Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Major Character Death

Categories:

F/M, Gen, M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships:

Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Grigori Rozanov/Irina Rozanova

Characters:

Irina Rozanova, Ilya Rozanov, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Grigori Rozanov, Shane Hollander

Additional Tags:

Character Study, Feminist Themes, Motherhood, Dark, Complicated Relationships, Mental Health Issues, Depression, Jane Eyre References, Intrusive Thoughts, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, nothing graphic but heavily relevant, taking irina rozanova out of the deadwife montage: a thought experiment, possibly inacurate depictions of russia/russian people/russian orthodox christianity (i'm sorry), asking the question what if Irina hated being a mother as much as she hated being a wife?

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-15 Words: 3,231 Chapters: 1/1

those lovely myriads

Summary

Irina is beautiful and funny and smart.

Irina is a good mother. She does all the things good mothers are supposed to do.

And she is so, so bitter.

Notes

Upfront, I think this could be a pretty controversial character study for some people. Please read the tags. This is not a flattering or romantic interpretation of Irina, her thoughts on motherhood, or her experience with depression and mental illness. It’s also not canon—it emerged from my ruminating about how I have been consistently representing Irina two-dimensionally in my Ilya POVs, and how it's entirely possible that she did become two-dimensional to him, and maybe she would have preferred it that way. But do I think this is how Rachel Reid, Connor Storrie, or Jacob Tierney imagine Irina? Not for even one second. When I tried to make her more complicated than I have in the past, this is where my mind went. I really debated whether or not I was gonna post it because it's really not like anything else I've written, but I like it, so I hope you do too!

Irina likes driving.

Her car is old and ugly. There is rust on the bumper and it takes wide turns. Grigori only bought it for her after much grumbling, and she had to insist it was for their youngest son, so she could get him to and from his practices and games, before her husband finally gave in.

So maybe it isn’t supposed to be her car, because he didn’t buy it for her, and it was secondhand besides. But no. It is hers.

When she drives it on the open roads outside of Moscow, and she lays hard on the gas and keeps her foot there until her ankle strains, the speed ticks up and up slowly, so fucking slowly, until the entire vehicle starts groaning and her fingers melt to the steering wheel and the floor is hot.

Sometimes she takes the boys with her. They always sit in the back. She tells them it is so they can’t argue about who gets the passenger seat, or distract her when she’s pulling dangerous tricks for them, but that’s not the real reason. She prefers their cheers bolstering her from behind rather than a face beside her, drumming on the dashboard or bumping against the fist she has clenched over the gearshift. This is her sacred space. That dashboard is her altar, her domain, and her little figurine of the Theotokos sits right in the center.

The boys holler like they’re on a rollercoaster as the other cars on the road honk at them. When there is enough space, she swerves into the wrong lane, still gaining speed, sometimes praying that a car coming from the opposite direction will turn a corner suddenly, or else meet her head-on in a fiery game of chicken.

She taught herself how to drive. No one else ever taught Irina how to get anywhere.

She’s been pulled over more than once on her joyrides, but she’s never gotten a ticket. It’s easy enough to talk her way out of one. With the boys in the backseat, she tucks a curl behind her hair and leans her head out the window and says, simperingly, ditzy, smilingly, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize! My sons, you know, we were laughing and having a grand old time. You know how boys are!” When she is alone, she tucks one curl behind her ear and leans out the window and says, “Hello, officer. How can I help you?”

If she ever mentioned Grigori’s name, they would let her go immediately. Grigori is a cop, and cops look out for cops. But she doesn't need Grigori. She can do this one thing on her own.

In that ugly old clunker, she spends hours locked in traffic in the city center, laying on her wheezing horn and screaming through her windows. She goes grocery shopping and replaces a lamp one of her sons broke (she already can’t remember if a puck hit it or if someone threw it into a wall, and she doesn’t care either way; either way, it needs replacing). She buys school supplies and takes her baby’s clothes to the laundromat because he generates so much fucking laundry, and it stinks, only getting worse as he gets older and sweatier and inches closer to becoming a man. It overwhelms her sometimes, and leaves a bad smell in her car. At least at the laundromat, she has an audience to perform for, which helps her get through the many, many loads.

She wants to drive to Berlin one day. That is the dream. She wants to see the spot where the wall had been, where it fell while she held her firstborn in her arms and watched, rapt by the television, stuck at home with Grigori at work. She wants to plant one foot on either side of the line and spin off eastward. Her car would never make it that far, but she dreams. She loves dreaming. Hadn’t her mother always called her a dreamer? It wasn’t a compliment back then, and it doesn’t do her any good now.

