no idea what this is, hope you enjoy! also i really have not read a lot of troy fic yet so if you have recs pls drop them in the comments. as always you can find me on tumblr @agoodsoldier

Troy stood outside in the six AM pitch-blackness of Lac la Biche, which they were only in because it was some Make-a-Wish kid’s dream to meet a real-and-true hockey player from his favourite team, which was inexplicably the Ottawa Centaurs. The kid was only little—which was depressing, because the kid had one of the top five rarest bone cancers or something—but Troy had kind of thought he would be old enough to remember when the Cens sucked ass, or maybe young enough that his parents would never have raised him to be a Cens fan. And in oil country, too. Go fucking figure.

In the bitter cold of a January morning, Troy shivered in the down jacket that he got once he was rich enough not to have to budget anymore for winter gear. He blinked as his eyes adjusted to the four street lamps in view. This was another thing he hated about going up north. The summer days were longer but the winter days were shorter, in a way that fucked up his southern Ontario brain. Plus in Toronto there were street lights everywhere so who gave a shit if the sky was pitch black.

Not so in Lac la Bitch. But Troy was trying not to make jokes like that anymore. “You are standing outside in negative twenty and you do not even smoke,” Rozanov scoffed from behind him.

Troy turned around. “Do not fucking smoke before we go visit the cancer patient, Jesus Christ.”

“What, he will get double cancer?” Roz said, and Troy laughed a little at that and then felt bad about laughing. On another day Roz probably wouldn’t have smoked, because whenever anybody said anything about it he always put his pack away even if it was a joke, but this morning he lit up despite Troy’s protests. Troy watched those handsome cheek bones hollow as he sucked in the nicotine, and Troy looked away.

Eventually, fucking finally, the sun was starting to lighten the edges of the world. Troy didn’t want to expose any part of his body to the cold by checking the time, but probably it was around 6:20 by now, because Troy really couldn’t feel his nose anymore. “Fucking Canada,” Roz spat, “too fucking cold. And nowhere for coffee in fucking town, only Tim Horton thirty minute walk away, not even open.”

That was the worst Troy had ever heard Roz’s English, which meant he really must be fucked up by the cold. “Doesn’t it get colder than this in Russia?”

“You think Moscow is winter wasteland from all your terrible propaganda. Canadians, just like Americans.” But Troy kept looking at him, and finally Roz relented. “Yes, is true. Moscow is much colder, Canadians are like babies. This is fact every Russian is born knowing.”

Troy turned around then, and watched the sunrise. He didn’t like the winter, hated it growing up because getting your ankles wet in foot-high snow while waiting for the streetcar was one of the great curses laid upon humanity, or at least the section of it that lived in Toronto. But when he took his first ice bath, when he was just getting serious about hockey and taking care of his body so he could do insane and lethal things with it, the shock of it had cured something in him. It was like getting slapped in the face, but much purer, none of the heat of another person, just a cold sheet passing through you and locking all the grotesque, alive, wet things in ice. It was a pause button for real life.

There was no ice bath in the Almac Motor Hotel because nobody was playing a game. It was kind of crazy that there was one MLH player in a town like this with no hockey to be played, let alone two players, let alone one of the two being Ilya fucking Rozanov. But for some reason Rozanov had insisted on coming along, and when you were a charitable foundation and an MLH superstar offered to tag along with the league’s most pathetic wet dog for free, you didn’t ask questions or look any gift horses in mouths.

“Do you think…” Rozanov started, and then stopped.

Troy said, still looking at the horizon which was now bright and flat and empty, “I’m going inside. If you want to tell me something, you gotta do it now.”

“Nothing to tell,” Ilya said, and came inside with Troy.

Breakfast was a disheartening plate of overdone scrambled eggs, mealy cantaloupes, sausages so oily they were soggy, and toast. But they were hockey players, so they ate three servings each, and probably put away a loaf of bread each.

When they got outside the thing that struck Troy was that it was so quiet. It had been quiet in the morning, but that made sense to Troy, because even Parkdale was quiet at dawn, after the last-callers were done but before the morning commuters left. This quiet was unsettling because it was already nine in the morning and Lac la Biche was as quiet as it had been three hours ago. That was because of the snow, but also probably the fact that there were fewer people in this entire town than there were in Troy’s neighbourhood growing up.

A car drove them from Almac to an unassuming house which was where they were going to meet the kid. Apparently his cancer was terminal, which meant he could live out the rest of his days at home if he wanted to instead of the hospital. This also meant that two MLH players were assigned to trudge through two feet of snow across the un-shoveled lawn to their front door. Troy wondered if the kid would make it to the summer.

