Shane walked down the hall to the lounge and switched on the television with the volume low, cycling through channels until he found the CBC broadcast. A few of his other teammates were right behind him. The anchor was speaking over a still photograph: Ilya Rozanov, in his CCCP warm-up jacket, the gold medal picture, the one where he looked young and serious and like he was performing a role he'd been assigned at birth.

Soviet officials have issued a statement tonight regarding the status of Red Army player Ilya Rozanov, twenty-one, following what sources describe as an unscheduled absence from the Soviet Olympic delegation's accommodations. The official statement from the Soviet Sports Committee characterizes Rozanov as a danger to himself, citing what they term 'acute psychological distress' and urging Canadian authorities to ensure his safe return to Soviet custody.

Shane sunk into one of the stiff plastic chairs by the TV, hands coming up to his face.

Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Voronov confirmed this evening that Rozanov has been reported missing from the Olympic Village and is considered by Soviet medical officials to be in a state of acute suicidal crisis. Ambassador Voronov issued a statement calling for immediate assistance from Canadian officials to locate and return Rozanov to the care of his team.

The screen cut to a man in a dark suit at a podium, presumably the Ambassador, speaking in Russian, words rolling past in subtitles: Lieutenant Rozanov is a decorated hero of the Soviet Union who is experiencing a grave psychological emergency. He requires the immediate support of his team and his country. We ask that Canadian authorities treat this matter with the sensitivity it deserves.

Shane sat very still.

Suicidal crisis. He read the words twice. Danger to himself.

He thought about the phrases from the recording studio. I am lost. I am afraid. I need help. His own voice on the tape, careful and uninflected, reading from a cue card with no idea what the words were actually for. He thought about the note in his jacket pocket at the press conference, the weight of it, how small it had been.

I go where I am needed, Rozanov had said. Shane heard it differently now.

He thought about Rozanov's face in the tunnel after the American game. That tiredness with nothing to do with hockey. The dark circles that never seemed to fade. He thought about three taps against the side of a shoe and a note pressed against a wrist and his eyes in the television lights, clear and steady, giving nothing away.

The Soviets were calling that a suicide risk.

Shane looked at the television and tried to square the Rozanov he had been watching for years, skating through a gold medal game with the focused calm of someone who had already decided something, with the picture the Soviet statement was painting. He could not make them match. He kept trying and they kept not matching, and the gap between the two versions sat heavy on him.

A hand touched his arm. It was his dad. Shane looked at his father. David was watching him with the attention he saved for moments when he'd decided not to say the thing he was actually thinking. He just held Shane's arm and looked at him.

"I'm fine," Shane said.

David nodded, slowly, in the way that meant he wasn't going to argue about it right now but reserved the right to return to it later. He let go. Yuna was there too. She had been watching the television, and her face had the careful blankness she wore when she was working through something she hadn't yet decided how to handle.

"Whatever the press asks you about this," she said, "You lead with professional. Respectful. No speculation."

"I know."

"The draft rights will come up. Every outlet is going to ask."

"I know, Mom."

She looked at him for a moment longer than the conversation required. Shane understood that was all she was going to say, which was its own kind of answer about what she suspected and had decided not to examine.

Rozanov in the red parka. Twenty-one years old. The same age as Shane. Standing at attention while the flag went up, looking exactly like he would if he knew the end was coming. Shane had thought that at the time, watching from the stands. He understood now that he'd been right. He just hadn't known yet what it was the end of, or how small a piece of paper it had taken to help get there, or what he was supposed to do with that information now that he had it. Did it work? Whatever it was? Was Rozanov alive right now? Were the cyanide pills just the stuff of James Bond, or was that real? Was he settling in to his new life in Canada right now? Could he have done more to help?

He didn't have a single answer. He left the room to pack the rest of his things and go home, feeling deeply inadequate.

He was back on the ice four days after the closing ceremony. Shane pulled his jersey over his pads in the locker room and felt the familiar heft of the wool settle across his shoulders. Good, he thought. This was something he knew how to do. Practice was hard and fast and precisely what he needed, right up until it wasn't. He lost a puck battle in the corner that he should have won, and stood there for a half-second too long watching the other guy carry it away. 

Coach Theriault blew the whistle and looked at him with a particular expression of shocked disappointment. 

"Hollander. Where are you?"

"Here. I'm good," Shane said. 

Theriault shook his head. "Try it again."

Hayden Pike materialized at his shoulder on the next line change, dropping onto the bench beside him.

"You doin' okay, Hollander?" he asked. Hayden had been rookies with Shane and was the only person he felt really close to during the past few years. He had been disappointed that Hayden hadn't been picked to come with him to the Olympics. It would have been nice to have a friend there.

"I'm fine."

"Sure," Hayden squirted water at the back of his helmet, watching the drill reset. "You're skating like you have a stick up your ass, but what do I know."

Shane stared at him. Hayden looked back with the expression he used when he was pretending to be less observant than he was. "I'm just saying. You've been back three days and I've seen more personality from the Zamboni." He stood up for his shift, snapping his helmet strap. "You want to get food after? The place on Ste-Catherine has that sandwich you like."

"Maybe," Shane said.

"Thrilling answer." Hayden hopped the boards and was gone, already calling for the puck before he'd finished his first stride.

Shane was fine after that. Technically fine. He ran the drills and took the passes. He put three shots on the net in the scrimmage and said all the right things in the right order in the locker room after. He saw Beaulieu on the way out, coming out of one of the front office corridors with a folder under his arm. He had an unhurried expression, so Shane didn't feel awkward approaching him.

"I need to know what happened," Shane said. He kept his voice low. 

Beaulieu glanced at him. "You did your part."

"I know. I want to know if it worked."

"Shane," Beaulieu said it the way adults said a child's name when they were about to explain something for the last time. "You passed a note at a press conference. That's the beginning and end of your involvement."

"They're saying he's trying to kill himself."

"I'm aware of what they're saying."

"Is he alive?"

Beaulieu stopped walking. He looked at Shane with an assessment that was neither unkind nor warm." Go home. Play hockey. You've got Minnesota on Thursday."

Shane grabbed his arm. "Please. Is he alive?"

Beaulieu turned down a side corridor and was gone. No answers. Still no answers. Maybe Rozanov decided he wasn't going to play hockey anymore and was pursuing a quiet life. No, impossible. He was too good. Too competitive. Driven. Like Shane. Shane stood in the hallway a moment, then walked to his car and sat inside without starting it for ten minutes. 

The Minnesota game was phenomenal, ending in a 4-1 win. Shane got two goals and an assist, and the crowd stood and cheered for him when his name went up on the scoreboard. In the locker room after, Hayden dropped into the stall beside him and started unlacing quickly.

"There he is," Hayden said. "Where was that guy on Tuesday?"

"I was fine on Tuesday."

"What changed? Pulled the stick out?"

Shane thought of Beaulieu in the corridor. "Nothing," he said. "Just needed to get back into it."

Hayden studied him for a moment. "Whatever you say," he said.

Shane tried Beaulieu again a few days later, catching him near the equipment room before morning skate. "Nothing to report, Hollander," Beaulieu said, without breaking stride. 

"That's an answer," Shane said. Beaulieu paused at that. Something flicked across his face that might have been an acknowledgement, or might have just been him regaining his patience. 

"Give it time." That was all.

Chapter End Notes

Some other little bits from this one:

The Olympic Village was located at the University of Calgary, in case that wasn't known. I love the idea of Ilya sleeping in what would become dorm rooms. Maybe I’ll write a college AU next…

There was an open agreement between the CBC and the USSR that certain kinds of footage, including athletes visibly distressed, social interactions between Soviet and Western players, and anything else they saw as inappropriate, wasn't broadcast on TV. So, the coverage of a missing athlete would have needed to be carefully orchestrated by both sides.

The locker rooms at the Forum were notoriously shitty, and the whole building had a very distinctive smell.

The Montreal Canadiens had the draft rights to several Soviet players in the late 80s. The NHL had a complicated relationship with the Soviet hockey players. There was a lot of back-channeling, money changing hands in sketchy ways, and specific plans for what to do during a defection. They would have been prepared for years for the possibility of the first defector, which is how they would know exactly what to do with Ilya. The Canadiens also nearly certainly had a front office-based fixer like (the fictional) Beaulieu, who would know exactly how to move a defecting player into the country and onto the team.

Chapter 10: Ratification

Chapter Summary

A series of safe houses. That's all Ilya has now. But maybe, soon, he can be on the ice again.

Chapter Notes

I am taking a short break from updated my fics. I have been on a pretty good 2-3 updates a week plan right now, but I'm heading to the wilderness for a week and unlikely to be able to get much done on this during that time. Sorry to keep you waiting! I won't say that it's impossible for me to do a drop earlier than that, but I'd say two weeks is a safe estimate.

Also SO SORRY to leave this where it is and bounce for a couple weeks.

Ratification (noun)

1. The action of signing or giving formal consent to a treaty, contract, or agreement.

2. The act of making something officially valid.

3. The moment at which a decision already made in the body becomes true on paper.

Example: "He could spend the morning learning what it said, or he could sign it and his life could begin." - March, 1988

They had been driving forever. Hours. The sun was rising. Ilya felt filthy. He had been wearing the same clothes since the processing had been completed, and the adrenaline-soaked sweat was making him feel decrepit. He needed a shower. He needed to feel like himself. How long would that be? Days? Weeks? The processing officials didn't seem to be able to tell him. Gordie and Benny certainly weren't going to.

Ilya realized how little of Calgary he actually knew. He had lived here for weeks, but had only seen the inside of an arena, or the inside of his room, or the mall where the colors had made his eyes water. He didn't know where they were. Was this still the city, or were they far away? He knew Canada was big. Not as big as the Union, of course, but big enough. The clothes on his back and his dictionary were the only things he owned right now. Everything else was in plastic bags somewhere in Calgary. Not that any of those things would really help him, but a little piece of home might dull the roaring static.

Gordie and Benny sat in the front seats. Benny had eventually released his firm grip on Ilya's head, allowing him to sit up. They talked to each other in low murmurs. It was casual, low, English that excluded Ilya entirely. He recognized the word hockey. To them it was just Tuesday morning. To Ilya, it was a disorienting blur. He pressed his fingers against the stiff denim of the jeans and held onto that feeling.

Eventually, the car turned onto a service road, bouncing over frozen ruts in the dirt. They stopped at a chain-link gate where a small twin-engine plane was idling on the tarmac. Its propellers were kicking up whorls of dry snow in the pre-dawn light. Gordie got out and opened Ilya's door. No handshake, no parting words. Just a hand gesturing at the aircraft. 

Ilya walked across the tarmac. The early March wind was biting straight through his flannel shirt. Ilya stood in the noise of the engines and understood something for the first time. This had not been improvised. The car, the service road, the plane already running…someone had arranged all of this months ago, in rooms he was never in, in conversations he was never part of, in a language he was only beginning to understand. He had believed, in some vague way, that the plan had been constructed around him. He understood now that he was just one more variable. It could have been any hockey player, but they chose him.

He climbed the short stairs into the cabin. Inside, there were eight seats but only one single window. Ilya wasn't the only passenger. There was a man in a suit with a manila folder, and the interpreter from the Calgary processing, whose name Ilya did not know and had not thought to ask. The interpreter's presence hit him with a relief so acute it was almost embarrassing. Someone he had seen before. One face that wasn't new.

The man gestured to the seat across from him. "Sit, Rozanov." Ilya sat. He kept his back straight. He didn't know this person. He didn't know who he could trust.

"How is your English?" he asked. 

"No English. Bad," Ilya replied. This was not entirely true, but it was true enough that Ilya saw no reason to correct it. The man opened the folder and began flipping through pages. He didn't look at Ilya for a long time. He had the specific manner of someone who processed unusual cargo and had long since stopped finding it interesting. He looked at Ilya the way a customs official looks at a shipping manifest, checking for discrepancies, not curious about the contents.

"What is your name?" Ilya asked the interpreter, in Russian. "Who is this guy?" he gestured at the other man. They exchanged a few words. 

"My name is Vadim," he answered finally. "This is Mr. Beaulieu. He will help you adjust to your new life in Canada." The plane began to taxi, the vibration of the engines driving into Ilya's bones. He watched the runway lights recede through the small window. The plane rose over the prairies and the ground turned into a vast, white graph-paper grid. Eventually, the flatness gave way to the dark rock and frozen lakes of the Canadian Shield. It was a landscape that had no interest in him. It looked like the moon. Maybe Canada was like the Soviet Union. Totally devoid of civilization for vast stretches. 

"I run hockey operations for the Metros," Beaulieu said, once they had reached a comfortable altitude. "You are very expensive, Rozanov. A significant headache for my office."

Vadim translated, his voice calm. Ilya recognized Metros and, oddly, headache. He pulled out the dictionary, found the word, and held the page up. Beaulieu gave a short, dry laugh. "And you said you didn't know English. Yes. A headache. The Soviets are saying you have been kidnapped, or that you are crazy. They say you want to kill yourself. Do you want to kill yourself?"

Vadim translated the news reports. Ilya heard the word kidnapped. He heard the word Soviets. He shook his head, pointing to himself and then to the window. He wanted to say that he had chosen this, that he had walked into the laundry room of his own free will. "No," he said in English. "I play for Montreal Metros."

"Good man," Beaulieu looked at him for a moment, as if checking the manifest against the actual contents, then appeared satisfied. He reached into his coat and set a small plastic bag on the table between them. A Snickers bar.

"They told me you liked these."

Ilya looked at the candy. He remembered the mall, the smell of sugar, the overwhelming particular brightness of things being sold. He remembered buying the bar because it was the only thing that looked the same as it did in the magazines he had seen. He did not touch it.

"Shane Hollander," Ilya said. He had meant it as a question and it had not come out as one.

Beaulieu's expression shifted. Something sharpened behind the professional neutrality. "Hollander is in Montreal. He's playing hockey. He is being a very good captain and telling everyone he knows nothing about you." He paused. "Which is nearly true."

Vadim rendered the words in Russian. Ilya sat with it. He thought about the three taps against his shoe and the citrus smell of soap at the press conference table. He wondered if Shane was still wearing the white cowboy hat. He wondered if Shane was afraid. If he was afraid for him. He didn't love that the only thing Shane knew about him was what he saw on the news, and that it probably looked like he was trying to kill himself. 

"Do you have a cigarette?" Ilya asked. It had been days since his last one. 

The interpreter produced a pack before Beaulieu could respond. Beaulieu gave him a look of mild corporate disapproval. Ilya lit one and inhaled and felt the first edge of clarity since the laundry room.

"The team would prefer you quit," Beaulieu said.

"Yes," Ilya said, enjoying every breath.

"Better?" Beaulieu asked. 

Ilya shook his head. "No," he said in flat English. Then in Russian, "It is all very confusing."

"You have questions," Beaulieu said. Not a question.

Ilya nodded. "Will you answer them?" He thought of the processing and the stony-faced man who gave him nothing. Vadim smirked at him.

"Maybe," Beaulieu replied.

"Are we going to Montreal?"

"No." Ilya gave him a look. "Okay, Ottawa. Another city."

"Why not Montreal?"

"More processing," Beaulieu replied. "The government needs to see you. Make sure you aren't a spy. Make sure you aren't going to jump off a bridge the moment I let you out of my sight." Vadim's eyes flickered toward Ilya when he said the part about the bridge. A small, involuntary thing.

"And my family? My team?"

"We do not have any information, and it is not safe to try to contact them. It may not be safe for some time. I am sorry."

"When do we go to Montreal?"

"Soon." Nothing further.

The smoke from Ilya's cigarette swirled in the cabin, catching the light coming in through the small window. Beaulieu was making notes on the pages held within the manila folder. The flight lasted three long hours. For most of it, the only sound was the low drone of the engines and the rustle of Beaulieu's paperwork. Ilya used the time to look up some words. Anything to build out his vocabulary. He knew the studying was desperate and futile, but he truly had nothing better to do. He found the word for family. He found the word for apartment. He did not find the word for what happened when you walked into a laundry room and handed your life over to a man who looked at you like a pile of dollar bills.

The plane began its descent into Ottawa. The sky was a pale, winter gray now. The city appeared below them as a series of stone buildings and frozen rivers. It looked older than Calgary. It looked like a place where things were decided slowly and the paperwork was never quite finished.

The building they drove to in Ottawa was low and brick, filled with tiny, windowless offices. The fluorescent lights hummed with a high-frequency irritability that made the back of Ilya's skull throb. He was starving. He was exhausted. He felt like he couldn't let his guard down for a moment. He was led to a room with linoleum floors and three uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs around a folding table. Beaulieu stood in the corner. Vadim sat next to Ilya. A new man in a poorly fitting suit sat across the table from them. He did not introduce himself, but he opened a fresh file and laid it on the table. Inside were Ilya's photos from his first processing, and a lot of official-looking forms. 

There were so many questions. Three hours of questions. Full name. Rank. Service history. Every person still in the Union who might be questioned about him and what they knew. Vadim translated everything carefully, his voice never changing register. Ilya answered in the flat, cooperative tone. He had been questioned by the State before and understood that the most important thing was not to be interesting. He felt the dried sweat itching at his neck. He needed that shower. He wanted to sleep in a bed that smelled like home.

Partway through, the official leaned forward with the particular energy of someone about to offer something.

"Listen," the official said through Vadim. "You were in the Red Army. You traveled. You saw things. If you have information about military structure, protocols, chain of command, your application moves to the front of the line. You help us, and we can help you."

Ilya stared at the man. He felt a hollow laugh building in his chest. He had been a Lieutenant because he played hockey. The rank was a title on a piece of paper, a way for the State to own him more completely. He knew the diameter of a puck. He knew the specific resistance of ice at minus four versus minus six degrees, or the specific curve of a hockey stick. He knew how to take a hit into the boards and keep the puck. He knew how to skate until his lungs felt like they were studded with broken glass. He did not know the locations of missile installations. He did not know the names of men in the Kremlin. He had been, his entire adult life, carefully kept away from anything a Western intelligence agency would find useful, because useful men were not sent to play hockey in Canada.

"I am a hockey player," Ilya said in Russian. "I do not have secrets."

Beaulieu stepped forward from the corner where he had been standing. "He is twenty-one years old. He has spent his entire life on ice. He doesn't have your intelligence. He has a contract with the Montreal Metros. My organization is funding his security and his housing. Every day he sits in this room is a day our investment produces nothing."

The official did not appear moved. "It's a matter of national security. We can't release a Soviet officer without full assessment."

Ilya stopped listening. He looked at his own hands on the table and thought about his father in Moscow calling for a woman who had been dead for nine years. He thought about Sasha's apartment, the cold radiator, the narrow cot. He thought about Svetlana's voice saying be here with me and the particular shame of not being able to stay.

He asked about his family once, in the middle of the second hour of questioning. Had they been contacted? Does anyone know if they are safe? 

"That can be arranged in due course," the official said. Ilya wasn't sure if he believed him.

After several hours, he was allowed to go. There was a long list of conditions. He had to stay where the Metros staff told him. He could not leave his accommodations without an escort at any time. Ilya nodded. Trading one prison for another.

He was in Ottawa for twelve days. The first safe house was a basement in a suburb where all the houses looked the same and the street was so quiet at night that the silence had a physical texture. He had a television he could control for the first time since arriving in Canada. He watched it for hours without fully understanding any of it. Rapid English, advertisements, the laugh tracks on shows that were not funny. He saw his own face on the news. He saw the word kidnapped. He saw the footage of the Soviet coaches looking angry. He saw a man from the Montreal Metros saying no comment over and over to reporters who kept asking anyway.

The second safe house was a high-rise apartment on the fourteenth floor. The windows did not open. He counted twenty-nine steps from the kitchen to the bedroom and walked them until his legs ached, then walked them again. He ate the eggs and bread the handlers brought. He drank the tea. He felt his muscles softening and the edges of his mind humming.

The boredom was a specific and physical problem. He had been moving his entire life, on the ice, in the barracks, between cities, between countries, between the versions of himself that different rooms required. Stillness had never been an option. When the anxiety got bad in Moscow, there were remedies. A bottle of vodka from someone's gear bag. A cigarette, or six. The press of Sasha's body in the apartment on Petrovka Street, the radiator that barely worked, the narrow cot that was somehow never too narrow for them both. There were always remedies.

Here there were no remedies. The handlers had made that clear. They visited. Making sure he was fed, and bringing him clean clothes, shampoo, soap. But nothing to do. The Metros' position on smoking, Beaulieu had told him on the plane, was discouraging. There was no vodka. There was nobody, no way to find a warm body for some comfort, no possibility of leaving the building alone to go and find a solution to the humming, climbing tension that had taken up residence in his chest and was getting louder by the day.

On the eighth day he could not stand it anymore.

The handler who had stopped by to deliver his dinner was a quiet man named Paul who spoke no Russian and communicated entirely through pointing and nods. It was a system that had worked adequately for several days. Ilya stood in front of him, blocking him from leaving. 

"I need–" he started, but the words failed him. He opened the dictionary and found the word. "Outside." He pointed to the window, then to himself. Paul shook his head. Yes, they had established that.

Ilya flipped through the pages. He found bored, and read it to Paul. Then, anxious. Paul nodded sympathetically. He understood, but could not change the situation. Ilya sighed, setting the dictionary down. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, trying to compose the words that would get his point across.

"In Moscow," he started carefully. "When like this–" he gestured to himself, in the general region of his nagging tension, "--I find woman, or" he paused. "Vodka. Cigarette. Here, no. No vodka. No cigarette. No woman. Need outside. Need help. Crazy."

Paul looked at him for a long moment. He appeared to be considering several responses and selecting the least complicated one. He picked up his radio.

He spoke for about two minutes. Ilya caught the words Beaulieu and rink and, improbably, crazy, which Paul said in English with the flat emphasis of a man quoting someone directly.

Beaulieu arrived the next morning with Vadim. 

"We are going for a drive," Beaulieu said, already moving toward the door. "Paul tells me you are losing your mind. I told them if they kept you in this room any longer they would create an actual psychological crisis, which would prove the Soviets right, which nobody wants."

Ilya put on his coat and did not say anything about how long it had taken.

They drove twenty minutes to a community rink on the outskirts of the city. It was empty. The lights were at half power, the ice unscraped from the previous session. The smell of the building hit Ilya in the doorway. Cold air and damp rubber and the particular ammonia-and-wool smell of a place where hockey happened, and something in him unclenched.

Beaulieu led him to a small locker room. There was a cardboard box sitting on the bench. Ilya opened it to find a pair of skates. White and black, brand new, definitely not his. He sat and pulled them on. The leather was stiff and foreign, biting into his ankles. He pulled the laces until his fingers went white, and stood up on the unfamiliar height of the new blades. They felt wrong, like stilts.

He walked to the gate and stepped onto the ice. The sound of the blades was loud in the empty arena. He took a slow lap. The boots fought him, the leather not yet shaped to his foot. He took another lap and pushed harder. The cold air came at his face and his thighs started to burn and the blades began, reluctantly, to respond. There was no puck, no opponent, no Shane Hollander across the red line. But he was moving. He was cutting. The ice was the same temperature in every country and it was the only thing in this country that felt like it recognized him.

He skated for an hour. By the end the stiffness in the boots had started to yield to the heat of his feet.

Beaulieu watched from the front row with the assessing gaze of a man looking at an investment that had just demonstrated it still had value. The interpreter stood by the gate and, when Ilya came off, gave him a small nod that was not professional courtesy. It was something else. Ilya accepted it.

Outside, the cold felt different. Manageable. He could do this.

Beaulieu came back three days later with Vadim and a different folder. Thinner. He sat with Ilya at the kitchen table with the air of someone who had finally won an argument he thought he was going to lose.

"Work permit," he said. "It's not what we hoped for, but it gets things moving. You are able to play hockey in Canada, and we can pay you for it. It isn't what we wanted, but it buys us some time."

"How long?" Ilya asked, looking at the folder.

"One year." Ilya nodded.

"And then?"

"Hopefully they grant your asylum claim and residency after that. If not, we apply again, and again, as long as necessary. The Metros will handle that. It's my problem, not yours. My office will handle any renewals. Your problem is to show up, practice, maybe play, and stay out of trouble."

"I can play? All games?"

Beaulieu's mouth did something of a brief grimace. "Just home games, for now." He had the tone of delivering bad news that he was not going to apologize for. "You have no travel documents. Without one, you cannot go into the United States, which is where about half of our games take place. I am working on it. We have options, but they take time." He paused. "It is already March. The season ends soon anyway. If the coaches see fit, you can play home games, and by next season, we will have something in place."

Ilya looked at the table. He wanted to make himself seem valuable. Worth the investment. Worth letting him out of this apartment.

"Think of it as a gift. You have not played with this team. You don't know how they are. You wouldn't be able to play in American cities yet anyway." He looked at Ilya with the flat assessment he had been using since the plane ride.

Ilya nodded. He was right. It was foolish to think he was going to walk out of the apartment and onto the ice. 

"Two days," Beaulieu continued. "Montreal. There's an apartment arranged. We keep a few for new players. You'll still need a handler for a few weeks, and you cannot go outside without an escort until we know you're safe there. Those are the conditions."

"I understand," Ilya replied in English. 

Beaulieu looked mildly surprised. Then he closed the folder and stood. "Two days, Rozanov."

The morning they left, the interpreter shook Ilya's hand at the door of the high-rise. It was the first handshake anyone had offered him since the laundry room. Ilya looked at him.

"Good luck," Vadim said, in Russian. "I think we will see each other again."

The drive to the airfield was quiet. Ilya watched Ottawa pass and felt no particular feeling about leaving it. It had been a waiting room. A place where decisions were made about him in other rooms and delivered to him afterward. He did not need to feel anything about a waiting room. 

The plane was the same size as the one from Calgary, or one exactly like it. Ilya took the window seat. He pressed his forehead to the cold glass as they climbed, and watched the city shrink, the frozen river catching the thin winter light, the stone buildings becoming small and then indistinct and then gone. Below him, Canada continued in every direction, enormous and largely indifferent. He had crossed most of it now in small planes at low altitude, watching it from above like studying a map of somewhere he had agreed to live without quite understanding the scale of it.

Montreal came up on the horizon as the light was going. The city was larger than he'd expected, spreading out along the river, lit against the coming dark. He had been imagining this day since Moscow, since the cassette tape and the silver microphone and Shane Hollander's careful voice saying I am lost into the silence of a recording studio. He had built it in his head from fragments. The Metros, the Forum, a city that smelled of maple syrup, which he knew even then was probably not accurate.

He looked down at the lights and thought: he is somewhere in there.

The plane descended. The city rose up around it. Ilya kept his face pressed to the glass until the runway came up under them and the wheels touched down and the engines changed their sound, and then he sat back and looked at the ceiling of the small cabin and took one slow breath. He opened the dictionary. He turned to the margin where he had written anticipation in pencil on the flight from Calgary. He looked at the word for a moment. Then he turned to a new page and wrote a new word, small and vertical.

Almost.

He put the dictionary back in his pocket and waited for the door to open.

His new Montreal apartment was on the sixth floor of a building in Westmount that had a doorman and a buzzer and two deadbolts inside of the door, which Ilya found both reassuring and depressing in equal measure. The handler who brought him up, a new one, a woman named Claire who spoke basic Russian with a terrible accent, showed him the locks, the windows that only opened two inches and no more, and a telephone that could call the doorman or the Montreal Metros and no one else.

She set two bags on the kitchen counter. Groceries. Bread, eggs, butter, a block of yellow cheese, a jar of instant coffee, apples, a tin of sardines that suggested someone had made an educated guess about his preferences. The second bag was clothes. He looked through it while she put the food away. Two pairs of jeans, dark, the right size, which meant someone had noted the size of the clothes he'd been given in Calgary and passed the information along. Three plain shirts. A dark wool sweater. Socks. Underwear. A pair of track pants that were not Soviet-issue, which he held for a moment before folding them back into the bag. At the bottom, a toiletry kit. Shampoo, soap, a razor, toothpaste, each item generic and adequate in the specific way of things chosen by someone who doesn't know your preferences and has made reasonable assumptions. 

The apartment itself was precisely what he had been promised. Comfortable, sterile, maintained for exactly this purpose. A good couch. Art on the walls that had been chosen to offend nobody and communicate nothing.  But it was his. His own apartment, for the first time in his life. It had a television and bookshelves that he could fill with whatever he wanted. The bedroom had a window that looked onto the street, and Ilya stood at it for a long time after Claire left, watching Montreal go about the ordinary business of a March evening below him.

People walking dogs. A woman with a bag of groceries. Two men in hockey jerseys going somewhere together, laughing about something. The specific breath of a city that had no idea he was standing above it in borrowed clothes with two deadbolts between himself and the rest of the world. He went to bed at nine. He lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling and listened to the building settle around him and thought about nothing in particular, which was the closest he had come to peace since Calgary.

He slept for eleven hours. It was the longest he had slept since the barracks.

Beaulieu came two days later with Vadim and a document that was forty-one pages long. Ilya knew it was forty-one pages because he counted them while Beaulieu set up at the kitchen table. It was something to do with his hands while his brain processed the fact that these forty-one pages were going to control his life for the foreseeable future. Vadim began to translate the first page, paragraph by paragraph. Ilya stopped him.

"Still the same price?" he asked.

Beaulieu nodded. Ilya didn't understand what a million dollars would look like. What it could buy. It was more money than anyone could fathom.

"Three years," Beaulieu continued. "Standard rookie structure. Performance bonus in years two and three. Metros have first right of refusal at the end of the term."

Ilya did not know these terms. What did it mean to have the first right of refusal? What was the bonus? More money? Bigger house? Prettier women? He did not ask Vadim to translate pages two through forty-one. He looked at the document for a moment, the density of it, the columns of figures, the clauses running into each other in small authoritative type, and understood that he could spend the morning learning what it said, or he could sign it and his life could begin.

He picked up the pen.

He signed where Beaulieu indicated. Six times, on six different pages, his signature looking strange and small against the formality of the document. The Cyrillic of his name that he had been writing since he was seven years old, sitting in a Montreal kitchen in clothes that weren't his, making it legal. Beaulieu gathered the pages. He looked at Ilya with the closest thing to warmth he had shown since the plane from Calgary, which was not very warm but was something.

"Welcome to the Metros," he said. Beaulieu stood, and then, apparently deciding something, extended his hand. Ilya shook it.

After Beaulieu left, Ilya sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes with the pen still in his hand. Outside the window the street was doing what it always did, indifferent and continuous. He thought about the first time he had signed his name to a document that changed the shape of his life. The army enlistment, seventeen years old, his father's hand on his shoulder, the colonel watching from the corner with the expression of someone whose plan was proceeding correctly. No one had their hand on his shoulder this time. The colonel was not watching. The plan, such as it was, was his own. He put the pen down. 

Three days later, and it was time for practice at the Forum. Claire drove him. She did not make conversation, which Ilya appreciated. He watched Montreal through the car window with focused attention, trying to memorize a city he was not yet allowed to walk through on his own. The streets were wide and gray, the snow pushed into brown ridges along the gutters. The buildings were older than he expected, stone and brick, the French lettering on the signs giving everything a slightly sideways quality, like Canada seen through a different lens.

The Forum appeared at the end of a block and was larger than he remembered. It had been less than a year since he last skated here, but it still felt unfamiliar. That day, the building had existed only as a surface to skate on. The crowd noise, the Canadian bench, the particular angle of the boards in the corners. He had not looked up. He had not looked at anything that wasn't the puck. Now, coming at it from the street, he saw it properly for the first time. The exterior plain and slightly worn in the way of buildings that have been important for a very long time and have stopped needing to prove it. He had not understood from the ice that it would smell, even from the parking structure, of cold rubber and old ice and something faintly sweet he could not identify and would later learn was the particular chemical signature of Zamboni exhaust in an enclosed space.

Claire walked him through a service entrance and down a corridor to the locker room, where Beaulieu was waiting with a compact French-Canadian named Theriault who shook Ilya's hand and looked at him the way coaches look at expensive acquisitions, with the specific combination of hope and skepticism of being promised something, but reserving judgment until he sees it move.

"Welcome," Theriault said, in heavily accented English, with the air of having practiced the word.

The locker room was already half-occupied. Ilya registered it in the first three seconds. A room full of men who had been told he was coming and had formed opinions about him before he set foot in the door. He had been in enough locker rooms to read one on entry. The ones near the door didn't look up, which meant they had decided not to. A defenseman at the far end raised his chin in something that was almost a nod. A winger two stalls over looked at Ilya with the open curiosity of someone who had not yet decided what he thought, which was the most neutral reception available.

Beaulieu indicated a stall. Ilya sat. Someone had placed equipment, Metros equipment, his number already on the jersey, which meant someone had made decisions about his number, without consulting him, which was fine. He had never been consulted about his number, in a careful pile that suggested it had been arranged by a person who was trying to be welcoming and wasn't sure how. He dressed in silence in the dark practice jersey. Around him the room continued its pre-practice noise, English moving too fast to track, the specific masculine low-level aggression of men preparing to hit things.

He laced his skates. The leather was still stiff. They were the Ottawa skates, the only ones he had, and he pulled them tight and stood and felt the height of the blades and thought: this is what you came for.

The ice stopped him in the doorway. Not literally. He kept walking. But the Forum ice was different from the community rink in Ottawa, different from the Saddledome, different from anything in the Soviet system. It was the ice of a building that had been making ice for six decades, maintained by staff who treated it as a professional obligation of the highest order, and it had a particular quality in the light, a hardness, a whiteness, that Ilya registered in his body before he registered it in his mind. His edges wanted to be on it. He had been off real ice for six weeks and his body had opinions about that.

The Metros were already running drills at the far end, a fast cycling pattern that Ilya watched for thirty seconds to understand its logic. Soviet drills were different. More structured, longer sequences, the emphasis on the collective pattern rather than individual decision-making. These players were making individual decisions inside the structure, small improvisations, the Canadian instinct to find the opening even in a rehearsed sequence.

He stepped onto the ice.

He took one lap at moderate pace, feeling the surface, letting the skates find their grip. A few of the players tracked him as he went by. He kept his face neutral and his edges clean and tried hard to look like he hadn't spent twelve days walking twenty-nine steps back and forth in a high-rise apartment in Ottawa. At the far end, he began to turn back toward center.

And there was Shane Hollander.

Chapter End Notes

Some more lil bits to tide you over!

Ice at the Forum: It was genuinely considered among the best in the NHL and was maintained with an almost ritualistic seriousness. The building used a specific brine-based refrigeration system installed during a 1949 renovation, and the ice-making staff had decades of institutional knowledge about the particular quirks of that building's temperature gradients. Visiting players consistently noted that the Forum ice was harder and faster than most other rinks. This was a quality that suited the Canadiens' skating style and was not accidental. The head ice-maker position was treated as a skilled trade of genuine prestige. Maybe another fic idea...I bet neurodivergent Shane would be a kickass head ice-maker.

Not having a country is a problem when you need a passport to enter into the US. Players like Ilya would be issued with a Nansen passport, which was what most people who were considered stateless could use to traverse some select borders.

Westmount was a deliberate choice. It's about halfway between the forum and the highway out of the city, to illustrate his foot-in, foot-out life at the moment. It's also wealthy, and predominantly English-speaking.

The "right of first refusal" clause Beaulieu mentions was standard in this era and meant the team could match any offer Ilya received from another team at the end of his contract.

I love tinned fish. Canned fish were a staple of the Soviet diet at this time. Many defectors wrote about feeling homesick and disoriented, and feeling specific comfort around finding sardines, and being upset that Canadian grocery stores often did not carry them at all. Someone doing their research on Ilya's likely preferences would have landed on sardines as a reasonable guess. Whether they got the right brand is another question.

Some immigration:
The Canadian immigration system in 1988 processed refugee and asylum claims through what was then called the Immigration Appeal Board, which was replaced by the Immigration and Refugee Board in 1989. Ilya would have been processed under the older system, which was notoriously backlogged and inconsistent. The intelligence-fishing that the official attempts in the interrogation scene was not unusual. CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had only been established in 1984 and was actively building its Soviet-affairs files throughout the late 1980s. A Red Army officer, even a junior one, would have been of genuine interest regardless of how little he actually knew.

Thanks for all the comments. I love you all.

Chapter 11: Transition

Chapter Summary

For two weeks Shane watched the news and changed the channel and watched it again. He told himself he was worried about a scared refugee with no English and nowhere to go. He was not wrong. He was also not entirely right.

Chapter Notes

Thanks for your patience! I’ll be back to my regular (irregular) upload schedule. My beta is also ill, so you're getting this one totally cold. Sorry if there are any noticeable typos...I'll give it another look with fresh eyes another time.

EDIT: Caught a few kinda-serious timeline inconsistencies that aren't a big deal NOW, but are a big deal in Chapter 13/14...so a few tweaks made there, in case you read this chapter in the first ~24 hours it was out. There were also a couple of references to the cottage being in Muskoka, which was a personal choice I thought would be way more true to the Hollanders' character. Still, I changed my mind back to it being canon-based Lanaudiere, strictly due to the drive time and later logistics...so if you saw that, no, you didn't!

A warning, this chapter and the next are fairly hockey-heavy. And that's what we all watch the show/read the books for, right guys?? I am a casual hockey watcher, and the moves are mostly drawn from describing what I can see watching hockey film, but if you're a real-deal hockey player or coach, I'm sure you'll spot some errors.

Also a warning, I'm an update-as-you-go tagger. Please keep an eye on them if that's something you need to do for your own safe enjoyment. I'd personally describe this fic as "tense" or "stressful" rather than dark or violent though.

Transition (noun)

1. The process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another.

2. The interval between what has ended and what has not yet begun.

3. What they call it in the front office when the thing they mean is too complicated to say plainly.

Example: "Different angle. Next time." — Ilya Rozanov, March 1988

Two weeks passed the way bad weather does, not dramatically but relentlessly. Shane went to practice. He came home. He ate food he didn't taste and watched the news until the anchor's face became abstract, a moving shape delivering information about a world that had nothing to do with him. He changed the channel whenever he saw the word Soviet along the bottom of the screen. Then he changed it back. Over. And over. And over.

He called Beaulieu four times. He was told, in four different tones of patience, that there was nothing to report. Nothing to report was its own kind of answer, and Shane was holding onto it tightly. Nothing to report meant Rozanov was alive and quite possibly well.

The image that kept coming back was from the CBC broadcast. The Soviet Ambassador at the podium. Acute suicidal crisis. Danger to himself. He'd been sitting in a plastic chair by the TV and read those words and felt something lurch sideways in his chest, and the version of the situation he'd been carrying since had a particular shape to it. A twenty-one-year-old with no English, no family, nothing but a hockey team and a government handler. He knew what he was going to be for Rozanov. He had it mapped out. He would make the room safe. He would stand between him and everything difficult. He'd been doing it his whole career for his team and he was very good at it. He told himself this until it felt true. He was aware, at the edges, that it didn't entirely feel true. He didn't look at that directly.

Hayden noticed something was off. He always did. "You're doing the thing," he said, setting a plate of eggs in front of Shane at the kitchen table. Standing Saturday morning arrangement, three years running, impossible to cancel. "Thousand miles away."

"I'm tired. Long tournament."

"It was a month ago," Hayden said.

"I lost."

"Fourth place. And you lost to Sweden. I've never seen you lose sleep over Sweden." He poured coffee into both mugs. "Is it the Rozanov thing?"

Shane looked up.

Hayden looked back with the expression he used when he was pretending to be less observant than he was. "I mean, it's all over the news. You were at the press conference with him. And now you're doing the thing." He shrugged. "Not hard math."

"I'm fine," Shane said.

Hayden looked at him for a moment longer than the conversation required. Then he picked up his fork. Hayden ate his eggs. He didn't push, which was both the most and least helpful thing he could have done.

The call came on a Wednesday, just after morning skate. The boardroom on the third floor had a long table and a view of the practice rink below. Four men Shane didn't know were already seated. Beaulieu at the end. Two suits with the groomed blankness of people whose job was managing the image of large sums of money. The head coach and assistant GM were also present.

"Sit down, Hollander," Beaulieu said. "Rozanov is in Montreal." Shane sat. The words moved through him in a way he was careful not to show.

"We have him on a work permit for now, asylum claim still processing. Home games only. No travel documents yet, can't cross the border." Beaulieu had the folder. There was always a folder. "As far as the press is concerned, Rozanov made contact during the Olympics and has been in negotiation for several weeks. That is the story." He paused and looked at Shane with the particular expression he used when he was about to say something he needed to land cleanly. "The season ends in three weeks. He gets maybe four, five home games, depending on scheduling. That's what we have."

"That's not much time," Shane said.

"No. But it's enough to get him on the ice, get him used to how we do things, see how the line reads." Beaulieu set down the folder. "In the meantime, we're arranging English lessons for the summer. Intensive. And we're working on travel documents so by training camp he can move freely. The plan is that he uses the summer to get established here, get the language, and hit camp ready to go."

One of the suits leaned forward. "Hollander. We are delighted with your captaincy this year. You have helped pull the team together. We have been happy with your performance. Ilya Rozanov is the best player in the world right now. Full stop. The investment our ownership group has made to facilitate this transition is substantial. We need him to feel valued."

"I imagine he needs more than to feel valued," Shane said. "He just left every—"

"Of course," The smoothness of it, the practiced pivot. The silent stop talking in between the words. "His well-being is a priority. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions, maybe. It needs to have been worth it. What we mean is the on-ice experience needs to be positive from the beginning. He can't come in as a political spectacle. He needs to come in as a teammate."

"He is a teammate," Shane said.

"Yes. Make sure he knows that."

The senior suit, a stern man with thirty years of boardrooms behind his eyes, looked at Shane directly. "We have arranged for the press to come by briefly at the start of practice tomorrow. Controlled. The first impression in that room is yours to manage. We trust you know how to do that."

Shane had been managing first impressions in locker rooms since he was fifteen. He had already assembled the version of this he was going to perform. He would find out, in the coming weeks, that he'd been preparing for the wrong person entirely.

Shane arrived early to practice, as always. He was taping his stick when Theriault appeared in the doorway and caught his eye. Shane followed him into the corridor.

"Rozanov's on your line," Theriault said. He said it in a tone that announced a decision made above his pay grade. "First line. You, him, and Boiziau."

Shane looked at him. "What about Hayden?"

"Second line. Comeau, Pike, Lachance."

"Hayden's been on my wing for two years."

"And he'll be back there at every away game for the next while. Right now, I need your read on Rozanov's game before I make permanent decisions. Things might change. He's a center, too." Flat patience, the conversation already resolved internally. "Two weeks. See how the three of you move."

Shane went back into the locker room. Hayden was already at his stall, gearing up. He looked at Shane's face.

"What?" Hayden said.

"You're on second line while Rozanov gets settled." Hayden put his skate down. He looked at the middle distance for a moment, doing careful arithmetic on his feelings. 

"How long?"

"He can't do away games yet. So a couple weeks. Maybe."

"Maybe," Hayden repeated. He picked the skate back up. He laced it. He was quiet for long enough that Shane thought he'd let it go. Then, "He'd better be worth it."

"He is," Shane said.

"I know he is," Hayden said. "I've seen the tape. I'm allowed to be annoyed about it anyway."

The other players filtered in over the next twenty minutes, the room running at a slightly elevated register, everyone doing their best impression of normal. J.J. was already there, sitting across from Shane's stall, tape job half-done. Dark skin, close-cropped hair. The easy posture of someone who knew exactly how good he was. He and Shane had always had a natural chemistry, the kind that doesn't require much maintenance. Shane caught his eye.

"Theriault told me," J.J. said. He held up his stick. "I looked up some Russian last night."

"What did you look up?"

"Horosho. Good. And peredacha. Pass." He considered. "Brosok. Shoot. I have three words."

