i was only ever going to write one heated rivalry fic but it turns out there were two slightly different ilya rozanovs to consider. this one is much more, i would say, the long game-inflected?

After mid-autumn break, Moscow was cold enough to freeze unassisted. Ilya was pleased when classes began again. The public ice across the street from the secondary school was half-length, and its surface faintly ribbed, like the condoms Andrei, who had a girlfriend, showed him once. When Ilya came down the middle at moderate speed it rattled his brain like a loose windshield.

Andrei was around always now that he had left the academy for good. He was Ilya’s favorite hockey player next to Jágr, and Ilya had carefully watched him for many years. He always tried to imitate him; the cool moves, but also how he skated, his grip on the stick, where he put himself on the ice. Ilya shared his school and was good enough to play with him and his friends every afternoon. In the evening, when everyone else had gone, Andrei would bring out cones and a puck and run drills from the academy against Ilya. Andrei did not always believe in the academy’s “for good.”

On Friday they claimed a tight square of ice in one corner. Ilya took the puck behind the cones for the net and made a short pass back out to Andrei, who circled a cone where one of the dots would be while Ilya closed the distance between them. Andrei attacked head on, heedless, and Ilya poked the puck away from him.

“Good,” Andrei said, and tapped his stick for the puck. Ilya passed, and Andrei circled back and passed up to Ilya, who circled himself and turned to attack. Andrei closed, and Ilya exposed his forehand the same way Andrei had, drawing the same poke check. Toe drag, explode the other way, puck between the cones.

“Good!” Andrei said. They switched, and Andrei tried a head fake that Ilya didn’t fall for. Good. Ilya’s turn. Head fake, into a backhand toe drag that Andrei knew he had, but maybe did not know he had at speed, since he was slow to react to it, almost lazy. Puck between the cones. Andrei’s turn.

Andrei was sixteen years old and 185 centimeters tall. Ilya had just turned twelve, but he was already almost 180 centimeters. The pediatrician said he was going to be at least 190 centimeters when he was done, maybe even 195. The doctors at the academy said Andrei had finished growing early. On the X-rays there were no more gaps between his bones. Ilya thought of this overheard conversation when Andrei tried to skate through him. Ilya was light but he was long, and he knew how to make himself heavy on the ice. The puck skittered past him and Andrei did not. For his turn on defense Andrei had to retrieve it from far outside their tight square, and he smacked it hard to Ilya from a distance, charging back in.

Having fun with the opening, Ilya tried something new, which did not know the name of but had seen while watching the NHL on TV. A pretty triple deke ended with the puck in the imagined top shelf.

“Too high,” Andrei said, floating his hand a foot above where the arc of the puck had intersected the plane of the goal line.

“Was not!” said Ilya.

On his next turn, Andrei tried the same thing, and Ilya stripped the puck easily since he had not overcommitted. Ilya’s turn, on which he badly flubbed a Zorro once he’d passed his brother and was punished for it.

Andrei’s turn. Ilya, still laughing at his own error, kept back towards their goal line as Andrei circled his cone, giving him space to try something. When Andrei turned around and saw the wide gap his face was frightening, and before Ilya knew it he was on the ground, having taken a puck to the hip from Andrei’s slapshot.

“Get up, you’re fine,” Andrei said, standing over him. Ilya was fine, although his hip hurt like crazy, an almost unbelievable pain, but he did not want to get up.

“What if I hadn’t turned?” he said, since he almost hadn’t in time.

Andrei seemed to think of the consequences of this and wish to abjure them. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going home.”

On the trolleybus, Ilya pulled out his notebook, which had a picture of Jágr pasted on the cover. He intended to work on his math exercises but paused to look fervently at his idol. He liked to imagine them playing together, although as he got older this was becoming less acceptable, for obvious reasons.

Andrei’s hand appeared to remove the notebook. “Stop with that shit,” he said. Andrei was the one who had taught Ilya the obvious reasons.