They met the parents. Troy felt like he was dissociating, but he tried to put on his best smile. The cold this morning hadn’t paused him for long enough, or frozen him deep enough. There was still something thawed in there, something muddy and restless that would swim to life like a big trout when the spring came.

“And this is Neil,” Neil’s mom was saying. Troy saw that she was smiling even though her eyes were watering, and she looked just like Mom, just for a second, even though she was maybe only five years older than Troy. And that was fucked up too, that an almost-thirty year old from nowhere, Alberta, was looking to a twenty-three year old hockey player to play God for her eight-year-old.

Neil was all smiles, though. “Barrett!” he said, grinning, and Troy grinned back. “You’re my favourite hockey player.”

“Wow,” Troy said, genuinely surprised, because Ilya Rozanov was right next to him and Neil hadn’t said anything.

“How can this be?” Roz said, clutching his heart, and Neil laughed. Roz hammed it up, getting on his knees. “Betrayal, betrayal of number one hockey player in the world…”

“But Troy Barrett’s my favourite ‘cause Mom says he’s the best,” Neil said. “You’re her favourite boy hockey player.”

“The Centaurs have always been his favourite team,” Mom said, voice heartachingly soft. “Whenever games came on the TV he always stopped crying, stopped everything, just to watch, so we showed him all the logos when he was just a baby. He loved the stupid horse-thing. We were never really a hockey family, but we had to pick a team to root for, if Neil was going to make us watch hockey all the time.”

Troy didn’t want to dwell on the deep grief there, the knowledge that soon Neil would not be there to make them watch hockey unless by some miracle. “I think the horse-thing is stupid too,” he said instead. “But seriously, I’m your favourite player? You know Rozanov’s been on the team longer than me, right?”

“I only picked after I saw why you got traded to Ottawa,” she said, and Troy turned to her, stricken. “I wanted Neil to have a good role model.”

Troy didn’t say anything, couldn’t. Mom smiled, a real one, crinkles in the eyes, and leaned back against the wall to watch her son.

“Neil has been waiting so long, Barrett,” Roz whined, like a kid. Neil laughed again. “Come on, get here.”

“All right, all right, jeez louise,” Troy said, and headed over to Neil’s bed to tell him all about what it’s like to play for a full stadium, and if he always knew he would be a hockey player, and if Neil wasn’t sick how he would help train Neil to be the best hockey player ever, and if his favourite food really is poutine like it says in the magazines, and other important questions.

By the time Neil got sleepy and the visit ended, it was three in the afternoon, sun getting low in the sky already. Sunset would be around 4:30pm today, Christ alive.

“Get in my car,” Rozanov said before they could get back to their room in the hotel.

“It’s not even your car, you freak. Why do you sound like you’re kidnapping me?” But Troy got in the passenger seat of Rozanov’s rental Land Rover from Edmonton, and let him drive thirty minutes until they were on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere, on the eastern shore of the lake.

The lake was big for a prairie province. It wasn’t as big as Lake Ontario, but Troy didn’t really think of the Great Lakes as lakes. The thing in front of them was a lake, because it was small and manageable, but it was still big enough that Troy couldn’t see the other side of it. The sun turned the sky a pale pink, pale like everything else in this winter, and Troy watched the reflection of it in the flat, still water.

The two of them leaned against the car. Rozanov lit up another cigarette, which was bad because nobody ever saw him smoke during the season and in the off-season he only smoked at parties or on special occasions. As far as Troy could tell, this definitely wasn’t either of those.

“I am keeping a secret from you,” Rozanov said finally. “Maybe you will feel less alone if I tell you, feel better about yourself, have some hope about this crazy terrible life of being gay in major league hockey. Still I say nothing.”

Troy glanced over at him. In the winter light, everything was piercing and bright. The sun on the snow hurt his eyes, and the reflection on the water glinted in his peripheral, and Roz looked too sad for words. “You have a partner,” Troy guessed, but Rozanov barely twitched. He said, “You don’t have to tell me anything,” because whatever Rozanov thought, Troy wasn’t some victim of homophobia who needed a sense of community.

“Ah, but if you…” and then Rozanov swallowed his words again. He sucked in another drag of his cigarette and then put it out against the sole of his shoe, and tucked it back into the pack. “Never mind.”

Troy sighed. “If you drove me out here for a heart-to-heart you better commit to it, or I’m putting my headphones on and watching the sunset.”