"That's two more than I have," Shane said.

J.J. grinned. "I also know bolsha from a girl I met in—"

"Let's stick to hockey terms. Unless there's something you want to tell me." J.J. looked horrified at the thought.

One of the wingers on Hayden's now-line, Gilbert Comeau, J.J. had privately nicknamed The Senator for his ability to have opinions about everything and act on none of them, was holding court near the showers. Shane caught the tail end of something about the Soviet system producing robots, not hockey players. How you couldn't teach a robot instinct. How you could spot them a mile away by the eyes. Dead, mechanical, no read for the situation, just drilled responses.

Shane stopped and turned around. "That robot's going to make you look slow," he said pleasantly, to the general vicinity of the voice. "So, probably get your legs under you this morning." A half-second of silence. Someone laughed. The Senator laughed too, the way people laugh when they've been checked and don't want to admit it. Shane turned back to his stall.

He was on the ice, running a half-speed drill with two of the defencemen, when Rozanov came through the door. Shane told himself he wouldn't watch. He watched. Rozanov stopped in the doorway for a fraction of a second, the Forum ice doing what it always did to people who understood quality, then took one slow, reading lap. Shane recognised the behaviour from his own injury returns, that first conversation with the surface. Then Rozanov turned at the far end and came back toward center, and there was nothing slow about it anymore. He came to a stop, edges cutting a clean white arc. He was bigger than Shane remembered from Calgary, or the ice made him look that way, the Forum's particular scale reducing certain distances and amplifying others. He looked at Shane.

Shane skated toward him. Close up, after all of it, the man looked tired. Shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there in Calgary, the particular hollowness of someone who had not been sleeping well in an unfamiliar place. But he held his stick correctly, blade flat, weight distributed, and there was nothing diminished in the way he stood. Shane put his hand out. Rozanov looked at it. Looked at Shane. He tentatively reached out for it. His grip was firm, and his hand was cold. That was just the ice.

"Welcome to Montreal," Shane said.

Rozanov looked at him with an expression that was not nothing. He said something in Russian, low. Shane didn't speak Russian. He was aware, briefly and without examining it, of not wanting to let go of the handshake before Rozanov did. Rozanov let go first.

"Yeah," Shane said. "Okay."

Theriault blew the whistle. The press had three minutes at the boards. A suited translator stood at Rozanov's shoulder.

"Ilya, how does it feel to be on Canadian ice as a Metro?"

Rozanov listened to the translation and considered it with the patience that comes from being used to questions with no good answers.

"Good ice," he said in English. He said it flatly, like a statement of engineering fact. "Best ice," he modified.

"What do you think of Montreal so far?"

A pause. He said something in Russian. The translator took that one on. "He says the city is larger than he expected. He is still learning it."

"And how does it feel to play for a Western club after competing for the Soviet national program?"

A pause. The translator murmured. Rozanov looked at the reporter steadily. "Same ice," he said, in English, without waiting for the translation. "Same puck." He looked at his stick. "Same game."

"There are people who feel this acquisition is — politically complicated. That it sends a message about —"

"Yes," Rozanov said. He said it before the translator finished, which meant he'd understood more than he was letting on, and the room registered this. 

"There are always people." He held the reporter's gaze. Shane realized Ilya must have been briefed on far more hostile interrogations than this one and found the comparison mildly interesting. "I come to play hockey."

"Have you had a chance to talk much with Captain Hollander?"

Rozanov looked at Shane. "We talk." He shrugged. "His Russian, very bad." A few of the guys laughed. 

"Captain Hollander, what does Rozanov bring to this lineup?"

"He's the best player in the world," Shane said. He regretted it as soon as it left his lips, but it was true. He heard Hayden, two players down, exhale through his nose. "The hockey part will come fast. The language on the ice is already there."

"Are you worried the language barrier will be a problem long-term?"

Shane glanced at Rozanov, who was following his English with the focused attention of someone reading a text they mostly, but not entirely, understood, brow slightly furrowed with the effort. Something about the concentration on his face was — Shane looked back at the reporter.  "He understood everything I just said," Shane told the reporter. "He just won't admit it yet."

Rozanov's eyes moved to him. A beat. "Admit." He paused, appearing to search for the next word and not find it. He settled on "Nothing." The reporters laughed.

A different reporter, from further back, "Ilya, are you concerned about how your defection has been received in the Soviet Union? Your teammates from the national program — do you think they feel you've —"

Rozanov's expression didn't change. It was already still and it stayed still, and there was something in the stillness that had a different mood than before. He listened to the translation. Then he said, in English, without inflection, "Only concern is hockey. No other questions, good?" He looked at the reporter for one more second. The reporter opened his mouth. Theriault used the silence to end the availability, and the media cleared out for practice to begin.

The first twenty minutes, Rozanov watched. Not passively. He tracked the drills with the focused attention of an engineer watching a stress test, reading decision points and tendencies. Shane recognised it from his own way of playing. He made himself stop watching Rozanov watch things and focus on his own skating.

Rozanov ran the cycling drill correctly on the first try. Watched it six times, ran it once, needing no further instruction. He was going to let his skills speak for themselves, Shane thought.

Their scrimmage was something else. Shane had the puck in the left corner, a defenceman pressing him, no clean outlet, and Rozanov materialised in a position that should have been physically impossible given where he'd been three seconds earlier. Shane hit to him on instinct, hands knowing before eyes confirmed. Rozanov took it in stride without breaking, put it on net, watching it bounce in off the post.

A half-second of silence. Then someone said, "Jesus," from the defensive end.

Rozanov skated back to center. A single nod to Shane, the brief, transactional acknowledgement of crediting an assist, and then he was already scanning the ice for the next sequence. J.J. had been watching from the opposite wing. He looked at Shane. Shane looked back. Neither of them said anything.

Rozanov got the puck at the right circle on the next shift with J.J. pressuring hard from behind, and instead of protecting it along the boards the way every player in the NHL would have, he simply stopped. A full, complete stop, weight dropping, edges biting, while J.J.'s momentum carried him two strides past and into empty space. By the time J.J. had recovered and turned back, Rozanov was already gone up the ice, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world because he'd just borrowed J.J.'s. He glanced back once without slowing, and the glance communicated quite precisely that he had known exactly where J.J. was and exactly what he was going to do about it before J.J. had decided to do it. His lips had a slight quirk. Not all the way to a smirk.  The glance was the smirk.

J.J. got to the bench and sat down hard. "Did he just — "

"Yes," Shane said.

"He just stopped. In the middle of — he just stopped."

"Yes."

J.J. looked at the ice. "Okay," he said, and he sounded like a man revising several assumptions simultaneously. Hayden dropped onto the bench from his second-line shift and caught the tail end of this. 

"What happened?"

"Rozanov pulled one over."

Hayden was quiet for a moment. "On J.J.?"

"Yes."

"In practice."

"Yes."

Hayden exhaled through his nose. He looked at Rozanov at the far end of the ice, already into the next sequence, and his expression was not the easy fond-irritation Shane had expected. It was something more considered than that. "He's going to be an absolute nightmare, isn't he?"

"He's going to win us the Cup," Shane said.

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Hayden said as he stood up for his next shift. "That's what I keep trying to tell you."

The other thing Shane noticed, and actively chose not to think about, happened on the second day. Rozanov came off the ice after the scrimmage and stripped his gear with the total indifference of someone who had spent his entire adult life in communal barracks and had never once been given a reason to think about his own body. No performance, no self-consciousness, no reading of the room. He simply existed in his body the way some people exist in a house they've lived in long enough to stop seeing it. The room noticed.

Not all at once. It was a sequence — Thibault nudged Pike, Pike looked, Pike's expression did something involuntary, and then Comeau, with the instincts from being in locker rooms for fifteen years, said to nobody in particular, "Christ. They feeding them something different over there?"

"Soviet training program," J.J. said, never looking up from his skates. 

"That's not training," Comeau said. "That's a customs declaration. Someone's going to have to tell Equipment about the extra stick he's packing."

The room laughed. Rozanov gave no indication he'd heard any of it, or that he would have cared if he had. He reached for his towel with the unhurried ease of having nowhere to be. Shane didn't mean to ogle Rozanov, but he was something else. There wasn't any other way to put it. He had to have thirty pounds of muscle on Shane. Rozanov's abs looked like they had been chiseled from marble, cutting a solid arrow towards – Shane found something on the far wall that required his complete and sustained attention. It was a motivational poster the equipment staff had put up in 1984 and nobody had taken down. He read it three times without retaining a single word.

He started timing the showers. He told himself it was about the hot water. The Forum's supply was a finite resource with twenty-nine men drawing on it after practice, which was true and had never previously been a factor in his thinking. He started going in early, before the scrimmage fully ended, or late, after most of the room had cleared. Both were slightly inconvenient. He did not examine why he was making that choice. Hayden noticed on the fifth day. He didn't say anything. He just watched Shane gather his things and head for the showers at an unusual moment, and when Shane came back, Hayden was taping a new stick, looking like he was putting that information away for later. Shane sat down and started dressing. Hayden taped his stick. Neither of them said anything, which was the loudest version of the conversation they weren't having.

The first chirp arrived some days later, quietly enough that Shane wasn't certain, for a moment, he'd heard it correctly. Hayden had missed a net-front opportunity in the scrimmage, a clean chance he'd overthought and put wide, and came off the shift shaking his head at himself. Standard. Rozanov was already going over the boards at that point, and as he passed Pike in the changeover, he said, without looking at him, very quietly, "Wide."

Hayden stopped on the step. "I know it was wide."

Rozanov was already gone. Hayden looked at Shane.

"Did he just — "

"I think so," Shane said.

"Wide," Hayden repeated, to nobody. "Like I don't know it was — "He stopped. "He hasn't even been here a week."

"I know."

It escalated carefully, within the strict limits of his vocabulary, with the precision of having had to communicate volumes through timing and tone and the quality of saying very little. When one of the younger defencemen made a lateral pass that telegraphed itself for two full seconds and got intercepted, Rozanov came to the bench, sat down, looked at the ice, and said, to nobody in particular, in English, "See this pass in Moscow." 

Hayden, two players down the bench, turned his head slowly toward Shane.

"Is he chirping Sullivan?"

"Yes," Shane said.

"He has been here — "

"Six days."

"Six days," Hayden said. He looked at Rozanov, who was watching the next sequence with the focused attention he gave to most things, as though the chirp had been a minor aside rather than a statement of philosophy. Something moved across Hayden's face that wasn't quite admiration and wasn't quite annoyance and was probably both. "He's an annoying asshole," he said, but the conviction in it had gone slightly sideways. 

After practice, Hayden caught up with Shane in the corridor again. "I want to say something about this, for the record."

"Go ahead."

"He is going to be a genuinely insufferable presence in that locker room when he knows English."

"He's going to win us the Cup."

"You keep saying that." Hayden stopped walking. He looked at Shane with an expression that did several things at once without committing to any of them. "I'm allowed to hold both things in my head. He's our annoying asshole and I support him entirely and I find him extremely annoying, and I want it noted." A pause. "And I want it noted that you called him the best player in the world."

"He is the best player in the world," Shane said.

"I know that," Hayden said. "You didn't have to say it on camera."

He went to get his gear off. Shane stood in the corridor for a moment and then went to get his own.

The room's adjustment wasn't without friction. The xenophobia lived where it always lived. Private registers, jokes with enough plausible deniability to survive a challenge. J.J. absorbed the chirping about the wide shot and came back to practice the next day and didn't mention it and quietly started watching Rozanov's positioning on the wall. That was the version of adjustment Shane could work with. Shane did his best. The lunches. The corridor conversations. The deliberate way he talked about Rozanov's game in terms of what it meant for the playoffs next year, the year after, framing it as an investment rather than a novelty. Some of the guys responded to investment arguments. Most of them, faced with the numbers at the end of each scrimmage, were doing their own arithmetic anyway.

What he couldn't manage was the other thing, the thing that had no name yet and therefore could not be addressed. The way his eyes found Rozanov in a drill before he'd decided to look. The way standing in a face-off circle six feet from him pulled at his attention in a way he had to actively redistribute to other parts of the ice. He'd felt something like it twice before in his life. Once in a movie theatre watching something he'd had to actively not think about afterward, once in a tunnel in Vienna, and both times he had routed around it cleanly and kept moving and not looked back. He was good at not looking back. He had a lot of practice. The ice was not ambiguous. The rest of it, he was managing.

The first home game that Rozanov played was the last Saturday in March. Just four regular home games left in the season. Shane was in the corridor outside the locker room an hour before puck drop, doing the pre-game walk he always did, the same forty yards and back he'd been doing since his second year when he'd discovered the motion helped him think. He nearly walked past Rozanov before he registered him.

Rozanov was standing at the far end of the corridor in full gear, helmet in hand, looking at nothing in particular with the focused vacancy of running something internal. Shane stopped. He had seen Rozanov in practice gear for over a week. The dark jersey, worn and unadorned. This was different. The Metros' home blues were bright under the corridor lights, the stylised M on the chest sharp, and across the back in the block letters Shane had been staring at from across the room as they hung in an unused stall. ROZANOV, and the number 81. Shane stood there for a moment and felt something he couldn't entirely account for. He looked good. The red of the Soviet uniforms had washed him out, made him look younger, more sallow. The blue suited him in a way the red hadn't, and Shane was aware of noticing this and of the fact that it was not a thought he'd had about any other teammate, and then he was aware of being aware of both of those things, which was worse. He kept walking.

Rozanov noticed him and turned his head with the unhurried attention he gave to most things.

"How are you feeling?" Shane said.

Rozanov considered the question with the seriousness he gave to questions he wasn't sure were genuine. "Good," he said. Then, after a pause, the honest version requiring slightly more vocabulary than the polite one, "Nervous." He sounded out the word carefully, like he'd looked it up and wasn't yet certain he was using it correctly. He glanced down at the helmet in his hands, then back at Shane. "Is normal?"

"Yes," Shane said. "Very normal."

Rozanov looked at him for a moment. Something shifted slightly in his expression, not quite relief, more like a recalibration after holding something at a careful distance and being given permission to set it down briefly. They were standing closer than the conversation required, close enough that Shane could see the shadows still under his eyes that nearly two weeks of sleeping in a team-owned apartment hadn't resolved. Close enough that he could have taken one step and their shoulders would have been touching. He didn't take the step. 

Then Rozanov put the helmet on, clipped the chin strap, and started back toward the locker room. He passed Shane close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

"Hollander," he said, without stopping or turning.

"Yeah."

"Good pass. In corner." He meant the scrimmage from the week before, the one Shane's hands had made before his eyes caught up. "Again tonight." He went through the door. Shane stood in the corridor for a moment, looking at the place where he'd been.

The Forum filled the way it did when something was going to happen that people would talk about afterward. Pittsburgh was fourth in the division. The goalie having a good month, a functional power play. The Metros were expected to win anyway. Theriault's plan was conservative. Limited minutes for Rozanov, let him get his bearings, see how he moves in a live environment before the season closed out. An audition, essentially. Four games before playoffs took over and then everyone went home for four months. That was the plan. What happened in the first period was not that.

Shane won the opening face-off and moved the puck around the left defenceman, running the standard breakout. Rozanov was on his right wing, positioned three feet further up the ice than the play design called for, not obviously wrong, just fractionally ahead of where he was supposed to be. Shane shouldn't have passed to him. He hit to him anyway, and Rozanov was gone before the Pittsburgh defenceman had finished the mental calculation of where he'd been.

He didn't score on that shift. The attempt was a wrist shot from the left circle that the goalie got a piece of, and Rozanov watched it go wide, his expression noting an error to be corrected. On the bench, he said to Shane, "Different angle. Next time."

Shane looked at him. "You're supposed to be on the half-wall." Shane pointed at the spot where Rozanov should have been.

Rozanov turned to look at Shane directly. His English ran out somewhere before what he wanted to say, and for a moment he had the look of scanning through a card catalogue and not finding the file. He tried anyway. "Half-wall is—" A pause. "For player who need—" Another pause, longer. He appeared to weigh the available words, find them insufficient, and make a decision. "I do not hide," he said. The grammar was wrong. The meaning was not. 

"That's not what the —"

"I do not hide," Rozanov said again. Not louder. Just placed down the second time with more weight, the way you said a thing twice when you needed someone to understand it was not negotiable. His English was broken and his meaning was not. The repositioning had created a passing lane that shouldn't have existed, and Shane had used it without being told to, and they both knew that. Shane was annoyed about the half-wall comment. He was aware the annoyance was only partly about the half-wall.

Ilya kept his promise at fourteen minutes. A pass from J.J. at the right circle, one motion, upstairs, the goalie's glove a half-second behind it. The lamp went red and the Forum made its noise and J.J. was on him before Rozanov had completed his follow-through. Both arms, helmet to helmet, yelling something in French at close range that arrived as pure sound rather than language. Rozanov went very still in the middle of it. Not pulling away, not returning it either. His arms came up in something that was almost an embrace and then stopped, uncertain of the protocol, hovering for a half-second before settling at J.J.'s shoulders in a grip that was more structural than celebratory, like he was making sure of his footing. J.J. didn't notice or didn't care. He was still talking in French, one hand on the back of Rozanov's helmet, and then Pike arrived from the left and hit them both in a way that was essentially a moving wall.

Shane got there as the pile broke. He looked at Rozanov from three feet away. The expression on his face was not one Shane had a word for. Not warm, not cold. He looked like he had just experienced something his body didn't have a protocol for, and was still deciding what to do with it. It lasted about a second. Then his face settled back toward neutral and he was already turning toward the bench. Shane tapped his shin pad with his stick. Rozanov looked back at him. Something at the corners. Brief, involuntary, gone before it fully arrived.

In the second period, Pittsburgh collapsed coverage toward Rozanov, tightening the gaps on his side of the ice. It was the same call Shane would have made. Shane understood within five seconds that Rozanov had been waiting for it. He had spent the first period in exactly the positions that would produce this response in the second. Because when Pittsburgh collapsed to Rozanov's side, Shane had ice. More ice than he'd had in any game in years, the ice he had before his reputation had made him predictable. He took the first open lane and scored from the right circle, clean and short side. He sat down next to Rozanov on the bench and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. A pure, uncomplicated pleasure in the quality of the decision, the game stripped back down to what it actually was. "You set that up from the first period," he said.

Rozanov was watching the ice. "Yes."

"First shift?"

"Yes."

"You spent half a period building a setup."

Rozanov looked at him. The familiar gap opened between what he wanted to say and the English he had for it. He bridged it the way he was learning to: reducing, selecting, saying the minimum that carried the weight. "Defence close me." He gestured with his glove. "Open you." A pause. "Easy."

"That's not how most players think."

"Yes," Rozanov said. A fact, no particular pride in it.

They went back out, and Shane found he had stopped managing the game and started playing it. He had been managing games for four years, distributing energy across the room's needs and the media's appetite and the front office's expectations, and he had gotten so good at it he'd almost forgotten the other way. Playing beside Rozanov was like standing next to something very loud. It made Shane louder too, by proximity, by some mechanism of calibration he couldn't name or explain.

Shane scored again in the second. Rozanov had another goal of his own, a wrist shot from the top of the circle that went upstairs with a precision that looked predetermined. J.J. had a goal, skating in lanes that hadn't existed for him before tonight, and the looseness in his stride said he knew it.

Pittsburgh called a timeout and came out of it slower and more cautious, and it didn't help them.

Rozanov scored a third time at six minutes of the third from behind the net, cutting the angle to almost nothing, finding a seam that existed for a quarter of a second. The Forum went up in a wave, the sound of people who had just seen something that couldn't be anticipated or explained or easily forgotten. And Comeau got there first.

Nobody expected it, including Comeau. He arrived at something close to full speed, all the accumulated energy of sixty minutes of watching this happen finally finding a direction, and he hit Rozanov at the boards with the completely uninhibited joy that comes from running out of ways to contain yourself. Rozanov's hands came up.

It was fast and total, the trained reflex from having taken ten thousand hits and knowing exactly what it feels like when one is incoming. The weight shift, the drop, the elbows out, fists up. He had Comeau by the front of his jersey before either of them had fully processed what was happening. Comeau's eyes went wide. Rozanov looked like he was about to clock him. 

Then J.J. arrived from the left with his arms out, still yelling the same French that had been going into Rozanov's helmet since the first goal, and Thibault behind him, and the Forum noise was still climbing, and Rozanov stood at the boards with his fist in Comeau's jersey and looked at all of it for one clarifying second. He let go.

He stood very still while the pile organised itself around him, J.J.'s arms coming over his shoulders, Comeau recovering and laughing with the slightly breathless quality of a man who had just been grabbed by someone considerably stronger than expected and was choosing to find it funny. Thibault hit Rozanov on the back of the helmet. Someone else on the shoulder. The noise was close and loud and entirely in languages he couldn't follow, and Rozanov's hands, which had nowhere left to go, ended up somewhere in the middle of it all. One at J.J.'s shoulder, one hanging slightly at his side, the adrenaline with no target still moving through him, the body prepared for impact receiving warmth instead, not entirely sure what to do with the difference.

Shane got there as the pile was breaking. He looked at Rozanov's face. The aggression was gone. What was left was harder to name. His body had prepared for one thing and received something entirely different, standing in the wreckage of that confusion with the Forum still going around him. The wide eyes had settled. His jaw had unclenched. He looked, for just that moment, genuinely young.

It lasted about a second. Then Rozanov blinked and his face did what it always did, smoothed back toward neutral, and he was moving away from the boards. Shane tapped his shin pad. Rozanov glanced back. Something at the corners, the same thing as after the first goal, still brief and still involuntary. Still gone before it fully arrived.

Final score: 7-0. The Metros' wildest shutout in three years. Rozanov went through the handshake line correctly, hand out, eye contact, moving steadily from one Pittsburgh player to the next. On a regular night, they wouldn't have done a line, but Shane knew Pittsburgh all wanted a good look at Rozanov. 

Theriault had pulled Rozanov for most of the third, cycling through the other lines, managing the minutes conservatively. Standard practice. Also the wrong call, and the conversation in the corridor afterward confirmed it. Shane couldn't hear Theriault's side of it. He could hear Rozanov because Rozanov's voice carried, and he was in the process of making a point with the vocabulary he had.

"Too much bench. Third period."

Theriault's response was inaudible.

"No." A pause, working around a missing word. "Soviet shift long. Two minute. More." Another pause. "Here, thirty second, I stop. I start. I stop." He appeared to search for something and land on it. "Not tired. In Moscow — "A longer pause. "In Moscow, play until coach say stop. Not clock."

More from Theriault, still inaudible.

"I can do." Flat, direct, the tone he used when he was stating something he considered factual. "Three games left." The pause this time had a different quality, less linguistic, more deliberate.

Shane sat with his skate in his hand and looked at the wall. Hayden appeared from around the corner and raised his eyebrows.

"He's asking for more ice time," Shane said.

"I know, I could hear him from the showers." 

Hayden sat down. "He's not wrong about the shift thing. Soviet shifts are apparently brutal. He probably feels like he's barely been out there."

"He's not wrong about any of it."

"That's the problem with him," Hayden said. 

"He just keeps not being wrong." He pulled his jersey over his head. "Three games left. Then what, he just stays here all summer?"

"That's the plan," Shane said. "Language lessons. Get the documents sorted. Hit training camp ready."

Hayden was quiet for a moment. "He can't go anywhere."

"No."

"So he's just…here? In Montreal. All summer."

"Yes."

Hayden nodded slowly at the floor, the expression connecting a thought he hadn't quite reached the end of yet. "And you're going to the cottage?"

"My parents' place. Probably June, July."

"Sure," Hayden said. He picked up his boots. He didn't say anything else.

The corridor went quiet. Rozanov came back into the room and sat at his stall and pulled off his jersey without comment. He had three goals and two assists in limited ice time and three games left in the season, and he knew what that meant, and so did Theriault, and so did the front office, and so did Shane.

The room was loud the way rooms are after shutouts. Someone had the radio going. Hayden got down on the floor to do his hip flexor routine, narrating the game to himself at low volume. J.J. was telling the same story twice to different people. Comeau was at the centre of his own story, apparently, gesturing at Rozanov's stall while two of the defencemen listened with expressions that were somewhere between sympathetic and delighted. Shane caught enough of it to understand that the story was about the boards, about the fist in the jersey, and that Comeau was telling it with the energy of a man who had survived a war and wanted credit for it. 

Rozanov looked up once from his gloves. He looked at Comeau across the room, clearly performing a brief assessment and reaching a conclusion, and then he said, loudly enough for the four nearest players to hear, "You celebrate before whistle. This is why you do not score."

Comeau stopped mid-sentence. Rozanov went back to picking a loose thread on his glove. Comeau's audience looked between them. Comeau laughed, eventually, the laugh of being told something accurate and choosing to treat it as a joke instead of an insult.

"He's right," J.J. said, from across the room.

Comeau pointed at J.J. "You're supposed to be on my side."

"You celebrate before the whistle," J.J. said.

He was very still in the middle of all of it. Not unhappy. Sitting with his helmet off and his hair pressed flat on one side, looking at his gloves where they sat on his knees. The same stillness as after the first goal, but quieter now, more settled. Shane watched him from across the room without appearing to watch him, and saw the exact moment when something almost reached Rozanov's face, some private version of the evening, processed and filed, and then didn't quite make it, pulled back by whatever reflex had been running long enough to be automatic.

Then J.J. dropped onto the bench beside him and said something in French. Rozanov looked at him. 

"This word," he said. "Again."

J.J. blinked. "Which word?"

Rozanov made a small gesture between them. "You say. When goal."

J.J. said it again, slower. Incroyable.

Rozanov held it for a moment, testing the shape of it. Something in his expression shifted slightly, just at the edges, the same involuntary thing from the ice. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to his skates.

Shane looked away. He reached for his shoe and started unlacing it.

Across the room, Rozanov pulled his sweat-soaked base layer over his head and sat in the noise and steam of a won game, and there was nothing in his posture that asked for anything. That was the thing Shane kept coming back to. He had arrived with nothing and no English and a work permit that wouldn't let him leave the country, and he sat in this locker room like he'd been here for years, like the Forum ice was his by right, like the summer ahead in a city where he knew almost no one was simply the next sequence to read.

Shane thought about the corridor before the game. Blue jerseys bright under the fluorescent lights, the name across the back he'd spent years watching from the wrong side of the ice.  Nervous. Is normal? He thought about the boards. The fist in Comeau's jersey and then the letting go. If this is how he played nervous, next season is going to be wild.

Three games left at home, then the season closed out, and the building would empty out after playoffs, and Shane would drive to the cottage and the lake and the particular silence of a place that had no agenda. His parents. The dock. Probably Hayden for a weekend in June.

And Rozanov would be here. In this city, in some apartment the Metros arranged, working through English lessons with a teacher the organisation found, learning words in the deliberate way he learned everything, the dictionary open beside him. Nowhere to go. The travel documents still in process. 

The summer stretched out in front of him, long and foreign and without a locker room in it. Three games from now, then playoffs, and then it would be summer, and Rozanov would still be in Montreal, and Shane would be at a lake in the woods, and somehow that felt like the beginning of something rather than the end of it. Shane felt the inexplicable urge to ask him to come with him for the summer. But no. He needed his English lessons. And it's not like they were friends. He didn't examine the feeling he was having too carefully. He put on his other shoe and went to find Hayden. He didn't look back at Rozanov's stall. He was aware of the effort of not looking.

Chapter End Notes

Some research notes, since you seem to like them and I'm feeling chatty.

The Metros' arrangement of intensive English lessons over the summer is consistent with documented NHL practices. When Mogilny moved to Buffalo in 1989, the Sabres enrolled him in English classes and paired him with a Russian-speaking liaison. The expectation in most cases of Soviet defectors was that the player would be functionally conversational within four to six months.

Ilya is uncomfortable when Comeau hits him in celebration. This was based on several interviews with Soviet players who reached the NHL in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They described the adjustment to celebratory physical contact as genuinely disorienting. Soviet celebration culture on ice was not a thing. Tikhonov actively discouraged individual displays, and physical celebration was considered both undisciplined and vulgar, emphasizing the individual over the collective.

The complaints about shift length are also based in fact. In the early 80s, the Soviet teams ran short, very tight shifts. As the 80s continued, these shifts got gradually longer. By 1988, CSKA players ran shifts of three minutes or longer (on a few rare occasions, he kept players on the ice for five minutes!). The system was built around sustained aerobic dominance rather than the stop-start burst model the NHL preferred, which itself was modeled after trying to beat the Soviet teams. Adapt to the game, right? When real Soviet players finally reached North American ice, these short shifts (30-60 seconds) were a genuine adjustment. It was an “old style” of play. If you watch a modern hockey game, you can see how even a three-minute shift is WILD stuff. The league average last season was 47 seconds.

A note on writing/pacing: To power through to finish longfics, I HAVE to have a very tight outline. When I wrote Miracle, it was originally supposed to be 10 chapters, but it ended up at...40. Whoops. Something similar-ish is happening here. I have this tagged as ending at 30 chapters, but I keep getting the "oh shit, I should include this plot beat" problem. So, if you're married to that number, I'd expect it to flex up...maybe to 35 or 40, but I don't want to commit. I hate leaving the ? there, because when I see fics with that, I always assume the author doesn't know how things are going to end, and I definitely know the ending. Is that a fair assumption? Probably not, but that's my feeling.

Seeing this work get recommended on Threads or Reddit is actually the wildest. I love you guys. Let me know what you think!

Chapter 12: Annotation

Chapter Summary

Ilya learns to annotate. The meetings, the games, the road trip, the bar. Everything goes in the margins of something. Three home wins and eight days alone and one moment at the Admirals game where he notices, with an embarrassing degree of precision, exactly what Hollander's hands are not doing.

Chapter Notes

I've been fighting off some intense jet lag, which means I can be up all night writing...have another chapter.

I want you to know that sticking to (vague-ish) historical accuracy is clearly important to me, but we are playing a little loosely with the dates here compared to a real hockey season, just so Ilya could get on the ice before the season ends. I gave myself about a three-week flex compared to the actual dates. Is anyone actually checking this against the real Canadien's schedule? Probably not, but if you are... don't expect to-the-day accuracy here.

Annotation

1. A note added to a text or diagram by way of explanation or comment.
   
   
2. The act of marking up a document with observations not contained in the original.
   
   
3. What you do in the margins when the main text is moving too fast to follow.
   
   

Example: "Ilya wrote Washington, outside in the margin of his folder and circled it." - April 1988

He had been reading the schedule on the apartment wall every morning since they taped it there, tracing the home dates with one finger. It was something to do. The away dates he left alone. There were too many of them and they all meant the same thing: a city across a border he was not permitted to cross, a seat on a bus he was not permitted to take, a dressing room full of his teammates who would be there without him.

Washington was three days after Pittsburgh. The dressing room going into the game had the frenetic energy that comes after a success when the team is trying hard, and failing, not to look overconfident. Ilya understood this. He sat in his stall and methodically taped his stick, as he always did before a game to clear the noise.

Home games were something different here, very different from playing in Moscow. Home games were the Forum, which he was beginning to understand was not just a building but an institution. He had stood in the tunnel before the Pittsburgh game and heard the noise build from somewhere below the sound of individual voices, a low compression in the air that he felt in his sternum before he heard it with his ears, and understood then why these people cared so much about this particular building.

He said almost nothing before games. This was not unusual. He had said almost nothing in any dressing room for the better part of the past three years. But then, the silence had been strategic. Here it was structural. There was simply no material to work with. The conversations moved too fast, in English that collapsed into French and back again, full of references he couldn't follow and jokes that needed twelve things to understand he didn't have yet. He caught words. Fragments. Enough to know when someone was talking about the game and when they were talking about something else, but not enough to enter. He was at the edge of a room he could see into but not walk through.

J.J. had taken to talking to him in slow, careful French. Ilya understood approximately ten percent of it and appreciated the effort without being able to say so. Comeau had decided the solution was volume. If he said things loudly enough, Ilya would eventually understand them through sheer repetition, which was not how language worked but was apparently how Comeau worked, and Ilya had no English to explain the distinction. He nodded at Comeau's contributions and stored them in the part of his brain reserved for things he would look up later.

The hardest part was the meetings. Theriault ran systems meetings before every game, a whiteboard covered in arrows and numbers and shorthand that Ilya could follow visually but not verbally. He understood the plays well enough. He had studied systems his entire career, Soviet and Western both, and diagrams had a logic that preceded language. What he couldn't follow was the commentary around the diagrams. Adjustments, the opponent-specific notes, the jargon of a team that had been playing together for two years and had built a private vocabulary out of it. Words that meant one thing in a dictionary and something different in this room.

He had a system. He wrote the words he didn't know in the margin of the folder they gave him, in the phonetic Cyrillic that was faster than the Latin alphabet, and looked them up when he got back to the apartment. The list after the first meeting had been twenty-two words long. After the third it was down to eleven. He kept the lists. Progress was a form of evidence he needed to hold onto.

Hollander helped without appearing to. He had a way of restating things Theriault had just said in simpler English, directed at the room rather than at Ilya specifically, so that Ilya could catch the meaning without the humiliation of being talked down to. Ilya was not sure Hollander knew he was doing it. He filed that information away anyway, in the private ledger he was keeping on things he knew about Hollander. The ledger had started as a vocabulary book and had become something else without his permission.

At the second meeting, Theriault drew out a neutral-zone trap for Washington's third line and Ilya saw the counter before Theriault finished drawing it. He said so. Carefully, in the English he had for it, "This line, they give you outside. If you take outside, trap is broken."

Theriault looked at him. Not unkindly. The look that said do I have the energy to deal with this right now? "We'll look at that option, Rozanov. For now—"

"Is not option," Ilya said. "I have seen this." He said it without inflection, the way he stated things he knew to be true. In Moscow, stating things you knew to be true was the only language that worked. Opinions got you nowhere. Facts were the only currency. 

The room had a certain feel to it at the moment, and Ilya felt the shift immediately. Some of it was the usual locker room noise, filling itself over the silence. Some of it was specific, a few of the veterans exchanging a look that Ilya could not place. Theriault moved on. Ilya wrote Washington, outside in the margin of his folder and circled it.

J.J. appeared in the corridor after the meeting. "You're going to need to let him finish his sentences," J.J. said. He wasn't unkind. He said it with the particular gentleness of trying to give useful information in a way that didn't require anyone to lose face. "It's not— nobody's saying you're wrong."

"I was right," Ilya said.

"I know. That's what I'm saying. You're right, and you need to let him finish his sentences." J.J. looked at him. "It's the same information. It just lands different."

Ilya looked at the corridor wall. In Moscow, the option had never been to be right at a speed the room could receive. You were right loudly and first, or someone else was right instead. He understood, in a mechanical way, what J.J. was telling him. He understood it the way you understood that a rule was different here, without yet having developed the instinct for the new rule. He understood he had made a mistake. "Okay," he said.

"Thank you," J.J. said.

"I was right."

J.J. walked away without answering.

The Washington game started badly. Their center won four of the first five face-offs, and the Metros spent the first eight minutes defending. Ilya found himself on the ice against a defenceman who played the body well and had been explicitly briefed on how to close the gaps that Ilya needed. He knew this because the defenceman was doing it correctly. He was good. The counter was to draw him wide, which required Ilya to be faster than the defenceman expected. In the first period, he hadn't quite managed the power he needed, because the Forum ice read differently on a game night than in practice, and his edges were still learning what this surface required.

He came to the bench after the second shift and Hollander was already there, breathing hard from the shift before. He didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at the ice. Then: "McAllister. Forty-four. He's going to give you the outside and take away the middle. Take the outside."

"Outside is—" Ilya stopped. He didn't have the word. He gestured toward the boards.

"Worse angle, yeah. But he's better at the middle than he thinks you know." Hollander glanced at him. "He's not expecting you to go wide."

Ilya looked at the ice. "Okay."

It worked on the third try. He took the outside at a speed McAllister hadn't calibrated for, got the shot away before the angle became impossible, and watched it go in off the near post with a satisfaction that was clean and the closest thing to uncomplicated he had felt since arriving in this country. The Forum went up. J.J. arrived from his left and hit him hard enough to make his teeth rattle, and Ilya caught him this time, both arms wide, which he had not managed with the correct instincts against Pittsburgh. It wasn't comfortable, but he saw it coming and avoided the awkward fumbles of the previous game.

They won 4-2. Ilya had a goal and two assists, the assists on passes that arrived at places the recipients had not yet reached and had to adjust toward, which Ilya understood was both irritating and correct. He was working on the patience required to put the puck where the man was rather than where he should be. It was a different calculus than the Soviet system, which had relied on collective positioning over individual improvisation. Here, the improvisation was the point. He was relearning a game he had been playing his entire life. It was like being six again, unsteady on his skates at the pond.

On the second goal, the crowd made a different sound, beyond the usual approval, something of surprise. Ilya knew what that sound was. He had heard it at the Olympics. It was what it sounded like when a crowd decided to believe in you.

In the dressing room after, Comeau told what was apparently a very funny story about something that had happened in the second period, and the room laughed, and Ilya laughed at the same time as everyone else because he had understood enough of it to know when the punchline arrived even if the specifics were gone. Comeau caught his eye across the room with the satisfied expression of a man whose joke had landed with full coverage, and Ilya gave him the half-nod that meant yes, I heard you, and Comeau seemed happy enough with that.

Buffalo was the following night. Back to back. Ilya had been told this was common and had privately considered it an interesting logistical choice for a league that professed to care about the quality of the game. They were a team in the lower half of the division that the Metros were expected to handle without difficulty. Ilya had learned by now that the games the team was expected to handle without difficulty were the ones that produced the oddest kind of tension in the dressing room beforehand. A slight looseness that wasn't quite confidence, more like a room that had relaxed slightly before it should have.

He said this to J.J. before warmups, in the careful English he had been constructing since practice started, each sentence built ahead of time like a small piece of engineering. "Room is too easy. Before game."

"You mean the guys are too relaxed?"

"Da. This. In Moscow. If relaxed, Coach make you skate. Until not."

J.J. stared at him. "Skate until you're tired on purpose?"

"Until we remember."

"Remember what?"

Ilya considered. "That game is not won."

J.J. was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to tell Theriault you said that."

"No," Ilya said, with some alarm.

"I'm kidding." J.J. was smiling. "He'd probably actually do it."

The game against Buffalo was 6-1. Ilya had a hat trick and set up two more goals for Hollander. The third goal went in six minutes into the third and the Forum went up as it usually did, but then something else happened.

The first hat came from the lower bowl, a dark wool thing that landed on the ice near Ilya. He stared at it curiously. Then another hat joined it. Then a dozen at once, sailing from the upper sections. Suddenly, the ice was covered in them. Caps and toques and dress hats in a slow spread. 

He had no idea what was going on. This country was weird. You are meant to score the goal, and keep playing. He looked at the hats. J.J. skated over, clapping a hand on Ilya's shoulder. He was grinning with the delight of someone watching a person encountering something for the first time. Ilya recognized it as an expression usually saved for children.

"Hats," Ilya said.

"Yes, hats." 

"Why?"

"You scored three goals. A hat trick. They throw the hats."

Ilya looked at the ice again. Hundreds of hats. He picked one up, turning it over in his glove. A green wool cap with a yellow pompom.

"You can take it, if you want.

"They do not want?"

"No, it's yours now."

Ilya looked at the pompom. He set it back down with the others, carefully, which felt like it was not what you were supposed to do with it, but was apparently what he was going to do. The linesman was already coming out with a bucket. Ilya watched him collect them and felt something he could not have named, the Forum still loud around him, the ice slowly clearing.

Ilya spent the third period on the ice slightly more than the score required. The other players noticed. A team with a five-goal lead over a lower-half opponent does not typically generate that quality of attention, and the bench was quieter in the third than it had been in the first two periods, watching. After the game, Hollander looked at Ilya from across the room with an expression that said he was holding something back. Ilya looked at him. Hollander pressed his lips together and said nothing. Ilya shook his head and went to unlace his skates.

The team left Thursday morning. Eight days. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and further south. He knew this from the schedule. He had not known what eight days in the apartment without the team would feel like, and it turned out to feel like something he did not have an English word for yet. He felt it in the practices that didn't happen. In the silence every morning when there should have been somewhere he had to be. He made coffee and watched the street do its ordinary Thursday things while he only watched.

He ran. The route continued to grow and stretch over the weeks into something with grades and options. The flat river path for days when his legs were heavy, the slope past the park when he wanted the effort to be the only thing requiring his attention, and the route up the hill for mornings when the apartment had been particularly bad. The running helped in the way that physical exhaustion always helped, which was to say it helped until it stopped, and then the apartment was still there. The roaring static was still there.

When he wasn't running, he was watching television. He had a system: a dictionary open on the cushion beside him, a notepad for words he couldn't find quickly enough. He watched everything, news, game shows, the American dramas that his teammates apparently loved, and paused it, rewound it, wrote things down with the same focused relentlessness he'd applied in Moscow to film of opposing defencemen. He had filled half the notepad in four days. His English was still bad. It was less bad than it had been. His vocabulary was depressingly small.

He watched the games on television. This was worse than not watching them. He could see Hollander from the broadcast angles in a way he couldn't from the bench. The full shape of how he moved, the decisions he made at three-quarter speed that were invisible at full speed. He watched this more than he watched the puck, which he was aware was not the usual way to watch hockey. He watched until the final buzzer, and then the broadcast cut to the studio and the arenas emptied on the screen, and the apartment was quiet again.

On the second night, he turned the television off before the third period. He sat in the quiet for a while. Then he turned it back on.

He felt profoundly unprepared for this. In Moscow, the barracks were never empty. There were always bodies, always sound, always someone moving through the peripheral space of his awareness. Privacy had been a thing you stole in small pieces. Here he had all of it, rooms of it, more than he knew what to do with, and it turned out that privacy without company was just another word for alone.

He thought about this carefully, because it was important to be precise. This was not homesickness. There was nothing in Moscow that would be better for him than being here. He was not afraid, or closer to the truth, the particular fear, the noise that lived in him for years, that fear of being seen and found and returned, had quieted to a background register he could mostly ignore. What he really was was something smaller and more embarrassing than fear. He missed the noise. He missed the noise of men preparing to play hockey. The tape guns and the music someone always had too loud and the arguments about nothing. He missed having somewhere to be.

He kept the television on in the evenings for the noise more than the content. He ran longer and longer routes. Claire brought him an English phrase book that he read cover to cover twice. It assumed the reader was a tourist with simple needs, which he was not, but it had the virtue of being readable.

The Boston game was the first night. The Metros lost 3-2 in overtime. He found himself tracking Hollander across the ice the way he tracked him on the bench, the way his head moved when he was scanning. Ilya sat with that for a while, then turned off the television and went to bed. Philadelphia was four nights later. The Metros lost 4-2. Hollander had a goal and an assist and played well in a way that contained its own frustration, visible in the set of his jaw on the broadcast and in how still he sat on the bench between shifts. Ilya understood what he was looking at on the standings board in the corridor. The arithmetic was plain enough even without full English. They were close to the playoff line. Every road game mattered in a way that home games, which Ilya could at least attend, did not.

He had learned the shape of the road trip the same way he learned the shape of the city on his runs, not a recurring condition but one long thing, with a beginning, a middle, and a known end. Nothing left in his legs by the time he got back. The apartment waiting on the other side of the door like a storm he hadn't packed for, and then the end of it, and then practice. The team came back Saturday. He knew this from the schedule and also because Hollander's car was back in the lot at the Forum when Ilya arrived before the doors opened, and something in his chest that had been sitting at a slightly wrong angle for eight days rearranged itself. He did not examine this feeling with any rigor. He went to practice.