“My math exercises,” Ilya said.

Andrei tossed the notebook to the floor and stepped on it. He had failed the Basic State Exam in math when he came back from the academy. Ilya had to wait until he got off the trolleybus to retrieve the notebook, then rush after him.

Inside, the new house was still mostly empty, except for Ilya’s mother’s voice. “My boys!” she called from the kitchen. “Glory to God. I was starting to think I was the last person alive on Earth.”

Ilya’s mother hated the new house. They’d moved onto a street of private homes when Ilya’s father got the new job, and she said she missed the other women from the apartment building, even though she never got along with them. Ilya thought that perhaps they hadn’t understood her.

“Ilya,” Andrei said, and Ilya paused on the threshold of the kitchen, in the spill of yellow light. Andrei beckoned, and Ilya followed him into their father’s study.

“Sir,” Andrei said. “Coach Vetrov needs to be called about him again.”

Ilya’s father looked up critically, over the newspaper. “He is limping,” he said to Andrei.

“Yes,” Andrei said.

Ilya said nothing. Unlike Andrei, he had twice failed the tryout for the academy in Moscow, at ages six and eight. They would not look at him again. His father’s only good connection was to Vetrov, but he was with the academy in Petersburg.

“You will not make me look foolish?” Ilya’s father said, and Andrei shook his head.

“It would be foolish not to,” Andrei said.

“Ilya?” said Ilya’s father. Ilya shrugged.

“If Andrei says,” he answered.

“Irina!” Ilya’s father called, and Ilya, who loved his mother very much, could not be near his mother and father together. He retrieved a ball from his room and his stick from the hallway, missing all his family members as they moved about the rooms of the house, and slipped out the back door. The alleys were well-cleared in this neighborhood, and lit. They made a funnel for the wind. Ilya took shots against the wall of the house, knowing he could be heard from inside as a series of ominous thuds.

Eventually, Ilya got too cold to hold the stick. Someone had locked the back door, so he made his way down the alley and around to the front and knocked. His lovely mother opened the door. She had been busy; the house smelled like cabbage and apples and honey. She reached up and brought his face down to kiss him on the cheek, which like his hands he could not feel, and so did not react to.

“Ah, my baby,” she said. “Big enough he doesn’t need his mother anymore, I can’t believe it happened so soon.” It was a distorted echo of Ilya’s thoughts; he felt an odd vertigo now when he looked at her, partly because he had become so much taller than her so quickly, and partly because something was wrong, and he did not know what it was, and it frightened him in an enormous and permanent way, like the ocean.

The next day was that Saturday. His father was gone. Ilya waited a long time for breakfast. Eventually, he went in to wake his mother.

The director of the Petersburg academy had a large mustache and an office that smelled like feet. This was the first solid thing in Ilya’s memory. “And who is your favorite player?” he asked, impeded by the mustache. 

There had been an individual tryout for Ilya sometime before. It went well. Ilya was better than he realized; he knew he was the best on his old team, but it wasn’t the best team. After school he didn’t play much with friends his own age. When he was younger he had been very small, and no one wanted to play with him; as he got bigger, that changed, but then in the last couple of years it changed back again.

Now there was an interview as well, since Ilya would be boarding with the other boys. Pointless; the school was for hockey and nothing related to hockey was wrong with Ilya. Still, they needed to ensure he would not do anything crazy, his father explained.

“Pavel Bure,” Ilya said, making eye contact to show there were no crazy or obvious reasons for this, but still the director frowned.

“NHL?” he said to Ilya’s father, who shrugged broadly.

“We could use another Pavel Bure, no?” he said. “He is one.”

A foolish promise. Ilya’s father did not need Ilya to make himself look foolish. Sometimes he needed Ilya and Andrei to rescue him from foolishness. 