“Give me one second.” So Troy did, and he waited, because waiting for the strongest man in the room to decide what to give him is one thing Troy’s always been good at. “I have been fucking men since before MLH,” Rozanov said.

Troy laughed. “Is that it?”

Roz flapped a hand at him. “Men in hockey. Hockey coach’s son, other players. Even until now I could do this.”

Troy blinked. And then he sunk down a little more into the car because he needed a little more support, because he was so astonished. “What?”

“You think there are only three gay men in entire sport of many many hundreds of men?” Roz shrugged. He said, “I am only saying this so you do not feel alone. There are many others. Even in major league.”

“That’s–” Troy looked at him. “You’re insane. You can’t fuck other hockey players. That’s the most fucking dangerous thing I can think of.”

Casually, Roz said, “Same secret. Very good thing. Mutually assured destruction.”

“Why are you telling me this?” And then Troy watched his beautiful face falter, a face he could acknowledge as striking if he kept it to himself, quiet, but then Ilya turned to Troy and saw it on him. They looked at each other and there was a truth there that passed between them, something that wouldn’t have been notable except for the fact that they were who they were. The truth was that they found each other handsome, because they were both men. That wasn’t a feeling Troy had ever thought he would feel with another hockey player, in real life, with someone that wasn’t airdropped in from a world so different it might as well have been Narnia.

It was possible. This was what Ilya had hid from him by not telling him his secret. It was possible. Anywhere, it was possible.

“It is not so exceptional,” Rozanov said, cutting his eyes away to the huge clouds that covered half the sky, waves of light and shadow blushing above the imminent sunset. Voice trembling a little, Roz said, “Not so scary, yes? It can be done. Two hockey players, it can be done.”

But it was scary. Troy suddenly realized that only Ilya Rozanov could’ve done this. Only Ilya Rozanov would have had the fucking balls to eye up another man in a locker room. In another sport Troy could see there being another man like Ilya, but not hockey. Not the sport that belonged to bulky and awkward plastic buildings on land that predated them thousands of years; not the sport that belonged to sneering, small men; not the sport that erased the summertime like a fairytale, made warmth so brief it couldn’t be believed; not the sport that led Troy to a life of highways and arenas and promised nothing for the long slow suicide of retirement.

“Your partner is another hockey player,” Troy said, realizing what Ilya was trying to do, and Ilya closed his eyes. “Jesus.” 

He wanted to tell Ilya that it was okay, the way Ilya obviously wanted him to. He would say, Ilya, you’re right. It’s not so scary. You can do it. Two players, it can be done. Some people might be assholes, but you’ll get through it.

He couldn’t. Ilya knew it just as well as he did. Hockey was a machine, a metal box, a gaping claw-toothed thing, closed except for the occasional grinding, creaking shift that cracked the walls open to light. It would be cruel to smother love between two people inside a thing like that. It would be claustrophobic, airless. But then, coming out, being bared open together with no escape in a snowglobe cage like hockey might be even worse.

“Holy fuck, Roz,” Troy said, when he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Rozanov laughed, a little bitter, eyes still closed. “Yes, is very sexy to imagine, but look before you leap, Barrett: so many stinky socks.”

“Where the hell did you learn the phrase look before you leap,” Troy said, but his heart wasn’t in it, because he realized that the horror show he’d imagined was Ilya’s actual life. His love, his partner, was another player, choking inside the same suffocating complex Troy was in, the same thing Ilya was in, even if he always seemed like he could dance outside it if he wanted to, somehow immune to all the gay threats that got thrown Troy’s way and probably everybody else’s.

And then Troy remembered it. Dallas was watching TSN like usual, and everybody was at his house because there were always chicks and free beer. There were Rozanov and Hollander announcing their joint charity for mental health named in honour of Rozanov’s dead mom who “had mental health struggles,” which meant she for sure committed suicide.

“Why the fuck is this news,” Dallas said, and everyone snorted. Dallas grabbed the back of Troy’s neck and held it tight, in the way that always made Troy freeze up which always made Dallas laugh. But even though there was a terror in him when it happened, it was also the closest thing Troy ever had to intimacy that he actually enjoyed, because like fuck was he doing anything other than pretending to grind on girls at the club when Dallas was around, which was pretty much all the time. But Dallas liked to tease him about the fact that he didn’t even like the girls because it was always fun for him to see someone being touched when they didn’t want it, so Dallas probably knew the truth. And Troy knew that too, and to avoid that knowledge becoming public he made every effort to stay in Dallas’s good graces, which was by humiliating himself.