The Admirals were on Friday. The final home game of the regular season. Ilya had been told they were a rivalry, fifteen years of history between the two franchises, and that this mattered in a way that exceeded the usual meaning of a regular-season game.

He understood rivalry. Soviet rivalries were political before they were personal, constructed from above and handed down. What he was watching in the dressing room before the Admirals game was different. It had roots somewhere specific, carried in Hayden's jaw and the particular way Pike taped his stick and in Comeau, for once, saying nothing at all.

Hollander was doing the thing he did before games he considered important. He sat at his stall and was very still. The stillness of doing a great deal that required no visible movement. Eyes on a fixed point across the room. Somewhere that was not here. Ilya had seen this in Moscow in men who had been playing for years, and it had always felt like a private thing. He looked away. After his stillness, Hollander got up to do his hallway pacing. Ilya found it distracting. Annoying, even. But they all had their own ways to prepare for the game.

The Admirals had a veteran captain named Scott Hunter. J.J. had mentioned him during warmups with the tone people used for someone they genuinely respected, which, in Ilya's experience, was rarer than the tone people used for someone they merely feared. Hunter was thirty-four. His sixteenth season in the league. He moved on the ice with the economy of a man who had learned long ago not to waste anything. Like many players on the other side of thirty, he wasn't as fast or as explosive, but he was smarter. Thinking faster and cleaner than the younger players. Ilya could see this.

During the pre-game skate, Hunter came to the red line and stopped. Not assessment, not hostility. Something more straightforward than either. He nodded once. "Welcome to the league. Good to have you." Said the way people said things they actually meant.

Ilya looked at him. The lines at the corners of his eyes. The nose broken at least twice. A sparkle of gray at his temples. Sixteen seasons of NHL hockey visible in the joints and the way he held his shoulders.

"Thank you," Ilya said. Then, because the observation seemed relevant, "You are old."

Hunter blinked.

"In Soviet Union," Ilya continued, working it out as he went, "player this old" he searched, "retired. Long time. You would be…grandfather. Grandfather of grandfather." He considered the image. 

Silence settled over the red line. Hunter stared at him. Behind Ilya, J.J. suppressed a laugh that turned into a cough. Further down the ice, Comeau appeared to have developed a sudden, intense interest in his own skate blade.

Hunter's expression moved through several stages in quick succession and landed somewhere that was not quite a smile. "I appreciate the perspective," he said, in the careful tone of selecting each word individually.

"You are welcome," Ilya said.

Hunter skated away. J.J. appeared at Ilya's shoulder three seconds later, moving with the barely-contained energy of holding something in under significant pressure.

"You just called Scott Hunter a grandfather," J.J. said, very quietly.

"He is old," Ilya said.

"He's thirty-four."

"Yes," Ilya said. "I said this. Old."

J.J. looked at the ice. Then at Ilya. Then he skated away without another word.

He found out later, from the expression on Comeau's face in the dressing room, that it had been discussed on the Admirals' bench for most of the first period. Ilya did not see the problem. Hunter was old. He confirmed it himself in the corridor after the second period, stopping Ilya with one hand on his arm: "For the record, in Canada, thirty-four is not old."

"In Soviet Union—" Ilya started.

"In Canada," Hunter said, firmly, "thirty-four is not old."

"Okay," Ilya said, in the tone he used when he did not agree but had decided the argument was not worth the vocabulary it would require. He paused, then added, "You skate good. For the age."

Hunter held his gaze for a moment, then laughed, a short, genuine thing, and shook his head and kept walking. Ilya filed it under things to understand better once his English was sufficient for nuance.

The game was the best hockey Ilya had played since arriving in Montreal. The Admirals came out structured and physical and the first period was a chess problem he was genuinely interested in solving. Hunter was on the ice for most of it and was, Ilya had to admit, extremely good for being an antique. 

The goal came in the second period off a sequence he hadn't planned. Hollander carried behind the net and Ilya went to the post on instinct. The angle was right, the Admirals' defender had taken one step too many toward Hollander, and there was a corridor that would close in approximately half a second. Hollander found him without looking. The puck came exactly to where Ilya's stick was, as though Hollander had a map of the ice that included wherever Ilya was going to be, and Ilya redirected it upstairs before the goalie had finished moving. He stood at the post for an instant. The Forum was very loud. Then J.J. hit him from behind with both arms and the noise became something physical and Ilya caught him without thinking about it. He would get comfortable with this. He would try. 

Hollander got there as the pile was breaking. Not part of it, but at the edge of it, the way he was at the edge of most things. He tapped Ilya's shin pad with his stick, the same way he'd done after the Pittsburgh goal, and that was all. J.J.'s arms were still on his shoulders. Gagnon, one of the defencemen, laughing somewhere to his left. And Ilya stood in the middle of it and felt, with a clarity that arrived without warning and left him briefly wrong-footed, that he wanted Hollander's hands on him the way everyone else's were. Not the shin pad. Not the stick. The weight of his hand. The actual contact. It was a want so specific it embarrassed him, and it was gone almost before he'd registered it was even there.

Later, Hollander said in the corridor, "I didn't know you were going to the post."

"I know."

"How did you—"

"You look at puck," Ilya said. "When you look at puck. Not at me. Then I go." He searched. "You are...telling. With the eyes."

"I telegraphed it."

"This word. Telegraph."

"Sending a signal without meaning to."

Ilya nodded. "Yes. But—" He stopped. What he wanted to say was: it was not a weakness, it was information, and I used it, and this is what we are going to do together for as long as we play on the same ice. What he said was: "Good pass."

Hollander looked at him for a moment longer than the sentence required. Then he laughed, short and real, and shook his head. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."

They won 3-1.

J.J. organized the bar, which Ilya gathered was a tradition. Final home game of the regular season, somewhere on Crescent Street, a place the team apparently knew well enough that the bartender had the first round ready before they'd fully sat down. Ilya came because J.J. asked him and because the alternative was sitting alone in the apartment.

The bar was loud in a different way than the Forum. The Forum's noise had a direction to it, a focus. This noise was just ambient, people talking over each other across small tables, a jukebox in the corner playing something with a guitar that Ilya didn't know. It was nice. Comfortable. He settled into a chair between J.J. and Thibault and looked at the room and tried to read it the way he read a dressing room, which was not exactly the same skill but was related.

The drinks arrived. Then another round. Ilya drank slowly, watching how people paid. Flagging down the server, handing over bills, waiting for change, or not waiting in a way that seemed to mean something. He had not yet worked out the system. In Moscow, you paid what you owed, and if you wanted good service next time you found a separate and private occasion to make sure the right person knew you were worth looking after. Here people were doing it openly, in front of everyone, at the end of every transaction. He wasn't sure what to make of a country where the bribe was public and voluntary and came with an expected percentage.

When the server came for the second round he took out his wallet. He offered to pay for J.J. and Thibault. The bill was eleven dollars. He had a twenty. He looked at the twenty. He looked at the bill.

Hollander was two chairs down, not watching him, and then was watching him. He leaned across Thibault. "Tip about a dollar a drink. So on eleven dollars, leave fourteen, fifteen."

"This is bribe?"

Hollander looked at him. "What?"

"Is right word? Pay more, brings good drinks. Fast. Or no, you wait a long time. Bad drinks." He looked at the server. "This is the same."

"It's not—" Hollander stopped. "Okay. It's not exactly the same. But leave fifteen."

Ilya put the twenty on the table. The server took it and left and came back with change, which Ilya left on the table in the amount Hollander had indicated. The server said thank you and meant it in the specific way people meant things when they were grateful for money.

"Same," Ilya said.

Hollander opened his mouth. Closed it. Picked up his beer.

Across the bar, Pike and one of the defencemen were at a table with two women who seemed to know them, the conversation running with the loosened energy of people who had decided the evening was going somewhere. Ilya watched this for a while. He understood the general mechanism. The leaning in, the laughter that wasn't about anything funny, the way bodies arranged themselves at an angle that meant something. He understood the mechanism. He did not know the specific rules of this city, this bar, this version of the game, and he had no interest in making a fool of himself in English in front of his teammates.

Hayden was at the end of the bar talking to a woman Ilya hadn't seen come in. She had dark hair and was saying something that made Hayden laugh with his whole face, which was not an expression Ilya had seen from him in the dressing room. She was also, Ilya noticed, the one doing most of the talking. Not performing, just thinking out loud, and Hayden was listening the way you listened when you were actually interested in what someone was going to say next.

He watched this for a moment. Then he turned to J.J. "Who is woman. With Hayden."

"Jackie. She's— they've been seeing each other. She works at a law firm, I think. Or a newspaper. Something."

Ilya looked back at them. Jackie said something else and Hayden laughed again and put his hand briefly on the bar near hers, not touching, just near.

"Too smart for Pike," Ilya said.

J.J. considered this. "Probably."

"Too funny also." He watched Hayden attempt a response and Jackie tilt her head with the expression of someone deciding whether to let something pass. "He is fifteenth-best player on team. Maybe sixteenth. She should know this."

J.J. pressed his lips together. "I'm not telling him you said that."

"I will tell him."

"Please don't." J.J. turned serious. "You know the rules about teammates' girls."

"I would not do this to Pike. He would not find another woman." He watched Jackie laugh at something, genuinely this time, and Hayden go slightly pink in a way that was probably invisible from where he was standing. It was, Ilya thought, a good laugh. Hayden had reasonable taste, for a sixteenth-best player.

He was coming back with his second drink from the bar. Comeau was at the near end of the bar with Thibault and one of the younger defencemen, and they were in the middle of something that stopped when Ilya got close enough to hear it. Not all at once. One person registering him first, then the others catching the register, the conversation finding a natural-looking pause that had not been natural at all.

He had heard this kind of pause his entire career. Every locker room, every corridor, the barracks and the cafeteria and the coaches' offices when he walked past. He knew what it sounded like. The texture of words that had been about you, stopping.

Comeau looked at him. His expression was easy, the default setting. "Rozanov," he said, and raised his glass in something that was either a greeting or a continuation of whatever had just stopped being said.

"Comeau," Ilya said, and kept walking.

He did not look back. He filed it and did not examine it. There was nothing to examine yet. A pause was only a pause. What came after it was information.

Ilya was nearly past the bar when a man he didn't know stopped him. Mid-forties. He'd been watching the table of Metros players for a while with the loose attention of waiting for a chance to feel talkative. He said something to the bartender in French and then turned to Ilya with the easy sociability of someone who expected to be well-received. "Soviet, eh? I've seen you play."

Ilya looked at him.

"Brave, I guess," the man said. "Getting out like that. Long as you were actually, you know. Came here. Not sent here. You hear things."

The question underneath the question. He had heard it in four different forms since Calgary. "I know what you mean," Ilya said.

"Right, sure." The man smiled in the way people smiled when they wanted to recover ground. "Good player, anyway."

Ilya picked up his drink. "Yes," he said, and went back to the table.

J.J. watched him sit down. "Everything okay?"

"Yes." Ilya drank. "Man wanted to know if I was spy."

J.J. was quiet for a moment. Then: "What did you say?"

"I said I know what you mean." He looked at the table. "He knows I know."

J.J. looked at him and didn't say anything, which was, Ilya was learning, sometimes the correct response.

Hollander was at the same table, not across the room where Ilya had half-expected him.  He was nursing a ginger ale of all things, watching the room with the half-presence of attending out of obligation rather than intent. He had not gone to find a table with anyone.

For months before he joined the team, Ilya had constructed a picture of what Hollander's life looked like. The Canadian captain, the face in the sports pages, a woman beautiful and easy in a bed, wrapped in white silk sheets somewhere in this city while he was at the bar with his teammates. Maybe more than one woman, a finger brushing over his freckles in the dim light of the night. The picture had been a piece of the larger fantasy. The West, the abundance, the life on the other side. The actual Hollander was sitting six feet away from two women who had glanced at him twice and he had not glanced back. Hollander hadn't spoken to him much since he'd arrived, so the picture of his home and his wife hadn't fully materialized in reality yet. But sitting there, alone in a crowded room, did not fit the image. He noted this and filed it in the same place he filed other things about Hollander that he noticed and did not examine. The file was getting full.

J.J. drifted off around ten, then Comeau, then most of the rest in the gradual dispersal that happened when a group ran out of specific reasons to stay. Ilya was putting on his jacket when Hollander appeared beside him.

"I'll drive you," Hollander said. "I'm going past Westmount anyway."

Ilya looked at him. "You live other way."

"I know where I live."

Ilya put on his jacket.

The car was a sensible dark blue sedan, clean in the way that suggested its owner thought about the inside of cars. Hollander drove the way he played.  Controlled, making decisions slightly earlier than the situation required, already reading two moves ahead. The city moved past the windows, streetlights on wet pavement, the particular late-night emptiness of a weeknight in April.

They didn't talk for a few minutes. Ilya had his elbow on the window ledge and watched the city. He was learning the grid slowly on runs, which way the mountain ran, and where the river was relative to where he was standing. It was starting to hold.

"I'm glad you're here," Hollander said. Not looking at him, watching the road. "In Montreal. On the team." He said it the way he delivered most honest things. Plainly, without preamble.

Ilya looked at the side of his face. The dashboard light caught the line of his jaw, the straight nose, the careful way he was holding his expression neutral. Ilya could see that smattering of freckles across his nose, the restrained bow of his lips. He thought about the corridor after the Pittsburgh game, and the bench exchanges, and Hollander's hand on his shoulder that had lasted exactly one second before Hollander had noticed and removed it.

He looked back at the window. "Yes," he said. "You are very lucky."

A beat. "That's not what I—"

"Best player in world," Ilya said. "You said this."

"One time!"

"Yes. Was true."

Hollander was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was in a register that was not quite irritation and not quite amusement, which Ilya was beginning to find he had opinions about. "You're an asshole," he said.

"Yes," Ilya agreed.

They drove for a while. The city thinned out toward Westmount, the streets quieter, the buildings older. Ilya watched the lights. Then, because the question had been sitting in him since the bar and he had the English for it now, "You have a girl?"

Hollander's hands shifted on the wheel, just the tiniest bit. "No."

Ilya looked at him. "At the bar. You did not—"

"No," Hollander said again. Same register. Not defensive, not explaining. Just the word, placed down with a flatness that said it was not an invitation to continue.

"Do you not like them?"

"What?"

"Girls."

"No, I like girls. Just not like that. I mean, yes, like that, just not at the bar."

"Is fine. To be virgin, Hollander. Time will come."

"Who taught you that word?"

"J.J."

"Of course he did. And I'm not a virgin." He paused. A beat. "You didn't either."

Ilya looked at the window. "My English."

"Your English was fine for telling Hayden his girlfriend was too smart for him." Hollander's voice was even.

Ilya said nothing.

"No," Hollander said, after a moment. Quietly, closing something. "I don't have a girl."

Ilya filed it in the same place he filed the million other things about Hollander that he noticed and did not examine.

Hollander pulled up in front of the building on Metcalfe and put the car in park. The street was quiet. The engine ticked. Through the windshield, the city was doing nothing in particular.

Ilya didn't get out immediately. He had his hand on the door handle and was looking at the building and was aware, in a way that was becoming familiar and not entirely comfortable, of not wanting to go inside. The apartment was up there with its adequate furniture and its schedule on the wall and the days of silence waiting on the other side of the door.

He could feel Hollander beside him, not looking, but present, the slight warmth of another person in a small space, neither of them speaking. The moment had a heaviness to it that Ilya could feel without being able to name, and he had learned enough by now to know that the thing to do with moments like this was to get out of the car.

He got out of the car.

"Good night," he said, through the open door.

Hollander looked at him. In the dashboard light, his expression was doing several things at once, none of them fully resolved. "Good night," he said.

Ilya closed the door. He watched the car pull away and then went inside.

He ran every morning. The hill route on the bad mornings, the river path on the others. He came back each time with his legs wrung out and his head clear enough to read the grammar book for an hour before the television became necessary. The team came back Saturday. Ilya was at the Forum before the doors opened.

The last regular practice of the season was on a Monday. Theriault kept it short: conditioning work, a light scrimmage, nothing designed to break anyone. At the end, he gathered the room. Ilya caught most of it. His English was not yet sufficient for every word but it was sufficient for the shape of things, and the shape of this was Theriault was disappointed about the regular season and intended to do something about what came next. He caught not enough. He caught playoffs, Wednesday, said with a weight that meant it was not a question but a fact. He caught Rozanov.

Theriault looked at Ilya as the room broke up. Not a long look, not a speech. Just a nod, the kind that meant: I see what you did here, and I am noting it. Ilya nodded back.

The room dispersed into the energy of a season ending. Playoffs were coming, and they always brought weight and uncertainty. The in-between was the hard part. Packing equipment bags, handshakes, understanding that their last day together could be any time. Hollander moved through it with the ease of someone who had done this many times, saying the right things to the right people. He found Ilya near the door.

"After playoffs," Hollander said. "English lessons."

"Okay."

"They said they'd have a translator around if you need something in the meantime." He said it the way he said most practical things: without ceremony. Then he put his hand out. "I'll see you soon."

Ilya looked at it. Then he took it. Hollander's grip was firm and brief, and he held it for exactly as long as a handshake lasted and then let go. Ilya let go. Hollander picked up his bag and walked out.

Ilya stood in the corridor for a moment. Then he went to get his own things.

Chapter End Notes

A few research-y things from this one.

I couldn't not include the hat trick. Toronto and Montreal both claim that they originated the tradition somewhere in the 1950s. "Hat Trick" is a cricket term, so Ilya almost certainly would know what one was, but would have been baffled by the hats. Henri Henri, a still-operating Montreal hat shop, gave free hats to players who scored three goals during the 50s-70s, which is where the association with the city comes from. Up until the 80s, you also could go pick up your hat at a kiosk after the game, so you'd get it back...but not anymore. They're donated now.

I included the Scott Hunter exchange because it was funny and unavoidable to me, but it gets funnier if you know that Ilya isn't entirely wrong. Under Tikhonov's barracks-living system, Tikhonov alone decided when a player was no longer useful. Vladislav Tretiak, considered one of the greatest goaltenders in history, retired at 32 in 1984. He was still capable of playing top-level hockey, and if he had been able to go to the US he probably would have played many more years. He retired after a major argument in which Tikhonov refused to let him live at home with his wife and children rather than in the barracks. Valeri Kharlamov was dropped from the 1981 Canada Cup roster at 33 due to being "out of condition" due to his advanced age.

The NHL operated on a very different timeline. In 1988, 34 was squarely mid-career for a quality veteran. Players routinely competed into their late thirties, and the game actively rewarded the kind of positional intelligence and economy of movement that accumulates over a long career. Fetisov and Larionov, when they finally reached the NHL in 1989, went on to win the Stanley Cup together with Detroit in 1997 and 1998. Fetisov was 39, Larionov 36. Scott Hunter, being 34, by North American standards, has years left. Gordie Howe, a notable outlier, played until he was 52 and (don't hate me, hockey people) I would argue he was still pretty good well into his 40s. Howe's career best season was when he was 40.

See? Scott Hunter is a little baby, not a dinosaur. I also aged Scott up to match the show closer than the books. Love me some Francois Arnaud, but no one is mistaking that man for being in his 20s (which is fine, and aging is fine, and we don't have to be weird about it).

Next chapter, playoffs. After that: Ilya's hot Montreal summer. As always, thoughts, feelings, comments - all welcome here. Love you all!

Chapter 13: Contact

Chapter Summary

Ilya's first playoffs, and a phone call that has nothing to do with hockey. The season ends. So does everything else.

Chapter Notes

This one came out kind of long, and was a real bear to try to wrestle into how I wanted it. This hit a new bunch of people recently (welcome! Happy you're here! Thanks Reddit!) but here's another gentle (firm) reminder that this is fiction. I'm a good researcher, but I absolutely cut corners for the sake of the story. My search history for this chapter includes an embarrassing amount of time spent looking at photos of playoff beards, trying to find the most facial hair Connor Storrie has ever grown, Soviet military communications infrastructure, and KGB soft-harassment tactics. But always a grain of salt on the details, please.

Contact (noun)

1. The state or condition of physical touching.

2. The action of communicating or meeting.

3. A person who may be approached for information or assistance, in an emergency or otherwise, assuming that such a person exists.

Example: "He looked at the phone for a long time. Then he put it back." — April 1988

Game one at the Forum was the loudest Ilya had heard the building yet. Not louder in volume, exactly, but louder in concentration, the crowd packed in with a focused heat that had nothing of the ordinary season in it. He understood playoffs in his body before he understood them in language. Higher stakes, tighter systems, the other team playing with an urgency that had none of the regular season's looseness. Philadelphia was physical in the way of teams that had been told physicality was their best option against him, which he also understood, and which did not work the way they wanted. He scored once and set up another. The Forum sent them off with a noise that reverberated through the tunnel floor.

In the locker room after, he noticed that several of the guys hadn't shaved. Not all of them, but enough that he looked twice. Comeau's jaw was rough. Thibault had a few days of something coming in along his chin. Drapeau, the starting goalie, already had more growth than the others by some distance. Ilya looked at this, decided it wasn't worth forming a theory about, and went to shower.

Game two was quieter in the building but louder in the dressing room before, the inverse of the first game, and told him something about how the room worked when it was confident. He scored twice. Hollander got the other two. The combination that had built across the past weeks was running at something close to its full capacity, and there were moments on the ice in the second period when he and Hollander were moving through the same geometry without either of them having to think about it, the way he had played with men he'd known since juniors. He noticed it. He thought Hollander had noticed it too. He did not say anything about it. 

By the second game the not-shaving had become impossible to ignore. Every man in the room had something going on below the nose. Drapeau's was the most advanced, a dense, even growth that had clearly been underway for longer than two days, which meant Drapeau either knew something Ilya didn't or had simply stopped caring about his face in late March. Hollander had the patchy, uneven attempt of someone whose beard came in reluctantly and in pieces, darker along the jaw, thin above the lip, the kind of growth that on anyone else might have read as neglect. On Hollander it read as stubborn. J.J. was somewhere in the middle, filling in steadily. The younger players had the soft, uncertain scruff of men not yet sure their faces would cooperate.

Ilya sat in his stall and looked at the room and understood that he had missed something. Not a rule, because nobody had announced a rule. Something older than a rule. He had shaved that morning out of habit, the same as every morning since the barracks, and he was now apparently the only person in this locker room who had. One of the younger defencemen glanced at him and then away, with an expression that Ilya couldn't fully parse but which clearly registered some unspoken breach of protocol. Gagnon looked at him from across the room, looked at his own chin, looked back. Said nothing.

He caught Hollander before they went out for warmup. Hollander was in the corridor doing the pacing he always did before important games, forty yards and back. He stopped when Ilya stepped into his path.

"No shaving," Ilya said, making it a statement rather than a question because he was fairly sure and didn't want to be wrong in a way that required further explanation.

Hollander looked at him. Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile. "Playoff beard," he said.

Ilya considered this. "All players."

"All players."

"How long?"

"Until we're eliminated." Hollander paused. "Or we win the Cup." He whispered the last part carefully, the way you said something you believed and didn't want to jinx. Ilya nodded. He went back to his stall and did not reach for the tape for his stick for a moment, looking at the middle distance. He thought about the barracks, the morning inspection, a clean face as mandatory as a clean weapon. He thought about six years of shaving before the mirror in whatever room he'd been assigned. In Moscow, personal appearance was not personal. It belonged to your coach, and he would have never tolerated such an unkempt appearance. He let it grow.

After the game, in the corridor, J.J. said something to Comeau in French, gesturing toward Ilya's stall. Comeau laughed. Whatever the joke was, it was short and had his name in it and the laughter had the texture of something said that didn't need to be said where he could hear it. Ilya dried off and dressed and said nothing. He had stopped expecting anything different. The geography of the room had settled around him over the weeks in a way that included him as a player and excluded him as a person. He had learned to operate within those boundaries the way he had learned the hill route and the river path, the shape of a thing accepted, not reconciled.

He walked home. The city was still running outside, people in jerseys, bars with their doors open, the noise of a playoff city that had just won two at home. He walked through it and went upstairs. The apartment was the same as he'd left it: the groceries Claire had delivered that morning, the folded towel on the oven handle, the laundry he hadn't sent out yet sitting on the chair in the bedroom. He stood in the kitchen for a while. He thought about who he could call at eleven at night after a playoff win. He thought about it for long enough to know what the answer would be, and then went to bed.

Games three, four, and five were in Philadelphia. He knew this from the schedule. He knew the dates, the game times, the outcome only afterward, when it arrived in the newspaper or on the television broadcast that he watched from the couch with the dictionary open on the cushion beside him. He was not on the bus. He was not in the dressing room, not in the tunnel, not on the ice at the Spectrum with its different sight lines and different ice and different crowd that would have taken him half a period to read. He was in the apartment.

He had done this before, during the away games in the regular season. He had learned what the days felt like. The morning of a travel day, when the building was empty and practice had been cancelled and life went on without him. The long corridor of the afternoon. The game broadcast in the evening. Claire or Paul's grocery delivery would appear on the counter while he was out, the refrigerator restocked by the time he got back from his run. His laundry went out in a bag on Mondays and came back folded on Wednesdays. He had not bought food or washed his own clothes since February. The same five outfits. There was a version of this arrangement that was meant to feel like hospitality. There was also a version that was structurally identical to being managed, and he had been managed by institutions his entire life and knew the texture of it.

He had said nothing about this for two months because saying nothing was what you did inside an institution when someone else held all the leverage and you were still establishing your value. He understood that calculation. He had been running it since he was eighteen. But he had also spent his entire life inside systems that decided where he slept and what he ate and when he could leave a building, and somewhere between game three going dark on the television and the folded laundry appearing on the chair Wednesday morning, he reached the end of his patience with it.

He called Claire from the apartment phone. He had been rehearsing the words since the laundry came back folded that morning.

"I want," he said, "to buy food. Myself." A pause. "And laundry. And phone. For me. To call. More than Metros or doorman."

A pause on her end. Claire was not unkind, and she was also not the person who made decisions. "I'll pass it along," she said.

He had prepared for this too. "I know," he said carefully, "there are reasons. I understand." He searched. "But I am here months. I cannot — "the word wasn't there. He tried around it. "My clothes. I do not touch them. Food, I do not buy. This is — "He stopped. He did not have the English for what it was. "In Moscow also this. Always someone else. I am done."

Another pause. "I'll pass it along," she said again, and this time it landed differently, the tone of saying she was going to actually do it.

Three days later the phone arrived. A wall-mounted unit, cream-colored, with a long cord. A notecard in Claire's small, even writing clipped to the handset.

Local calls only. Yours to use.

The groceries and laundry he would have to keep waiting on, apparently. One thing at a time. He read the notecard twice, then went to run.

Ilya had stopped shaving the morning after the conversation with Hollander, and by game five he checked the bathroom mirror out of habit and found something he hadn't expected. Dense, even, coming in dark and fast, already further along than most of the room had managed in the same time. He had no frame of reference for this. He had shaved every morning in the Soviet army. It felt strange. Foreign, in the way a face that had always been clean suddenly wasn't. He touched it with the back of his hand. He wasn't sure he loved the way it looked, but it was different. He stood at the mirror for a moment, then went and watched the game.

He watched all three games on television, not missing a single moment. He relished another opportunity to watch the broadcast angles, showing Hollander in ways he so rarely could see him in person. He could see the full shape of Hollander's positioning, the decisions he made before he made them, the way his head moved when he was reading a play two seconds ahead of everyone else. He tracked this more than he tracked the puck, which he knew was not the usual way to watch hockey, and which he stopped doing when he caught himself doing it and then started again. Ilya realized Hollander was playing as if he were there. But he wasn't. When he tried to pass to Hayden, it didn't land. 

Game three they lost 3-1. Game four they lost 4-2, Hollander with a goal and an assist, playing well enough that the frustration showed anyway in the set of his jaw on the broadcast and the stillness of how he sat on the bench between shifts. Game five they lost 2-1 in overtime, a deflection off a defenceman's skate that could not be assigned to any failure and therefore could not be fixed. 

After game five he turned the television off and sat in the quiet. Philadelphia led the series three games to two. One game left, at home, which meant he would be there. If they lost, the season was over. He went to bed.

The call came at half past two in the afternoon. He had gone to morning skate and noticed the shift in the room. The guys were finally acknowledging his beard, though it was a silent, grim acceptance. Hollander's was still a patchy mess, which gave Ilya a flicker of unexpected satisfaction. He had come home and was at loose ends. Bored. Killing time for a few hours until he was back for the game. He was eating a chunk of bread standing over the sink. It was from the loaf Claire had left with the groceries that morning, same as every week, same delivery, same bag. When the phone rang, he felt a sudden jolt of elated anticipation. A phone call. A real phone call from another human. He picked up on the second ring.

The voice was male. Nobody he recognized. Flat and careful, the cadence of someone who had made calls like this before and learned to keep them short, or who was reading from something prepared. He spoke in clipped, native Russian.

"Your father went walking today," the voice said. "He became lost. It took some time for his wife to find him."

Ilya's blood went cold. He said nothing. He was aware of his hand tightening, crushing the bread into a dry pulp.

"He is home now. He is safe." A pause that was not a pause for breath. "For now."

The line went dead.

Ilya stood at the counter. The street below was doing what it always did. A car went past. Someone's window opened a floor up, then closed. He was still holding the bread, compressed nearly into paste in his fist. He set it down. His hands were shaking. He looked at his fingers the way he had looked at them in Vienna before his first game against Canada, when they had felt like tools borrowed from someone else. He pressed them flat against the counter. The shaking didn't stop. Suddenly, he felt the bile rising in his throat and he gave several stifled, dry heaves into the sink, struggling to get back in control of himself.

The call had lasted under thirty seconds. His father's name had not been used. His own had not either. No names at all, just concern relayed about an elderly relative, the kind of call a neighbor might make, the kind that left nothing on a tape that could be connected to anything real.

For now.

He thought about his father going walking. Someone with a failing mind stepping outside and forgetting. He had known before he left that this was happening, had watched it happen at dinners and in hallways, his father's mind drifting somewhere Ilya couldn't follow. He did not know how far it had progressed since February. He did not know who was with him. He did not know if Polina was there or if she had gone. He knew nothing, and the knowing-nothing had a different weight than ordinary not-knowing. This was the not-knowing of someone who had cut every line, who had made it impossible to ask, who was standing in a kitchen in another country holding a phone that could not call the one number that mattered without potentially making everything worse.

His father was lost somewhere in an apartment in Moscow and Ilya had put him there. Not the dementia. Ilya. By leaving, by making himself into something the State would want to use as leverage. He stood at the counter for a long time. Then he went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. The beard, which felt like a badge of belonging a few minutes ago, now felt like a disguise that hadn't worked.

He showered again, trying to get the feeling of disgust off his skin. He dressed for the game. 

He was in his stall forty minutes before he needed to be. He had nowhere else to be, which was part of it, but he also needed the room to do what it did, to become something he could use. The Forum before an elimination game had a different energy, lower than usual, more deliberate. Thibault's music was on but three of the guys sat with their heads down. Gagnon paced the back of the room. J.J. was taping his stick with intense focus. Ilya sat in his stall and began his own tape job.

Ilya had his own pre-game rituals, like all players. These things were all he was allowed to have of himself, unique, in a team that prided itself on being the same. Most of the Metros preferred white tape, but he chose black every time. He didn't care. It was what he knew. He started at the heel, the tape at a five-degree angle, each successive strip overlapping the previous one by nearly half its width. No gaps. Consistent tension. At the toe, he folded the tape back instead of cutting it, then ran his fingers down the entire blade face twice, pressing out any lingering air pockets. Always twice. Then the knob was built up in two phases. A base layer, eight wraps. Then a second, looser layer, creating a gradient, not a hard stop. It fit perfectly in the heel of his hand this way. 

Then the skates. He skipped the first eyelet on both boots, which lowered the flex point slightly. The lacing went normally from there until the top two eyelets, where he crossed the laces instead of threading straight through to create a slightly different pressure distribution across the top of his foot. Then a triple knot, not a double. After lacing, he tapped each blade against the floor twice. It was probably the closest thing to a genuine superstition in the whole process, and he was aware of it, but did it anyway. It emptied him out. Pulled all the thoughts from his head, ready for the game. Ready to think of only the puck, and only winning, and it had worked for so many years. 

And today, today it was not working. 

He understood the room. He had been in rooms like this in Moscow, before games that mattered in ways he was not permitted to discuss, before games he was told to win in the same tone someone else would use to give a different kind of order. He knew what collective will looked like when it was starting to cost something. The difference was that in those rooms he had known every face for years. Here he had two months. He knew the rhythms. There was a layer beneath the rhythms he was still working toward, and tonight was not the night he was going to get there.

For now.

The words surfaced again the way they had been surfacing since half past two, arriving without invitation in the middle of whatever else he was doing. During the shower. During the drive to the Forum. He would be somewhere inside a thought and then the two words would be there, flat and unhurried, in a voice he couldn't place. He pressed the tape down and smoothed it and pressed it again. It wasn't right. It wasn't sitting like it was supposed to.

He did not know if his father had actually wandered. He had been turning this over since the call ended and had not gotten closer to an answer. The not-knowing was a low continuous pressure behind the sternum that he recognized from the barracks, from the years of living inside a system that rationed information as a form of control. He knew how to function inside that pressure. He had been doing it since he was eighteen. What he had not anticipated was doing it in a locker room in Montreal two hours before a playoff elimination game with no one he could tell.

He ran his thumb along the tape again. Uneven. He pulled it off and started over.

"Rozanov."

Hollander, from two stalls down. Not loud. Ilya looked up. Hollander was already dressed, sitting with his stick across his knees, watching him with an attention that had nothing to do with hockey. 

"First elimination game," he said. It was framed as an observation rather than a question. An offering, reasoning for his nerves, in case Ilya wanted to use it.

"Yes," Ilya said.

Hollander held his gaze for a moment. Something in his face said he wasn't entirely convinced by the explanation he had just provided, but he wasn't going to push. "It's loud," he said. "The crowd. Different from regular season. Takes a period to settle in." A pause. "You'll find it."

"I am ready," Ilya said.

Hollander's jaw shifted. He understood this was the answer he was getting, and that pushing would accomplish nothing. He nodded once and looked back at his stick. He stayed aware of Ilya for the rest of the time in the room, peripheral, steady, the way you watched ice you didn't entirely trust. Ilya noticed it and kept taping and thought about a voice on a phone that had not used a single name. The tape just would not sit right.

The Forum was full. He had learned over the season to use the Forum's noise, its energy, to let it run along the outside of his focus rather than through it. He went through warmup and put pucks on net and listened to Theriault, who kept the pre-game short, which was the right call. The room was not going to absorb more words tonight. 

He stood in the tunnel. When he stepped onto the ice the crowd came up, and he went through his first lap, and he tried to only think of the ice. Just the ice. But he couldn't. He thought about the call, the voice on the other end of the line, for most of the first period.

It came back in the gaps. Not during contact, not when he was moving at full speed. His body was too busy then, it crowded everything else out. It came in the half-seconds of stillness. Waiting for a face-off. Skating back to position after an icing. The bench between shifts, which was when it was worst, when his legs stopped and the thirty seconds of audio started again. He is home now. He is safe. The pause. For now. He would be back on the ice before it finished and then it would wait, and then the next whistle would blow and it would start again from the beginning.

The problem was not grief, or not only grief. The problem was not knowing in a way he couldn't stop thinking about. He could not confirm whether his father had actually wandered. He could not assess the caller, could not run him against any face or voice from his years in Moscow, could not determine what apparatus he represented or how close it was to his father's actual life. He had thirty seconds of audio and no name and no callback number and no one in Montreal he could tell. He played his shifts and came back to the bench and sat with it and went back out again. 

He was not bad. He was close enough to good that Theriault wouldn't pull him. But he was a half-second slower than he had been in game two, not in his legs but in the space between reading a play and acting on it, that gap where the decision lived, and a half-second at this level was a different game. For now, echoing in his ears. He missed a setup for Hollander in the first period that he would ordinarily have put on his tape with his eyes closed. He saw the lane open and was already moving toward it and then the two words came back and his edges held for one stride too long and the lane closed. He felt Hollander look at him when he came to the bench, a question on his face. But Ilya didn't look at him. He wouldn't. He couldn't.

Philadelphia scored late in the second on a defensive breakdown he was not part of. Then again early in the third on one where he was. A pinch that cost them the angle, a recovery that came one stride late. A pass that didn't connect. He had been at the wrong depth, still recalibrating from a face-off he had spent half a second not watching. He knew it immediately. He was back on the bench before the lamp was lit, and he sat there, listening to the crowd, and did not let himself think about the call, which meant he was thinking about it.

He played the rest of the third. They got one back with seven minutes left, Hollander sliding it in, and for a few minutes the Forum was doing what it had done all series, running on its own belief. They did not score again. The final buzzer landed in a way that wasn't silence but wasn't a noise either. It was the sound of thousands of people being disappointed at the same time.

He stood at his blue line and watched Philadelphia celebrate at center ice and felt the crowd change frequency around him. This morning he had come to the rink. He had taped his stick. The season had still existed then. Now it was over, and the phone call was still there, and he would have a lot of time to think about that.

The handshake line he moved through correctly. Eye contact, firm, move. Some of the Philadelphia players looked at him the way players looked at a dangerous thing they had narrowly avoided. He was aware of this and kept moving.

The locker room after was the worst room he had been in since the windowless office in the back of the Wiener Stadthalle where the minders had waited for him after the Vienna game, the one with the flint-eyed man and the Western newspapers and the silence that had teeth. Not quiet. He had expected quiet.

Instead it was loud in the ugly way, equipment thrown rather than set down, someone's stick hitting the wall hard enough that the sound went through the room and nobody acknowledged it. Gagnon was in the shower corridor saying something in French that didn't need translation. Itemizing blame, one person at a time. Hayden had his jersey on the floor and was staring at it like it had done something to him personally. Comeau had a face like a storm system moving in, the kind that looked for somewhere to land.

Theriault came in and said what coaches said, the version of it that was technically accountability and functionally nothing, and the room received it the way rooms received things they had already decided not to hear. Someone knocked over a water bottle. Nobody picked it up.

Ilya sat in his stall and let the sound drift around him. He could understand the anger. He had been in angry, bitter rooms his entire career. He knew how to recognize the difference between the kind that was useful and the kind that was just a missile looking for a target. This was the second kind. The disappointment had no place to go, so it went everywhere, flowing like water, to the coach, the ice, to each other. Comeau said something across the room at Thibault that had a sharpness to it that he didn't deserve. Thibault's jaw tightened but he said nothing, which meant whatever he was holding back would come out later, as anger or as some vice. 

Across the room, Comeau pivoted and said something in French. Low, meant to carry, the tone of a joke that needed an audience. Ilya caught his own name and the laugh that followed, the one that had been there all season in the register just below where anyone would officially acknowledge it. Hayden looked up sharply. Then seemed to decide it wasn't the moment and looked back down. Ilya finished removing his equipment and said nothing. He had gotten very good at that.

Hollander was across from him, jersey already off, forearms on his knees. He was not part of the anger. He was somewhere on the other side already, working out what needed to happen next. He looked up once. Found Ilya across the room. Held it for a moment. Something was in the look, an awareness of the gap between what had just happened on the ice and what Ilya had been carrying into it, but he had no way to ask about it and Ilya had no way to answer. He looked back at the floor.

The room went about its business. The anger drained away slowly, the way it always did, leaving behind the sound of the end. Equipment being packed, the absence of the season. The walls had been there all year, the ones that existed in registers too low for anyone to officially acknowledge, and he had operated within them, and tonight they were simply more visible than usual. He sat in the middle of it and understood, with a clarity that was not new but was sharper tonight, that he had been here for two months and had teammates and an apartment and the Forum ice and nothing else. He had built his entire life around leaving one country. He had not given sufficient thought to what it meant that the life in this one had to be built from zero, at twenty-one, in a language he was still learning, alone.

He dressed. He went out through the corridor without stopping and nodded to the equipment staff and went into the cold.

He walked back to the apartment. It was a little far, but was a reasonable distance on a night when he needed his legs to do something. The city was still running. Fans moving in the same direction, some loud, some with the quiet of the locker room settling into them. A man outside a bar with a jersey on and his head down. Two women leaving a restaurant, laughing about something, their breath white in the cold air. He went down his street and unlocked the door and went inside.

The kitchen light was on. He had left it on when Paul picked him up to go to the game. The rest of the apartment was exactly as the organization had left it before he went to morning skate. Counter wiped, dish towel folded over the oven handle, the week's groceries still in the refrigerator behind a door he had opened twice today. The laundry from Monday was back on the chair in the bedroom, folded. Everything in order. Everything arranged. He had come home to an apartment that was already finished before he left.

He put the bread back in the bag and folded the top over. In Moscow there had been a period when bread was unavailable at the barracks for eleven days because of a supply problem. He had been eighteen then. That kind of thing stayed with you. Here, bread appeared on the counter on schedule, same as everything else, and he had not once had to think about where it came from. 

The phone was on the wall. He sat down at the table and looked at it. The cord reached to where he was sitting. He pulled the handset off its cradle and held it. A dial tone. In the barracks there had been one phone for the whole floor, a gray unit bolted to the wall outside the sergeant's room. You signed for a slot. Fifteen minutes, if you were lucky and nobody had taken yours. Most of the time the line ran long and you got less, and whatever you needed to say had to fit into what remained. He had called his father on it twice in three years and both times his father had ended the call before the time was up. Here the phone was his own and the line was clear and he could call anyone in Montreal, which was the full extent of what the organization had agreed to give him.

He could not call Moscow. The line didn't reach. That was not a technical limitation. It was a decision someone had made in a room he wasn't in, the same as every other decision about his life. He held the handset anyway.

He thought about who to call. His father's number was memorized, a Moscow number, but it was just five digits, the kind of thing that didn't deteriorate from your memory. When you were a local, you only needed five digits. But he wasn't local now. He didn't know how to dial the number. It needed a long-distance prefix, and more numbers. What numbers? He didn't even know who to ask. He held the handset and thought about a voice on a phone saying he is safe, for now, and what it would mean to call that number. To have someone answer. Whether Alexei would answer. Whether the line was monitored. Whether calling Alexei would tell someone that Ilya had something to protect, which they probably already knew, which was the whole point of the call this afternoon. But he couldn't dial the number, even if he wanted to. Local calls only.

Alexei. He had no way of knowing if Alexei was safe. He had written him a letter in February and walked out of an apartment and gotten into a gray sedan and that was the last information that existed between them. He did not know what Alexei had said when the KGB came, or whether they had come at all. He did not know if his brother was still in Moscow or still in his apartment or still employed or still free. The line didn't reach anyway. 

Svetlana. He knew her number too. He sat with it for a moment, her reading the letter in her coat pocket, what her face had done with it, and put that away. He wanted so badly to talk to her. To tell her he loved her. That he thought of her every day.

Sasha. What would he even say to Sasha?

Maks. Somewhere in Moscow in a room Ilya would never see, having said whatever he needed to say about Ilya to keep himself safe. He hoped Maks had said it convincingly. He hoped it had been enough. He hoped it was just that room, and then Maks could go home and he wasn't in a prison somewhere.

He could call Hollander. He had the number, a piece of paper still folded in the kitchen drawer from when Beaulieu had written the whole roster's numbers down and handed it to Ilya as though this were a normal thing to do. He thought about what he would say. He thought about Hollander's face across the locker room tonight, the look that had lasted a moment and ended, the understanding that couldn't be spoken because there was nothing to speak it into. He thought about what it would mean to call Hollander from this kitchen at midnight after a playoff elimination and say: someone called me today and used my father to tell me he can reach my father, and I cannot explain to you what that means, and I have nobody to call. He did not have the English words to do it.