Apparently, though, the director agreed yes, maybe another Pavel Bure. Worth a shot. Ilya didn’t go back to Moscow with his father; his things were sent along to Petersburg, emptying another room in his mother’s house. There was very little use for mathematics at the academy, and Ilya threw away his notebook with the bootprint and the photo of Jaromír Jágr, which his mother had retrieved from the hallway and left for him at her bedside.

When they first began to be together, Ilya was much bigger, stronger, and faster than Shane. It was absurd, candidly, it spoke to the absurdity of Shane Hollander, that there was any discussion of him being taken first at all. The numbers from the combine were concrete and Ilya’s were better. Montreal must have looked closely at his X-rays, however, must have believed their doctors. Shane was indeed a rare man who kept growing into his twenties and the difference between them now was immaterial except, glory to God, he was so pretty. It could just kill Ilya. He could just die.

Ilya had managed to slip inside him just before the gaps between Shane’s bones closed. Now he resided safe in the solitary confinement of his rib cage. Lonely, but pleasant; Ilya liked to picture it as a ballroom, with a thick spongy lung carpet and the heart an absurdist throbbing chandelier above his head. Ilya wandered between the slender columns of rib, admiring: sunrise, the staff cleaning up after a party that had finally ended.

“What were you like as a kid?” Shane asked, and Ilya surfaced through the layers of tissue and muscle and skin until his ear was against Shane’s chest, just listening.

“Mm, tiny,” he said. “Miniature child.” He liked learning the things he could call miniature in English: miniature bar, miniature golf, miniature horse.

“Really?” Shane asked. His heart sped up. An extra few beats every minute for Ilya.

“Mm, no, sorry,” Ilya corrected. “I was big.” This was true or not true; he hadn’t remembered his childhood and there was no one else to do it for him.

“Figures,” Shane said. “I was a shrimp.” Then, potentially unrelated: “I went as Diglett for Halloween when I was like, twelve.”

Ilya frowned. “What is he?”

“Ah, Pokémon?” Shane asked, and Ilya nodded.

“Ah, yes. His name is the same.” This was typical of Shane. Ilya was there, and then he was here, with very little in between, but Shane was so continuous. He continued. 

“It was crazy, I had, like, the little pink nose and these rocks to carry around and everything. You know, like Diglett.”

Ilya was seized by a sudden and formless fear that he could not control.

“My mom used to throw these Halloween parties at our house, like every year for all of junior high. We had candy and bobbing for apples and shit. She would do up the whole inside like a haunted house. One time, my uncle chased everyone who came through with a chainsaw. I think that was the year I was Diglett.”

Ilya’s fear was this wild thing and it did not make any sense. Shane was twelve with a little pink nose and rocks to carry around. “Did you have fun?” he asked. “At your party?”

“Yeah, it was awesome. My mom always like, really wanted everyone to want to come. She worked super hard to set it up. The whole grade was invited.”

“And they came?”

“Yeah, dude. My uncle was out there chasing people with a chainsaw.”

Shane was in a happy memory. Cruelty was meaningless. Ilya put his mouth to the soft place below Shane’s nipple, above where his ribs revealed themselves through the skin.

“I should go,” Shane said after a while, and Ilya lost the sound of his heart, which when he listened closely was not a thud but a rush of blood in and out, like the tides.

On his way out the door, Shane frowned. “The chainsaw didn’t have the chain on it or anything,” he said.

“Really?” Ilya asked, sarcastic. “Your family did not kill all of your twelve-year-old friends with real chainsaw at fun party?”

“I just don’t want to give you the wrong idea about my Uncle Paul.” Sometimes Shane knew when something was there but he never knew what. His keys and his wallet were in a bowl on Ilya’s entryway table. Ilya thought that if anyone had made fun of Shane’s costume it would have broken his, Ilya’s, heart, but it hadn’t happened. Shane waved behind his back as he walked out, and Ilya went back to bed, back to the ballroom. He was considering pink carpet.