“What do you think, fag,” Dallas said. Dallas said fag after pretty much every sentence so Troy had gotten immune to it. But this time it registered as an actual word because of what Troy was looking at on screen, which was so unbelievable he couldn’t really process it.

Hollander was blushing, pretty with it, which was a terrible thing for Troy to realize in a room full of rowdy men. And onscreen Rozanov looked over at him and the expression on his face was something Troy had never seen before and couldn’t understand. What he did understand of it made him say, “Don’t call me a fag, those guys are the fags. Seriously, look at them.”

And now looking back, Troy felt it was even worse than he thought it was at the time, because that was a true thing on that screen. That was love, and there was Troy, tightening the gears on the crushing machine of hockey. And Troy had said look at them and exposed Hollander and Rozanov to the gaze of all those men at that party. And they had looked, all of them, and someone made the usual joke about Hollander’s pretty-boy face but added a bit about bending over for Rozanov, and then everyone got grossed out by thinking that much about gay sex and the party moved on. And probably Dallas Kent raped someone at that party too, come to think of it.

That was hopeless. Hockey was hopeless. It was all hopeless. But before Troy could tell Ilya about his realization, that Ilya was in love with Shane Hollander and there was nothing anyone could do to fix it, there was a sound down the road, maybe four or five metres away, and Troy and Ilya turned to look at the same time.

There was a moose, placidly licking at the salt on the road.

“Holy fuck,” Rozanov breathed. “That thing is fucking enormous.”

It was. The Land Rover was a big car, but the moose was bigger.

“Should we… get in the car?” Troy asked, as if Ilya would know what to do. Moscow was like twice the size of Toronto. There was no way they had moose walking around downtown.

“I’m scared to move,” Ilya said, which was fair enough. So the two of them watched the moose. It had no antlers, but it was so big Troy was convinced it was a male anyway.

After minutes of standing there in the cold, waiting, the moose looked up at them, snorted a puff of warm air, and stalked off the highway.

They both exhaled, and then finally went inside the car together. “What the fuck,” Rozanov said, and then he started laughing. “What the fuck?”

“Are you…” Troy blinked. “Are you okay?”

“I am having crisis about Canadian boy and moose comes to save me from jumping in frozen lake,” Ilya said. “This is stereotype.”

Troy didn’t really like joking about the moose because it was so large and gorgeous and sonorous, the heavy breathing under those enormous ribs, so he didn’t say anything about that. He just said, “I have a feeling that I was actually the guy that saved you from jumping in a frozen lake.” 

“Maybe, yes.” Ilya leaned back against the headrest. Troy watched the setting sun on his face. “You did good job.”

Troy let that sink in. He didn’t want to think of Ilya, impulsive just-recovered-from-street-racing Ilya, jumping in the lake for the same reason Troy always volunteers to go first for the ice baths.

“I know who it is,” Troy said gently, and Ilya nodded. Troy thought about that moose, about the occasional sound of woodpeckers in the trees, the silence of the lake. All this great big world and the two of them, little men trying to make a life in it.

No way could hockey grind down a man like Ilya Rozanov, who could find the truly stupidest ways to give you hope and make you feel like maybe the world wasn’t ending. Like taking Troy to a lake to not-tell him about Hollander to make him feel better about being gay, sure, but other things too. The way he held you in the locker room, on the ice, the way he knew exactly what to say, the way he ordered Swiss chocolates for Luca’s birthday and ordered the team to watch Ocean’s 11 because Swiss bank accounts were mentioned in it. A man who brought Troy Barrett of all people to help him face grief at the edge of this place, this land.

“I think you guys can make it,” Troy said, only half-believing it. But if anyone could, it would be them. Together even since the draft, even since before their first season. Yes, yes. Jesus, it has to be them. “I really think so.”

“I hope so.” And then Ilya touched him, rested his hand over the bare skin of Troy’s hand, and Troy felt a wave of goosebumps from the warmth on his cold body.

Troy exhaled, and turned his hand up to squeeze Ilya’s, and then they separated. Ilya turned on the radio and waiting for them was Dolly Parton, singing through the static, I will always love you.

Troy looked out the window. The sun, finally, touched the horizon. Troy thought to himself that when they got back to the hotel, he might text Harris, just to see if he’s still up. Sick kids always made him think of Harris, because finding out that the Cens visited Harris at the hospital when he was a sick kid made him want to swallow Harris alive so nothing else could hurt him. 

And as for what he might ask Harris about once they get back to Ottawa… well, at this point, Troy could believe in anything.

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