He looked at the phone for a long time. He set the handset back in its cradle. He sat with his hands flat on the table. The worry was real. That was the uncomplicated part, the part he could hold without it turning on him. His father in a Moscow apartment, his mind going, no one reliable to watch him. Ilya had left his father knowing Alexei was not going to fill the gap. Not knowing where Polina was at all. He had known it when he wrote the letter and walked out. The worry lived in him as a low, continuous ache that had nothing to do with the phone call and everything to do with February.

The rest of it was harder. He had a memory from when he was nineteen. He had just won the Soviet championship. Not contributed to. Won. His goal in the final minute, the kind of goal that got written about and discussed in admiring tones. He had gone home for the day they were given, and his father had looked at him across the dinner table and said, without preamble, that he was still skating like he was afraid of getting hit. Like a little girl. That his edges were soft. That a stronger player would have scored in the second period instead of waiting for the game to nearly slip away. Ilya had sat with this, the medal still in his bag, and said nothing, because saying nothing was what you did. 

He had been nineteen. He had just won the Soviet championship. It wasn't enough. It was never enough.

There had been other moments like it, scattered across his whole career. After Vienna, his father had said the silver medal was an embarrassment and that Ilya had played the third period like a loser. After the Canada Cup, that his skating in overtime had been sluggish and lazy and that he had let the team down by not being where he should have been. There was never praise. There was the baseline, and then there was falling below it, and that was all the scale his father operated on.

Ilya understood, in the way you understood things you had spent years working out slowly, that this was not cruelty for its own sake. His father was a colonel. He had learned to build soldiers, and building soldiers meant closing off the parts of a person that needed reassurance, because reassurance made you soft and soft men died. Ilya knew this. He had even found a use for it, the way you found a use for everything the State gave you. The voice in his head that said not good enough had driven him through games that would have broken other players.

But the voice was his father's voice. And now his father was lost somewhere in an apartment in Moscow, and Ilya was in a kitchen in Montreal, and there was nobody in the world he could call and say: I am worried about him. I love him. I do not entirely know how to love him. I have never once heard him say he was proud of me and I do not know if I needed him to and I think perhaps I did.

That was what he wanted. Not advice, not strategy, not someone to tell him the call was a threat or that his father would be fine. Just someone to sit with the fact of it. The way Svetlana used to sit with things, in the dark of her apartment, not trying to fix anything, just present. The way Sasha had said stay with me, don't go to that place in your head. He wanted the weight of another person in the room. He had not understood, until he was sitting in this kitchen at midnight with a phone on the wall that didn't reach far enough and no one local to call, how much of his life had been held together by the proximity of other people even when those people couldn't be told anything true.

He sat at the kitchen table in Montreal at the end of his first season in a country that did not know his name yet, and the night ran itself down around him, and there was no one to call. He had known this in a general sense since February, that the life he had come from was not portable, that the people in it were on the other side of something he had crossed and could not re-cross. He had known it as a fact. Sitting with it at midnight with his new phone and nothing to say to anyone was a different thing than knowing it.

The phone on the wall. The bread in the bag. The Forum ice going cold two miles away. Everything in its place, arranged by other hands. He got out of the chair and slid onto the floor, his back against the kitchen cabinets in the only patch of the apartment that didn't feel pre-arranged. He stayed there until his hip bones ached, then he went to bed.

Chapter End Notes

This one is quieter than the others, which felt right for where Ilya is.

Oh. Fun facts.
Stick taping. Every player treats tape differently, and it's a fairly non-negotiable ritual. Blade taping affects how the puck feels, your shot accuracy, and how the puch releases off the stick. You absolutely can tell the difference. The knob at the top of the stick is also very personal. Maybe you want a hard stop, maybe you want a taper. The grip in the hand during a wrist shot is directly effected by this. Also what color tape you want is a big deal. The argument for black is that the puck blends in and makes it harder for the goalie to see...but there isn't great data to back that up. Writing this scene, this is how my D1 hockey-playing college boyfriend taped his hockey stick. In case you're reading this Scott.

Superstition in general. As seen in Game Changer, they're super serious abotu this. Gretzky famously tucked one side of his jersey into his pants. Many players won't step on lines when skating to the bench. Equipment goes on in the same order, every game, every time. If you mess it up, you have to start again. Winning streaks mean changing nothing. Same meal, same music, same route to drive to the rink. Playoff beards. They're a weird superstition because they are collective, not individual. The WHOLE TEAM has to do it, which is why Ilya sticks out like a sore thumb, and why they can easily blame him for their loss. Playoff beards started in NY in the late 70s, as far as I can tell. If you are unfamiliar, you stop shaving when playoffs start, and then keep it going until you're eliminated or win. Ilya would have had ZERO idea what was going on with that. Sexy Lumberjacks incoming.

Playoff format in 1988. The format ran 2-2-1-1-1, meaning the higher seed hosts games one, two, five, and seven, and the lower seed hosts three, four, and six. So, technically, they should have played five at home and six away, but I needed Ilya to be there for the elimination, and didn't want to write all seven games. It was getting tedious and this chapter was getting LONG.

The phone thing is real. 125 guys sharing a single phone, able to make one phone call a week for fifteen minutes, in the couple of hours of "leisure time" they had in the evening only. The math does not math there, and most of the time you didn't get your call. There is a zero percent chance any of them would have ever been able to make an international call of any kind.

The KGB regularly visited, questioned and monitored the left-behind family of defectors. It was vague and deniable, and used soft-pressure tactics to destablize defectors and remind them that they were never out of the reach of the Soviet Union. This is not the last you'll be seeing of that.

Thanks for reading. Comment on what you liked/didn't/want more of. The next chapter has gotten shifted around like four times, but it's finally time for Ilya's HOT MONTREAL SUMMER. You won't have to wait too long for it. That was a MUCH easier chapter to write than this one.

Chapter 14: Acclimation

Chapter Summary

Ilya is ready for summer. English lessons, exploring the city, and getting a taste of what life in Canada could be.

Chapter Notes

Surprise update!

If this chapter was an episode, it would be #3, in that it's kind of this moment out of time that is very important to the plot.

Ilya's whole summer was originally meant to be one jumbo chapter, but that chapter right now is nearly 15,000 words and isn't done. It got to be so unwieldy that I had to cut it into chunks. Good news? More updates, sooner than expected! Bad news? Story just keeps getting longer. Is that bad news? I wrote this part while I was on an airplane a few weeks ago, so it doesn't make sense to sit on it any longer. And I think you deserve some joy after that last chapter.

Anyway. Content warning for sex in this one.

Acclimation (noun)

1. The process by which an organism adjusts to changes in its environment.
2. What happens to the body when it has no other choice.
3. The word you use when what you want to say is that you are surviving somewhere new until it becomes somewhere you live.

"I am learning to like it." — Ilya Rozanov, Montreal, May 1988

The movement restriction lifted on Tuesday. Ilya lay in the apartment the following morning and listened to the city begin its day. Today was the day. Today, he was going to venture out of the apartment on his own. He made a list. Seven items: milk, bread, eggs, coffee, bacon, apples, butter. It was certainly not all he needed, but it was a good start. He wrote it in English, which took longer than it would have if he had just done it in Russian, but his English lessons didn't start for another week and he needed the practice. Seven things. He felt ashamed at the simplicity of it. He was a grown man, going to the market for the first time, like when he was five and his mother pressed a few kopeks into his hand so he could buy sweets, her coaching him how to shyly ask the man at the counter how many candies he could buy. He put on his jacket and went to the store.

The Provigo was on Sherbrooke. It was only a ten-minute walk that he had done twice this past week when he was on his runs. He always saw it from the outside and always moved past quickly. From the outside, it looked like a store, but on the inside, it was a sports complex lined with wall after wall of refrigerators, shelves, and bins. They had every possible thing he could imagine and thousands more he couldn't. Arrays of fruits he had never seen before, and wouldn't even know how to eat them if he had bought them. He stood in the entrance for a moment and let the monumental scale of it settle, the smell, something sweet and industrial under the produce, and then he got a basket. He was going to start with bread because bread was the first thing on the list.

He could not find the bread. Well. That was not true. He found so much bread. Too much bread. There were forty-two varieties. In Moscow, you went to the market and they had bread or they did not have bread and you bought it if they had it and did not have any further decisions to make. He thought about being eighteen and being unable to buy bread for eleven days during the shortages. That would never happen here. There was twenty years worth of bread right in front of him. He counted them. He had been standing there for long enough that counting seemed like a reasonable use of time. Reading labels, trying to identify the logic of the arrangement. Was it by type, or by brand, or by price, or by something else entirely. A shop assistant, a teenage girl, appeared at his elbow. Did he need help? He had firmly declined, in English, because he was an adult and adults know how to buy a fucking loaf of bread. 

He chose a loaf from the middle of the display. It was not the cheapest and not the most expensive, and it had a label that was the same color as the one Claire usually brought him with his weekly grocery delivery, even though he was certain they were not the same. But he had done it. He had chosen one and could move on.

Milk was worse. How could milk be worse than bread? There was a whole refrigerated wall, subdivided into nonsensical categories. He knew whole and skim from his dictionary. He did not know homogenized or partially skimmed or 2%. 2% what? There were also at least two full categories of something that could be milk, but also was maybe not milk. And the cream, and the buttermilk, and all the other white containers of something. The cold came off the glass in waves. He read the labels until the words detached from their meanings and became shapes. He stood there for a long time. 

He could not stay there any longer. He left with the bread and one carton of milk. They were both certainly the wrong kind and not what he wanted. He also fumbled with the money, pulling a twenty dollar bill out of the envelope of cash that Paul had procured for him. He had gotten numerous coins back that he would be studying later. He had gone in for seven things. He was missing coffee, eggs, bacon, butter, and apples, which was most of the list, and the list could have been much longer. It was only meant to get him through a couple of days until he could get more familiar with the shop. How would he ever be familiar with this store with its endless aisles and impossible choices.

He was not going to call anyone for help. He was an adult. He was enough of an adult that he had defected from the Soviet Union. He had survived the processing facility in Calgary, fingerprinted and photographed in a room with no windows, stripped down to a borrowed identity in someone else's clothes. He had learned to play hockey in a language he did not speak. He had won an Olympic gold medal and gotten into a gray sedan in a loading dock and changed his entire life and he was not going to call someone because buying bacon was too hard for him.

Before Beaulieu had left him for the summer, he had said, among many other practical things, that Vadim would be available over the summer if Ilya needed help navigating things. Ilya had tucked that knowledge away, certain he wouldn't need it. He did not need a guide. He did not need someone to take him to the store and press coins in his hand and coach him on what to say to the cashiers. 

He sat a long time. And then he called Vadim.

Vadim arrived forty minutes later with a grocery bag and a smaller box from a bakery. He had the expression that said he had been expecting this call, but he didn't make Ilya feel guilty about it. He set the goods on the table and sat down without being invited to do so. He looked at the bread and the single carton of milk on the counter.

"Too many choices," he said, in Russian.

"There were forty-two breads," Ilya replied, also in Russian.

"There are always forty-two breads." Vadim stood and put the kettle on. He unpacked the bag while it boiled. Eggs, butter, coffee, tea bags, apples, cheese, a packet of meat Ilya didn't recognize. He set each thing on the counter.

"What is–" Ilya started, looking at the meat.

"Smoked meat. Montreal thing. You will like it."

The bakery box had chocolate-filled pastries inside. Vadim offered Ilya one and they drank weak black tea while he talked through the logic of the grocery store, still in Russian, easy and fast. Ilya felt the relief of speaking his own language again. The store was a system. Always start in produce and move inward. The milk wall. Choose whole, full-fat, at least for now. Once you find one you like, buy that one every time. There were actually two places to buy bread in the store. The bread at the back, from the bakery, was better and looked more like bread you would recognize. The bread in the aisles in the plastic bags isn't as good. Forty-two options was because the store wanted you to stay longer, not because you were actually supposed to choose between them.

Ilya listened. He understood it all perfectly, immediately. That was the problem. In Russian, everything arrived without friction, without the agonizing moments of trying to parse out what was actually being said. He had been here now for months. His language teacher arrived next week. He was conducting his recovery from a defeat at the grocery store entirely in Russian with a man whose entire value to him was supposed to be the opposite of that. He set down his cup.

"English," he said, abruptly changing languages. Vadim looked at him. "From now. Speak English to me."

"Your English is–"

"I know. Very bad." He held Vadim's eyes. "Need to speak English."

Vadim considered this. Then he switched, without ceremony. "Okay, the grocery store is a system. Treat it like a system." He tapped the table to make his point. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Yes," Ilya said in English, and he meant it. In English every word cost a little more energy, a little more effort, than Russian. But he needed to do it until there wasn't a difference. 

"You haven't been answering the calls," Vadim said.

"I answer. I say fine."

"Gerald reads this as hostile."

"Who is Gerald? And what is hostile?" 

"Beaulieu? That's his name. Gerald. Gerald Beaulieu." Ilya rolled his eyes. "Hostile. Angry or mean."

"Not hostile. Nothing to say!" He paused. "If you say fine, it means is fine. Stop asking."

"Not in Canada. They want you to be happy."

"I know this. I will tell Gerald I am happy."

"That would help."

"Is a lie," Ilya said.

Vadim looked at him steadily. Not with judgment, but with the attention of cataloguing what was actually in the room. "You're alone," he said.

That was not the same word as bored or homesick or any of the other words Ilya had looked at in his dictionary to try to describe the condition of the apartment, but it was more accurate. "Yes," he replied.

Vadim looked at Ilya. Bright blue eyes landing on him. "Do you want to see the city?"

"I see the city," Ilya said. "When running."

"You run the same three routes. I'll show you the rest."

"Why?"

"Because it's my city and you don't know it."

"One rule," Ilya replied.

"Yes?"

"English only. I need to learn."

Vadim considered this. Then he nodded, stood, picked up both cups and took them to the sink. "Get your coat. We're going to try the store again. You will need a car, though," he told Ilya. "To really explore."

"I can buy car. I have money." 

"You have money in an account the Metros have been managing for you. But can you get money yourself? Without calling Paul?"

Ilya said nothing. "So, they bring you an envelope of cash every week for you to spend on beers with the team. How much?"

"Twenty dollars."

"Twenty dollars a week? And you just hang on to it? What if you need more? Do you know what bank it's at? Or your account number?" Ilya looked at the floor. He didn't know why he was feeling so embarrassed. He said the name of the bank.

"There is one on Sherbrooke," Vadim said. "Next to the grocery store. Come."

The branch was cool and carpeted, with the serious tones all financial institutions have. A teller with careful English and a charmingly painful demeanor that seemed accustomed to complicated situations looked at Ilya's work permit, the identification they had, and the account number Vadim had found by calling the Metros office from the lobby payphone while Ilya stood beside him. The account existed. There was money in it. Someone had set it up in March and had deposited his signing bonus and his salary since then and nobody thought to explain to Ilya how to use it because Paul had been handling his weekly allowance and that seemed sufficient. 

The teller explained chequebooks. She explained how to write a cheque, what information went where, what the numbers along the bottom meant. She spoke slowly and clearly and only looked at Vadim once, when a particular phrase produced no visible comprehension in Ilya's face. Vadim said one word in Russian. Ilya nodded. It was the only Russian spoken between them all day.

At the end, the teller handed him the chequebook. She explained he would get one in the mail in a few days with his name printed on them, but that this would last for now. She counted out the cash he requested across the counter, bill by bill. He put them into his pocket along with his starter cheques. He would need a wallet.

"There is much more money in that account than you think."

"How much more?"

Vadim told him. An outlandish sum. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

"Good," he said.

Madame Tremblay arrived the following week at nine in the morning with a canvas bag, a recorder the size of a paperback, and the expression of a woman who had been correcting people's English for thirty-five years and had made her peace with what that entailed. She looked at Ilya for a moment after he opened the door.

"Say something," she said. "Anything."

Ilya said, "I am happy to meet you."

"Your English is very bad."

"Yes," Ilya said. "Is why you are here."

Something shifted in her expression. Not warmth exactly, but a slight recalibration. She set the bag on the table and opened the textbook. "We'll start from the beginning. Not because you know nothing. Because you've learned things wrong."

She came Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. No exceptions. She treated his English the way a good mechanic treated an engine that had been badly repaired. Not with contempt for the previous work, just the clear understanding that some of it needed to come out before anything useful could go in. She left him homework. She had him record himself speaking and play it back, which he found unpleasant enough that he was motivated to improve simply to make the recordings less painful to listen to. He practiced evenings with the recorder after she left. He filled a notebook. He went back and corrected his earlier entries, producing the odd experience of being embarrassed by himself across time. By the end of the first week, she said, "Better." Just that. He put it in the ledger under things that mattered.

A structure developed. The rink at five-thirty. The ice at the municipal rink in the east end Beaulieu had arranged. Soft ice and uneven boards and a Zamboni kid who had not recognized him and had continued to not recognize him across all the mornings that followed, which Ilya found useful. He was nobody at that rink. Nobody who needed to be the best player in the world. Just someone who showed up to skate at the crack of dawn for a few hours. 

Back at the apartment, shower, the grammar book for an hour over coffee that went cold because he forgot about it in his focus. Lessons on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. The gym on Saint-Laurent on the other days. A basement room Vadim had found, iron weights and a cracked mirror. The kind of room that had been getting men in shape for decades. He came back from the gym with legs wrung out and his head quiet in a way exhaustion produced.

Afternoons with Vadim, most days, learning the city. Vadim had a way of moving through the city that suggested he had long since decided where he stood in relation to it and had stopped revising. He walked the same way he talked, at a pace that was neither hurried nor demonstrative, stopping when something was worth stopping for and not when it wasn't. Ilya found himself watching this. Not the city Vadim was showing him. Vadim showing it. The particular way he held his coffee on the walk between the market and the car, the way he turned to check that Ilya had understood something without making the check obvious. He had bright eyes and the kind of face that looked best in motion, less remarkable in repose. Ilya noted this the way he noted positioning on the ice and filed it without examining what he was filing it under.

Somewhere in the second or third week of May, he realized the noise was lower. Not gone, but lower. He was so tired each night that it couldn't take full hold, and during the day there was always something that needed his attention. A rule, a direction, a task, a question. Between the exercise and Vadim's company and Madame Tremblay's corrections, there was not enough space for the noise to run at full volume. He did not examine this closely. He just let the structure work.

The noise had started at twelve. The winter his mother had died. He remembered the feeling arriving, a high-frequency hum at the base of his skull, and not understanding what it was. Before that, there had been something else in its place. He could still hear her laugh if he tried. The way it arrived without warning, too large for her small body, her blond curls moving with it. She had been thirty-three when she died. He hadn't understood until recently how young that was.

Hockey drowned out the noise the best. Starting when he was thirteen, and now, almost a decade later. There was always something with hockey. Always a next game. Always Hollander's positioning to analyze, or a system to read, or something the noise could occupy itself with. Now the season was over and the apartment was quiet in a way that never happened in Moscow. He understood, lying in bed waiting for his alarm to ring, that he had a fear he did not look at directly. That the noise would do to him what it had done to her, given enough time and enough quiet. She had needed something for the noise. Something that was not available to her. He would feed the noise. He would keep it away.

The echo of the phone call had not gone away. He had folded it up and put it somewhere he wouldn't look, the way you store things with no solution. His father in a Moscow apartment, the fog in his mind thickening. Ilya could not call to check and he could not let this be the noise that overpowered his life. He had known they would do this since February. They would do something. They would press on him in ways they knew hurt. The knowing didn't make it quieter. But there was nothing to be done, so he pushed it down and tried instead to worry about all the ways he could live on his own terms. Without the noise.

Vadim was right. To really solidify his independence from the minders, what Ilya needed was a car. This process was not as simple as it should have been. The first problem was the licence. His Soviet documentation was not recognised in Quebec in any straightforward way, which Vadim had anticipated and Ilya had not. There were forms. There was a written test, which existed in French and English but not in Russian, which Ilya sat at a plastic table in a government office on a Tuesday and worked through with the same focused ferocity he brought to systems meetings. The diagrams clear enough, the vocabulary mostly manageable, the occasional question requiring him to read it three times before the meaning arrived.

He passed. The examiner handed him the certificate without ceremony. Ilya looked at it for a moment. It had his name on it and his photograph and the seal of the province of Quebec, and it meant that he was a person who existed here in a legal and documented way that had nothing to do with the Metros or the KGB or anyone else's decision about where he was permitted to be. He folded it carefully and put it in his jacket pocket.

"Done?" Vadim said, from the plastic chair where he'd been reading a newspaper.

"Done."

"Road test is Thursday."

Ilya had known this. He had studied the road test requirements with the same methodical attention he gave to opponent film. He passed the road test without difficulty, which the examiner noted with the mild surprise of someone accustomed to first-time failures. Vadim, in the parking lot afterward, said nothing. He just handed Ilya the keys to his own car and got in the passenger seat, and Ilya drove them back to Vadim's apartment in the Plateau in the silence that comes from being given something he'd needed for a long time.

The dealership was the following week. Vadim came, sat in the background, said almost nothing. He had told Ilya beforehand, "You have English. Use it. I'm here if it fails." The salesman spoke quickly and ran through features and financing options in a patter Ilya caught about seventy percent of, which was enough. He asked two questions. He got two answers. 

When the salesman tried a third financing option, Ilya said, in careful English, "I will pay the full amount. Today." The salesman recalibrated visibly. Ilya wrote the cheque at the counter with his own pen, his name already printed along the top, the amount in both numbers and words, the way the teller on Sherbrooke had shown him. He tore it out along the perforated edge and handed it over.

He drove home in a Grand Wagoneer, green, with a distinctive smell that Ilya had never experienced. He had chosen it because it seemed the most sensible car for the snow and because it was a different colour from Hollander's. On the street outside the building he sat in the driver's seat for a moment with the engine off. His own car. His own licence. His own money. Three things that had existed in this country for less than a week and were already reshaping the apartment from a place he was kept to a place he lived.

He went upstairs and called Vadim. "Thank you," he said.

Vadim replied, "You did the work."

"I should have gotten something more – what is the word?"

"Sexy?" 

"Yes, sexy."

"Next time," Vadim said, with a large, genuine laugh. "You will get another car."

One afternoon that week, Ilya drove the two of them up to Outremont, carefully following Vadim's directions. It was a street on the crest of the hill where the river was visible between the buildings, the light gleaming on the water. Vadim had been explaining the logic of the boroughs, which ones were historically French and which anglophone and why the distinction still mattered in ways both obvious and invisible, and Ilya had been following most of it. Then Vadim stopped talking, because the explanation had run its course, and they sat in the car for a moment in the particular silence of a vehicle that has stopped moving and has nowhere it needs to be.

Ilya was aware of the distance between them. The gear shift in between. Vadim's hand resting near it. The specific quality of the afternoon light through the windscreen. He looked at the river.

"You like it," Vadim said. It wasn't a question.

"The river?"

"Montreal."

Ilya thought about this. "I am learning to like it," he said, which felt more accurate. Vadim looked at him. Ilya felt it before he turned to meet it, the weight of being looked at with a gaze that had nothing professional about it. Then Vadim looked away.

"That is how it works," Vadim said.

At the beginning of June, Vadim took him shopping. Ilya had five outfits. The team had arranged for them. A practical selection, delivered in a bag. Jeans, shirts, a dark sweater, track pants. Some exercise gear for practice. Functional, correct in size, chosen by someone who clearly knew what a hockey player needed. He had been wearing them since March on a strict rotation. He hadn't thought about this until Vadim commented on it.

"We are going shopping."

"I have clothes," Ilya protested. He was thinking of the mall. Bright colors. Too much.

"You have three pairs of pants." He looked at Ilya. "You have money. Do you even know what you like?"

Ilya thought about that statement. He knew what the State gave him to wear. He knew what the team gave him to wear. He didn't have much data on what he would choose if choosing was available. "No," he said.

"Then we'll find out."

Saint-Laurent in early June was warm and beginning to open up after winter, the street doing its summer business in a tentative way, jackets still on but lighter ones. Vadim moved through it with the ease of someone who had been coming here for years, knowing which blocks to skip, which doors to go through. He had opinions about clothes in the same way he had opinions about coffee, based on something he had worked out a long time ago and didn't need to revisit.

The first shop Ilya walked out of with nothing. Too much, too fast, the rails dense and the salesman attentive in a way that required him to have preferences he didn't yet know he had. Vadim said nothing. They went to the next one.

The second shop was smaller and Ilya stood in front of the racks and started pulling things out. Not methodically, the way he had approached the bread wall, but because something caught his eye. A shirt in a deep burgundy, the colour of good wine, the kind of colour that had not existed in the CSKA wardrobe or the Calgary bag or anywhere in his life that he could remember. He held it up. The fabric was different than the clothes had been at home. Thicker. The stitching more robust.

"Yes," Vadim said. "I like that color on you."

He tried it on. He looked in the mirror and understood two things simultaneously. First, that he had been wearing clothes that fit him incorrectly his entire life because the State did not make clothes for his specific dimensions. Second, that he had been living in a colour palette of grays and reds and state-issue blues that had nothing to do with what he actually wanted to wear. The burgundy shirt was none of those things. He gave it to the clerk and went back to the rack.

A rust-orange sweater in heavy cotton that Vadim held up and Ilya took immediately without deliberating, the colour warm and saturated in a way that would have read as inappropriately loud in Moscow. A forest green jacket, structured, good buttons, the kind of thing built to last a decade. A pair of trousers in a warm caramel that had no equivalent in the Soviet colour palette and that fit him as though they had been made with his proportions in mind. He paid for each with bills from his wallet, counting them out at the counter, getting change back, the transactions accumulating into a pile of paper bags by the door.

The leather jacket was in the third shop, on a rack near the back. Dark brown, minimal hardware. Ilya put it on and Vadim's eyes widened but he said nothing at all, which meant yes. He took his chequebook out for this one, the amount large enough that paying in cash felt unwieldy. He wrote it at the counter, tore it out, handed it over. The salesman held it for a moment, read the name printed along the top, looked up at Ilya, and then processed the transaction without comment.

He wore the jacket out of the store, the burgundy shirt visible at the collar. On the street he stopped at a shop window. His own reflection with the jacket, the shirt, the correct trousers.

Vadim had come to stand beside him, looking at the same window. Not at himself. Ilya could see him in the glass, the slight tilt of his head, looking at Ilya's reflection with an expression that had no professional distance in it whatsoever. He said nothing for a moment, which was different from his usual nothing, which was neutral and considered. This nothing had a different feeling entirely.

Vadim was quiet for a moment. Then, "The jacket is right. The shirt is right." He paused. "You look like yourself. For the first time since I've known you." He turned and walked toward the car. Ilya looked at his own reflection for another moment. Then he followed.

The money stopped being an abstraction that day. Not the contract number, not the figure in the account. The chequebook with his name on every page and the pile of paper bags in the back of the Jeep and the leather jacket sitting on his shoulders exactly right.

He spent the rest of June filling the wardrobe at his own pace, one or two things at a time, learning what he was drawn to. Colour, it turned out. He had been living in grayscale and his appetite for it was larger than he had known. A deep teal shirt he wore to three consecutive grammar lessons because he kept reaching for it. A cobalt blue sweater. A pair of dark olive trousers. Shiny leather loafers. Running shoes. A new suit to wear on game day, made to his measurements in a way the cheap polyester one the team gave him was not. A scarf in a deep ochre that he bought in the second week of June and wore on cool mornings driving to the rink, which Madame Tremblay noticed without saying anything. By the end of June, the five Metros outfits were still in the wardrobe but the wardrobe had become his, and the apartment had become his along with it, each small claim adding up to the fact of a life being lived rather than endured. 

One afternoon, Ilya came out of the gym still warm from the workout, jacket over his arm, and found Vadim waiting outside. Vadim gave him a long look that was not strictly professional and didn't pretend to be. 

"What," Ilya said. 

"The gym is working."

"I have been in gyms since I was thirteen."

"Yes," Vadim said. "I can see that." He said it the way he said most things, plainly, and then changed the subject, but Ilya walked to the car aware of being looked at in a way that was not new as an experience and felt entirely different from all the previous times.

Vadim came on a Thursday in the second week of June, which was not a usual day. He had a paper bag from the bakery and a smaller one Ilya didn't recognise, a flat square one with a label from a music shop. 

"The Metros had your birthday on file," Vadim said. He set both bags on the table and sat down. "I thought you might like a gift."

"You didn't have to."

"I know."

Inside the bakery bag was a singular piece of decadent chocolate cake. That would have been enough of a gift all on its own. But the other bag held a cassette. No case, just the tape itself with a strip of white label: Montreal. The other side listed song titles, none of which Ilya knew.

"Local music," Vadim said. "The kind you won't find on the radio. The city has its own sound. You should know what it is."

Ilya turned the cassette over. He looked at the recorder on the shelf, which until now had only ever played his own voice back at him. "Thank you," he said.

"Twenty-two," Vadim said. "Young."

Ilya was aware, sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment in a city that did not know his birthday existed, that this was the first time since playing in the juniors in Moscow that anyone outside his family had marked the day. He did not say this. He put the cassette on the shelf and they ate the cake.

He listened that evening with the window open, Montreal coming in underneath the music. Something unlike he'd ever heard in rhythm, words in French, with an undertow that felt like the city at two in the morning when he couldn't sleep and the streets were wet with rain. He wrote three song titles in the margin of his grammar book and fell asleep with the recorder still running on the table.

The following week, Vadim said one evening, "There's something I want to show you. Saturday."

"What?"

"Easier to show."

It was a bar on a street east of the Plateau, a small sign, a man at the door who nodded them through. Ilya wore his leather jacket over the burgundy shirt. Inside the light was low, the space filled with the same music that had been coming through his window all week. But the surprise was the men dancing with each other. Openly, without performance. The way you did something when you had been doing it long enough that you had stopped thinking about it. Ilya stood still inside the door. He was aware of his own heartbeat in a way that was distinct from exertion. 

"Okay?" Vadim said. He looked nervous, Ilya noticed. It was a rare expression on him.

Ilya didn't answer immediately. A man across the room caught his eye and held it for a moment, something that was not quite fear and not quite desire and contained elements of both. He read the room the way he read new ice. Nobody here knew his name. Nobody here had a relationship with the version of him that existed outside. The Soviet defector, the hockey player, the version of himself the city was watching. The anonymity hit somewhere he hadn't expected.

In Moscow, even in the rooms where the thing was known and understood, the pressure of the outside world had been present. You felt it even when it wasn't in the room. Here it had not come with him. He had understood this intellectually since Calgary. He had not, until this room, understood it in his body.

"You don't have to do anything," Vadim said. "We can just stand here. We can leave if you want."

Two men near the far wall were dancing badly, enthusiastically, with no apparent concern for this. Ilya watched them for a moment and then laughed. Short, involuntary, arriving before he'd decided to. Vadim looked at him, eyes nervous, hungry.

Ilya moved toward the dance floor without looking back. He was not a dancer. He had never danced. His body moved before the decision was fully formed, the way it moved on ice when the read was right.

Vadim found space beside him. They barely touched. They didn't need to. Ilya felt the music in his chest and the anonymity of this room in his lungs and something he hadn't felt in so long he'd stopped expecting it. Happiness. Is that what this was? Yes. Just that. Uncomplicated pleasure. He grinned at Vadim across the small distance between them and Vadim grinned back, the full real version, and Ilya thought, I am allowed to be happy. The thought arrived without irony and he let it stay. He watched the lights dance over Vadim's face. He never wanted to leave. 

They left around midnight. On the pavement Ilya said, "I knew the music."

Vadim looked at him.

"The cassette. From my birthday. It was the same."

Vadim was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled. The real version, which Ilya had learned to distinguish from the professional one. It split his face wide, just as it had inside. "Good," he said. "That was the point."

They walked in the direction of Ilya's car. Their shoulders were close, occasionally touching. Ilya was still feeling the music somewhere in his blood, the residue of an evening that had asked nothing from him except to be present in it. He was not paying attention to the distance between them. That was why, when Vadim stopped walking at the corner of a narrow alley, Ilya stopped too and turned, and found Vadim closer than he'd calibrated for. Vadim looked at him for a moment with the same expression from the car above the river, from the shop window, from outside the gym, the one with nothing professional left in it, and then he kissed him. Not tentative. Not a question.

Ilya kissed him back immediately, one hand finding the front of Vadim's jacket, pulling him in. It was soft and slow and tasted faintly of whatever Vadim had been drinking, and it was entirely unlike anything that had preceded it in Ilya's life, which had always been conducted in the dark with one ear toward the door.

Vadim pulled away. "Is this okay?"

"Yes," Ilya replied. He was aware of smiling, which was not something his face did without consulting him first. "Very okay."

In the apartment, Vadim pressed him against the wall inside the door, mouth on his throat, and Ilya let his head fall back against the plaster and felt his whole body light up. He got his hands under Vadim's shirt immediately, spreading his palms against the warm skin of his back, pulling him flush. Vadim was solid against him, warm, and Ilya could feel his heartbeat through his chest, which was faster than his controlled exterior suggested, which was information Ilya found he wanted more of.

Vadim had a way of going slowly that wasn't restraint but intention, the way you did something you wanted to do correctly. He walked Ilya backward to the bedroom with his hands on his hips, kissing his jaw and his throat and the corner of his mouth each time Ilya turned toward him. Ilya kept trying to speed things up and Vadim kept declining, which should have been frustrating and instead was making Ilya slightly insane in a way he hadn't anticipated. By the time they reached the bed, he had his hands in Vadim's hair and his mouth against his ear, saying something in Russian he hadn't meant to say, which Vadim seemed to find encouraging rather than alarming.

Vadim took his time with Ilya's shirt. His mouth followed his hands down Ilya's chest, deliberate and attentive, and Ilya put a fist in the pillow above his head and stared at the ceiling and worked very hard on breathing. He had spent his adult life treating sex as a transaction to be completed at speed in the dark with maximum efficiency and minimum noise. What was happening now was nothing like that in any particular way. Vadim looked up at him from where he was, his face catching the light from the window, and Ilya understood in a way that rearranged something foundational that he was being attended to. Not serviced, not evaluated, not rushed through. Attended to, with genuine interest, by someone who was in no hurry to be anywhere else.

He pulled Vadim back up and kissed him hard, rolling them so that Vadim was beneath him, and felt Vadim laugh low against his mouth, his hands spreading warm across Ilya's back. Ilya was twenty-two years old and had more money than he knew what to do with and his name was on a chequebook and nobody in the world knew where he was right now except the man underneath him, and the room was warm and the window was open and Montreal was doing its indifferent beautiful thing outside, and he felt, quite suddenly and without preparation, the specific lightness of a person who has set something very heavy down.

He had not been with anyone since Svetlana, in February, in the narrow bed in the Moscow apartment. That had been warm and familiar and threaded through with grief he hadn't let himself feel yet. This was different in every conceivable way. He took his time with Vadim's shirt, his belt, learning the geography of him with hands and mouth. Vadim's stomach was flat and warm under his palms and he made a sound when Ilya's mouth reached his hip that Ilya decided immediately to catalogue and return to. He worked his way back up until they were pressed together chest to chest, both of them breathing hard, and felt Vadim's hand slide between them and wrap around them both. The sound Ilya made was undignified and he did not care at all.

Vadim moved his hand with the same unhurried deliberateness he brought to everything, and Ilya buried his face in his neck and held on and let himself be loud about it for the first time in his life, because the walls were his walls and the room was his room and nobody was listening at the door. When Vadim finally pressed his face close to Ilya's and watched his eyes as he brought them both over the edge, Ilya kept his eyes open because he had spent enough of his life doing this in the dark. He breathed Vadim's name into the emptiness of the apartment, letting the release, the complete bliss wash over him. 

When it was over, he lay there breathing. Vadim's weight warm across him. He felt rinsed out. Quiet. The noise was gone, completely and simply gone, the way it went after a very long hard skate, and he hadn't realised until the silence arrived how much room it had been taking up. He could not remember ever feeling this way.

Vadim propped himself up and looked at him. "Still good?"

"Yes," Ilya said. "Better."

Vadim was quiet for a moment, his weight still warm across Ilya's chest. Then, "Have you done this before?"

Ilya looked at the ceiling. "Which part?"

"Any of it. The bar. This."

"The bar, no." He paused. "This," he waved his hand between them. "Women, yes."

"And men?"

The ceiling had a small crack running from the light fixture toward the window. Ilya had not noticed it before. "One," he said.

Vadim didn't say anything. He had the ability, sometimes, of making silence feel like a room you could stay in. Not uncomfortably. Safely.

"A friend," Ilya said. "Not romantic. Just. Something we did." He paused. "It was not like this."

"No," Vadim said. He was not asking.

"I didn't know it could be."

Vadim settled back down. After a while he said, "I was worried you wouldn't like the club."

"I had never been somewhere like this."

"But you liked it."

"I liked it," Ilya said. Then, because it was true and the room was dark and the noise was gone, "I liked all of it."

Chapter End Notes

Hope you liked it! Shane will be back from summer break soon, and will get to meet cool fashionable confident club rat Ilya.

The Provigo on Sherbrooke is the only grocery store I have ever personally been to in Montreal. I am also a personal fan of Montreal smoked meat, which is cured and steamed rather than smoked and steamed the way New York pastrami is and the spice blend is different. The canonical and correct (in my opinion) version comes from Schwartz's on Saint-Laurent. Vadim bringing it as Ilya's introduction to Montreal food is basically cultural onboarding.

I spent a LONG time deciding on Ilya's car. The Grand Wagoneer was produced from 1963 through 1991 before a hiatus (you can get 'em now) and became increasingly associated with a particular kind of wealthy-outdoorsy aesthetic. Wood panelling. Leather inside. The luxury SUV before that was a thing. Ilya buying one for practical reasons while accidentally getting one of the most recognisable status vehicles on the lot is very on brand for someone who has no context for what anything costs or signals. Quebec had no graduated licensing system until the mid 90s. Written test, road test, full licence. Ilya could have been driving alone on the highway within two weeks. He would have been fine. Terrifying, but fine.

Okay. Last one. I want to mention one more time that I am not ignoring the AIDS crisis. But this is also not a story about AIDS and I'm not making it one. It's important. It exists. It will be present, especially as Ilya contacts the community more. But right now, Ilya is 22 and has just gone dancing in public one time, so we're going to sit in that for a minute. The Village along Sainte-Catherine Est had been developing as a distinct gay neighbourhood since the 1970s and was established by 1988, though it pretty much exploded into mainstream visibility in 1990, if you know you know. Vadim's bar is slightly west of that, in the Plateau. Known to people who know. The music playing in it is a nod to the Haitian-Canadian scene that was genuinely thriving in Montreal by this point. Compas (or Konpa or Kompa) fused with Quebecois and R&B, played in venues that wouldn't play it on mainstream radio. Montreal had developed one of the largest Haitian communities (outside Haiti, of course) in the late 1980s. Perhaps maybe something that Ilya and J.J. can bond over. Someday. Maybe. Or not.

See you next chapter. Comments always appreciated here.

Chapter 15: Belonging

Chapter Summary

The summer Ilya spends with Vadim is the first time silence arrives without him having to chase it. He learns the city, learns English, learns what it feels like to want something without fear underneath it.

Chapter Notes

Ilya and Vadim have a conversation regarding safe sex practices in this chapter that includes a period-appropriate understanding of HIV/AIDS.

Belonging (noun)

1. The state of being a member of or fitting naturally into a group, place, or situation.

2. What accumulates in the corners of a room where someone has chosen to stay; the weight of a place that has had years to become the way it is now.

3. The thing you didn't know you had until the room is empty and it's yours alone.

Example: "The second time Ilya knew the music before they walked in and felt the familiar pleasure of a place becoming comfortable and yours." - July, 1988

After that first time, it became frequent in the way that things became frequent when you had been missing something for a long time and didn't need to anymore. Three nights a week, sometimes four, sometimes more. Vadim would arrive after Ilya's evening English practice or they would eat dinner and the dishes would be washed and the grammar book set aside and they would find each other in the natural progression of an evening that had nowhere else to go. Maybe they watched television before, or went for a walk.

Vadim was patient in bed the same way he was patient with everything else, willing to take his time, willing to demonstrate, making it a form of instruction without making it clear that's what it was. Ilya, who had spent his adult life treating sex as a pressure valve, a quick desperate transaction conducted with maximum urgency, was initially resistant to this approach on a purely reflex level. He kept wanting to rush toward the end. Vadim's hand on his hip, easy and firm. Not yet. There was more here. Take the time. He learned to take the time.

He learned other things too. He learned what sounds Vadim made and what produced them and which discoveries, when applied, made Vadim forget to be quiet and controlled and slow. He learned that he had an enormous amount of previously untested capacity for patience when the alternative was Vadim's mouth on his throat saying his name the way he did, breathless and soft. It was a strong argument for patience. He learned that sex without fear underneath it was a completely categorically different experience, and that he had been missing this for the entirety of his adult life, and that he intended to make up for the deficit now.

One evening, maybe two weeks in, Ilya came out of the shower and found Vadim asleep in his bed, a mystery novel open on his lap. Vadim never asked if he could stay. He did or he didn't, but Ilya didn't think his opinion mattered either way. Ilya dodn't mind it which had become its own kind of invitation in time. Ilya dropped the towel without thinking about it and watched Vadim stir into wakefulness and look at him in the way he did, not a hurry or a care in the world, the way that still hit Ilya somewhere foundational every time, and crossed the room.

Vadim pulled him down and spent a long time with his hands and his mouth moving over Ilya with the focus that came from having no other commitments or requirements of the evening. He kissed down Ilya's sternum, his stomach, mouthing at his hip until Ilya's grip tightened against him. When Vadim finally took him in his mouth, slow and thorough, Ilya lay with his hand loose against Vadim's head and felt the noise go so completely silent it was like the rink before the lights came up.

He stared at the ceiling. Vadim's mouth was warm and patient and utterly without urgency and Ilya understood, lying there making sounds he would not have permitted himself a month ago, that this was the thing he had been looking for every time he pushed himself to physical exhaustion on the ice or in the gym. The silence he had been chasing could arrive like this. Through someone else's deliberate, unhurried attention. He hadn't known that was an option. That there was something else besides treating a body as something to be used and moved on from. He felt, lying there in the after, feeling the warmth of Vadim's body on his, a wave of something that was partly grief for all the years he had spent not knowing this, and mostly gratitude that he knew it now.

He pulled Vadim up when he couldn't stand it anymore and kissed him hard, turning them over, getting his mouth on him in return and feeling Vadim's whole body go tight and attentive beneath him, those carefully controlled sounds coming apart at the edges. Ilya took his time with it. He was learning what Vadim liked and he applied that knowledge with focus and found it was its own particular pleasure, the pleasure of a thing done well, until Vadim's hand tightened in his hair and he gasped something in Russian that he probably hadn't meant to say, and Ilya catalogued that away too.

Some nights Ilya drove to Vadim's apartment in the Plateau and they cooked there, which was better because Vadim had a real, well-stocked kitchen. Ilya still struggled with buying enough food at the store. He felt like he was missing something constantly, and hadn't branched out from the few items he was now comfortable buying. Vadim cooked meals from memory, and the apartment smelled of things that had no equivalent in the barracks cafeteria. Soups and stews that were familiar enough but slightly different. They ate and talked, sometimes about questions Ilya had, interactions he felt he didn't understand. Other times, about nothing important. After dinner they moved to the bedroom without discussing it.

Vadim's apartment felt lived-in in a way Ilya's didn't yet, a place that had had years to become the way it was now. The bedroom, especially. Books on the nightstand, a lamp that cast a warm yellow light, a window that looked onto a courtyard where someone had planted something determined and green. Ilya liked it there. He felt, in Vadim's bed in the warm Plateau dark, a version of himself that was not performing anything for anyone. Vadim read with his finger moving just below the lines of text, tracing carefully. Ilya noticed this the first time and then kept noticing it. He read fast, his finger flying across the page. When he finished for the night he would fold the corner down. When Ilya pointed this out, he said books should look like they've been read. 

Sometimes, after a late night where it stopped making sense to return home, he would wake at five in Vadim's bed, the city not yet started, the room still gray. Vadim asleep beside him, breathing slow and even, one arm across Ilya's chest. Ilya would lie there for a while and look at the ceiling and feel the noise absent and understand that this was what it was like when the structure held properly. This was what it felt like to live somewhere instead of survive it.

He would get up quietly and drive to the rink. The leather jacket in the passenger seat. His car handling well on the empty streets. The colour of the city before sunrise, purple and gray and briefly gold where the first light hit the mountain. He would think about nothing on these drives except the route. The noise stayed gone. Sometimes on these drives, Vadim's voice arrived in his head without warning. Something Ilya had said wrong the night before, the correction arriving suddenly but without impatience. Or a thing Vadim had said about the city, a building or a street name. Ilya would hear it the way you registered an unexpected sound any other time. But then the rink would appear and the voice would be gone. 

They went back to the bar on the street east of the Plateau the following week, and the week after that. The second time Ilya knew the music before they walked in and felt the familiar pleasure of a place becoming comfortable and yours. He was better at dancing the second time, or less self-conscious about being bad at it, which was the same result. A man with a red shirt and a strong, defined jaw danced near him for a while and said something in French that Ilya caught most of and smiled at, and the man smiled back and they danced together for two songs before Ilya's vocabulary ran out and the man drifted away good-naturedly. Ilya found Vadim at the bar and reported the exchange. Vadim corrected his translation of the French with the pleasure of a linguist finding an error in an otherwise solid piece of work.

"You should have talked to him longer," Vadim said.

"I did not have the words."

"You had enough words."

"What did you say?"

"He asked if I come here often. I said no."

Vadim was quiet for a moment. "Yes, that was the wrong thing to say. He was not asking for the information."

"I know this now."

"You should say something like not often enough. Or I will come back if you're here. Don't give an actual number of visits."

"This is inefficient."

"Flirting is inefficient. I am sure you were plenty good at it in Moscow." He was smiling. He bought them both drinks and they stayed until the music changed register around midnight.

The club closer to downtown was Vadim's idea, which surprised Ilya until Vadim explained it was on Crescent Street and that a woman he knew from university worked the bar on Wednesday nights and would make sure they were not overcharged for the privilege of standing in a room full of anglophones.

It was louder than the other bar. This bar wasn't for people like Ilya. Women. Women looking for men like him. Everyone was more self-conscious swaying instead of dancing. More lights, less interesting music, the aggressive cheerfulness of a place designed to move people from sober to less sober as efficiently as possible. Ilya stood at the bar and looked at the room and felt the difference immediately. Here people were performing. Not badly or dishonestly, just in the way of everyone in a room who knows they are being looked at and has opinions about what that means.

Vadim's friend was behind the bar, a small dark-haired woman named Barbara who spoke to Vadim in rapid French and then looked at Ilya with uncomplicated assessment. "Hockey player," she said in English.

"Yes," Ilya said. 

"Don't cause trouble," she said, setting two drinks on the bar.

"I am very good," Ilya said, which was true in some contexts and completely untrue in others, and Barbara looked at him in a way that suggested she understood the distinction. She went to serve someone else.

Vadim leaned against the bar beside him. "See the woman over there. Green dress? She looked at you twice when you walked in."

Ilya looked. She was talking to a friend, dark hair, easy posture, the kind of woman who looked comfortable in herself. "Yes."

"She's going to look again."

"You are very confident."

"You are tall and wearing a very nice outfit. I am just observant." He sipped his drink. "When she looks, make eye contact. Hold it longer than feels comfortable, then look away first. Then look back."

The woman in the green dress looked at him. He held her gaze for a beat past comfortable, then looked at his drink, then looked back. She was still looking. She said something to her friend without taking her eyes off him. Her friend turned and looked too, then looked away. The woman smiled, small and private.

"Good," Vadim said. "Now wait."

Ilya waited. He was good at waiting. He had spent most of his career waiting for the right lane to open, the half-second of hesitation that was the only invitation he would get. She came to the bar to order a drink. Not next to him, but near enough that the distance was a question. Ilya turned towards her and said, in English, "Good evening."

She looked at him. Up close she had a sharp, amused face and earrings that caught the light. She said something in French he didn't catch.

"Only English," Ilya said. "My French is," he paused, selecting the words Vadim had told him. "Work in progress."

"I think your English is fine." 

"I am still learning. I am Ilya."

Her name was Elaine. She worked in an office downtown and had a direct way of speaking that he found restful after months of navigating the social indirectness of English small talk. They talked for twenty minutes, him finding his way through sentences that were almost sufficient and occasionally landing on exactly the right word, her patient in a way that seemed genuine rather than performed. She laughed twice at things he said. The second time he was fairly sure it was at him rather than with him, but in a way that felt good, not bad.

Vadim had disappeared into the room at some point. Ilya caught sight of him talking to Barbara over the bar, both of them laughing about something. He looked comfortable. Ilya felt comfortable. The room was loud and a little ridiculous and Elaine was pretty and interesting. Ilya felt a sudden lightness. He was standing in a club in Montreal speaking English to a woman he had met twelve minutes ago, and the sheer improbability of this being his life compared to where he was even a few months ago was staggering.

She gave him her number on a piece of paper torn from the corner of a receipt. He folded it and put it in his jacket pocket. They danced for one song, which he was only slightly better at than the red-shirt man had been, and she found this funny in the right way. She pressed her lips against his neck and giggled in his ear and it felt nice. He would let her do that some more. He had the sudden thought that he could take her home. To his apartment. Where they could be alone and he could take all the time he wanted. He could do that and no one would stop him. He wouldn't, because Vadim was coming home with him. But he could. When the song ended, they parted without ceremony.

Vadim found him at the bar afterward. "How long did you talk?"

"Twenty minutes. Maybe more."

"She gave you her number?"

"She kissed me," Ilya said. He said it the way he said most things he was still deciding what to do with, giving it to Vadim to see what came back.

Vadim looked at him. Something moved across his face, brief and unresolved. "Yes?"

"Yes." Ilya picked up his drink. "Are you jealous?" Jealous. He had worked on feelings words with Madame Tremblay a few days ago. 

Vadim was quiet for a moment. He turned his glass in his hands. "No," he said. Then, more carefully: "Maybe a little. But it is not the important thing."

"What is the important thing?"

"That you did it." Vadim looked at him directly. "That you spoke to a woman in English and she kissed you at the end of it. I wanted you to be able to do this." He paused. "But I am allowed to feel two things at once."

Ilya looked at him. The small amount of jealousy on Vadim's face, visible only because Ilya had been watching that face directly, in detail nearly every night and knew the registers of it, was not an unpleasant thing to see. It meant something real was there. "Are you going to call her?" Vadim asked.

"No," Ilya said. "But I could."

"Yes," Vadim said. "You could." He picked up his drink. "That is the point."

They drove to Ilya's apartment, and went inside for another drink. They ended up in the bed again, as they often did. Vadim was not noticeably jealous for the rest of the evening, which Ilya found he appreciated, and also very much did not. At a certain point, Ilya shifted his weight, moving his hands until his fingers slid between Vadim's legs, making his intentions clear enough that Vadim stilled. He wasn't sure why he decided tonight was the night to push things. Maybe it was the possibility that he could have been inside a woman right now. Maybe it was the flash of jealousy. But he wanted this. He wanted to be in Vadim. 

"I want to," Ilya said. His English still finding its way around subtlety, so he said it plainly. 

Vadim didn't pull away, but he went still in a way that was different from desire and looked at the ceiling. He was quiet for long enough that Ilya felt the temperature of the room change. "I know you want to. I need to talk to you about something first," he said.

"You do not want this," Ilya said, pulling his hands away. A beat passed, the two of them in silence, Ilya's heart thumping in his chest. 

"That is not –," Vadim started. He sighed. Not impatiently. Choosing his next words carefully. Vadim switched to Russian. Ilya started to object, but Vadim put a hand on his arm. Just, wait. "I knew a man here. Pierre." He paused. "He died in March. AIDS." The word sat differently in Russian. Borrowed and blunt, a foreign word for a foreign catastrophe. "There is a man from the bar. He is sick now. So, so sick," Vadim continued. He turned to look at Ilya. Ilya had heard fragments even at CSKA, the kind of information that moved in oblique ways, half in code. He had not, until now, connected them to himself. The habit of not connecting things to himself was old and well-practised. "This disease. It is moving through men like us." 

Vadim ran a thumb along his cheekbone. Ilya's eyes closed at the touch. Vadim kept talking. "What you want to do." Vadim stopped. Started again. "People are afraid of it now. There is a reason for that." His thumb continued the soft strokes. "Condoms help. This is what they know. But help is not the same as safe and I cannot give you a number." He looked back at the ceiling. "Pierre did not know he was sick until he was already dying. The time between is long and you cannot see it."

Ilya thought for a long moment. Condoms. He never used them. In Moscow, they were impossible to find, thick and unwieldy, but he knew that they were better in North America. He had watched Volkov trying to smuggle back strips of them from a game in France once, individual foil-wrapped squares. He could start using them. He would start using them.

"Pierre. How long from when he knew?"

"Five months."

A car passed on the street below. Someone's radio, two floors down.

Vadim broke the silence. "If you want – if we did this. Condoms every time. And it would need to be only us."

Ilya turned his head to look at Vadim oddly. "It is only us now."

Vadim was quiet a beat too long. He didn't meet Ilya's eyes, and something shifted in his expression. "Ilya, I never asked that of you."

Ilya looked at him a long moment. He had spent these weeks assuming something that they had apparently not agreed upon. He was certain he was not wrong that he assumed that it was just the two of them. He was also aware Vadim was not in the wrong either. These two things could exist at the same time. "Have you?" Ilya asked. He tried to bite the jealousy from his voice.

Vadim didn't answer it. He held Ilya's eyes instead. "I am telling you this because you should know what you are asking. It is not nothing."

"I know it is not nothing."

"You came here with nothing. I don't want you to say yes because it is simple to do that. I want you to say yes because you understand what that means." Vadim had a way of being honest that did not leave room for argument, not because it was harsh but because it was accurate, and the accuracy was hard to push back against.

"You are telling me we can," Ilya said finally, "but that if we do, it changes what this is."

"Yes," Vadim said.

"And you are not sure you want it to change."

Vadim waited a beat too long. Again. Ilya wished he would just say it. Would hurt his feelings. Would be honest, as he so often was. "I am not sure you should want it to change. This is good. It does not need to become something else."

Ilya lay back. He thought about Pierre, a man with no face who had died in March. He thought about what Vadim's careful honesty was costing him to deliver, because it was costing something. He could see that plainly.

"For now," Ilya said. "What we have been doing. This is fine?"

Vadim looked at him. "Yes. This is fine."

"Yes." He paused. "We will not. Not tonight. But we should talk about it again. Later. If we need to."

"Okay," Vadim said. Something in his expression settled. He reached over and put his hand over Ilya's on the sheet. They lay there in the quiet for a while, and Ilya thought about the word careful and everything it held that he didn't yet have the English to say, and the city came in through the window and the night ran itself down around them.

Things were different after that. Vadim showed Ilya more of himself. On the fire escape outside Vadim's apartment, where they sometimes sat with coffee when the evening was warm enough, Vadim said, "I came to Toronto when I was fourteen." Ilya looked at him. Vadim was watching the street below, not making it into a moment.

"From Crimea. My father had a cousin there, in Toronto. We came with two suitcases and an address written on a piece of paper." He drank his coffee. "I didn't speak English. My father spoke a little. My mother spoke none. The cousin had a house in Scarborough and three children who found us very funny."

"What was funny?"

"Everything. The way we dressed. The food my mother cooked. I said 'yes' to everything for the first six months because it was the only word I knew. Someone asked if I wanted mustard on my hot dog. I said yes. I didn't know what mustard was."

Ilya considered this. "Did you like it?"

"Mustard?"

"Toronto."

Vadim was quiet for a moment. "No. Toronto is," he paused. "Cold. Cold in a way that has nothing to do with the weather. I was fourteen and I went to a school where everyone had known each other since they were five years old." He turned his cup in his hands. "I learned English in eight months. Not because I was gifted. Because I decided I was not going to spend one more day not understanding what was being said about me."

Ilya recognised the mechanism. "And Montreal?"

"I came for university. I was eighteen and I thought I understood the country." A pause. "Montreal is different. It doesn't care if you understand it. It just goes on being itself and eventually you either belong to it or you don't. I decided I did." He looked at Ilya. Some feeling flickered across his face before the words arrived. "You will too."

They sat with that for a while. Then Vadim said, without looking at him, "I have not been back to Crimea since we left. My father went once, three years ago. He said it was smaller than he remembered." He turned his cup in his hands. "I think he meant he was larger. That he had grown past the size of the place where he was from." He was quiet for a moment. "I think that happens. You leave somewhere and the leaving changes the size of things."

Ilya thought about Moscow. The apartment, the rink, the gray of the sky in November. He could not tell yet if it had shrunk. "Does it help?" he asked. "Being larger than it."

Vadim considered this seriously. "Sometimes," he said. "Not always." They were quiet for a moment. Then Vadim said, still looking at the street, "I did not have anyone, when I came here. To Montreal. I knew people, eventually. But the first year." He stopped. He turned his cup in his hands. "The first year is very long."

Ilya looked at him. He thought about the winter in the safe house, the Ottawa streets, the silence that had no bottom to it. "Yes," he said.

Vadim glanced at him. Something passed across his face, brief and unguarded. "You did better than I did," he said. "I want you to know that."

Ilya did not know what to do with this, so he said nothing. Vadim looked back at the street. Below them a couple argued in French on the pavement, quietly, the way of people who had been arguing about the same thing for years. 

It was Vadim who shifted the conversation then, the same way he did most things. Directly, without making it larger than it was. "Did you leave anyone behind in Moscow?" Ilya knew what he was asking. It wasn't about his family.

"Yes," Ilya admitted. "We knew each other. There was no word for it. In Russian or in English. Sasha."

Vadim was quiet for a moment. "I know that arrangement."

"Here it is different."

"Yes," Vadim said. "Here it is different. It is not…open. But it is possible to have a life here that is not possible back home."

Below them the arguing couple had stopped arguing and were walking together, their shoulders almost touching. The cat in the window had lost interest and gone elsewhere. They sat for a while without speaking. The coffee had gone cold. At some point Vadim shifted and his knee came to rest against Ilya's, light contact, nothing that required acknowledgment. Neither of them moved away. The street below went on doing what streets did.

Eventually Ilya broke the silence. "We should go in."

Vadim looked at him. The particular look from the car above the river, the one with nothing professional in it. "Yes," he said.

Ilya stood first. He offered his hand to pull Vadim up, a practical gesture, and Vadim took it and stood, and they were close in the way that the narrow fire escape made inevitable, and neither of them stepped back. Vadim looked at him for a moment. Then he kissed him, brief and warm, and Ilya caught his jaw and kept him there longer than brief, and they went inside. Vadim's words were in Ilya's ears. It is possible to have a life here.

The third time they went to the bar on the east end it was a Saturday in late July and Ilya wore a striped silk shirt and danced for an hour without stopping and came off the floor with his hair damp and his heart rate high and felt, simply and without caveat, happy. Not the qualified version, not the careful monitored version he had been permitting himself since February. Just happy. Vadim appeared beside him and clinked his glass against Ilya's without saying anything, which was exactly right.

He thought about Sasha sometimes. Not with grief exactly, or not only grief. What he and Sasha had been was real. But it had been conducted at a permanent low register of fear, so constant he had stopped registering it as fear and had thought that was simply the shape of the thing. That wanting something you weren't supposed to want and the fear underneath it were the same thing, inseparable. They had never been the same thing. He understood this now, lying in a room where nobody was listening at the door. The fear had been a condition of Moscow. Not a condition of the wanting. He was glad, with a depth that surprised him, to have learned the difference while he was still young enough for it to mean something. He was glad to have been wrong. He wished he could tell Sasha. He could not tell Sasha.

The noise was almost gone by August. He noticed this the way he noticed things that had changed gradually, by looking at where it had been and finding it diminished. Between the rink at five-thirty and the gym and Madame Tremblay's implacable corrections and the evenings with Vadim and the long afternoons learning the city street by street, there was simply not enough room for it. He had been running himself tired on purpose since February, in the barracks, in the safe houses, on the Ottawa streets. He had not understood until now that the noise was what he had been running from. He had been running from the noise his entire adult life. Hockey had been the most effective solution. Vadim was the second.

He thought about his mother. Not in the way he had thought about her at the cemetery in February, the cold granite and the kopek and the words that had gone into the air and not come back. He thought about her in a more practical way. What she had needed. What had not been available to her. The silence his father had required of her, the shape of the life she had been permitted to have. He sat with this and did not do anything with it except keep the structure, keep moving, keep the apartment full enough that the quiet had no room to collect.

Vadim came on a Thursday in the last week of August, after the lesson. He cooked while Ilya sat at the kitchen table with the grammar book, and they ate without much conversation, which was not unusual. What was unusual was the quality of the quiet afterward. Vadim washed the dishes. Ilya dried. They moved around the kitchen the way they had moved around it all summer, comfortable and familiar, and something in that familiarity felt different this evening. Present in a way it hadn't been before, as though the summer had suddenly understood it was ending.

Vadim set the last cup down and turned.

"I need to tell you something," he said.

Ilya waited. Vadim didn't start speaking right away. He pulled two glasses out of the cabinet, and poured a bit of vodka in each one. It wasn't the Russian stuff Ilya was used to. The Canadian vodka was grassier, sharper. 

"The Metros didn't renew my contract." He said it plainly. "I've been offered work in Ottawa. Government translation, foreign ministry. I'm going to take it."

Ilya looked at him.

"Why did they not renew?"

"Because you don't need me." Vadim held his eyes. "Your English is good enough now. Good enough that what I do isn't necessary." He paused. "You did that. Three months. You worked harder than anyone I've helped before."

Ilya sat with this. The thing he had worked toward every morning with the grammar book and every evening with the recorder had been real progress, measurable progress, progress he was proud of. He was still proud of it. The pride and the other thing existed in the same place without cancelling each other out, which was one of the stranger things the summer had produced.

"You could stay," Ilya said. "In Montreal."

"It is a good job." Vadim's voice was not unkind. "And you'll be in training camp in three weeks. And your English will keep getting better. And by January you won't need anyone to show you the grocery store." He looked at Ilya steadily. "This was always going to end when you didn't need it anymore. You got there faster than I expected."

Ilya looked at the table. He felt a sudden clap of betrayal.

"You knew this from the beginning," he said. "Is why you helped me learn the city. Not just translate."

Vadim was quiet for a moment. "I knew since July," he said. "The offer came in early July. I had already decided by the time we went to the bar on Crescent Street." He held Ilya's eyes and did not look away. "I wanted to tell you. But I knew it would change what the summer was."

Ilya looked down at his hands. The bar on Crescent Street. Vadim coaching him through eye contact. Waiting. Vadim teaching him how to be alone in this city.

"You were practicing," Ilya said. 

Vadim hesitated a moment. "I wanted you to be okay, on your own."

"You were practicing me being alone," Ilya said. Vadim avoided his eyes. Vadim set down his glass, looking down at his fingers. The moment sat heavy between them.

The two weeks after that were ordinary in a way that required effort to maintain. Vadim came on his usual evenings. They cooked, or Ilya drove to the Plateau and Vadim cooked there. They ate and talked and went to bed and none of it was different except that it was, the way a room is different when you know you are leaving it. Ilya did not say anything about it. Vadim did not say anything about it. They moved around it carefully, the way you moved around furniture when walking through a dark apartment.

He stopped letting Vadim leave. Not in any way that required acknowledgment, nothing that could be named or pushed back against. He just found reasons for it to be late, another drink, a question about something, and Vadim stayed, and they went to sleep with Ilya's hand on Vadim's ribs feeling them rise and fall. In the morning, Vadim would leave for the Plateau and Ilya would drive to the rink and the voice would be there on the drive, still present, still usable, and he would think: not yet. Still here. He kept track of the days without meaning to.

He lay awake some nights after Vadim slept and looked at the ceiling and tried to locate what he was feeling, the way Madame Tremblay had taught him to locate the right word, patiently, without forcing it. Talking around the words he did not know. He was not sure he had the English for it. Something between grief and wanting, the knowledge that the thing you were holding was already on its way out of your hands. He had felt this before, about other things. He had not expected to feel it about this.

He did not say any of it. It would not have changed anything, and Vadim knew anyway. He could tell from the way Vadim looked at him sometimes across the kitchen, brief and direct, saying nothing, and then looked away. 

The last night was attentive in the way you were attentive to something you understood you were doing for the last time. Neither of them said so. They undressed each other slowly. Vadim's hands moved over him like he was memorising something, the topography of Ilya's shoulders and the scar on his left side and the place on his ribs that made him inhale sharply every time. Ilya let him. He did the same in return, memorizing Vadim's particular angles and warmths and the sound he made low in his throat when Ilya touched him in certain ways, storing it somewhere deliberate.

They took turns. That was the only way to describe the shape of the evening, patient and reciprocal, each of them giving the other their full attention in a way that felt different from other nights, weighted by the knowledge of what it was. When Vadim's mouth moved down his body Ilya let himself be loud about it, the desperate sounds he had learned over the summer he was allowed to make in rooms that belonged to him, and when it was his turn he took his time and felt Vadim's control come apart in his hands with a satisfaction that was one of the better things the summer had given him.

Afterward, they lay pressed together, Vadim's arm across his chest, both of them breathing heavily. The noise that had been absent all summer was only quietly present at the very edges of the room, held off by the warmth of another body. The window was open. The city came in. Traffic, someone laughing two floors down, the ambient hum of a place that went on indifferently past midnight. Vadim's hand rested open on top of him. Ilya looked at it. He thought about saying something. He thought about grabbing his hand. Holding it. He had the shape of it without the words, the way he still sometimes had feelings in Russian that arrived in English with something missing. He lay there with it for a while, the thing he didn't say, and the city ran itself down outside. At some point Vadim's breathing slowed into sleep and Ilya was still awake with his hand an inch from Vadim's on the sheet, not moving and he thought I will remember this. The thought arrived quietly, without ceremony. He would remember this. He went to sleep.

Then Vadim was gone. He shook Ilya's hand at the door, the formal grip he had used in Calgary at the very beginning, before any of it. Ilya watched him down the stairs until the angle took him out of sight. He closed the door. He stood with his hand still on the latch for a moment, not thinking anything in particular, just not ready yet to hear how the apartment sounded without him in it. Then he took his hand off the latch.

The noise came back immediately. He stood in the apartment for a moment. The kitchen light was on, the one he'd forgotten to turn off that morning. The grammar book was on the table, open to the last lesson. The ledger beside it, two notebooks now, filled. The cassette recorder on the shelf. His jacket on the hook by the door. The wardrobe full of colour in the bedroom, the burgundy shirt and the rust sweater and the teal and the cobalt, all the things he had chosen for himself. He looked at all of it and it was his and it was not enough. Vadim had read on that side of the bed. Had left the coffee too strong every time without noticing. Had folded the corners of pages in every book he touched. There was nothing in the apartment that showed any of that. People left and took all the evidence of themselves with them and you were left standing in a room that looked exactly as it had before, which was its own kind of loss.Then he went to bed, because it was late and there was nothing else to do. 

He woke at five. The room was gray, the city not yet started. He lay still for a moment before he understood what was wrong, and then he understood. No arm across his chest. No slow, even breathing beside him. The bed had that longing emptiness of something recently vacated, still faintly warm on the other side, and Ilya lay there and felt the weight that wasn't there and did not move for longer than he should have. Then he got up. He dressed. He picked up the leather jacket from the hook by the door.

He drove to the rink that morning. On the way, he waited for Vadim's voice to arrive the way it usually did, a correction, a street name, something said the night before surfacing unexpectedly. Nothing came. Just the route. Just the color of the city before sunrise, purple and gray and briefly gold where the first light caught the mountain, and the silence where something used to be.

Training camp in ten days. He was the best player in the world and he was going to walk into a room full of his teammates and play hockey and that was the thing he was built for. He knew how to do that. He had always known how to do that.

After, he made tea and sat at the kitchen table and the noise sat with him, and after a while he got up and put on a cassette of Vadim's music and that was a little better. He went to bed. He lay on top of the covers and listened to the city and thought about Vadim on a train to Ottawa and Madame Tremblay's last lesson and the ledger full of English words and training camp in ten days, and none of it was enough to fill the apartment, but he was tired enough from the gym that the noise didn't get a full hold, and eventually he slept.

Chapter End Notes

Well. The summer has come to an end.

Let's do fun (and un-fun) facts.

The bars in this chapter reflect the two sides of Montreal nightlife in the 80s. The east end bar, darker, dancing, men-only, is there to represent the growing gay bar culture in what would be the Village. The bar on Crescent street is one of many bars on the strip that ran downtown that catered mostly to straight couples in louder, more performative spaces. Loud, commercial, designed for pickup culture. Two worlds, one city.

In 1988, there were approximately 500 reported AIDS cases in Montreal. Emphasis on reported. It is likely that the number was significantly higher due to the difficulty and stigma around getting tested for HIV. There was also still essentially no treatment at this time, and by the time you became symptomatic, life span was measured in months. The first antiretroviral (AZT) had been introduced in the US, but it was not widely available in Canada and was impossibly expensive. Montreal had the highest rate of HIV infection in Canada. The community organized their own response to the crisis, starting telephone hotlines and peer support groups, since the official public health response left so, so much to be desired. The community was very tight-knit, and everyone would have known someone who was affected.

I talked about condoms all the way back in Chapter 2, but here's a little more. Soviet manufactured condoms were known as "galoshes" at the time because of the thick, low-grade rubber they were made of. Western condoms, particularly French and German brands, were genuinely treated as desirable contraband by Soviet citizens who traveled abroad.

Vadim's story is also based on the wave of Soviet Jewish immigration to Toronto in the 1970s, primarily from modern-day Ukraine. There was already an established Jewish community in Scarborough that would have been the easiest place to call home. A teenager arriving in Toronto schools with no English in the 70s would have found no ESL support. This was deliberate, designed for students to learn through immersion only.

Comments and kudos always appreciated.
I had a hard time pulling this chapter out of my head and onto the page. Next up, Shane's POV.

Chapter 16: Drawer

Chapter Summary

The lake is supposed to fix things. It has fixed things before. Shane runs eight miles every morning, reads the same four pages of the same book, and does not think about Ilya Rozanov. He manages two of those three.

Chapter Notes

And now we get a little of Shane.

There is a brief discussion of race and racial identity in this section. It is not a negative discussion and there are no slurs or distressing language.

Next update probably midweek, when we start entering the "forced proximity" portion of the work.

Drawer (noun)

1. A boxlike storage compartment without a lid, made to slide horizontally in and out of a desk, chest, or other piece of furniture. 

2. The place you put things that require more attention than you currently have available.

3. What you call it when you know exactly what's in there and choose not to look.

Example: "The drawer, it turned out, had been open the entire time. He just hadn't been looking at what was in it." — Shane Hollander, July 1988

Shane drove north out of Montreal on the Friday morning after the elimination, the city thinning into highway and then into the kind of country that felt endless. Anonymous. Shane loved that feeling. He loved hockey, but he didn't particularly love being famous. He would rather be here, in the privacy of the woods. The drive was under two hours. He had done it so many times that his hands knew it without him, the exits, the turn onto the main road, the unpaved section after. He stopped once at a gas station because the tank was low and not because he needed a reason to stand outside for a few minutes. He stood outside for a few minutes. Then he got back in the car.

His parents' cottage sat on a lake twenty minutes off the main road, down a dirt track that had been washing out every spring since Shane was eight. His mother had been lobbying to have it paved for fifteen years. His father lobbied the other way, on the grounds that the wash-out kept the casual visitors away. Yuna considered this a flawed solution but had stopped arguing about it somewhere around 1981. The track was still unpaved. There was a pleasure in the sound of the crunch under the tires. 

His mother was on the porch when he pulled in, reading something with a pen in her hand. She looked up, assessed him, and said, "You should have eaten before you left."

"I ate," Shane said.

"Coffee doesn't count."

His father appeared from around the side of the house in the old clothes he kept just for the cottage, carrying a section of dock. He set it down when he saw the car, and his face did the thing it always did. That particular light, greeting his son with an overwhelming look of relief. Like the sun had come out on a cloudy day.

"There he is," his father said. "You want to help me with this dock?"

"Sure," Shane said.

"Give him an hour," his mother said. "He drove."

"Not that far," Shane said.

"Give him an hour," his mother repeated, and went inside.

He helped with the dock. His father talked about the winter damage, the ice heave, the section that needed a new bracket. Shane handed him tools and listened to him work through the problem out loud, the way David always had, thinking with his hands, narrating as he went. It was one of Shane's earliest memories. His father under a car, under a sink, at a workbench, explaining each step to him. Explaining that you couldn't hire someone to do everything. You needed to do some things for yourself, with your own hands. His seemingly endless patience with an awkward, unhelpful adolescent Shane. He had grown up understanding that some people thought by talking and some thought by going silent, and his parents were one of each, which had given him both tendencies and made him careful about which one he used in public.

"Rough end to the season," his father said, not looking up from the bracket.

"We were outplayed."

"You weren't outplayed in the first two games."

"No," Shane said. "Just in the ones that mattered."

David tightened something and sat back on his heels. "Rozanov. He played well."

"He played very well."

His father looked like he wanted to say more, but decided not to. He handed Shane the wrench, asked him to hold the bracket steady, and they finished the dock in the afternoon light while his mother brought out lemonade. The start to a perfect, easy summer.

The summer established its routine over the first week. Running in the mornings along the lake road, longer than he needed to, pushing into the heat because the heat was simple. Most days he swam in the lake. He lifted in the garage his father had set up with weights years ago, basic equipment, nothing like the facility in Montreal, which was the point. He skated twice a week at the rink in town, early enough that it was just him and the ice and the silence of an empty arena at seven in the morning. He was good at training alone. He had always been good at training alone.

The captaincy was almost a year old. He kept forgetting that. It still had that feel of a new thing, something he put on each morning and checked in the mirror, not quite trusting the reflection. His teammates had voted for him. That was the part he kept coming back to. Not Theriault's decision, or a front office calculation. His teammates, in a closed room, had put his name down. Pellerin, one of the assistant coaches, had told him afterward that it hadn't been close. Shane had nodded and thanked him and driven home and sat in his car in the parking garage for six minutes doing nothing. He had been twenty-one. Gainey had been twenty-seven when they gave it to him, and if he hadn't retired, it still would have been his. The room was young right now. Mostly guys in their twenties, only a few years on the ice. If anything Shane was younger, which was either a vote of exceptional confidence or a sign the room had run out of better options. Shane had spent his career being very good and very quiet, and his teammates had apparently decided that was what they wanted. He was still working out what to do with that.

For most of the year the captaincy had been something he could get his arms around. He knew the room. He knew who needed a conversation and who needed to be left alone, who responded to accountability spoken directly and who needed to arrive at it themselves. The role was difficult and he was learning it, but he could see the weight of what was required. Then March happened.

He had done some reading in the weeks between the Olympics and Rozanov's arrival. Soviet hockey culture, the state program, the political dimension the front office kept briefing him about. He had assembled a picture of what Ilya Rozanov might be. The picture turned out to be wrong in almost every detail that mattered.

He had prepared for violence. He had watched tape on Rozanov going back to the '84 World Juniors and there were moments in it that were difficult. Aggressive, physical play that suggested instruction or inclination. He had prepared himself for a player who might be a problem in ways beyond the diplomatic situation. The fact was Rozanov was among the cleanest players on the ice in most games. Precise, controlled, no apparent interest in his body as anything except a tool for moving efficiently through space. 

The other thing Shane had prepared himself for was more personal. He had read about the Soviet state's official position on race. Not difficult reading to get your hands on. The propaganda was public, the ideology exported, the language available to anyone who looked. What he found was more complicated than he expected. The official line was more progressive than he had anticipated, built on decades of using segregation as a weapon against the West. He had sat with that for a few days and it did not reassure him the way it probably should have. 

Shane was aware that certain players had overcome a lot to end up at the highest levels of hockey, and that Rozanov may have differing opinions on that. He had understood, abstractly, that a man formed entirely inside that system might carry views that would make a locker room very complicated very fast. Might say something in the wrong moment. Might look at J.J., or at Vilgran, in a way Shane would need to respond to directly, publicly, in a way that would cost something. He had thought about how he would handle that when it happened. If it happened, he corrected. He had thought about it more than he had thought about almost anything else related to Rozanov's arrival. He had also thought about himself, which was the part he had been least willing to examine.

Shane was the only Asian player in the NHL. This was a fact he carried the way you carried something that had always been there. Just as the background condition of every room he'd ever been in, not a wound or grievance. His mother was Japanese. His father was white and cheerful and largely unaware that his son had grown up navigating a space his father moved through without friction. Shane had been raised in a good house in a good neighborhood with good schools and the kind of stability that came from two parents with government careers and very clear ideas about how to conduct oneself in public. French immersion. No Japanese. By every cultural measure that didn't involve a mirror, he had been raised white.

None of that changed what people saw. The half-jokes. The where-are-you-really-from. The reporters who called him disciplined or precise or surprising with a weight that has nothing to do with hockey. The opposing bench, once or twice, when the game was going badly and someone ran out of better ideas. He was good at not reacting. His mother had taught him that composure was power, and she was right, and he had been performing it for so long he sometimes forgot it was a performance. 

Shane knew exactly what it felt like to be visible in a way you hadn't chosen, and he did not particularly want to introduce someone into that room who was going to make J.J. feel that way, or anyone else. So when he read about Soviet racial ideology he told himself he was thinking about protecting his team. And he was. But he was also thinking about whether Rozanov would walk into the room and recalibrate when he saw the C on Shane's jersey. Whether Shane would see it happen. Whether Rozanov would respect him. He had worked hard for a year to make that C the first thing anyone looked at. He hadn't entirely succeeded. He didn't need a new problem on top of the existing ones.

And Rozanov had not done any of it. He had looked at Shane the same way he looked at everyone. He had not said or done anything to anyone that required Shane to intervene. Shane had thought about all of this from the bench and felt something he couldn't name. Maybe relief. And underneath the relief, something more complicated. He had built an elaborate defense against a threat that had turned out to be completely unneeded. Rozanov arrived and was a different man than the one Shane had constructed in his head. The construction said something about Shane that the arrival couldn't take back.

The question Shane couldn't resolve was why, having discovered that almost everything he'd prepared for was wrong, he had maintained the distance anyway. He had been preparing for a dangerous man and gotten a different one. But then he behaved, for the five weeks they played together, as though the preparation still applied. He had kept his careful captain's distance. He had measured every exchange and kept it short and functional. He had managed what he was feeling and told himself it was professional judgment.

The shower thing started on the second day of practice. Rozanov came off the ice and stripped his gear with total, immodest indifference. No performance, no self-consciousness. He simply existed in his body. The room noticed, Comeau said something that got a laugh, and Shane found something on the far wall that required his complete attention. 

After that he started timing the showers. Early, before the scrimmage fully ended, or late, after most of the room had cleared. Hayden noticed. He didn't say anything. He was waiting for Hayden to say something. It was the loudest conversation they didn't have all season. 

What he was actually afraid of was simple and mortifying: that Rozanov would say something, or look at him, or just exist in the room the way he existed in rooms, and Shane's body would respond in a way he couldn't walk back. That he would be standing eight feet away from his most important player in a communal shower and something would happen that could not be explained as anything except exactly what it was. He was the captain. He managed it by not being there.

The honest version, available to him now in a way it hadn't been in April, was that the professional distance had not preceded the feeling. It had followed it. He had met Rozanov and felt something that frightened him, and had used the caution as cover.

Shane knew what it felt like to be drawn to a woman. He had been drawn to women before. It hadn't lasted, but it could, he was sure. The right person. The right time. To not let his nerves get the better of him. So these feelings about Rozanov and his firm muscles in the shower was just misrouted. A filing error rather than a new category. He didn't want a new category. So he hadn't made one. 

His mother had said as much to him after the season ended, at the restaurant she liked in town. She had ordered for both of them.

"The Rozanov situation," she said, "is going to require more management than anyone in the organization is saying."

"The organization has been careful," Shane said.

"About the political dimension. That's not the same thing." She set down her fork. "He's going to be the most interesting story in the league next season. The first American cities. Every interaction he has with every player on every team is going to be watched." She picked her fork back up. "They're going to be watching you specifically. How you handle him publicly tells a story about the franchise. I'm not saying keep your distance. I'm saying be deliberate. There's a version of closeness that reads as endorsement, which is fine, and a version that reads as something harder to control. We need to keep control of the story. You understand."

Shane said he understood.

He had understood. That had not been the problem. The problem was that he had taken those words and used them to ratify something he had already decided, the way you use a doctor's note to justify a day off you were going to take anyway. His mother had been talking about optics. Shane had heard something more personal and had felt, under the dinner conversation, a wave of something that was mostly relief.

He sat with that on the dock in July. The relief of being given permission to stay at a distance. The fact that he had needed the permission at all.

His mother had a list. It wasn't called a list. It was a folder on the porch table that had grown substantially since last year when he became captain. It was thick with correspondence and notes. Yuna Hollander had been managing the external dimensions of Shane's career since he was nineteen, first informally and then, after the second contract, as an actual professional arrangement with actual billing. Shane had not resisted. She was better at it than he was. She had never once steered him wrong on something that mattered. She had also, over the course of the summer, scheduled him for four things he had not entirely agreed to.

The television spot in Toronto came first. Two days in late June, a camera crew, a jersey, a rink rented at five in the morning. The product was a skate blade brand he'd been with for three years. The spot was fine. He mentioned the four-thirty call time once and his mother looked at him with the expression that indicated she had heard him but would not advocating for changing the schedule, and he went to bed at eight-thirty and got up at four and did the spot.

There was a profile in a magazine he'd never followed closely, which required a phone call with a journalist and a photographer who came to the cottage in July and wanted the shoot on the dock, in natural light. Shane sat in the worn flannel shirt he wore every morning and answered questions about the captaincy and his training regimen and did not answer questions about Ilya Rozanov in any way he hadn't cleared with Beaulieu or his mother.

"He's my teammate," Shane said. "I'm looking forward to seeing what he can do with a full season." The journalist wrote this down. Shane could tell she had hoped for more.

There were two dinners with people his mother wanted him to meet. A sports director from the CBC interested in a documentary project about nontraditional athletes. Shane took that to mean non-white. A broadcast executive interested in Shane's perspective on expanding the league. Shane shook hands and ate the food and was thoughtful and engaged and drove back to the cottage both times feeling like he'd spent the evening in a slightly ill-fitting version of himself.

He didn't say any of this to his mother. There was no version of saying it that didn't make him sound ungrateful. She worked hard, had always worked hard, was doing something she was genuinely good at and that benefited him materially. He was the thing she'd built her second career around. You didn't complain about that.

"The CBC conversation is going to matter someday," she said, after the second dinner. "Not this season, not for a long time. But Theriault won't be behind the bench forever and when that conversation starts you want to be someone they've already been thinking about."

"You're already planning my coaching career," Shane said.

"I'm planning options," she said. "You can choose not to use it. Everyone retires eventually."

This was accurate. He let it go. 

The thing the lake was supposed to do, the thing it had done the two previous summers, and the summer before the captaincy, and every summer since he was old enough to need it, was make whatever he'd brought with him smaller. Quieter. Routable back to a level that didn't require attention. It wasn't working.

He understood why by the fourth week, lying on the dock on a Tuesday with the sun on his face and nothing to do. The Buffalo game kept coming back. Hat trick. The Forum making a sound he hadn't heard it make in years. And Shane across the room afterward, looking at Rozanov with something he was holding back. He could feel the electricity of it, the weight of it, and pressing his lips together and saying nothing. Rozanov had looked at him. Held the look for one beat. Shaken his head slightly, the smallest possible gesture, and gone back to his skates. 

Not even a word. He had been standing in a locker room while a man who had left everything he knew and crossed an ocean scored three goals in front of twenty thousand people, and Shane had looked at him and offered nothing. He had wanted to say something. Do something. Be in his orbit. And he had given him nothing. He had told himself it was correct captaincy. Treating him like any player. Not making it a spectacle.

He was unable to make that version hold. What he could sit with was the simpler wrong. He had been managing a feeling and called it professionalism. He had kept a distance that served himself and framed it as serving the room. He had been the captain. He had not been Rozanov's captain. Those were different things, and he had known the difference at the time and chosen the easier one. He picked up his book. Read three pages. Put it down.

The nights were the worst of it, or the most honest of it, which was the same thing. He ran himself tired enough that sleep should have come easily. Mostly it did. But there were evenings when the cottage was quiet and his parents had gone in and he had showered and lain in the dark of the room he'd slept in since he was nine, and his body was tired and his mind was not, and he was twenty-two years old. With needs.

One night, when he could not quiet his mind, he ran a hand over his length. It started as nothing special, the ordinary animal fact of it, a long day and a quiet house and the restlessness of a body that had been working hard for weeks. He kept his eyes closed. He wasn't thinking about anyone. And then, without any decision being made, he was.

Not a particular moment or scene. Not anything he could have written down. Hazel eyes finding him across the bench, the way a room reorganized itself around where Rozanov was standing in it, the corridor before the Pittsburgh game, the brightness of the home blues under the fluorescent lights, ROZANOV across the back in block letters. The weight of the man, in some way he couldn't articulate, like a pressure in the air. He spilled across his hand, faster than he expected, still thinking about Rozanov's eyes on him. He lay there after, looking at the ceiling, his heart coming down. He felt a flush of embarrassment he could not stop to examine. If he did, it would be his total undoing. He cleaned up, turned onto his side, and went to sleep. In the morning he got up and ran eight miles in the heat and didn't think about it.

He didn't think about it for three days. Then, on the fourth day, sitting on the dock with a book he wasn't reading, he thought about it, and understood that this was the thing that had been making the lake not work. Not the season. Not the captaincy. Not the missed moments in the locker room, although those were real. This. He picked up the book. He read four pages this time. He put it down. He could not keep avoiding the thoughts, not for an entire season.

Hayden came for a long weekend in July. He arrived with beer and a bad sunburn from a charity golf event and they took the canoe out and covered most of the lake without saying much for two hours. Hayden was good at that. He could sustain a silence with intent, without it feeling like something that needed filling. They beached the canoe at the far end and ate sandwiches and watched a heron stand in the shallows.

They sat for a while. Hayden pulled at the grass with one hand, not going anywhere in particular with it. "I'm going to ask Jackie to marry me," he said. "Before camp."

Shane looked at him. "You've known her what, six months?"

"About that."

"Hayden."

"I know what you're going to say." He didn't sound troubled by it. "But she's it. I knew pretty quickly." He turned a flat stone over in his palm. "You've met her. Tell me I'm wrong."

Shane liked Jackie. She was not what you expected, standing next to Hayden in a bar. "I can't tell you you're wrong," he said.

"Right." Hayden threw the stone. It skipped twice and sank. "She knows it's coming. We both know. I'm just making it official. You're supposed to be happy for me. I'm getting married!"

"Sorry, right. Congratulations. I'm happy for you," Shane said. And he was. He was happy for Hayden.

Shane looked at the lake. His best friend was getting engaged to someone he'd met less than a year ago. He understood it, actually. It was short but Jackie was not a person you needed a long time to understand. What he understood less clearly was the comparison it drew. Not to where he was now, which was fine, but to why he was there. He had ended things with Lisa a year ago on this same dock, more or less, and he had done it with a cruelty that still sat on him when he let himself look at it. Used the Olympics as the reason. She had cried quietly into her sweater and left. He had felt like someone who had cut the last thing tethering him to a life he'd been performing, which was accurate and did not make it better.

Shane thought about the night in the car. The drive back from the bar on Crescent Street after the Admirals game, two blocks, the city quiet. Ilya had turned and asked, with the elaborateness of someone who had been holding the question for a while, you have a girl? Shane had said no, flat, not explaining. He hadn't asked Ilya the same. 

He had been looking at it from one angle all summer. He looked at it from the other one now.

Ilya had left a country. He had left everything in it. A man in that system did not live alone. He had people. He had a life, structured and surveilled but real, with relationships in it that were real.

Hockey players got married young. It was practically a professional requirement. The league expected it, the organisations encouraged it, the culture read a wife as evidence of stability and character. Kids followed shortly after, nearly always. Nearly all his teammates had done it before twenty-five. Hayden was going to do it at twenty-three after less than a year, which was extreme even by those standards and somehow made complete sense when you'd met Jackie.

Ilya was twenty-two now, Shane was pretty sure. He had been the best hockey player in the Soviet Union since he was seventeen. In that system there would have been a girl. The state liked its athletes settled. A suitable woman, a suitable family, something that read as stable. There would have been someone. He left her. Or left the situation that contained her, which was close to the same thing. When Ilya had asked about his theoretical girl, Shane hadn't returned the question. It was possible there was an answer in there that Ilya had decided not to give, in a car, at night, to someone he'd known for three weeks. Shane had no way to know. He hadn't asked. He didn't know if Ilya had met anyone over the summer. Shane realized he wanted to know. He wanted to ask. 

"You should find someone," Hayden said. Not unkindly.

"I know."

"Not this summer, clearly."

"I know," Shane said.

Hayden lay back down. The heron had not moved. "You know, Jackie has this friend–"

"I didn't handle Rozanov right," Shane said, abruptly changing topic.

Hayden opened one eye.

"The weeks he was with us. I kept the captain distance." Shane said it at the lake rather than at Hayden. "He was trying to reach something and I kept it professional."

Hayden was quiet for a moment. "You were also figuring out how to captain him. That's not nothing. He came in with a completely different idea of what a captain even is."

"I know." Shane picked at the grass. "I'd built this whole picture of who he was going to be. Before he arrived. Most of it was wrong."

"Most of it," Hayden said.

"Most of it," Shane said.

Hayden seemed to decide this was a complete answer. He looked at the heron for a while. "So fix it in September."

"I'm going to."

"Good." After a while: "You're hard on yourself."

Shane didn't say anything.

"Neutrally," Hayden said. "Mostly it's useful. Just noting it."

Shane looked at the lake. He was thinking about the bench in Game 1 of the playoffs. The third period, the Metros two goals up, Rozanov coming off a shift that had made the building go briefly quiet in the way only a certain type of play could, and Shane reaching over without thinking and knocking his glove against Rozanov's. The brief look Rozanov had given him. The second and a half before Shane looked back at the ice.

He had put that in a drawer without looking at it. It had been in the drawer all summer.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

They paddled back in the late afternoon, the light going gold, the cottage visible from the far end as a small pale shape against the trees. Shane's arms were tired. It was good to have something to be tired from.

The Metros called in late July. Beaulieu's assistant, training camp roster, availability dates, logistical notes about the new rookies. At the end she said, "One more thing. We're putting together a brief media package for the start of camp. First full season with Rozanov, travel documents in order. Theriault wants you involved in the framing. Nothing formal. Fifteen minute phone call with Beaulieu whenever you're available. There will be some media, probably."

"Next Thursday?" Shane said.

He was on the porch. His mother inside, audible through the screen door. His father back in Ottawa to catch up on some work. Beaulieu picked up on the first ring, which was unusual. He must have already opened his folder.

"How's the summer," he said. Not quite a question.

"Good. Quiet."

"Good." The word had no warmth in it. "We're framing the start of camp around normalisation. Rozanov as a Metro. Not a Soviet, not a defector, not a diplomatic event. We've got him settled now. He travels everywhere the team goes. His English is pretty good. He's making friends, handling himself now. Good enough we let the translator and both assistants go. He can talk to the media on his own. The story is a team story now, and we need it to read that way from day one."

"Understood," Shane said.

"The ownership group has been patient," Beaulieu said. The word patient sat in the sentence with a weight that comes from choosing carefully. "The acquisition cost was considerable. The political cost was considerable. We need the return on that investment to be visible. Quickly."

Shane said nothing.

"What I mean," Beaulieu continued, "is that Rozanov arrived in March with a few weeks of practice and four home games and a first-round exit. That is not the return anyone had in mind." A pause. "This season cannot look like that season. His experience in the room, his standing on the team, the way the rest of the league sees him when they play you. All of that starts in September, in training camp, on the first day. It starts with how the captain sets the tone."

"I understand what the captain's job is," Shane said.

"I know you do." Another pause, not a silence so much as a held position. "I'm saying it anyway. Because the people I answer to are going to be watching September very carefully, and they have long memories for what things looked like in March and April."

Shane looked at the lake. A boat was crossing the far end, moving slowly, trailing a white line. 

"He's going to be fine," he said. "He was always going to be fine. March was a compressed situation."

"March was a compressed situation," Beaulieu agreed. "And he handled it better than anyone expected and played the best hockey anyone in this organisation has ever seen in person. Which is exactly why there is now considerably more pressure attached to his second impression than there was to his first." He let that land. "He's not like he was in March. He asks about training camp. Specifically line combinations. Specifically whether his place on the first line is guaranteed or whether Theriault is going to run evaluation."

"Theriault will want to run his own read before he makes anything permanent. That's standard."

"Standard," Beaulieu said. "Yes. I would suggest, when you speak to him, you find a way to communicate that without making him feel like he is on trial. He is not a man who responds well to feeling like he is on trial."

"Has he said that?"

"He hasn't said anything. That is how I know." A brief pause. "He is also not someone with a great deal of patience for things that feel political when he considers them hockey questions. Managing the line between those two things is going to be part of your job this year."

"It was part of my job last year."

"Last year he was here for five weeks." Beaulieu's voice was even, not unkind, just exact. "This year is different. Everything this year is different. I need you to understand that the organisation is counting on the captain's relationship with this player to be one of the stable elements. If it isn't stable, other things become very unstable very quickly, and those things have dollar amounts attached to them that I would rather not say out loud on a telephone."

Shane looked at the white line on the lake. It was smoothing itself out. "It'll be stable," he said.

"Good." Beaulieu closed the folder, audibly. "How's the shoulder?"

"Fine."

"Good." He confirmed the media call details, said goodbye, hung up.

Shane sat with the phone in his lap. The boat had reached the other shore. His mother came through the screen door with iced tea and sat in the other chair. She handed him one without asking. They looked at the lake.

"Beaulieu?" she said.

"Training camp logistics."

"Rozanov."

It wasn't a question. He said yes anyway. She held her glass in both hands. "He performed well in the playoffs."

"He was the best player on the ice in Games 1 and 2. We still lost Games 3 and 4 without him."

"The road games."

"He couldn't travel."

"He can now?" Shane nodded in response. "That changes a great deal."

"I know."

"The media interest is going to be significant. The first American cities." She turned her glass slowly. "You're going to need to be thoughtful. Not at a distance. Up close."

"We already talked about this."

"I'm saying it again because it still applies. Keeping it professional while he was settling in was probably the right call for the first few weeks. This season is different. A teammate who remains isolated because the captain kept him at arm's length is a story too."

Shane looked at the lake.

"So the distance narrows," she said. "But in ways you control." She finished her tea and went inside. He stayed on the porch. The sun was going down behind the tree line and the lake had turned from blue to something more complicated, gray at the edges, still bright in the middle.

He had been building a version of how he would be Rozanov's captain. In the evenings on the dock, in the mornings on the runs. How to give him authority on the ice, how to involve him in the room without forcing it, how to be close in ways that read correctly. The prepared posture, the calibrated distance, designed to look like the thing he had not managed in the spring. He sat with the honest version for a moment. The honest version was that he was going to get to training camp and see Rozanov for the first time since May and he had very little idea what would happen to the prepared version when they finally made contact. Five weeks and a summer sitting by a lake and he had not managed to close the drawer where he kept those feelings.

He was not going to open the new category. He was going to correct the professional wrong. Those were different and he was capable of the second one.

He picked up his book. Read less than a page. Put it down. He was not going to be finishing it this summer.

His father came home late, headlights through the trees, the sound of the car door. He stretched, looked at the sky, looked toward the porch, raised a hand.

"Good drive?" Shane called.

"Long. Construction past Lachute. You want something to eat? I stopped at that place in town."

"Sure."

They ate on the porch, his mother with her folder, his father telling a story about a colleague that didn't seem to have a point. The lake went dark. The bugs came out. His father fell asleep twenty minutes after they finished, head tilted, breathing audible. His mother turned a page. Shane watched the dark water.

His father woke up briefly and looked at him.

"You doing okay?"

"Yeah," Shane said. David put a hand on the back of his neck, just the weight of it, no words, and went inside. His mother followed. Shane stayed until the air went cold.

He packed on the last morning of August while his mother sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and the folder, cross-referencing something, adding a note in the margin. His father was already outside. Shane could hear him somewhere around the side of the house, the familiar sound of a tool against wood.

"There's a lunch in October," his mother said, without looking up. "The broadcast partner. I've penciled you in."

"I'll make it work," Shane said.

She looked up then. Assessed him the way she had when he pulled in three months ago. Whatever she found, she seemed to decide it was sufficient.

"Good luck," she said. "Call me after the first skate."

He loaded the car. His father appeared from around the side of the house when he heard the trunk close, wiping his hands on a rag, and they shook hands the way they'd been shaking hands since Shane was tall enough for it to make sense.

"You'll be fine," his father said.

"I know," Shane said.

David nodded, with the expression of someone who had been watching his son be somewhere else for three months and had decided not to make anything of it, not because it didn't matter, but because some things worked themselves out on their own schedule and pushing didn't help.

Shane got in the car.

The track was the same under his tires, the same sound, the same pleasure of it going the other direction. He reached the main road and turned south. The highway, the city, the season. Training camp coming soon. The first skate, the first time the room assembled itself around him and the C on his jersey and whatever he was going to make of it.

He drove into the morning with his hands steady on the wheel, the country opening out around him. He had a prepared version of how this was going to go, and he knew the prepared version was going to last about as long as it took for Rozanov to look at him, and he was going anyway.

He made the phone call from his kitchen. He had been thinking about when to make the call for days. He realized he didn't know enough about Rozanov to know when a good time to call would be, so he made the call before he could think about it any more. 

It rang four times. Then: "Yes."

The voice was different. Fuller. The English landed with more weight, more stability than it had in May, less assembled and more inhabited.

"Hi, Rozanov? It's Hollander. From the team." God, why did he sound so fucking stupid?

A beat. "I know who you are Hollander." Shane could hear his smirk. He wished he could see it.

Shane had prepared remarks and they left him completely. "How's the summer?"

"Good. Better than spring."

"Your English is better."

"Madame Tremblay does not like excuses." Something underneath it, not quite a joke but moving that direction. "You call for reason, or just to check I am not dead?"

"Captain's skate," Shane said. "Thursday morning. Nine thirty at the practice rink. It's not mandatory. Just the veterans getting on the ice before camp. But I thought you should be there."

A silence that was considering rather than careful.

"I am not captain," Ilya said.

"No. But you're going to be on this team for a long time and those are the guys you need to know." Shane stopped. Started again. "You're our teammate. We need to treat you like it."

"Okay," Ilya said. Even the way he said it had changed — less clipped, more room in it. Ooo-key.

"Nine thirty," Shane said.

"I will be there at nine."

Of course he would. "Good," Shane said.

He hung up and sat with the phone for a while, looking out at his dark neighborhood through the kitchen window. Then he went to bed.

Shane got there at eight-fifty, laced up in the quiet of the locker room, and was reaching for his helmet when the door opened. Ilya walked in.

Shane had been constructing a mental version of this reunion all summer. Measured, the corrected distance, the prepared captain. He had approximately three seconds of it before the preparation became irrelevant.

He wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn't that. The man who walked through the door was wearing a jacket the color of a pine forest, fitted at the shoulders and waist in a way that had nothing to do with any clothing Shane had ever seen on a hockey player. Dark trousers. Clean boots. His hair was different. Gone was the close Soviet crop, replaced by something longer on top, swept back with the kind of intention that required a barber with opinions. He looked good. Healthier, more comfortable. 

He saw Shane and stopped. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"You said nine thirty," Ilya said.

"I did," Shane said.

"It is nine-oh-three."

"I'm aware."

Ilya set his bag down and started unpacking with the ease of someone who had been in locker rooms since before he could form long-term memories. The others arrived over the next twenty minutes. Hayden with his coffee, J.J. already moving like he'd been awake for hours, Gagnon, in conversation with Drapeau. Comeau coming in loud. Thibault. Lachance. Fleury.

Shane was mostly dressed by the time Ilya shrugged off the jacket. He folded it carefully, set it across the top of his bag, and pulled his shirt over his head in one motion, and Shane's peripheral vision did something he immediately told it to stop doing.

Something had happened over the summer to Rozanov. Something in his body that was not subtle. In March he had been formidably built. Shane had spent considerable effort not looking at that directly through aggressive shower-schedule management. What was standing across the locker room now was something the spring had only suggested was possible. He had packed on more muscle and was enormous. The shoulders broader, the chest fuller, the kind of change that came from four months of training with no Soviet-era constraints on how to do it. He moved through changing into his practice gear with the same total indifference to his own body that he'd had in March. No performance, no awareness of the room, which made it considerably worse. 

Hayden appeared at Shane's elbow, ostensibly looking for his gloves. "You're doing the thing," he said, very quietly, into the middle distance.

"I'm not doing anything," Shane said.

Hayden found his gloves and left without further comment, which was its own kind of comment. Shane went to the ice.

The skate started loose and found its structure quickly after. Hayden organized a three-on-three without anyone asking him to. Shane ended up against Ilya in the third rotation and discovered, almost immediately, that whatever he had been expecting, it was not this.

Ilya had always been precise on the ice. What was different now was the ease underneath it. In the spring there had been something coiled in his game. Contained, careful, the posture of constantly running calculations. Now the calculations were faster or older or simply his, and what was left was play. He moved through the three-on-three with a fluency that was almost offensive, not showing off, simply doing exactly what the situation called for at the speed it called for, looking effortless.

He scored twice on Shane's side. The second time, Shane went for the poke check a half-second early and Ilya simply waited him out. Stood completely still until Shane committed, then went around him so cleanly that J.J. started laughing from the other end of the ice.

Ilya stopped beside Shane, not breathing hard. "You telegraph," he said.

"I know," Shane said.

"Every time. Same shoulder. You drop it before you move." He said it with the flat certainty of someone who had been sitting on this information for a while. "In Pittsburgh I see it game one. I wait all summer to tell you."

"You waited all summer."

"I was being professional."

Shane looked at him. "That makes one of us."

Ilya's expression did something. Not quite a smile, but something that understood it was supposed to be one. "I also have notes on your weak backhand," he said. "But we have camp for this. I do not want to overwhelm now."

"Very considerate," Shane said.

"I am very considerate." He pushed off, already moving. "I will start with the shoulder. We work up from there."

Shane watched him go for a moment. Then Hayden hit him in the shoulder with a glove from behind. "Can we play hockey now," he said, already skating past.

The room emptied gradually after things petered out. Ones and twos, nobody making a formal departure, until it was just Shane and Ilya, the room suddenly a different size than it had been with fourteen people in it. 

Shane had managed this in the spring through careful logistics. He was the captain. He was a professional. He had spent the entire summer arriving at a position of clarity, and he was going to maintain it. He picked up his towel and went to the showers.

The shower room had six heads along one wall. Shane took the far left, turned it to cold enough to be useful. The rink smell hit first, sharper here where the steam hadn't entirely won against it. He stood under it with his eyes closed and his mind carefully blank. He heard the door. He did not turn around.

He heard the shower two heads down come on, the pipes giving their brief complaint before the pressure settled.

Shane looked at the wall. Institutional concrete, grout lines, nothing useful. He kept his eyes on it. The tile amplified everything. The hiss of the water, the hollow echo of the room, the way sound moved differently when there were two showers running instead of one. He was an adult. He was a professional. He had been in communal showers since he was fifteen and this was not going to be a thing.

Then Ilya said, without preamble, "You played well today."

His voice came off the tile and arrived from three directions at once. Shane looked over before he'd decided to.

This was a mistake.

Ilya was standing under the water with his head back and his eyes closed, water running down his chest and Shane's eyes moved before his brain caught up with what they were doing. He stood there for one terrible second in which several things became simultaneously and irrevocably clear. The cold water was not doing its job. There was heat moving through him that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, and he stood there taking all of it in from eight feet away, wanting in a way that was not ambiguous and could not be filed anywhere useful.

"Hollander," came Ilya's voice. 

Shane turned off his shower in one harsh motion. Not because he was finished and definitely not because something in him was approximately thirty seconds from making itself known in a way that could not be walked back from. He wrapped his towel around his waist facing the wall, hands steady through an act of will, and walked to the door at a pace that was as close to normal as he could manage. He went back to his stall and sat down and pressed the heels of his hands into his thighs and looked at the floor and breathed.

"Your poke check," Ilya called through the doorway. His voice came off the corridor tile the same way, arriving from everywhere. "You go too early. Every time."

"Thanks," Shane said. Level. An achievement.

From the showers, after a pause: "Cold water not so cold today."

It was delivered without inflection. It could have been about the building's plumbing. Shane stared at the floor and said nothing. The back of his neck was hot.

"I will mention the poke check again," Ilya said. "Until it is fixed."

Shane sat at his bench, willing his growing erection to go away. He understood, with the clarity of someone who has been carefully not-knowing something for months and has just definitively known it, that the summer had resolved nothing. The summer had been a waiting room. He breathed through it and waited for his body to reach a decision he could live with, and eventually managed it.

He was still sitting there when Ilya's shower went off.

Ilya dressed with the ease he brought to everything. Beaulieu appeared in the doorway.

He looked at Ilya. Then at Shane. "Hollander. Good skate." Then, "Rozanov. You have a minute."

Not a question. Ilya pulled the jacket back on. It looked exactly as good as it had two hours ago, which struck Shane as faintly unreasonable, and he followed Beaulieu out without looking back. Shane should have left. He tied his shoes slowly. The rink's corridors did what they sometimes did, channeling sound in ways the building hadn't intended. There were rarely any secrets here.

Beaulieu's voice was too controlled to reach him. What came through were fragments of Ilya's.

"— the apartment. It was right then. Not now —"

Beaulieu, inaudible.

"No, not more money. I ask to live where I want —"

A longer stretch of Beaulieu. Whatever it was, it produced a silence from Ilya that carried weight.

"Okay," Ilya said finally. It didn't sound like concession. It sounded like a position being held for later.

Shane picked up his bag and went out into the morning. He stood on the pavement for a moment in the cold air. The apartment. He didn't know what Ilya's place looked like, had never been there, but he understood without needing the details that a man who had spent the summer learning a city would have reached the point of wanting somewhere that was his. Shane had not thought about this. He had been thinking about himself all summer and he had not thought about this. He walked to his car. He had a Montreal house to get back to. His own place, chosen by him, full of his own things, which he had taken entirely for granted until approximately right now.

He drove through the city and parked and let himself in and set his bag down in the hallway. The house was quiet, end-of-summer light coming through the back windows. He should eat something. He should check his messages.

Instead he went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed and lasted about thirty seconds before he lay back and closed his eyes, and Rozanov was there immediately. Not constructed, not searched for. It was there, the way he'd looked in the shower with the water running down him, the size of his shoulders, the total unselfconsciousness of him, and Shane's hand moved and he didn't try to redirect it or file it anywhere or call it something else. He let it be exactly what it was. He thought about Ilya's eyes when he'd said I was being professional, the corners of his mouth, the weight of him in a room, what it had felt like to stand eight feet away and not be able to look away. He thought about the glove-knock on the bench in Game 1 and the second and a half that followed and all the things he had put in the drawer without looking at them, and he didn't look away from any of it this time, and when he came it moved through him in a long slow wave that left him on his back in the afternoon light with his arm over his eyes and no remaining ground on which to pretend he didn't know what this was.

He lay there for a while. Then he got up, cleaned himself up, went downstairs, and ate something standing at the kitchen counter. Only a few more days until camp. A team to captain, a line to set, a wrong to correct, and a drawer that was not going to close. He was going to do all of it anyway.

Chapter End Notes

Is the drawer a metaphor for the closet? Of course. It mirrors Ilya's file he's making on Shane. I am also so aware that I was being a big fucking tease with that shower scene. Sorry, not sorry.

Here's your research notes, fellow nerds.

As of this minute, the youngest NHL captain ever was 19 (Gabe Landeskog). Being 21 wasn't unprecedented for the time, but would be quite young still. The Gainey that Shane references is Bob Gainey. He was the Canadiens' captain and retired in 1989, so I just pushed that up a year. And I know the Metros aren't the Habs but they are a very helpful inspiration and Gainey is a legend so it makes sense. Also having a long-term beloved captain leave and replacing him with a very new but very talented player tracks.

The USSR's official anti-racist position was real and extensively documented. Soviet propaganda regularly used photographs of Jim Crow America to communicate that segregation was the result of capitalist failings, not like the noble Soviet Union. This is a fascinating subject and there is a WEALTH of knowledge there that I cannot do justice. As to whether this ideology translated into the lived attitudes of individual Soviet citizens is a different and more complicated question, but on paper, they were shockingly progressive in this way. There were zero real-life visibly Asian players in 1988. Shane would have been the only one.

Let's talk about marriage! The USSR used families as leverage, frequently... as seen in Ilya's mysterious phone call. Encouraging players to marry young and have kids helped maintain a "family first" image and also ensured compliance. Dark, but there's precedent there. In 1989, Slava Fetisov, along with seven other Soviet players, was permitted to travel to the United States to play hockey. Allowed to go! Didn't defect! His story will come into play later, including how 99% of his salary had to be surrendered to the Soviet government (fucking wild). But the important part here is that he had been trying to defect to the United States since 1978, but ultimately did not because of threats to his wife and daughter. They were not permitted to go to the US with him, presumably to get him to return to Moscow at the end of the season.

What about in Canada? In Junior Hockey, ages 16-20, hockey players are often billeted in small towns with host families. This put them in tight-knit communities where relationship formation was pretty accelerated. The communities that produced most NHL players in the 1980s, which were primarily rural communities in Quebec and Ontario, were places where marrying young and having 2-3 kids before age 25 was simply the norm, and hockey players arriving in the NHL with girlfriends or fiancées from home was standard. What Hayden is doing isn't weird. Shane being young, rich, hot, and somehow single is the weird thing.

Comments? Thoughts? Thanks so much for all of you who keep reading and commenting and recommending. You make this thing a joy to write.

Chapter 17: Composure

Chapter Summary

An envelope arrives with six photographs. Ilya files this information the way he files everything, carefully, without letting it change his face. Shane Hollander is also becoming a problem he does not quite know how to solve.

Chapter Notes

Hello my sunshines. Another surprise drop for you. Another circumstance of the chapter getting so long it must be split, and I could not see any reason to delay putting it out. It's starting to be a trend. It’s the other half of Chapter 15, with that delicious Shane interlude we had in 16 stuck in the middle.

Please don't get used to it! We're starting to run out of the chapters that were (mostly) pre-written.

Composure (noun)

1. The state of being calm and in control of oneself.

2. What you maintain when the alternative is not available to you.

Example: "He finished taping and set the stick down and did not look at anyone's face, because the floor was the right place to look, and because he had been trained since he was twelve years old to keep his face arranged." — September, 1988

The envelope arrived four days after Vadim left, brought up by the building manager in the early afternoon. No return address. Ilya set it on the kitchen table and looked at it for a moment before opening it. Inside were six photographs, printed on glossy paper, no note.

His father first. Sitting by the window in the Moscow apartment, in the wool sweater Ilya had bought him two winters ago, looking at nothing. His eyes were glazed over in a way that Ilya could not tell was from the progression of his disease or drugs. Both, perhaps. The photograph had been taken from the building across the street. You could see the texture of the window frame.

The second. Alexei outside his building, turning a key in the lock, not looking at the camera. The photograph was close. Whoever had taken it had been standing on the same pavement.

Svetlana on a street he recognised, carrying groceries, her head down against the wind. It was summer in the photo. Recent. She looked thinner, her cheeks more gaunt.

Sasha at a tram stop. He looked tired. More worn in some way. He was reading something and his shoulders were up against the cold and he did not know the photograph was being taken. How did they know to find Sasha? What else did they know?

Maks. Maks who had bought him the few precious minutes he needed to disappear. He was standing outside what looked like a training facility, with a gear bag over one shoulder. He wasn't in Moscow. Somewhere more barren. He had a scar stretching down one side of his face from his hairline to the corner of his mouth, narrowly missing his eye. That hadn't been there in February. Red, taut, new. 

He went through all five of these slowly. He set each one on the table face-up and looked at them in a row and did not let himself rush. The message would have been obvious from even just one photo. We know who they are. We know where they are. We are still close enough to touch them. You have not gotten away cleanly.

He had known this was a risk. He had understood it since he got into the gray sedan in the loading dock and watched the Saddledome's lights shrink in the rear window. He had built no fantasy in which his departure had no consequences for the people he left behind. He had tried to give them protection of some kind. Money. Permission to denounce him. Deniability. He had known it was not enough. He had gone anyway, because staying was not survivable either, and you made the choice that gave you the best odds and you lived with it when it was done. He knew this. He had known it for months. The knowing and sitting across from five photographs of people he loved were not the same experience. Maks especially. He barely knew Maks. But Maks was not someone he left behind by accident or by unfortunate circumstance. Maks was someone he had used, and Maks was the one paying for that.

But there was a sixth photograph.

Himself. On a street he recognised as being two blocks from the bar in the east end. He was wearing the leather jacket, the one he had bought on Saint-Laurent and walked out of the store wearing on that day in June. Beside him, Vadim, mid-sentence, gesturing at something ahead of them. Vadim's arm was around Ilya's shoulders, easy and thoughtless, the way you put your arm around someone when you had been spending enough evenings together that the gesture no longer required a decision. His collar was unbuttoned, askew. Neither of them were looking at the camera. Neither of them had known the camera was there. And Ilya. Ilya was looking at Vadim with nothing short of undignified lust in his eyes. Ilya remembered this day. They had gone to Vadim's apartment and Vadim had sucked his cock until Ilya had shouted his name and his vision had gone blurry. 

Ilya sat with this photograph for longer than the others. The Moscow photographs said we can reach the people you left behind. This one said something different. It said we are already here. In your city, on your street, close enough that we could have touched your shoulder instead of just photographing it. The ocean was not as wide as he thought.

It also said, without saying it, we know about this. We have it. We could use it.

He understood what that meant for himself. He sat for a while longer and then understood what it meant for Vadim, whose name was in the Metros' files, who had worked for a Canadian government-adjacent organisation and spoken Russian and spent three months in Ilya's apartment several evenings a week. Vadim was not untouchable. The photograph made Ilya a liability to Vadim. Which was possibly the point.

He thought about calling Vadim. He thought about what that call would contain and what it would do. If the line was monitored, it confirmed everything the photograph was holding over them. If it wasn't, it gave Vadim information he couldn't act on from Ottawa, information that would only sit in him and generate fear he couldn't use. Ilya knew what information did to a man. He had spent his life managing what he knew and when he said it and to whom. Calling Vadim did nothing except discharge his own need to do something, which was not a good enough reason.

He did not call.

He picked up all six photographs and put them inside the dictionary and closed the cover.

He put the dictionary on the shelf and stood there for a moment. The noise was loud. Not the volume from February, maybe, but present, and finding all the space Vadim had been occupying for three months and filling it completely, leaving no gaps. He stood in the kitchen and let it run and did not try to quiet it, because there was nothing available tonight to quiet it with.

He put on the leather jacket. He picked up the car keys from the hook by the door. He went downstairs and got in the car and drove for an hour, the city opening up around him in the dark, the grid of it that he now knew street by street, the river appearing and disappearing as he moved through the east end, the mountain dark against the sky to the west. Nobody was following him. Or if they were, they were very good at it, and there was nothing he could do about that either.

He drove home. He parked on the street and sat for a moment with the engine off. He went inside. He opened the grammar book and worked through the irregular verbs until his eyes stopped tracking the page. Then he went to bed.

The phone call came a week later.

He had been picking up differently since the first phone call, not slowly, not with any hesitation anyone could observe, but with the attention he had learned in the barracks when rooms had ears. Arranged, ready, giving nothing away until he knew what he was dealing with. Showing no weakness. No chance that they could see the duress was getting to him. 

The voice spoke Russian, beginning before Ilya had the chance to say hello. Not the Russian of a man who had learned it at university. The Russian of Moscow, of somewhere administrative and cold, of a man who had grown up inside the same system Ilya had grown up inside and knew exactly what it required of you.

"Rozanov."

"Yes," Ilya said.

"You are well."

It was not a question. Ilya said nothing.

"Your father is also well." A pause, measured and deliberate, the kind of pause that had been practiced for maximum effect. "He had a good day yesterday. He was asking about you. He wonders when you are coming home from practice."

Ilya's hand was flat on the table. He watched it.

"What do you think he would say," the voice said. "If he could remember what you have done?"

The line went quiet. He could hear the slight compression of an open connection, the distance of it, and then the click of a receiver being replaced somewhere on the other side of an ocean.

He held the handset for a moment. Set it back in its cradle. Sat with his hand flat on the table and the kitchen doing its ordinary things around him, the refrigerator cycling, the street noise from below, the September afternoon continuing without reference to what had just happened in it.

He had known this was coming. He had known it since the photographs. He had known it, in a broader sense, since February, since the gray sedan, since the moment he understood that the cost of leaving was not a one-time payment. He had known it, and knowing it had not made the sound of his father's name in that voice any easier to hold. He sat at the table. The dictionary on the shelf. The traffic on the street outside. His father in Moscow, having a good day, asking for him by name.

The phone rang again. Fuck.

He arranged his voice and picked up.

"Yes?"

"Rozanov? It's Hollander."

The shift took a moment to complete. He was still running the other call, the check for accent, for what came next, parsing the silence for what was underneath it, and then it resolved, Shane, talking about Thursday morning, nine-thirty, the practice rink, and Ilya's brain arrived two sentences late.

"Sorry," Ilya said. "Say it again, please."

"Captain's skate. Thursday, nine-thirty at the practice rink. It's not mandatory. Just the veterans getting on the ice before camp. I thought you should be there."

Ilya looked at the window. The street below was doing its ordinary afternoon things, completely indifferent. "I am not captain."

"No. But you're going to be on this team for a long time and those are the guys you need to know." Something in Shane's voice that was careful and genuine at once. "You're our teammate. We need to treat you like it."

"Okay," Ilya said.

"Nine-thirty," Shane said.

"I will be there at nine."

He could almost hear Shane deciding not to comment on that. "Good," Shane said, and hung up.

Ilya put the handset back and stood in the kitchen. The dictionary on the shelf. His father asking for him by name, which was not always the case. Shane Hollander's voice, which was not either of those things and could not be filed in the same category as either of those things, and yet occupied the same room, the same hour, the same kitchen, arriving minutes apart on the same phone. He stood in the middle of it for a moment before he put it away and went to make dinner.

He arrived at nine, as promised. Shane was already there, which Ilya had expected. Ilya had worn clothes that made him feel confident, in colors that he liked. He felt Shane's eyes on him when he walked in, that quick slide of attention before Shane looked away, and the intensity of that attention.

What followed on the ice he filed under a separate category. He had been building this category since May, and it was well-organized by now. The three-on-three. The poke check Shane had been carrying since Pittsburgh game one, Shane's shoulder dropping before he moved. The second goal, where he simply waited Shane out, stood completely still until Shane committed and then went around him so cleanly that J.J. started laughing from the other end.

You telegraph, he had told him. Every time. Same shoulder. In Pittsburgh I see it game one. I wait all summer to tell you. The sentence had come out more fluently than he expected, and Shane's surprise at this was also filed.

The shower he was going to put in a different file entirely. Somewhere without a name or a location and therefore not findable during any kind of search. Hollander had already been in the shower when Ilya came in through the door. Ilya chose the shower two heads down, turning it to colder than he typically would. 

Ilya was reaching for the soap and his eyes moved before his brain had anything to say about it, and then he was looking at Shane Hollander standing under the water with his head back and his eyes closed. Hollander had been avoiding the showers. Ilya wondered for a moment if it was because of some…deformity. Some embarrassment he wanted hidden. But Ilya didn't see anything. He knew it was bad form to look, especially with such scrutiny, but he looked anyway. Smooth hard muscle, not as large or defined as his own. Not much hair besides on his head, almost like a swimmer. He was sure that Hollander's body would feel solid and strong under his hands. The freckles went further than he had realized, across the shoulders, across the chest. The way his throat moved when he swallowed. Eight feet away, completely unaware of being looked at, and Ilya's body had opinions about this that had been accumulating for years if he was being honest with himself and which surfaced all at once in a way he had very little time to manage.

He thought about the sixth photograph. The Montreal street, blocks away from the bar. Vadim's arm easy around his shoulders, neither of them looking at the camera because neither of them had known the camera was there. The implication of that image sitting in someone's hands. 

"You played well today," Ilya said. 

Hollander looked at him, briefly, so briefly. Ilya saw the panic in his eyes, the quick downward flicker. Hollander was getting hard. Before Ilya had a chance to say anything, to do anything, Hollander left the room hastily. Ilya could hear him, breathing hard in the lockers. 

Ilya kept speaking to him, trying to bridge the gap Hollander was creating. Your poke check, he called, Ilya's own voice echoing back to him, Cold water not so cold today.

He knew why he had said it. Now being alone, he let himself think about it. Not because he had decided to. Because there was nothing and no one in the room to stop it and his body had been waiting and Hollander wasn't going to come in and see him.

He imagined Hollander against the concrete wall. That was the first image, immediate and clear in his mind. The resistance of his body as Ilya pushed him against the wall. Would Hollander like that? To be handled? His fingers in Hollander's wet hair and the freckles and the jaw and all of it available at once, eight feet of distance collapsed to nothing. The noise in his head going completely quiet. Hollander could make the noise go quiet. He sat with it for as long as he was going to sit with it, which was not very long, because it was not useful and it was not safe and there was a photograph in the dictionary at home and Ilya knew the geography of what was safe and what was not. Ilya forced the thoughts from his mind, with far too much difficulty.

Beaulieu was in the corridor outside the equipment room with a coffee and the expression that said he had already had several difficult conversations that morning and was prepared for several more.

"Apartment," Ilya said. "I want to move."

Beaulieu looked at him. "Something wrong with the current one?"

"No." He had decided beforehand what he was going to say, direct, because he did not have enough English for anything else, and because direct had the advantage of being true, up to a point. "I want something different. Smaller building. Quieter street. Closer to the rink."

"You've been in that apartment six months."

"Yes."

"You're settled there."

"I want to move," Ilya said.

"I suppose I'm just not understanding why. Did something happen?" Yes, they can call me and send me photographs and I do not want them to be there.

"No, no. The apartment, it was right then. Not now. Now I am looking for somewhere that I like. Not chosen for me."

Beaulieu studied him with the flat assessment he had been using since the plane out of Calgary. Something moved behind his expression, a man reading what he could and arriving at a conclusion that Ilya could see forming and could not quite correct without saying more than he intended to say. A settled player asserting a preference. A man making himself at home. A good sign.

"Is this about money? We are not paying you more." 

"No, not more money. I ask to live where I want. Where I choose. I will pay. I do not know how to get a new one."

"I'll look into it," Beaulieu said. Not no.

"Thank you," Ilya said, and went back to the ice.

September felt more austere, holding the promise of autumn, a new hockey season. He stood at his window with his coffee and watched the light slide across the street and understood, with the clarity of having studied the city for six months, that this was what Montreal looked like when it was about to be serious. School back in session. People heading back to work. The carefree days of summer gone.

He was ready for serious. Training camp was held at a secondary rink in LaSalle. He arrived early each morning. He had arrived early every morning since April and saw no reason to stop now. Ice, he knew everywhere, but this ice was starting to feel less like a foreign language and more like a language he had spoken before in a different accent.

His English was passable. He knew this. Madame Tremblay had been thorough and the summer had been long. He could follow the systems meetings now, could hear the rhythm of the team's private vocabulary. He still built sentences slowly, testing each word before he committed to it, and he missed things, the context around words, the nuance of what people meant underneath what they said. But he was getting it. He was getting more of it every week.

What he did not need language for was skating. The first day of training camp he skated two laps and the forty-three other men in the building understood something had changed. Not individually, because the individual pieces were all familiar, the speed and the edges and the shot that arrived somewhere before anyone had finished calculating where it was going. The difference was harder to name than any individual piece, which was that when Ilya Rozanov was on the ice everything else became context. The drills ran around him. The scrimmages organized themselves in relation to where he was. The young players from the AHL invites watched him the way you watched something you had been told about and were now revising your expectations upward. They had underestimated him, and it showed. Even the veterans, the ones who had been in the league long enough to be unimpressed by most things, paid attention when he had the puck in ways they probably would not have admitted to. 

He was not performing. He had been trained since he was very young to do exactly one thing at his absolute limit, every time, without exception, and he did not know how to do it differently. He knew being able to exercise how he wanted and eat what he wanted had made things different. He knew he was faster, smarter, than he had ever been, and he was going to show everyone that fact.

The room's response had two temperatures running at once. Respect was one of them, the grudging and almost involuntary kind that high levels of skill and dedication produced whether you wanted it to or not. The other was harder to name in English, though Ilya knew the word for it in Russian and had lived with it since he was fifteen and the CSKA coaches started giving him ice time that had belonged to older men. Not resentment exactly. The discomfort of being displaced by someone who had done nothing wrong.

On the third morning Theriault ran a breakout pattern Ilya had been watching on film since April. He waited until Theriault had finished drawing it on the board.

"This," Ilya said, and pointed at where Thibault's mark sat on the diagram. "He is here. But if the pressure comes—" he paused, reaching for the word. "If they pressure early, here is problem."

Theriault looked at the board. "What do you suggest."

"He moves. Earlier. Before the pressure." Ilya stood and went to the board and moved the mark two inches. He was aware of the room behind him in the way he was always aware of rooms. "Like this. Then this pass, it opens."

He sat down. Thibault was looking at the surface of the table. The room was quiet in a particular way, not hostile, quieter than hostile, and Theriault said, "We'll work it in practice," and moved on. Ilya registered the silence and understood it and could not have done differently, because the positioning had been suboptimal and he had said so, and he was not in the habit of leaving correct observations unspoken to preserve someone else's comfort. In Moscow that habit got you killed on the ice.

The team dinner came on the fifth day. He parsed dinner and missed team, because his English was reliable on nouns and shakier on everything surrounding them.

"Tonight," Comeau said, pulling on his jacket. "Everybody. Moishes, on St. Laurent. You coming?"

"I have—" Ilya started, and reached for the word and did not find it. "Other things," he said, which was not true. He had the apartment. He had the grammar book and the television. He had the walls. 

Comeau looked at him for a moment. "Other things," he said.

"Yes."

"Okay," Comeau said, in the tone of someone who had decided not to push. He said something to J.J. in Québécois as they left and Ilya did not catch it, only the rhythm of it, which was enough.

He went back to the apartment and stood in the kitchen and the walls were exactly as close as they always were. He lasted forty minutes. Then he put his jacket back on and drove to St. Laurent and found the bar they had moved to after dinner, a place two doors down from Moishes with a long counter and low light and the noise of the team already well into the evening.

Comeau saw him come in and said something Ilya didn't catch over the music and someone pushed a beer into his hand. He stood at the edge of the group and drank it and felt the noise in his head compete with the noise in the bar and the bar was winning slightly, which was the point.

She was at the other end of the counter. Dark hair, a red dress, talking to someone who was not holding her attention. She looked at Ilya twice and then a third time and the third time she didn't look away. He went over.

Her name was Marie. She worked in fashion, something about buying, she explained it and he followed most of it and smiled at the right moments and she didn't seem to need him to say much, which was fortunate because his English was for hockey and what he had for this was mostly his face and the way he was standing and the fact that he was looking at her like she was the only thing in the room worth looking at, which was not entirely untrue. She was warm and she smelled like flowers and when she put her hand on his arm to say something close to his ear the noise in his head dropped by half.

They danced and drank and an hour later she pulled him by the hand into the narrow corridor behind the bar, past the payphones, into the dim alcove where the emergency exit made a pocket of shadow. She pushed him back against the wall and looked up at him for a moment with an expression that required no translation, and then she went to her knees on the concrete floor. The red dress pooled around her legs, and her hands were efficient and certain, and her mouth was soft and warm on him. Ilya put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

The noise stopped. Not dropped. Stopped. For the four or five minutes it lasted the inside of his head was completely quiet for the first time since August, since the summer ended and Vadim left and the apartment walls started closing in. He held the quiet carefully, the way you held something you knew was temporary, and breathed. 

She stood and he kissed her and she tasted like lipstick and bar and his own lingering bitterness on her tongue and she was warm against him and laughing softly about something, the easy laugh of someone who had gotten exactly what she wanted, and he held her there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary because the quiet was already beginning to thin at the edges and he was not ready for it to go.

He drove home alone at two in the morning with the windows down and the September air cold. The noise came back on the highway, climbing steadily as the city thinned out and the apartment got closer. By the time he parked it was back where it had been. He sat in the car for a moment. Then he went inside. He would not miss another team dinner.

He skated every drill at the full speed his body had the next morning.

Nine days into camp, one of the wingers who had joined in at the captain's skate named Fleury got called into Theriault's office on a Tuesday afternoon and did not come back. Fleury had been on the bubble all camp, a fourth-line candidate with good instincts and no real offensive threat, the kind of player who survived in the league on character and adherence to the system. He had made it through the first two cuts. The third cut came and Fleury was part of it, which surprised people, because Fleury had been better in week three than he had been in weeks one and two, and the player who stayed instead of him had been worse. Being put on waivers as a player who had been middle of the pack but had made the team several years in a row was a rarity and made the entire room nervous.

Ilya was getting started on his taping routine when Comeau came back from the corridor and sat down at his stall and didn't say anything for a moment.

"Fleury get cut?" someone said.

"Yeah."

"Doesn't make sense," said one of the AHL kids. "He was better than Leclerc all last week."

Comeau looked at the kid. Not upset, but the look of determining how much to explain. "Somebody saw him," Comeau said. "Down in the Village. At one of those bars." He paused. "With someone."

The kid looked at Comeau. Then at the floor. "Oh," he said.

Nobody said anything else. Someone's tape gun clicked. Across the room one of the veterans had his head down, jaw tight, working at something on his skate that didn't need working at. J.J. was very focused on his own hands.

Ilya kept taping. Pull, press, tear. The same motion he had used every morning for years.

The nausea arrived before the roaring noise did. He understood where it came from. He had been in those bars. Not once, not carefully. He had danced in them in a silk shirt. He had not been careful because Montreal felt anonymous. No one there knew his name. The summer had felt private in a way Moscow never had. Vadim's arm, possessively, draped over his shoulders. Dancing closely, the taste of warm liquor on Vadim's tongue. He had been exactly as reckless as Fleury and much more visible. Fleury had been seen once. Ilya had been photographed. 

He thought about the sixth photograph in the dictionary. Vadim touching him in public, neither of them looking at the camera because neither of them had known the camera was there. The KGB had it. Had had it for weeks. And what had he done with that information? He had driven for an hour and worked through irregular verbs and gone to bed and continued building his efficient system for filing things that could not be acted on. He had been so certain the photograph was a threat aimed at Vadim, at what it would mean for Vadim, that he had not fully sat with what it meant for himself. For this room. For the team he was about to ask to put an A on his jersey. Pull, press, tear.

A photograph could be anywhere. Their private summer. Private was not the same as invisible. He knew that better than anyone in this room. He had known it since the envelope arrived and still the knowledge had not changed anything he had done in June or July, and he was not sure, sitting in this locker room with the tape gun clicking and the veterans looking at the floor, whether that was something to regret or simply a fact. He finished taping and set the stick down and did not look at anyone's face, because the floor was the right place to look, and because he had been trained since he was twelve years old to keep his face arranged.

The roster was set on a Friday. Narrowed down to just twenty-three men. Theriault posted it outside the equipment room. Ilya read it and went to find his skates. There were no surprises.

The vote for alternate captain was the following Monday. He had arranged the meeting before it happened, had put on something that made him feel confident, but was more conservative. A dark blue suit jacket, one Vadim had helped him find on Ste-Catherine in July, the one that fit his shoulders correctly. He sat across from Theriault and Beaulieu in the small office behind the equipment room and made his case in the English he had.

Beaulieu's expression, when Ilya explained the purpose of the meeting, was the careful blankness of someone recalculating.

"Alternate Captain," Ilya said. Direct was the only approach, because he did not have enough English yet for the indirect one. "I want to ask. Formally."

Theriault looked at Beaulieu.

"I know," Ilya said. "Hollander. He is good captain. I am not—" he paused, building the sentence. "I am not saying he is wrong choice. He is right choice. I am saying I want you to know I am serious. I want to lead. I have done this. Moscow, national team. I know how."

"Ilya," Beaulieu said, in the tone adults used for a name when they were about to explain something carefully. "The captaincy isn't something we—"

"I know. Players vote. I know the process. I want to put my name. I want you to know before." He looked at Theriault. "I want alternate. If I cannot be captain." There was no reason to pretend this wasn't the real ask. "I know what this means. Someone loses the A. I want it anyway."

Theriault studied him for a long moment, deciding how much of what he was thinking to say. Then: "You've been here six months."

"Yes."

"The room doesn't know you yet."

"No." A beat. "They will."

Theriault made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a disagreement. He looked at Beaulieu. Some communication passed between them that Ilya could read as he means it without being able to read the rest.

"We'll put it to the room," Beaulieu said. "Standard process."

"Thank you," Ilya said. He stood, shook both their hands, and left.

The vote happened with limited fanfare. Shane's C was already stitched onto his jersey, a permanent fixture of the Metros' landscape, but the two As were erased from the chalkboard every autumn. Ilya carefully observed the room's reaction to his own name being on the board. Not hostile, he had stopped expecting hostile and started reading the more complex emotions. Two of the veterans exchanged a look that was over before it started. Comeau's face was carefully neutral, which meant he had opinions and had decided not to voice them.

Theriault read the result. J.J., by a landslide. Then Theriault paused, his eyes flicking to the back of the room where the veterans sat. "The second alternate for this season: Rozanov."

He let the information settle. Went to his stall. Got undressed, because practice was over and there was nothing further to do, and he was aware of the room around him in the way he was always aware of rooms, peripheral and total, but he did not look up.

He found out it was Hayden's A the following morning.

J.J. told him in the corridor outside the equipment room, in the careful way you mentioned things you were not sure were safe to mention. Pike had the A last year. Not an accusation. Information, offered with the implicit question of what Ilya intended to do with it.

"I didn't know it was Pike," Ilya said. And he truly hadn't. He had been too busy just surviving the few games he had played last season that who wore the A hadn't crossed his mind even once. 

"Yeah," J.J. said. And moved along.

Ilya went into the equipment room and picked up a stick and turned it in his hands and thought about this. He had known there would be a cost. He had calculated it as acceptable before he knew whose it was. The arithmetic had not changed. He also had Hayden's face from across the locker room the day before, filing something quietly, and the arithmetic did not contain that face and could not.

He put the stick down and went to find his skates.

Shane came to his stall before morning skate and crouched down to his level, elbows on knees, in the way he did when he wanted to say something without making it a formal thing.

"You went to Theriault," Shane said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Before the vote."

"Yes."

Shane looked at the middle distance for a moment, working through several things at once and choosing which one to say. "You could have talked to me first."

Ilya looked at him. "Why?"

Shane opened his mouth. Closed it. The question had been more direct than he'd expected. "Because I'm the captain."

"I did not ask for your job. I asked for my own." Ilya pulled a lace tight. 

"You asked for something that belonged to someone else. There's a hierarchy here, Rozanov. A system."

"I asked for something the team gives. Team decides." He looked up at Shane. "You think I should not have asked?"

Shane held his gaze for a moment. The expression was doing several things, not all of them related to the captaincy. There was something in it that was more personal, and Ilya didn't have enough of the room's history to know what it was. Ilya did not know what it was, but he knew he had done something he should not have. "I think you should have told me."

"Okay," Ilya said. "Now you know."

He stood and went to the ice. Shane didn't follow immediately. Ilya felt the distance of that without turning around, not a break but a rearrangement, a new edge neither of them had been standing on before. The before had been built on assumptions about who Ilya was. Now they were going to find out how brutal you had to be to survive in Moscow. He skated his first lap and felt the edge and filed it and kept skating.

He was the last one on the ice that afternoon, running edges until Theriault's assistant knocked on the glass and pointed at his watch. He came off and went down the corridor and pushed into the locker room expecting it to be empty.

Shane was still there. Not dressed, he had his skates off and his jersey off and was sitting at his stall in his pads and base layer, turning his water bottle in his hands. He looked up when Ilya came in. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Ilya went to his own stall and sat and began on his skates, and then his pads, and then the rest of it, pulling off his base layer and dropping it, standing to get out of his hockey pants, until he was down to nothing, moving around the stall the way he had moved around locker rooms his entire life, which was without thinking about it because there had never been anything to think about.

"Most of the guys," Shane said, to the water bottle, "show a little more modesty, you know. Around the room."

Ilya looked at him. Modesty. He did not know this word. Shane gestured toward his body. Ilya looked down at himself and back up. "Nothing to hide," he said. Simply. As a fact.

Shane's ears went pink. He looked up from the floor, which was a mistake, because looking up meant looking, and he did, for a moment that was a beat too long before he caught himself, caught himself the way you caught something you had not meant to drop, and looked back down. Ilya felt the heat start at the back of his neck.

Shane's jaw was good. Ilya had noticed it before, the clean line of it, the way it sat. He noticed the freckles too, the scatter of them across the nose and cheekbones that spread further down his throat, that Ilya had not had occasion to observe this close before. He was looking at the floor and his ears had gone from pink to red. Ilya let the silence sit for one beat. Then two.

"Hollander," he said.

Shane looked up. "Yeah."

"You like what you see?" The smirk had gotten into his voice before he decided to let it.

The color moved from Shane's ears to his face in a single wave. Shane looked away, jaw tight, and said nothing, which was an answer. Ilya watched it happen, the flush, the set of the jaw, the way Shane's hand went still on his things, and felt the heat in his own chest climb and then he looked back down at his things because there was nothing to do with any of it and he knew that. But he wanted to do something with it. He pulled on his shirt. His pants.

"You stayed late," Shane said. To the middle distance. His voice was mostly even.

"Yes."

Shane nodded. "You don't have to stay after everyone else."

"I know." Ilya sat to pull on his shoes. "I like it. When the ice is empty."

Something moved across Shane's face and then was gone. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Me too."

Ilya got his jacket and when he looked up Shane was looking at the floor, jaw set hard. He understood what the jaw meant. He had spent the summer learning the architecture of what men in this city were and were not allowed to want.

"Okay," he said. Pointed at nothing.

"Yeah," Shane said.

Ilya gathered his things and left. In the corridor the fluorescents hummed their ordinary hum and the building was its ordinary building and he walked the length of it to the exit and pushed out into the September evening and stood in the parking lot for a moment before he found his keys.

The line change came on a Wednesday, posted before morning skate. Ilya read his name at center, on a different line, and held it for a moment with blank attention before he reacted. He looked at Shane's name. He looked at the gap between them on the sheet.

He had pushed for the first line. He had not pushed quietly. He had laid out the logic to Theriault in the direct way he laid out all logic, with the positioning and the numbers and the fact that his best seasons in Moscow had been running a top line from the center. Theriault had listened the way coaches listened when they had already decided and needed to wait for the player to finish. The answer was no. The reasoning offered was something about balance, about not concentrating the team's offensive weight, about what they needed from him as a center on his own line, all of which was probably true and was also not the only reason, and Ilya knew it and Theriault knew Ilya knew it and neither of them said so.

He went to the ice. He ran the new line. The center position opened the ice differently than the wing, a different grammar of movement, and his body understood it within twenty minutes because his body understood ice regardless of where on it he stood. He could do this. That was not in question. What was in question lived in the space on the line sheet where Shane's name was not. His new line was fine. More than fine. Eventually, he was certain it would overtake Shane's. They would be better. Faster. He would earn his place. And they would still be together on the power play.

He called Vadim that evening.

He had decided, the night the photographs arrived, that calling was not useful and potentially dangerous. That decision had held for weeks. It held through the phone call, through the captain's skate, through the vote and the line change and the team dinner and Marie and all the other management the month had required. It held until it didn't and he stood in the kitchen and picked up the phone anyway, because he had run out of other options and the apartment was quiet and he needed to hear a voice that knew what he was.

Vadim answered on the third ring. He was in Ottawa. Work was going. The canal in September was worth seeing, he said, if Ilya ever had cause to be in Ottawa in September.

They spoke in English. Ilya's rule from the summer, and Vadim held it.

"How is camp?" Vadim said.

"Fine."

"You're lying."

"Difficult," Ilya said. "Better word."

"The English or the hockey?"

"The room." He paused. "I asked for the captaincy."

A silence. "The captaincy."

"Alternate. Hollander has the C. But I asked for the A." He moved the phone to the other ear. "I got it. The room is—" he looked for the word. He did not have the word. "Deciding," he said, which was close but not right.

"Deciding what they think of you."

"Yes."

"And what does Hollander think?"

Ilya looked at the window. He did not have the English for the texture of Shane's expression that morning. "Careful," he said, which was not quite right but was the closest word available.

Vadim was quiet for a moment. Then: "I want to say something. I've been thinking how to say it."

"Okay."

"You need your own road. Not through me." A pause. "I have my life here now. Ottawa, the work. It's good. The summer was real and I don't want to — I'm not saying it wasn't. But you don't need me the way you did in May. We both know this. It would be wrong to pretend."

Ilya sat at the kitchen table and looked at the phone cord. "I know."

"I know you know. That's why I'm saying it. Before it gets complicated."

"I knew in August." He thought about Vadim packing the two suitcases, the focused efficiency of someone who knew exactly what he was returning to.

"Yes." A beat. "You'll be all right."

"I know."

"I mean it."

"I know that also." He looked at the window. The street was doing its ordinary things. "Thank you. For the summer."

"Thank you for speaking English."

Something in Ilya's chest did a thing he did not examine. "Okay," he said.

"Call me if you come to Ottawa. Not before," Vadim said, and the line was quiet and there was a click. Ilya held the handset for a moment. Then he set it back in the cradle and sat at the table. The dictionary on the shelf. The street below going about its ordinary business. Everything continued, but a feeling of finality permeated his apartment. He had known this was coming since August. Knowing something and arriving at the end of it were not the same experience. He stayed in the chair until the street noise changed its pitch and night had arrived. 

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for reading. Some thoughts from this chapter:

Captains! Hockey teams can have one captain and two alternates, although every so often, they will elect to have three alternates and no head captain. There is no set mechanism for choosing a captain. It is totally up to team management. Some teams vote. Some are appointed. Here, I chose to have them vote to increase that piece of betrayal towards Hayden. Don't worry. Hayden is not a villain in this one.

Fleury getting removed for being seen at a gay bar is also based on some precedent. Hockey is an incredibly conservative sport - then and now. The language used in NHL locker rooms in 1988 was unkind to say the least. A player suspected of being gay would face extreme social isolation. While Quebec had laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, the Criminal Code of Canada said "bawdy houses" were illegal. Because the definition of a bawdy house (which is a great term, despite the unfortunate connotation there), was very vague, police raided gay bars regularly, citing indecent behavior, overcrowding, disorderly conduct, or public health concerns. Police usually arrested patrons, not the owners of the establishments. While the charges were usually dropped, being caught at a bawdy house during a raid would be a social and professional death sentence in conservative fields, and especially in government work. In my head, what happened was Fleury was swept up in a raid, let go, but management found out and saw that as a liability. The Bawdy House law was overturned in 2013. I could talk for days about the stuff the government did too...they actively purged gay and lesbian employees from the RCMP, government jobs, and the armed forces from 1950 until at least 1996.

As of today, there has never been any NHL player, current or former, who has come out publicly as gay. There have been a few in Europe, or in other leagues, but not the NHL. I think this speaks enough to the social pressure to stay closeted.

I also got a (probably well-intentioned) comment about how Ilya is always taping a stick. Yes, yes he is. In 1988, most players still used wood sticks. It's a nice pre-game ritual, to begin with. It's personal and meditative. It would be normal to tape between 4 to 6 sticks a game, and maybe two or three for a practice. One for warm ups, your favorite one for the game, two or three backups, and one that is taped in a different way just for the power play. You needed a good tape job because wood absorbs water throughout the game and the blade of the stick would get soft and squishy and noticeably heavier as the game progressed if you didn't have a tight tape wrap. Also wood splinters or delaminates during face-offs, so it's practical. Even today, with composite sticks, players have 3 or 4 taped per game.

Chapter 18: Witness

Chapter Summary

A man outside Ilya's building. Photographs in a dictionary. Shane Hollander walks through an apartment like he's reading something, and ends up staying the night on a couch that isn't quite big enough for what the evening has become.

Chapter Notes

Hello lovelies.
The timing worked out and I had some time to write early this week.

Also, with the authors pulling their works, I’ve gotten a lot of truly lovely messages from some of you. There is no AI here, in case that ever crossed your mind. I’ve poured a lot of myself into this work and it’s all here. Inconsistencies, typos, all of it is just me.

Witness (noun)

1. A person who sees an event take place and can speak to what occurred.

2. The condition of being known by another person. Not suspected, not observed — known. The difference matters more than you would think until it happens to you.

3. What you become, without meaning to, when someone leaves six photographs in a dictionary on a shelf and you pick up the wrong book.

Example: “He had not had anyone in the apartment since Vadim. Shane Hollander walked through it like he was reading something.” — September, 1988

Ilya had been carrying the photographs heavy in his mind for three weeks, and in that time he had developed a way of moving through the world outside his apartment. Not cautious, not visibly so, nothing that would read as wrong to anyone watching. More aware, present. The way he had moved through the barracks, where the corridors were always being watched and the only safe response was to look like there was nothing to hide. He didn’t like it. It felt too much like before. He wanted it to feel like July again. 

He came through the lobby, nodded to the doorman, pushed through the glass door. The morning was cool and clear, the September light more golden, glistening than August. He had his bag over one shoulder and his keys in his hand and he was thinking about the practice schedule, about the center position and the new line, and then he saw the man across the street. Everything stopped. 

He was standing stiffly near a parked car. Looking at nothing in particular, in the way of someone who had been trained to look at nothing in particular professionally. He was wearing a dark coat, a cap pulled low, nothing that would stand out on a Montreal street in September. Nothing that would read as anything except a man waiting.

But Ilya knew the face. Not the name. Most of them didn’t have names. Only those like Ivannikov, a true, documented official who had traveled with the Soviet delegation got to have names. He was further back than that, a peripheral face, the type whose function was never formally described and whose presence at the Calgary Olympics had been felt, not seen. The cogs grinding away behind the machinery. Ilya had seen that face in the corridors outside the changing rooms, in the hotel lobby at odd hours, in the way he occupied space without drawing attention to it.

He was looking at Ilya now.

Ilya did not stop walking. He went to his car, unlocked it, put his bag in the back. He did not look across the street again. He got in, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking space, only concentrating on driving and not on the fact that his hands were starting to shake. 

He drove to the rink. He got through the lobby. He went to his stall. He was fairly sure he hadn't been followed. They wouldn't come here, not with this many people around. They would wait, like they always did, until he was alone. And then Ilya would simply disappear.

It was not a shock that the session was bad. Not catastrophically, not in ways Theriault could name afterward, but Ilya was so distracted his usual electric foresight was gone. Some press had been invited that day for a few photos and it took every ounce of his concentration not to keep searching the faces, over and over. It consumed his mental energy. That pivotal moment between thought and action that was shorter than everyone else’s, that made him a great player instead of a good one. It had gone, just as it had before, during playoffs. He was on the ice and he was not quite on the ice. The face was still there in front of his eyes, easy to blend in but impossible for Ilya to forget. It lived in the peripheral where things you couldn’t stop thinking about lived when you were supposed to be busy with other things.

They had been trying him on a line that included Comeau and rookie named Sorenson that had just been drafted this year. Ilya didn’t know much about Sorenson besides the management must have great faith in him to put him on the second line with two very strong veteran players. But Comeau…Ilya did not like playing on his line. He was too brash. Too prone to anger. He took it all too personally, even during training camp. He wanted to be back with Hollander. Even if it meant being a wing, they would win.

He missed a setup in the first rotation that he would have put on his tape with his eyes closed. The lane opened and he was already moving toward it and then the face arrived and his edges held one stride too long and the lane closed. Comeau glanced at him. He did not look back.

He took a hit in the second rotation that he would normally have absorbed and spun off cleanly. Instead his weight was wrong and he went down on one knee, and the scrimmage carried on around him and he got back up and skated and did not let himself look at the clock.

Across the ice, Hayden watched him go down and said nothing, but smirked at him. He had been saying nothing to Ilya for two weeks, deliberately and coldly. It was the kind of nothing that was designed to hurt.

After the session Ilya came off and Hayden was at the near end of the corridor, equipment still on, talking to Shane in the low voice. Ilya hadn’t planned on listening until he realized it was about him.

“He’s been here six months,” Hayden said, without looking up. “You know that’s not what this is about.”

“I know,” Shane said.

“Five years.” Hayden was jabbing a finger at Shane to make his point. “I’ve been in this room five years and I’ve never done anything except the right thing, every day, without being asked. And Rozanov has been here six fucking months and he walks into Theriault’s office and asks for it, and we give it to him, and you’re telling me there’s nothing to say about that.”

“I’m not saying—.”

“Well say something.”

Shane looked at him. “He earned it on the ice. The room voted.”

“Earning it on the ice and being entitled to take it from someone who—” Hayden stopped. “I don’t like him. I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m asking whether this is what a captain does. Let one guy walk in and take whatever he wants because he’s the best player and nobody wants to have that conversation.”

“I had the conversation,” Shane said. “With Theriault. With Beaulieu. With the room.”

“You had the conversation with Theriault and Beaulieu.” Hayden looked up. “Did you have it with Rozanov?”

Shane said nothing.

“Right,” Hayden said. He stood, bag over his shoulder. “I’m asking you to acknowledge that it was a shitty thing to do, and that the room sees you not saying so.” He held Shane’s gaze for a moment, even and direct. “That’s all.”

"I didn't know he was going to—"

"You knew he was ambitious. You knew the room better than anyone. Don't tell me you didn't see it."

Shane looked at the floor. He didn't have an answer for that, and Hayden knew he didn't, which was the point of saying it.

"Five years," Hayden said again, quieter this time. "I have worked for five years to be someone this team trusts. And in three months, without any conversation, that just—" he stopped. He picked up his bag. "I'm not asking you to fix it. It can't be fixed. Just say you know."

“I know. And I’m sorry.”

“You’re my best friend, dumbass. I need a little bit more from my captain though.”

Shane nodded. "Come for drinks," he said. "The three of us. Tonight."

Hayden looked at him.

"You don’t have to be his best friend." Shane said. "Do it for me. Clear the air."

Hayden was quiet. "One drink," he said.

It was time. Ilya stepped through the door. Hayden’s jaw tightened. He looked at Shane and not at Ilya and said something that Ilya did not catch, and then walked past without acknowledgment.

Shane looked at Ilya for a moment. There was something in his expression that was working through more than one thing at once.

“Good session?” Shane said. Even.

“No,” Ilya said. He rolled his eyes. Hollander knew it had been bad.

Shane nodded. He looked like he had just been asked to choose between two positions he did not want and had not picked one yet. “Go get changed,” he said. “We’ll run the breakout pattern again tomorrow. Your shots on the weak side were off.” A pause. “Come for a drink after. Not the team place. Somewhere quieter.”

It was not quite a question. Ilya looked at him.

“Sure,” he said. 

Ilya went to his stall. Shane walked away and he could hear Shane and Hayden resume their conversation further down the corridor, the cadence of it, Hayden’s voice carrying a flatness that Ilya had learned to recognize as the tone he used when he was managing his own frustration with care. He could not hear the words. He did not need to. He understood the shape of what was being said. He had been in enough locker rooms to know when someone was asking a captain to do something about him.

The bar was four blocks from the rink, the kind of place that had been getting hockey players drunk for thirty years and had the indifference to fame that came from long practice. Ilya came in, found them at the back table, and sat. He pulled off his jacket and laid it on the back of his chair. He did not need to look at Hayden to know how the evening was going to go.

Shane started talking about the breakout pattern because it was a safe subject. Hayden contributed because it was hockey and hockey was not the problem. Ilya made the observation about Thibault’s positioning and Hayden looked at the table and said nothing.

Shane said, “He’s right about the angle.”

Hayden said, “I know.”

The silence after that felt brittle. Shane tried again with the new rook on Ilya’s line, with the upcoming home schedule, with a story about Comeau that had a reasonable punchline. Hayden laughed because it was genuinely funny and then seemed to remember where he was and went back to looking at his glass. Ilya said what was required and did not push into the silences, because he understood that pushing would make it worse, and because he had spent his entire life being the person a room had already decided how to feel about before he walked in.

At some point, Shane said, “Hayden, he didn’t know it was yours. Right, Rozanov?”

Ilya’s head snapped over. “I did not know you were A,” he said. “I ask for the position. I did not know the name of who had it.”

Hayden looked up. “I know that.”

“I’m just—” Shane started.

“Shane, I got it.” Hayden cut him off, flat and even. “That’s not actually the point.” He looked at Ilya for the first time all evening, directly. “You knew it belonged to someone. You asked for it anyway.”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

"You don't even—" Hayden stopped. He shook his head. "You don't seem sorry."

"I am sorry it was you," Ilya said. "I am not sorry I asked."

Hayden looked at Shane. "See, that. That right there." Hayden pointed at Ilya and looked at Shane. “That’s the shit I’m talking about.” 

Ilya could see the gears in Shane’s head turning. It made sense, both positions were perfectly defensible. Who would you pick? Your friend or your new alternate captain? He sat in the middle of it with a beer he wasn't drinking and said, "He's not wrong that –."

"Don’t," Hayden said.

“I’m just saying–” Shane started. 

Hayden’s voice told Shane to stop digging. “Shane. You are not helping.” Shane closed his mouth and picked up his beer.

“You would have done it the same,” Ilya said. “If you were me.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Hayden said. 

“You would.”

“I said I wouldn’t.”

“I say I do not believe you.” Ilya snapped. Hayden looked at Shane. Shane looked at the table. 

“I’m not getting involved,” Shane said. 

“You are already involved,” Ilya said. “You are captain. This is your problem.”

“That’s –” Shane started.

“He’s right,” Hayden said with annoyance. “You are involved.” Shane looked between them. Two people who had just agreed on something at his expense and did not appear to find this remarkable. He picked up his beer.

Ilya searched for the word. "What is word. To want to be best.”

“Ambition?” Shane supplied, reflexively. Hayden glared at him. “What? He needs help with his English.”

Ilya snapped his fingers in agreement. “Ambition. Yes. I have this. You have it also. I am saying we are not so different. Is not an insult."

"I know it’s not an insult," Hayden said. “That’s not the–” He stopped and shook his head. “You know what, fine.”

“Fine,” Ilya agreed.

“Still an asshole.”

“I know,” Ilya replied. 

Shane said, "Can we—" and both of them looked at him and he stopped talking.

The bar filled around them. Someone put money in the jukebox. The table beside theirs cleared and two people took it, a man and a woman, talking in low French. Not touching. Near. Two people who had been in enough rooms together that proximity no longer required a decision. Like him and Vadim.

Hayden said something to Shane about Gretzky going to Los Angeles. Shane turned toward him to answer and in the angle of that turn his knee came briefly against Ilya’s under the table. Not intentionally. The table was small. Did Hollander notice? He kept talking about Gretzky.

Ilya looked at the couple at the next table. He looked at the man’s hand near the woman’s on the surface. He conjured the image of the final photograph tucked into the dictionary at home and the handler on the street that morning and Fleury’s stall being emptied on a Tuesday and the noise that had been running in his head since August, and the sum of all of it arrived at once.

And then he saw him. Across the room. The handler. He was there. A beer in front of him untouched. His vision narrowed to the man's face and the untouched beer and his nearly unnatural stillness, and the bar noise went somewhere very far away. His hand was flat on the table and he could feel his pulse in it. All the oxygen had been removed from his lungs in an instant. 

“One minute,” Ilya said. He stood. “Air.”

He went out the front door and stood on the pavement and breathed. The city was doing its ordinary things. A cab went past. Two women came out of a restaurant across the street, laughing about something. None of it had any relationship to the man inside with the untouched beer and the face from the corridor outside the Saddledome. Ilya stood in the middle of all that ordinary and understood that this was how it worked, that the world did not stop or go quiet when it was happening, that there was just a man in a bar and a man on a pavement and the distance between them was whatever he made of it. He did not go back in. He walked home, leaving his car behind. 

The buzzer rang at eight thirty. Ilya was at the kitchen table with tea he wasn’t drinking, staring into the distance.

“It’s Hollander. I have your jacket.”

He pressed the button to let him up. He stood in the kitchen and waited for the knock.

Shane was at his door, the jacket folded over one arm. He looked at Ilya with the measuring expression. Ilya knew the conversation was coming. 

“You left it,” Shane said. He held it out. 

“Yes.” Ilya took it. “Thank you.”

“It’s a nice coat. I thought you would want it back.” Ilya nodded. Shane did not leave. He was looking at Ilya’s face, clearly trying to gain more, to keep the conversation going. “You all right?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t take off like that. It freaked Hayden out.”

“And you,” Ilya replied.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Practice was rough.”

“I was tired.” It was not quite a lie. It was not quite enough to end the conversation either, and they both knew it.

Ilya stood in the doorway for a moment. Then he stepped back and opened the door wider, because there was no version of turning Shane Hollander away that didn’t involve explaining why, and he did not have an explanation he was willing to give in a doorway.

Shane came in. He looked at the apartment the way he had probably been looking at it since Ilya opened the door, taking inventory. It was tidy, everything in place, nothing personal on the surfaces. The grammar book on the table. Tea. A shelf with a few books, mystery novels Vadim gave him. The dictionary. A history book about Quebec that came with the apartment.

“Late for coffee,” Ilya said. “You want tea.” Not quite a question.

“Sure.”

Ilya put the kettle on. Shane moved slowly through the apartment, not nosily, just with the ease of navigating a space he has been invited into. Ilya stood at the counter and watched him do it. He had not had anyone over to his apartment since Vadim, who had known every corner of it, who had invited himself in and made it his space as much as Ilya’s. Shane looked at the bookshelves. He picked up the grammar book, turned it over, set it down. Ilya noticed the specific way he handled things, careful without being precious, and filed it without examining what he was filing it under. Ilya turned away while Shane drifted toward the shelf.

Ilya had his back to him, setting out the cups. He heard the sound of a book being lifted from the shelf. He did not turn around. He stood at the counter and listened to the small sounds of Hollander opening a book, the particular silence of pages turning, and then a silence that was different from the others. There was a gentle fluttering and a soft thud.

Fuck, the dictionary.

He turned around. Shane was standing with the dictionary open in both hands and the photographs had fallen to the floor at his feet. He had gone very still. His eyes moved from the photographs to Ilya and back down, and whatever he had been prepared to say when he arrived had left him entirely. Shane crouched down to pick them up but his hand faltered a few inches above them, as if afraid to touch them.

Ilya crossed the kitchen and crouched by Shane, their heads nearly touching. He picked up the photographs one by one trying to shuffle them away. He looked at Shane, who was looking at the photograph that was still visible at the top of the stack, the one of Vadim’s arm around Ilya’s shoulders on a Montreal street, two blocks from a bar they had been to together.

“Who took these,” Shane said. His voice was level in the way that meant he had made it level.

Ilya set the photographs on the kitchen table, face down. He sat down in the chair and put his hands flat on the table and looked at them, willing his fingers to be steady.

“I do not know.” Ilya said, shaking his head. “Envelope with no marks.”

“Is this why you were off today?”

Ilya shook his head again. “This morning,” he said. “Outside the building. There was a man. I know his face.” He stopped. Started again. “From the Olympics. One of their men.” He looked up at Shane.

Shane set the dictionary on the table. He looked at it and then at Ilya, and something moved across his face that Ilya had not seen there before, a rearrangement of the architecture, something being decided about how serious this was.

“How long have you had the pictures?”

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks.” Shane held this for a moment. “And the man outside your building today.”

“Today is the first time I see him here. But the photographs—” Ilya spread his hands slightly. “Someone took them. This one—” he did not turn it over. “Someone took it in the summer. I did not know.”

Shane was looking at the table. At the dictionary and the photographs and Ilya’s shaking fingers.

“You’ve had these for three weeks,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Who else knows?”

“No one.”

Shane stood. He looked around the apartment once, a quick scan, then his eyes went to the phone on the wall. He crossed to it.

“I am calling Beaulieu,” he said.

Ilya sat at the kitchen table and did not say don’t. He watched Shane pick up the handset and dial the Metros office from memory, and listened to the one-sided conversation that followed, Shane’s voice low and even, saying Rozanov’s name and the word photographs and then, after a pause, today, outside his building, and then, no, he is with me now. He watched Shane hold the receiver and wait and then say yes and then say I understand and then hang up.

Shane turned from the phone. The kitchen was very quiet.

“He’s coming tomorrow morning,” Shane said. “Early.” He looked at Ilya across the kitchen. “You should have told someone.”

“I know,” Ilya said.

“You could have told me.”

“How? I say what, Hollander? Scary man with camera come to my house? How do you help me with this?”

Shane held his gaze for a moment. Then he sat back down at the table, and the kettle began to boil, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“Who are they?” Shane asked, gesturing at the photos.

Ilya set a cup in front of Shane and sat back down and looked at the photographs face down on the table and then he told Shane all of it. Not because he had decided to. Because Beaulieu was coming in the morning and when Beaulieu arrived he would ask questions, and Ilya didn’t want the first time he said these things to be tomorrow. He knew he was stressed and the English words weren’t coming as easily.  The noise in his head had been loud since August and the photographs were on the table and the handler had been outside his building that morning and all of those things were true at once and the sum of them was that he picked up his tea and told Shane everything.

The phone calls. Not one, he said. There had been two. The first one in the spring, the voice using his father’s name. He had not told Beaulieu about that one either. He had thought he could manage it. He said this without apology, just as a fact about what he had thought at the time. He told him it was why they lost the playoffs. Shane took this information more graciously than Ilya would have, he thought.

The envelope. He turned the photographs over one by one as he spoke, because they were easier to describe if he could see them. His father at the window. 

“My father. He does not remember things.” Next, “My brother.”

Svetlana. Shane spoke first. “Is this your sister?” Clearly it wasn’t. There was no resemblance there.

“No,” Ilya said. How could he describe Svetlana. “A friend. Since I was young. Very close.”

Shane looked away from the photograph for a moment, and something shifted in the set of his jaw.

“And him?” Ilya flipped over the photo of Sasha.

“Another friend. Long time.” He did not elaborate.

Maks. He sat with Maks’s photograph for a moment before he said anything.

“Maks. Maks made time for me to run. In Calgary. He trust me, but now – ” He looked at the photograph of a man who had taken that on faith and was now living in whatever came after. He set it down.

“They hurt him,” Shane said. It wasn’t a question. Ilya nodded.

“They hurt him, yes.”

He turned over the last photograph. Shane looked at it for a moment and then looked at Ilya.

“That is Vadim,” Ilya said. “You know him. Translator, then handler the first months. We become friends. He is in Ottawa now, government work. He does not know this photograph.” He looked at the photograph rather than at Shane. “He has done nothing wrong. He knows me because he did his job. The photograph—” he stopped. “They took it and kept it and can use it. Against him. Against me.”

He put it face down with the others.

Shane was quiet. He looked at the photos, then at Ilya. He cleared his throat. “That photograph. The two of you. Are you in the Village?”

Ilya went still. Fleury. "I'm not—" Shane paused, looking for the words. "It’s not my business. But I'm saying Beaulieu is going to see it and he might have questions."

"It was not—" Ilya said. The English wasn't there. He pressed on anyway. "We were friends. That is all. I had not—" he looked at his hands. "I had not many friends here. He was teaching me the city. We spend time together. That is what you see."

Shane looked at him steadily.

"I know how it looks," Ilya said. His voice was flat. 

"Then you understand."

"You think I should not show him."

"I think if you show him, you're going to spend the next hour having a very different conversation than the one you need to have." 

Shane looked at the photo, Ilya did too. He thought about the handler across the bar that evening, the untouched beer, the quality of his stillness. He thought about the sentence on the document Beaulieu was bringing tomorrow morning. He thought about what it would mean to have Beaulieu look at that photograph and start asking questions that Ilya didn't have safe answers to.

"You are right," Ilya said again. He picked up the photograph and stood and went to the shelf and slid it into the dictionary separately from the others, deeper in, behind the back cover. He came back and sat down. "He does not need to see it."

Shane nodded. He did not say anything else about it. The tea had gone cold. Ilya got up and poured it out and stood at the sink looking at the drain.

He had thought talking would make it better. It had not. He had carried the hum of the noise as a background thing, manageable with movement, with ice time, with the grammar book and the grocery store and the ordinary business of building a life. Right now it was not background. Right now it was the whole room. His father in Moscow asking when he was coming home from practice. The document on a table in Beaulieu's office with his name on it and the word death below it. The man at the bar with the untouched beer. The man outside his building that morning. He stood at the sink and the apartment was very quiet and the city was doing its ordinary things outside and none of that was any help at all.

“You should get some sleep,” Shane broke the noise.

“I will not,” Ilya said, his face settling into a line, still facing the sink. Not to Shane particularly, just out loud, because it was true and the room needed something in it.

Shane was quiet for a moment. “Do you have any movies?”

Ilya looked up. “Yes.”

Ilya looked at the small stack of VHS cassettes the organization had left when they set up the apartment, the same way they had left the tinned sardines and a wool sweater, educated guesses about a man they didn't fully know. He read the spines. Shane came and stood beside him and looked at the stack. He hadn’t watched them. He preferred television. Simpler. Shorter bursts of attention.

"That one," Shane said. He picked up the case. Dirty Dancing. It had come out the previous summer and Ilya recalled Comeau had mentioned it twice in a way that suggested he had seen it more than once and was not going to admit why. Ilya had not seen it. "Have you watched this?"

"No."

"Good." Shane moved toward the couch. "Come on."

Ilya looked at him. Shane had settled onto the couch, his jacket off, his feet on the coffee table. He held up the cassette.

Ilya sat down on the other end of the couch. The apartment felt different with another person in it. Smaller. He was aware of the distance between them on the couch. He could close that gap, if he wanted. Shane leaned forward and put the tape in the VCR and pressed play. Ilya watched the screen. He did not follow all of it. His English was not equal to rapid American film dialogue at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. But he could follow the shape of it. A pretty girl at a summer resort. A man who danced. A father who did not approve. Lines that were not supposed to be crossed, being crossed anyway, with consequences.

At some point Shane said, "You following it?"

"Girl learns to dance," Ilya said. "Father does not like the man."

"That's basically it," Shane said.

Ilya watched the screen. The noise was still there. It was always going to be there. But it had settled into something manageable since they sat down, which was the same thing that happened at the grocery store and the morning rink and the bar on Crescent Street before he had seen the handler, the same thing that happened when the city let him be nobody for a while. Something about the presence of another person in the room was doing the same work. He did not examine this.

His chest was tight in a way that had not fully resolved since the morning. Since before the morning. He could locate the specific day in May when the first phone call had come and the tight thing had started and had not stopped since. He was aware, sitting in the dark of his apartment watching an American film he could not entirely follow, that he had been frightened for five months in a sustained and uninterrupted way, and that he had not told anyone this, and that it had been very heavy, and that Shane was on the other end of his couch knowing most of it now, and that this was, in its way, the least alone he had been since the summer ended. He did not say any of this. He watched the screen.

Around the second hour Hollander's breathing had slowed and deepened and when Ilya looked over he was asleep, his head tilted against the back of the couch, one hand resting open on his knee. Ilya looked at him for longer than a moment. The line of his jaw in the dark. The way he looked without the careful arrangement on his face, without the captain's posture. When it went slack and peaceful and was only him. He had decided to stay and had stayed and was now sleeping on Ilya's couch at midnight. Ilya turned back to the screen. He did not entirely watch the rest of the movie.

“Hollander,” Ilya said, gently waking him. “You should go. Sleep.”

“Nah, I’m going to stay.”

“I do not have more bed.”

“I’ll sleep here. You go to sleep.”

“Beaulieu ask you to stay.”

There was a beat of silence. “Yeah,” Shane replied. There was something in it, the way you said a thing that was true and you'd rather it weren't.

“Hollander, go home.”

“No, I’m good. You go to bed.”

“No, you take bed.”

Ilya finally agreed, bringing Hollander a pillow and blanket for the couch. 

"You can sleep in bed," Ilya said. He was not sure why he said it a second time. He was sure why he said it a second time. “Share.” Hollander's ears went red at the tips. 

"No. I toss and turn." He said it to no one in particular.

“Fine. Is your back,” Ilya replied walking to the bedroom and closing the door. He did not sleep. He sat in the dark with the film replaying in his head and the noise at its manageable level and the city outside doing what it did, and he was still sitting there when the gray began to come into the windows and the screen went to static. He got up quietly, moving past a sleeping Hollander. 

He stood in the kitchen and looked at the photographs on the table, five of them. He put the kettle on.

Shane woke when the kettle began to whistle. He came into the kitchen with his hair pushed in several directions and his jacket over one arm, and Ilya looked at him for one unguarded second before he looked back at the kettle. Shane in the morning was different from Shane at the rink or Shane across a restaurant table. He had not known he was going to notice that.

"You did not sleep," Shane said. Not a question.

"No."

Shane set his jacket on the chair. He sat down at the kitchen table and Ilya brought the weak black tea and they sat and the city outside started its morning and neither of them said anything.

Beaulieu rang the buzzer at seven-thirty. Shane answered it without being asked. He had a folder and the expression he wore when he had already made decisions and was arriving to explain them. He looked at Shane, then at Ilya, then at the five selected photographs on the kitchen table, and set the folder down and sat.

He asked questions in the flat, methodical way of someone building a record rather than discovering information. The phone calls, dates, content. The envelope, the photographs, each one described and identified. The handler outside the building. Ilya answered, but the English was harder than it had been in months. The stress was doing something to his access to it, collapsing vocabulary he'd built carefully over the summer, leaving him reaching for words that weren't arriving cleanly. He answered in shorter sentences than he would have wanted. He left gaps. He watched Beaulieu's expression and could not always tell if the man was following him. At one point, Beaulieu looked at Shane. “How much of this is he getting?” 

“Enough. He didn’t get much sleep last night. Stressed out,” Shane said, looking at Ilya. “You’re doing fine.” Ilya was not sure this was true, but he kept going.

When it was over, Beaulieu made a note, then set down his pen and looked at the table. He said, almost to himself, "We may have moved Vadim too quickly."

Ilya looked at him.

"The language," Beaulieu said. "I’m sure you’re fine in the locker room, but under pressure. We thought you were ready to be on your own. We may have been optimistic." He picked up the pen again. "We'll revisit that."

Shane said nothing. Ilya said nothing. The comment had not been cruel. It had been an assessment, made in the way Beaulieu made all assessments, and it landed the way those things landed: accurately and without softening. 

“Unfortunately, we have more to discuss,” Beaulieu said. “There are some things you need to know. We didn’t know when the right time to talk about them was. The Soviet state has formally charged you with desertion of military duty.” He set a document on the table. “There was a trial in August, you were sentenced to death in absentia.”

Ilya twitched, the muscles in his arms spasming. He did not know this word, absentia, but he understood the sentiment. The word death next to his name and military ID number on the paper. His chair scraped back before he knew what he was doing, moving to the kitchen counter, back to the table. He put both hands on the edge of the counter and breathed. He had known, in a theoretical way, that this was one of the shapes the future could take. He had known it the way you knew things that existed in the distance, as a possibility with an if in front of it: if they catch me, if I am returned, if they decide to make an example of me. The idea of a firing squad always existed in the back of his mind, when he was listening to the tapes on his Walkman, or counting his American dollars. A punishment that could happen. Maybe. If. That was before. The if had gone. There was no if. There was a man outside his building who was not here to bring him back in handcuffs but to make him simply not exist anymore, and the distance had collapsed to nothing and all of the theoretical weight of February had arrived at once in a kitchen in Montreal on a Thursday morning.

His hands were pressing hard into the counter edge, the knuckles blanching. He was aware of this. He kept them there because they needed something to press against. He heard Hollander’s chair push back. Footsteps. Then Shane was beside him at the counter. A large, warm hand on his shoulder. Just present.

"Hey," Shane said quietly. "Look at me."

Ilya did not look at him.

“Rozanov. Come on.”

Ilya looked at him. Shane's face was doing more than it usually allowed itself to do. There was something in it that was not quite controlled. It was receiving the gravity, the heft of the news, but refusing to show it because someone else needed him not to. Ilya had seen this expression on Maks. He had not expected to see it here.

"The man outside my building," Ilya said. His voice came out level, which surprised him.

"I know." Shane held his gaze. "And Beaulieu is going to do something about that. That's why he's here." He paused. "But you need to come back to the table. Whatever he's going to offer, you need to hear it."

Ilya looked at the table. At Beaulieu, who was waiting with the patience of someone who had done this before, who had sat with men in worse moments than this and knew that the moment eventually passed and the conversation continued. He looked at his hands on the counter. He took one breath, then another.

"Okay," he said.

He pushed off from the counter and went back to the table and sat down. Shane sat beside him this time, not across. Beaulieu did not acknowledge the interruption. He continued.

“They have filed an extradition request with the Canadian government,” Beaulieu continued, in the same tone. He paused. “They asked Canada to send you back. Canada said no. This was already decided. It’s been a big mess. Your asylum claim complicates the request sufficiently that it goes nowhere legally.” He paused. “But the request exists. And it gives the Soviet state a formal basis to pursue this through every available channel. Legal, diplomatic, and otherwise.”

Ilya looked at the document. He did not pick it up.

“The man outside the building yesterday morning,” Shane said.

“Falls under otherwise,” Beaulieu said. He looked at Ilya. “This is why the photographs matter more than they would otherwise. The extradition request failing does not mean the matter is closed. It means the official channel has been exhausted.” He let that land for a moment. “There is something I need you to see.”

He removed a single sheet and passed it to Ilya. It was a transcript, Russian text with an English translation running alongside. “State broadcast. Three weeks ago. The charges were filed publicly. They ran a video alongside the formal proceedings. They show this to build their case. And to scare the people around you. They are also saying — if you come back, maybe no death sentence. But they will not put that in writing.”

Ilya wasn’t catching nearly enough of the words. They wanted him to go back. Willingly. He couldn’t do that. He read the transcript. He read it twice. His face did not change.

Beaulieu gestured towards the living room with the TV. “I have a copy if you want to watch.”

Ilya nodded, and they made their way to the TV. Beaulieu popped Dirty Dancing out, and replaced it with his own tape. The screen filled with the gray tones of a Soviet broadcast studio, the flag, the logo, and then the faces.

Alexei first. He looked tired and contained, reading from something just off camera, his voice flat. The words were what they needed to be. Traitor. Disgrace to the state. No longer his brother. Agreeing with whatever harsh punishment they saw fit. He said them with a dark emptiness. Ilya watched his brother’s face and understood exactly what was happening behind it. He sat with his hands pressed to his knees and felt something settle in his chest. It was not quite grief or regret. They had never been close. Not since their mother had died, anyway. But hearing Alexei say, on national television, that he, his own brother, deserved to die struck him deeply in a way that he had not anticipated. 

Two of the CSKA administrative staff came on screen next. Men he barely knew. Their names read from a list.

Then his father. He was in a room Ilya did not recognize. A chair against a plain wall, the kind of room that existed inside official buildings. His father was wearing the uniform he kept for state occasions, and someone had combed his hair. It was different from how Ilya remembered him looking, in warm sweaters that were easy for someone else to dress him in. He looked at the camera with the vacant expression he had been wearing for the past two years, present in his body but losing the thread of where he was in time. He read from something off to his left. The words were the right words. Failure. Treason. Disappointment. He read them in the voice he had used for commands, the colonel's voice, the only tone left to him that still arrived cleanly. He did not look like he knew what he was reading. He looked like he had been handed a piece of paper and was doing what he was told, which was the only thing he had ever known how to do.

Ilya sat very still. They had dressed him in his good jacket. They had combed his hair. They had brought him to a room and pointed him at a camera and given him words to say, and he had said them, and he did not know why, and he would not remember it tomorrow.

The final person was Svetlana. She was composed. She had always been composed under pressure, it was one of the things he had loved about her, the stillness at the center of her. She looked directly at the camera in a way Alexei hadn’t, and she said the necessary things in the necessary order. He had committed a crime, and deserved to be punished. He had betrayed her trust and that could never be repaid. Then she paused and said, “My mother would be so disappointed if she knew what he had done. She always believed in the values of this country. She would be heartbroken.”

Ilya’s head snapped up. Beaulieu was watching him. “Is there something in that statement?”

“Her mother,” Ilya said. He kept his voice level. “Svetlana’s mother was American. She came to Soviet Union, married a Soviet man. She left ten years ago. She is in Paris now.” He looked at Beaulieu. “Svetlana says her mother would be sad I leave.” He paused. “She is telling me she understands what I did.”

The room was quiet.

Shane was looking at the blank television screen. He looked at Ilya, and there was something in his face that was trying to hold more than one thing at once.

Beaulieu made a note. He closed the folder. He looked at Shane.

“Hollander,” he said. “Give us a few minutes.”

Shane looked at Ilya. Ilya nodded once. Shane pushed back his chair, went to the door and pulled it closed behind him. His footsteps went down the corridor and stopped.

Beaulieu turned back to Ilya.

“I want to move you,” he said. “Immediately. A different location entirely. There is a secure building on Drummond, used for government protection cases. You would have your own unit. A security detail, a few men, rotating shifts. You would not be alone at any point outside the unit. Travel to the rink and back, escorted. Any other movement, escorted and approved in advance.” He looked at Ilya steadily. “This is not like in Ottawa. You can still practice. You can still play. Travel with the team. But you could never be alone.”

Ilya looked at the table.

“How long,” he said.

“Until the threat assessment changes. Months, possibly longer. Maybe the whole season. They used the summer against you and we can’t let that happen again.”

Ilya was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the window. The street below. The city he had spent six months learning, every street a small act of accumulation, the grocery store on Sherbrooke, the municipal rink in the east end, the bar on Crescent Street. The mountain in the mornings. The silence of the apartment at five-thirty before the city started, which belonged to him and no one else. Beaulieu didn’t even know about Vadim, and it was still enough to take away his freedom. 

He looked at the photographs on the table. He looked at Beaulieu.

“No,” he said.

Beaulieu did not look surprised. “Rozanov—”

“I understand.” He kept his voice level, because level was what he had, and he was going to use it. “What you want is not safe. It is a different kind of cage. I did not come to Canada to live in a cage.”

“You came to Canada to play hockey,” Beaulieu said. “You need to be alive and safe to do that. That is all that matters.”

“I know.” Ilya looked at him. Something in his chest was very tight. “I know that. I am not — I am not arguing. I am asking you to find a different way.” He stopped. He did not look away. “I cannot go back to that. I am asking you. Please find another way. Please.”

The please was the closest he could come to begging. He was aware of it. He said it anyway, in the same way as everything else, flat and precise, because that was all he had and Beaulieu needed to hear it. Beaulieu met his eyes. He picked up his pen. Set it down. He looked at the folder and then at the photographs and then at the wall past Ilya’s shoulder.

“The logic of the safe house arrangement,” he said finally, “is that you need to be in a known, controlled environment, with a vetted, secure presence around the clock. The security on Drummond serves that purpose. But we could—” he paused, working through it as he said it. “You live with someone. Someone we trust. Someone who understands the situation and can handle pressure. They agree not to leave you alone.” He looked at Ilya. “That is a gigantic ask of another person. You would never be able to be out of the house alone. Either with them or a handler. This isn’t something we can just ask of anyone, and I hear you aren’t making many friends on the team.” Beaulieu looked at him. “You understand?”

Ilya felt a brief flush of shame. “I know,” Ilya said.

“The person would need to be vetted. They would need to understand what they were agreeing to. They would need to be someone whose judgment I trust under pressure.” He looked at Ilya. “Do you have someone like that? That’s going to be a very short list, Rozanov, if it exists at all.”

The kitchen was quiet. Down the corridor, Shane’s footsteps had been still for a long time. Ilya looked at the door. He looked at Beaulieu.

“Shane Hollander,” he said.

Chapter End Notes

So it starts! You hung in for the slow burn...

Research notes:

The death sentence seems wild but is accurate! Alexander Mogilny was tried and sentenced to death by firing squad for desertion based on his defection. Both of his parents lost their jobs and were summoned to Moscow to give official filmed testimony denouncing their child. The US wouldn't extradite him, so it just...went away after the fall of the Soviet Union. Canada also would not extradite in this case. Mogilny, like Ilya, was the first though, so all of this was unprecedented.

The VHS for Dirty Dancing would have cost the modern-day equivalent of about $100, so whoever picked it did so knowing it was a substantial investment in Ilya's cultural knowledge. I originally had them watching Die Hard but the timing didn’t work out quite right.

Chapter 19: Proximity

Chapter Summary

A night that starts with a jacket left behind at a bar ends with a death sentence, a security sweep, and an arrangement that changes everything. Shane is not sure he has done the right thing at any point. He goes to sleep anyway.

Chapter Notes

This chapter took longer than I wanted because the editor in me says that I should have cut the first 3000 words of this thing. But a lot of you want Shane's thoughts on things, so I decided I needed to just make a dang decision and post the thing.

You could absolutely skip to

"Hollander," Beaulieu said. "Give us a few minutes."

if you were in a time crunch and want the "new stuff". Consider this one the director's cut.

They're slowly inching towards each other, I promise.

Proximity (noun)

1. Nearness in space, time, or relationship.

2. The distance at which something becomes impossible to ignore.

3. What remains when every other kind of distance has been removed.

Example: "His knee was almost touching Shane's. Almost." — September, 1988

Shane's head was ringing when Beaulieu asked him to step out into the hall. It had been a fucking insane day and he was not quite sure if he'd done the right thing at any point, starting with suggesting drinks and ending here. That was the mistake. Trying to get Rozanov and Hayden to clear the air. That was the beginning of the end.

Hayden had been saying something. Shane took the words in without hearing all of it because he was looking at the door Ilya had just walked through, the one that led to the street, the one that had closed behind him without explanation.

"What was that about?" Hayden said.

Shane did not have an answer to that. He looked at the empty chair, the untouched beer, the indent in the cushion where Ilya had been sitting thirty seconds ago. They had been talking. Ilya had been present, holding his own in the conversation with the English that had come so far since the playoff games, and then something had changed. His face had gone somewhere else entirely. Shane had watched it happen without understanding it. One minute. Air. And then nothing.

"I don't know," Shane said honestly.

Hayden looked at the door. He looked at Shane. "Should we go after him?"

"Give him a minute."

They gave him a minute. They gave him five. Twenty. The bar continued around them, the music and the low conversation. Hayden drank his beer and watched the door and the two of them chatted. About everything and nothing, and the time moved by. The jacket was still on the back of Ilya's chair. Shane picked it up without deciding to. The leather was heavy in his hands, that weight of good material, the wine red nearly black under the bar lighting. He held it a beat longer than he needed to, feeling the warmth still in the lining. Something about this, the personal weight of someone else's coat in his hands, the residual heat of their body, moved through him in a way he was not going to examine in a bar with Hayden watching.

"I'll take it to him," Shane said.

He stepped outside first. The street was empty in both directions, just the ordinary September night, wet pavement and a cab going past and no sign of Ilya at all. Something tightened in Shane's chest. He went back in.

"He's not out there," he said. "I'm going to swing by his place."

Hayden was quiet for a moment, doing arithmetic on his face. "Want me to come?"

"No. Go home. I'll call you."

"Shane."

"I'll call you."

Hayden picked up his coat. He looked at Shane, clearly letting Shane know he'd be asking about this later. Then he left. Shane folded the jacket over his arm and went out into the September night. He knew the address from the Metros file. He had known it since March and had never been.

What happened after Ilya opened the door was something that he'd think about later in bits and pieces, the way you think about things that arrive too fast and too heavy to process all at once. Parts of a puzzle that he was still trying to put together. 

The jacket delivered, the apartment catalogued in a single sweep. Shane was appalled by the total lack of stuff in the apartment. Nothing personal on the surfaces, nothing on the walls. One exception, a Russian-English dictionary on the shelf with a cracked spine. Shane couldn't help but reach for it. He picked it up because he thought maybe, just maybe, it would give him some insight into Ilya Rozanov. The dictionary would be his way in. Then the photographs fell and the things he learned about Rozanov turned out to be much larger and more complicated than he had been looking for.

Shane went very still when the photos fell. The top one, a familiar-looking man with dark curly hair and a wry smile and a possessive arm wrapped around Ilya. It was recent. Ilya was wearing the same jacket Shane had brought with him. Shane looked at the photograph and understood several things at once. The first thing was that Ilya Rozanov was not alone in the way Shane had assumed he was alone. The second thing was that whoever the man was, he was much closer to Ilya than Shane was. The third thing arrived without language, just as a physical fact, a tightening somewhere below his heart. He looked at it for one more second. Then Ilya was there, gathering the photographs fast, and Shane let him.

Shane didn't know what to do. He found himself needing to make a call. Someone, anyone, who could make this better. Beaulieu answered on the second ring, which meant he had been awake, which told Shane something about how much Beaulieu already knew, or suspected, or had been waiting to hear.

"It's Hollander," Shane said. He kept his voice low. "Something's happened with Rozanov."

A pause that was not surprise. "Where are you."

"His apartment. He got an envelope. Photographs. People from his life back home. People they can use against him." Shane looked at the kitchen table, the five photographs facedown, the dictionary on the shelf. "There's a man who's been outside his building. He saw him this morning. He's been sitting on all of it for three weeks."

Silence. The thinking kind.

"Is he all right," Beaulieu said.

"He's—" Shane looked at Ilya's blank, ashen face at the kitchen table, his hands around a cup that had gone cold, his face doing the careful neutral thing. "He's here."

"The man outside. Do you know if he's still there tonight."

"I don't know."

"Assume yes." A pause. "I'm coming tomorrow morning. Early." Another pause, shorter. "Can you stay tonight."

Shane looked at the hallway. He thought about walking out and calling a cab and going back to his house. The deadbolts and the six photographs and the man possibly still across the street and Ilya at the kitchen table alone with all of it at midnight.

"Here?" Shane asked.

"Yeah, Hollander. Don't leave him alone."

"I can, yeah."

"Good." The quality of Beaulieu's voice shifted slightly, the note-making quality. "Don't let him go out before I get there. In the morning, when he wakes up."

"He's not going anywhere tonight."

"In the morning," Beaulieu said again. Specific. The way he said things he needed to land.

"All right."

"Seven-thirty. Don't open the door for anyone else." He paused. "And don't leave."

"I won't."

The line went dead. Shane again felt a flurry of anger. Rozanov should have told him. Should have known to tell him. He tells Rozanov as much. "You could have told me."

"How? I say what, Hollander? Scary man with camera come to my house? How do you help me with this?"

Shane felt himself flush again. The answer was that he didn't know. He didn't know how he would have helped, specifically, practically, with a man across the street and photographs in an envelope. But that wasn't quite the point and they both knew it. The point was that Ilya had looked at the short list of people available to him and Shane had not made it onto that list. Shane had spent the summer believing he was building something, a real captaincy, and apparently he had been building it on his side of the relationship only. He sat back down at the table and neither of them said anything for a while.

Finally, Shane asked about the photos. They sat at the kitchen table and Rozanov told him everything and Shane listened and received it the way you received a package that might contain a bomb. The phone calls first. The playoffs, the lost lanes, the half-second off. All of it running on top of a voice using his father's name, and Shane had watched it happen from fifteen feet away and called it a bad shift. Three weeks of photographs sitting in this apartment, a man outside the building, and Ilya had said nothing. Had come to practice. Had sat across from Shane at team dinners and said nothing. Shane was his captain. But he wasn't someone Ilya could trust.

He knew Ilya had left people behind. He had understood this in the abstract since he arrived. But now there were faces and names, each one a new weight. His father at a window in Moscow. His brother. The man who had helped him get out, who had paid a specific price for that act and was now living in whatever came after. Svetlana. Shane asked if she was his sister, hoping she was, feeling something in his jaw shift when Ilya said no. A friend. Since I was young. Very close. Shane wondered how close was very close.

Then Vadim, and Shane asking the Village question and watching Ilya's face when it landed. Friends. Teaching me the city. That is what you see. Shane had looked at him steadily and understood that Ilya was lying and that the lie was necessary and that Shane was going to help him maintain it, because the alternative was a conversation neither of them could afford to have right now. He stood.

The hours after had been quieter than they should have been. Rozanov was so nervous, so still as they watched the movie. Shane wanted to tell him it was okay. Tell him they would come up with a plan and all would be well. But he didn't know that. He couldn't guarantee that. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and Shane put the tape in and the movie started and neither of them talked about the photographs or the man outside the building or the phone calls or anything else. The screen filled the room with American summer light and a story about a girl learning to dance and a man she wasn't supposed to want, and Shane sat with his feet on the coffee table and felt the distance between them on the couch and was aware of it in a way that had nothing to do with the movie. Ilya was watching the screen with the focus he gave to things he was processing, his eyes bouncing rapidly. His English wasn't catching all of it, Shane could tell. 

"You following it?" Shane had asked.

"Girl learns to dance. Father does not like the man."

"That's basically it."

Ilya's knee shifted slightly toward Shane at some point. Shane did not move away. He spent a considerable amount of time thinking about not moving away, which was its own kind of decision. Shane didn't want to be here. He was going to leave. That had been the plan. Return the jacket, make sure Ilya was all right, go home. But Beaulieu had asked him to be here. He sat on the other end of the couch and felt the gravity of the evening settle into something that was not going to let him leave, even if he tried.

He fell asleep. He didn't mean to. He woke in the dark to Ilya saying his name in the dark, low and close. 

"Hollander. You should go. Sleep."

"Nah, I'm going to stay." The words came out before the decision had fully formed, but once they were out they held. He was staying.

"I do not have more bed." 

"I'll sleep here. You go to sleep." He jerked his head toward the bedroom.

"Beaulieu ask you to stay." It was not quite a question. It was a read, accurate, the kind of thing Ilya did. Seeing through the surface to the machinery underneath.

"Yeah," Shane said. There was something in it he'd rather weren't there, the admission that Beaulieu's voice on the phone had said don't leave and Shane had agreed, and that this was partly why he was still on the couch. Only partly. The other part was something he was not going to name at midnight on a sofa in Ilya Rozanov's apartment.

"Hollander, go home."

"No, I'm good. You go to bed."

Ilya brought him a pillow and a blanket. The domesticity of this, Ilya holding the linens carefully, setting them on the couch, the tips of his ears going slightly red under the kitchen light, required more management than Shane currently had available.

"You can sleep in bed," Ilya said. Shane's face did something he was grateful the low light concealed. He could not sleep in that bed, surrounded by the smell of him, with his body inches away. That was not an option.

"No. I toss and turn." A reasonable excuse.

"Fine. Is your back."

Ilya went to the bedroom and closed the door. Shane lay on the couch with the pillow that smelled like someone else's laundry detergent and the blanket that was thin but adequate and looked at the ceiling. He was aware of Ilya on the other side of the door. He was aware of what he had agreed to when he told Beaulieu he was with him now, and what he was continuing to agree to by staying. 

He did not sleep well. The couch was too short and his thoughts were too active and every sound the building made had a volume that he could have dismissed if it was daytime. A pipe ticking somewhere in the walls. The elevator at the end of the hall. A car on the street below, stopping, idling, moving on. The images of the photographs replayed in front of his eyes until he finally was able to doze off.

When Shane woke Ilya was at the stove. He was wearing a flannel shirt and his hair was pushed flat on one side from a pillow and he moved through the small kitchen with the automatic ease of a routine performed hundreds of times, reaching for the kettle, the tap, the match, the burner, without looking. Shane watched him for one unguarded moment. There was something in the way he held his head, slightly forward, as if the weight of it had increased overnight.

Shane sat up on the couch and the noise of it carried. Ilya looked back and their eyes met and whatever Ilya saw in Shane's face he did not comment on.

"You did not sleep," Shane said.

"No."

Shane got up. He ran a hand through his own hair and pulled on his shoes and went to the kitchen and sat at the table and Ilya set a cup of tea in front of him and they sat in the morning silence and neither of them said anything. The photographs were still there. They had not moved. Shane had somehow expected them to have been put away, but Ilya had left them, five glossy rectangles face down on the kitchen table, and the fact of their continued presence was its own kind of statement.

Beaulieu rang the buzzer at seven-thirty. Shane answered it without being asked. He pressed the button and stepped back and felt the small weight of that action, the way answering someone else's door rearranged the relationship you had to the space you were standing in. Beaulieu looked at Shane. Then at Ilya. Then at the five photographs on the table. He sat.

The questions came in the flat, methodical order of a man building a record. Dates. Content. Sequence. The phone calls, the envelope, the handler outside the building. Ilya answered and Shane sat at the end of the table and listened and kept his face arranged. Ilya's English was more stilted, harsher than it had been. The stress was collapsing his vocabulary, leaving him reaching for words that weren't arriving cleanly. His sentences shortened. Gaps appeared. Shane watched the effort of it and felt something tighten in his chest.

"You're doing fine," Shane said, when Beaulieu looked at him with a question about comprehension. He meant it. He was also performing it, because Ilya needed him to.

Beaulieu made a note, then set down his pen and looked at the table. "Unfortunately, we have more to discuss. There are some things you need to know. We didn't know when the right time to talk about them was." He set a document on the table. "The Soviet state has formally charged you with desertion of military duty. There was a trial in August. You were sentenced to death in absentia."

Shane absorbed it. The words arrived and he processed them in the order they came and each one was heavier than the one before it. Death. In absentia. Trial. August. A government a world away had formally decided Ilya Rozanov should not exist. Shane sat with that and felt it rearrange things, the memories appearing in a new light. He thought about the Forum last season, Ilya at full speed, watching him do something that no one else on the planet could do quite that way. He thought about the locker room, the smirk getting into his voice, the ears going red. He thought about the wardrobe in the apartment — the rust and the teal and the burgundy and the cobalt, all the colors Ilya had chosen for himself for the first time in his life, each one a small act of becoming someone who was allowed to exist as himself. He tried to imagine every little bit of that slipping away, never to exist again. Shane looked at him. He was pale, sweating. Not his usual, defiant self. Shane held his face steady, even under the effort it took to do so, because Ilya needed him too.

Ilya's chair scraped back. He was at the counter before Shane had fully processed what was happening. The movement was not anger. It was the body doing something the mind had not approved, a physical need to be somewhere other than sitting with what had just arrived.

Shane pushed his own chair back. He crossed the kitchen and stood beside Ilya at the counter. His hand was on Ilya's shoulder before he thought about it, he could feel the heat of him, the soft tremor through his shirt.

"Hey," he said. Quiet. "Look at me."

Ilya did not look at him.

"Rozanov. Come on."

Ilya looked at him. Shane's face was doing more than it usually allowed itself to do. He could feel it. Something was showing that he normally kept arranged, a response to the gravity of what was happening in this kitchen that he could not entirely control. He saw Ilya's hands on the counter edge, the whiteness of the knuckles, the controlled rigidity of a man who was holding himself together through training rather than choice.

He had reassured Ilya, there was a plan, a good one, even as he didn't believe it himself. Ilya looked at the table. At Beaulieu. At his hands. He took a breath.

"Okay," he said.

They went back to the table and Beaulieu continued.

The extradition request. The asylum claim. Legal channels exhausted. And then the broadcast. Beaulieu pulled a VHS tape from his folder and they moved to the living room and removed Dirty Dancing from the VCR and put in the tape and the screen filled with gray Soviet broadcast tones and then the faces. Shane had the translation, trying to follow.

Ilya's brother, reading from something just off camera, his voice flat. Traitor. Disgrace. No longer his brother. The words were delivered with a dark emptiness that Shane could hear even without understanding Russian, something mechanical underneath the language, the sound of a man saying what he had been told to say because the alternative was worse. Shane did not know Alexei. He knew the type. He had played against men like him, men who performed what was expected with total obedience and saved whatever was real for a room no one could see into.

Then the father. He looked ill. Sickly and aged, far too old to have a son as young as Rozanov. He spoke, but the words lacked passion or emphasis. Failure, Treason, Disappointment, but behind them was nothing except the mechanical habit of following instructions. Clearly he had been pointed at a camera and given lines and he had read them. Shane sat very still and watched a government use a father's voice to tell his son he was a failure, and the understanding of what Ilya had been carrying arrived with a weight that changed everything Shane had thought he knew about the past six months.

Then Svetlana. Composed. Direct. Looking at the camera in a way the brother hadn't. She said the necessary things and then she paused and said something about her mother, and Ilya's head came up.

"Her mother," Ilya said. "Svetlana's mother was American. She came to Soviet Union, married a Soviet man. She left ten years ago. She is in Paris now." He looked at Beaulieu. "Svetlana says her mother would be sad I leave. She is telling me she understands what I did." Shane felt the briefest flash of something that may have looked like jealousy.

The room was quiet. Shane looked at the blank television screen and then at Ilya and there was something in Shane's face that was trying to hold more than one thing at once. Grief and admiration and the particular ache of watching someone realize they are still loved from across an ocean through a coded message on state television.

"Hollander," Beaulieu said. "Give us a few minutes."

Shane looked at Ilya. Ilya nodded once. Shane pushed back his chair and went to the door and pulled it closed behind him.

And there he was, standing in the corridor with his back against the wall and heard nothing through the door. He thought about the apartment and the deadbolts and the handler across the street and the death sentence sitting on the kitchen table in a manila folder. Beaulieu came into the corridor and said, "Rozanov's going to his room for a few minutes so we can talk."

Shane went back in. Ilya was already at the bedroom door. He looked at Shane once, a brief reading look, checking a temperature rather than asking a question and went through. The door didn't latch. The line of light underneath it was thin and steady.

Shane sat. Beaulieu opened the folder.

"Why didn't you tell him," Shane said.

"It wouldn't have changed anything."

"It would have changed things for him."

"The document existed whether he knew about it or not. The operative outside this building was there whether he knew about it or not."

"He's been walking to the rink by himself." Shane's voice was still even, barely. "Going to bars. He had a man watching him from across the street and he didn't know what for. Keeping that from him," Shane shook his head. "It's indecent."

"What it would have changed," Beaulieu said, with the patience of someone who had won this argument before, "Was his behavior. A man who knows he's under active sentence becomes observable. He draws attention. The operative was monitoring, not acting. I needed Rozanov's patterns to stay stable while we worked the diplomatic channel. And it would have affected his training schedule. We needed him in shape to play."

Shane tried to hold in the huff that escaped him. Of course, he had to be in top shape to play.

"And the diplomatic channel."

"Failed."

Shane was quiet. He was doing the thing where he decided that being angry was not the most useful thing he could be. It took a moment. "Did you know it was coming?" he asked. "The whole time?"

"We knew it was a possibility. The only thing that mattered operationally was getting him appropriate travel documents so he could play in American cities. That was it. The death sentence is a Soviet legal instrument with no Canadian jurisdiction. It creates diplomatic pressure, which I was managing. Last week the travel documents came through." A pause. "Which is why we're having this conversation now."

Shane looked at the thin line of light under the bedroom door. A court in Moscow had decided in August that Ilya Rozanov should not exist. And Ilya had gone to grammar lessons. Had bought cobalt blue sweaters. Had learned to say enough, you're doing fine in a language not his own. Had done all of it on top of a sentence he didn't know about, while Shane had been at the lake on a dock managing his feelings.

"Okay," Shane said. Quiet. "What's the plan?"

Beaulieu explained the Drummond Street building. Shane said, "He would have said no to that." 

"Immediately. He did not like that plan. The alternative is a trusted private residence. Someone vetted, someone present, someone whose judgment holds under pressure." He looked at Shane. "He said your name."

Shane said nothing.

"It would be a huge imposition. Wherever you live, he lives. He doesn't leave without you. Those are the two conditions."

"How close does close actually need to be?"

"He cannot leave the residence without you. That's the line." Beaulieu's voice was level, specific. "If you're both home that's fine. You go about your business. You're not following him room to room. What you cannot do is leave while he's inside, or let him go out without you."

"The whole season."

"Possibly. Quarterly reassessment."

"What would the team know?"

"Nothing. His lease was up, you had space."

"Theriault."

"Enough to give you today." Beaulieu reached for the telephone and passed it across.

Shane took it. He called Theriault and used the captain's voice, the one calibrated for bad scoreboards and difficult rooms, and said they needed the day off. Theriault's silence gave away his understanding he was being deliberately not told something. "I don't want details," he said.

"No."

"Rozanov is at practice Monday. Full practice."

"Yes."

"I'm not happy, Hollander." Flat, final.

"I know, coach."

Theriault hung up. Shane set the receiver down. Beaulieu made a note. 

"I have a condo," Shane said. "New building. I've had it since the spring and haven't used it. One entrance, better locks. I bought it for privacy." He said this without elaborating further and Beaulieu appeared to decide the rest was not relevant. He wrote down the address.

Shane felt the satisfaction of converting a problem into a series of actionable items. The call to Theriault. The condo. The security team. All of it manageable, all of it within his ability to organize and execute. He was good at this. He managed things. He made structures. He put himself between difficult situations and the people who needed protecting from them and he was very, very good at all of that.

What he could not manage was the specific fact that Ilya Rozanov's safety now required Shane's presence rather than his management. Those were different things. Shane had always been more comfortable with the second. You could manage from a distance. Presence meant closing the distance entirely and standing in it, and the distance was the thing Shane had been carefully maintaining since February for reasons he was not going to examine with Beaulieu watching. Something else for the drawer in his mind, to be opened later.

"We'll sweep the condo this afternoon. New deadbolts, alarm, direct line." He closed the folder. "Get him."

Shane went to the bedroom door and knocked twice. "Rozanov. Come back." Beaulieu explained the arrangement in the same flat order. When he finished Ilya was quiet for a moment.

"I can still travel," he said. "With the team."

"Handler on the road. Not Hollander's responsibility." Beaulieu looked at him. "That's already arranged."

Another pause. "Practice. I do not need escort to the rink."

"You go together. You're both going to the same place." Beaulieu's voice was even. "It doesn't look like anything. Two teammates."

Ilya looked at the table. He looked at Shane. "You agree," he said. Not a question.

"Yes," Shane said.

Something moved across Ilya's face. Not gratitude exactly. Something more complicated, something that had to do with the burden of needing someone and knowing you owe them for this. Gratitude, or relief maybe, or what it looks like to have a debt you will never repay. He nodded once. That was it.

They packed what there was to pack, which was not much. The grammar book. The dictionary with the photograph still inside it. The cassette recorder. A few practical things. Ilya left most of the wardrobe. Shane made a mental note to have the rest moved before the week was out. They drove separately, stopping to pick up Ilya's car outside the bar from last night. Ilya followed Shane across the city and stood in the doorway of the condo and read it the way Shane had read his apartment the night before.

The condo was on the third floor of a building that still smelled faintly of fresh paint and new carpet. Shane had bought the whole building in February and had slept here exactly never. The first floor had retail space that he was renting out that more than covered the mortgage, but the upper two residential levels were vacant. He had bought it for privacy, from his parents, from the team, from the pressure of being Shane Hollander at all times in all rooms. A place with no accumulated meaning, no history, nothing attached to it yet. It was different than the house on the other end of town that he would count as home. Facing Rozanov in his space was just too much. Standing in it now with Ilya in the doorway reading the space, it occurred to him that this was what he had actually been building it toward, without knowing it, a place where the prepared version of himself did not yet exist and therefore could not be performed. 

"You live here?" Rozanov asked, looking at the sparse furnishings, bare walls.

"It's new," Shane said. "Good investment. I'll rent it out someday."

"Mr. Landlord," Ilya said. The smirk was there, which made Shane feel better. Ilya set his box on the kitchen counter. Shane noticed he put the dictionary on a shelf first, before anything else.

The security team arrived at ten. Two men who moved through the unit efficiently. One stood at the front window and looked down at the street for a long moment. "Retail below is good," he said. "Separate entrance. Single stairwell for residential." He turned around. "Who has keys to the building."

"Just me," Shane said. "The retail tenants have their own entrance. They can't access upstairs."

The man nodded, made a note. "We'll change the stairwell lock as well."

By four in the afternoon there were new deadbolts on both doors, a keypad alarm by the entrance, and a direct line telephone mounted inside the kitchen cabinet. One of the men shook Shane's hand on the way out and said it was a good building and Shane thanked him as though he had chosen it for exactly those reasons.

Shane showed Ilya where things were. The hot water tap that ran slow. The extra keys on the hook. The guest room at the end of the hall. 

They sat at the kitchen table later and Ilya said, "What do we tell the team."

"Lease was up. I had space."

Ilya turned his cup in his hands. "Hayden will not believe this."

"Hayden doesn't need to believe it. He might have to invite you to his wedding now though."

"And if someone asks about the apartment."

"Lease was up. That's it."

Ilya was quiet. He was deciding whether to push on something and decided against it. Then, "You did not have to do this."

"I know," Shane said.

"You could have—"

"I know." He said it in a way that closed it. Shane was aware of the distance across the table. He was aware of how easy it would be to close it. He was aware that he was not going to.

He looked at his cup. "The thing Beaulieu told us this morning," Shane started.

Ilya looked at him.

"You know, the trial." Shane kept his voice level. "How are you doing with that."

Ilya was quiet for a moment, there was a brief internal negotiation, the kind Shane had watched him conduct on the ice when a play was going wrong and he was deciding in real time whether to commit or pull back. He looked at the table.

"I knew," Ilya said. "Not the — I did not know the word. But I knew this could happen." He paused. "I knew it is possible. If. Maybe." He turned his cup. "Now it is not maybe."

Shane said nothing. He waited.

"My father," Ilya said. He stopped. He pressed his lips together and looked at the window and Shane watched something crack very slightly in the arrangement of his face, a line appearing that had not been there a moment ago. "He does not remember. He read the words and he will not remember. Tomorrow he will not know he said them." He stopped again. "They know this. They chose him because of this." His voice had gone somewhere quieter. "I want a cigarette." 

Shane looked at him. 

"I do not smoke much anymore," Ilya said. "The team. They say is bad for the lungs." He gestured at his chest. "But sometimes." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

"I don't have any," Shane said. "I've never smoked."

Ilya looked at him. He smirked again, not quite amusement but moving in that direction, which was remarkable given the last twenty-four hours. "No?"

"No."

"What do you do," Ilya said. "When you want to be —" he searched for the word. "When you want to break rule. Like from movie." 

"I don't know," he said, which was honest and also slightly embarrassing to say out loud.

Ilya considered this. "You let teammate stay with you," he said. "Teammates who are maybe in trouble with police."

"You're not in trouble."

"Death, Hollander."

"Canadian law," Shane said. "You're fine in Canadian law."

The corner of Ilya's mouth moved. He looked back at the window. Shane looked at the table.

The honest answer to Ilya's question was nothing. He did not do anything when he wanted to be rebellious because the wanting had never been loud enough to require an outlet. He had been the captain since he was fifteen in spirit and twenty-one on paper and he had built his life around the requirements of that, the discipline and the structure and the managed distance and the professional version of himself that he wore to every room he entered. His mother arranged his schedule. Beaulieu arranged his obligations. Theriault arranged his ice time. Shane arranged everything else, tightly, carefully, with the particular skill of a man who had decided very young that control was the thing that stood between him and whatever he was afraid of if he didn't have it.

He had never done anything rebellious. He had never smoked or crashed a car or broken curfew or stayed somewhere he shouldn't or crossed a line he had decided not to cross. He wasn't even good at chirping the other players, staying limited to the occasional fuck you. He had been, for as long as he could remember, extremely good at being exactly what was expected of him.

The most rebellious thing he could think of, sitting at this kitchen table, was leaning across it and finding out what Ilya Rozanov's mouth felt like. Which was not something he was going to do. But it was the only answer he had to the question, which was itself information he sat with for a moment before he put it away.

Shane's hand moved across the table before he thought about it, two inches toward Ilya's, and then he felt it moving and stopped it and pulled it back and put it flat on his own side of the table. Ilya had not looked up. Shane was not sure if he had seen it. He kept his hand where it was and looked at the window alongside Ilya and did not say anything for a while, because there was nothing to say that would be adequate.

Ilya nodded. He picked up his cup. The negotiation on his face resolved back into something more composed, not closed exactly, but settled. He looked at Shane. "Thank you," he said. "For letting me come here."

"Yeah," Shane said.

Later, Ilya was at the kettle. Shane was on the couch with a book he was not reading, and Ilya had gotten up to make tea and was standing at the stove with his back to the living area, which was separated from the couch by nothing but empty space. An open plan that had seemed like a selling point when Shane bought the place, but now Shane was wishing for some more separation. Ilya reached for the cabinet above the counter and the shirt rode up at the back. That same drab flannel he'd been wearing since the night before, not one of the rust or cobalt things from the wardrobe he'd left behind. A strip of skin showed on his lower back, pale and unexpected. Milky white from years of Soviet winters and windowless practice halls. Shane had seen Ilya's skin before. The locker room made that unavoidable, even as he tried his hardest to avoid looking, to avoid the showers. But this was different. This was not the locker room. This was Shane on a couch eight feet away with nothing professional between them. He found the ceiling suddenly very interesting. 

The kettle began to heat. Ilya turned at the counter to ask about sugar and the kitchen light was on him and Shane's book was closed in his lap and there was a moment where they were just looking at each other across the few feet of open plan. Ilya's forearms rested on the counter edge. He was looking at Shane with that direct, unavoidable attention, like he was a problem worth solving.

"Tea," Ilya said.

"Sure," Shane said.

Ilya turned back to the kettle. Shane looked at the ceiling again and then at his book and then at his hands and did the quiet internal work of a person managing something with a great deal of discipline and no outlet and no clear end date.

Ilya brought two cups and sat down on the other end of the couch. Not the kitchen chair. The couch. Approximately three feet away, which was closer than the table and further than last night, and Shane noted it with the part of his brain that had been keeping a running inventory of distances for the past several months. Ilya wrapped both hands around his cup. He looked at the dark window. His knee was almost touching Shane's. Almost.

"Long day," Ilya said.

"Yeah," Shane said.

They sat. Shane was aware of the warmth coming off the body three feet away from him and that was a thing he needed to stop being aware of immediately. He picked up his book. Read the same sentence three times. Put it down.

After a while Ilya said, without looking away from the window, "I am thinking about the photographs."

Shane waited.

"Not — the threat. Not this." He gestured vaguely at the apartment, the new locks, the alarm. "Just. The photographs. Someone watching me. Watching us. Without us knowing." He turned his cup in his hands. "It makes it feel —" He searched for the word. Didn't find it. "Small," he said finally, which was not quite the right word but was close enough to something true that it landed.

Shane looked at him. "Do you want to talk about it."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "I miss —" He stopped. Started again. "In Moscow I had people. People who know things. People I did not need to explain to." He looked at his cup. "Vadim was like this. Not Vadim. But having. Someone." His voice had gone to a register Shane had not heard from him before, something underneath the performance of composure. "It is hard to always explain. History. My life. In English." He stopped. "Even in Russian. To start from nothing with a person. Every time."

Shane looked at him for a moment. "You don't have to start from nothing with me," he said. "I've been paying attention."

Ilya looked at him.

"I can be your person," Shane said. He said it simply. "If that's useful."

Ilya's face shifted. The same expression from that morning, when he had nodded once and that was it. Not gratitude and not relief but something in between, something that had to do with the cost of needing and the difficulty of receiving. He looked back at the window. He nodded, small.

"Okay," he said.

They sat for a moment. The city outside. The new locks. The alarm panel blinking green by the door.

"The broadcast," Shane said. He had been thinking about it since the kitchen table that morning and had not found a way in until now. "Your father." He paused. "You don't look like him."

Ilya turned his cup in his hands. "No," he said. "I look like my mother."

Shane nodded. He did not ask about the mother. He had gathered enough from the morning to know there was a shape to that absence, that it was old and complicated and not his to press on. But the high cheekbones, the particular set of the jaw, the eyes that were light in certain angles of light. Someone's eyes.

"She would have liked Montreal," Ilya said. He said it to the window. Shane was not sure Ilya had meant to say it out loud. Dead then, Shane thought. That was the shape of the absence.

Shane stood. He was careful about it, casual, the way you were casual about standing up when standing up had become a project requiring some management. "Get some sleep," he said. "Tomorrow is going to be a lot."

"I know."

"Goodnight, Rozanov."

"Good night, Hollander."

Ilya picked up his cup and moved toward the hall. Shane watched him go and felt something he didn't have a clean name for. Not the captain's instinct exactly, though it wore that clothing. Something more specific, and less manageable. The unwillingness to let him out of his sight.

"Rozanov."

Ilya stopped. He turned.

Shane looked at him. He looked tired in a way that was not just the hour. The exhaustion of managing something enormous in a language not built for it. Shane looked at him and thought about all of that and about the hand that had moved two inches across the table before he pulled it back, and he did not have anything to say. He had stopped Ilya and now he did not have anything to say.

"You going to be all right in there?" Shane said. Which was not what he meant, but was the only version of it he could say out loud.

Ilya looked at him for a moment. The reading look. Whatever he found in Shane's face he held for one beat, two, longer than the question required.

"Yes," he said. Then, quieter, "Thank you. For asking."

He went through the door. It closed. Shane looked at the line of light underneath it for a moment, thin and steady, and then looked at the ceiling and did the necessary work of being a person who had just done something unremarkable and was going to continue doing unremarkable things indefinitely. 

He stood in the dark. He sat on the edge of the bed. He pressed the heels of his hands into his thighs and looked at the wall. Somewhere on the other side of it Ilya Rozanov was doing whatever you did with a day like this one.

His mind was racing, thinking about everything. He thought about the couch. The knee, the almost. The kitchen, the ceiling he'd been finding increasingly useful, that strip of pale skin at the small of Ilya's back that he had no business thinking about and was thinking about anyway. He thought about the word death. Ilya with his hands around a cup saying I miss having a person in a voice that had something raw underneath it.

The thing Shane understood about himself, sitting here, was that he had spent eight months managing the distance between himself and Ilya Rozanov with considerable skill. He was good at control. He had always been good at control. What having Ilya in his space did was make that decision vastly more difficult. Every day. At close range. The conditions had just changed entirely, and he had agreed to that this morning without hesitating, which was itself information he was not going to look at directly.

He lay down. He was alone in a dark room and no one was watching and the discipline was going to hold everywhere that mattered. Tomorrow. The day after. All the way through. But not right now, in the dark, with the memory of a knee almost touching his and I can be your person still sitting in the air of the hallway where he'd said it. 

He let the image come without fighting it. The kitchen light on Ilya's jaw. The shirt riding up. The pale strip of skin at his lower back, private in a way the locker room never was. Ilya's body in a professional context and could be managed, but this version, the kitchen at ten o'clock version, the domestic unguarded version, which could not. And then, because the dark made honesty easy, something he had not let himself think directly before, what it would be like to close the distance between them. What Ilya's mouth would feel like. Whether he would be as deliberate about that as he was about everything else, or whether something in him would come apart.

He did something with that. His hand moved under the waistband and he let himself think about it until he didn't have to anymore. He stroked, fast and purposeful chasing his end, the vision of Rozanov in front of him.

Afterward he lay still and looked at the ceiling. The clarity that followed was not flattering. He had been awake for nearly twenty hours had watched a man learn he'd been sentenced to death, had sat beside him at a kitchen counter, had agreed to share a building with him, had said I can be your person in a hallway, and then come to bed and done this. He was thinking of what that mouth would feel like. The clinical explanation, stress, redirection, the body doing what bodies did, was there. That's what it was. Nothing more. It didn't hold and he knew it didn't hold.

He was always quiet about things he was not going to name. He had been quiet about this one for a long time. He was going to have to be very, very good at this for a very long time.

He would need to call his parents. His mother would want to know. She always wanted to know, and there would be a conversation, and he would manage it the way he managed everything. But not tonight. Tonight was his. 

Chapter End Notes

Shane having post-nut clarity is my favorite thing.

A few other notes.

Smoking was very common for hockey players (and like...everyone) through the 80s, but by the late 1980s, most North American hockey teams encouraged their players to either stop smoking or never start for younger players. Russia also still provided 10 cigarettes a day to enlisted men and cadets up until a few years ago.

Several Soviet hockey defectors have spoken publicly about continued surveillance after their defections. The most detailed accounts come from players who defected in the early 1990s as the Soviet system was collapsing and former KGB officers became more willing to discuss operations. Common themes: the feeling of being watched in their new cities, strangers who seemed to know their routines and ran into them suspiciously often, occasional approaches by individuals claiming to want to help them reconnect with family, and the systematic pressure applied to family members still in the Soviet Union. Alexander Mogilny, who defected in 1989, has described the year immediately following his defection as one of genuine fear. It's not paranoia if it's a reasonable conclusion.

The Soviet consulate in Montreal was an active center of intelligence operations throughout the Cold War. Montreal was of particular interest because of its large francophone population, its geographic position, and its role as a financial and cultural hub. KGB operatives living under assumed civilian identities operated in Montreal throughout the 1970s and 1980s. If a Soviet player had been based in Montreal, the local intelligence would have been tasked with monitoring their activities, contacts, and associations. This would have included physical surveillance, telephone monitoring, and cultivating sources within the player's social circle, including teammates, coaches, and anyone else with regular access to them.

It's been a hell of a week, but I hope you like this one. Thanks always for supporting me. Comments/feedback are always appreciated. This one is a bit of an in-between chapter, but things are mooooving for the dudes now.