Her baby is a beautiful skater. He gets that from her, along with his golden blonde curls, his scrunched nose, and the moles all over his body. She takes a vindictive pride in the fact that he looks so little like his father. In a way, he is her on the ice, out-skating all the other kids (not really, but it helps her pretend). She gets to smile meanly at the other mothers who don’t like her anyway, because that is her son throwing their sons to the ground, scoring against them, gloating in their faces and turning to find her approval.

Irina gives her praise easily and she hides all the bitterness she feels from him. For him.

She had been a beautiful skater, too. She could have gone so fucking far, but her body is older now, and it has sagged, and marriage means a man who won’t buy her new skates, and pregnancies mean time off from practice, and pregnancies lead to babies, and babies keep her at home even after they grow up and walk out her front door to do whatever babies do all day when they are slightly grown up, and their moms are still stuck at home. Doing laundry.

She is a pretty good mother, all things considered. She is a decent cook. She believes in God, and loves God, and thinks He probably had a better plan for her at some point. Maybe it isn’t His fault that everything has gone wrong for her, or maybe it is.

It’s idolatry to pray to Mary instead of God, but Irina has so many questions that it feels like they are bursting from her skin, like uneven seams will split open like burst threads and spill out all her guts if she can’t ask them.

She calls her mom.

Her parents retired to their dacha. It’s not that far from Moscow, only a few hours’ drive, but they don’t visit often. The day of the wedding, Irina screamed and wept and swore at her mother, and her mother slapped her hard across the face and then covered up the imprint with soft white powders and gently brushed the tears from her eyes.

They chat. They talk about the boys, as always, which is safe ground. They talk about Grigori’s work. They talk about their homes. Meals they’ve cooked. Stubborn messes they’ve cleaned up. Things that they’ve asked their husbands that their husbands haven’t done.

Irina’s mother is sixty-six years old.

“How do you do it?” Irina asks her.

“Oh, well,” her mother says. “You get through one day and then you get through the next.”

+++

Someone breaks another fucking lamp.

The hockey gear is piling up, and it smells worse than ever. She’s supposed to buy new skates and new wax and new tape—for the sticks and the socks—and if she gets anything wrong, she’ll have to do it all over again, a waste of fucking money and time. She has to drive to the school in the middle of the day and pick up her son from the principal’s office because he got caught fighting again, and how can she blame him when Grigori is setting such an illustrious example, and when she can feel such a tempestuous rage inside her own chest? Oh, her boys are doomed. Bad role models and bad genetics. They don’t have a chance.

It’s a bad week.

She gets into bed and doesn’t let Grigori drag her out. She latches her fingers around the wooden bars of the headboard and holds on until they threaten to break. She sleeps. She tries to dream. When she wakes up screaming, Grigori changes his mind and gives her pills to sleep better. She takes them.

She gets up, cooks dinner, burns dinner, and gets back into bed. Her baby climbs under the blankets. In the darkness, she notices that he looks a little rough, too. His hair hasn’t been washed properly, like no one is reminding him how to take care of his curls. He smells bad, but she smells bad too. No one is doing laundry.

He puts his heavy head on her chest, and she’s so tired from the pills that she can’t even shove him away.

The next week is better.

But the weeks keep coming.

They’re never going to stop, are they?

+++

She’s a good mom. She is. She does all the right things, even when her chest feels hollow. She doesn’t feel proud when she watches her baby win another tournament, another medal draped around his neck. She feels angry, and she does hate him, in a way, because she didn’t want him, and she made him, and he’s going to have a chance at everything she never did. But she doesn’t let it show on her face, and that’s what makes her such a great mom.

She takes all her fury and rage, the kind that could set a house on fire in the middle of the night, and blankets it with a thick coat of despair and curls up in her bed. Grigori moves into one of the guest rooms, so it really is her bed. Her baby climbs in with her sometimes and she wishes he wouldn’t, but she lets him stay because she’s a good mom, and she knows he thinks he’s helping. Her oldest gives her more space, and she can tell that he is embarrassed by her now, just like their father. Irina hears him telling her baby that she's sick. That she needs rest. That he should leave her alone.

She’s grateful for that.

When she was a schoolgirl, learning English, she remembers reading Jane Eyre. She hadn’t cared for the characters, for the ugly Mr. Rochester or the moralistic Jane, but she had been amazed by the plot twist—the animalistic, insane, ghostly wife locked in the attic, dragged across an ocean and hidden in the dark, who ends the novel by lighting the world on fire. What a visual. Irina is haunted by it, but she can’t quite remember the woman’s name. She remembers, though, how angry Irina felt on her behalf when she read that the attic woman had died in the fire that only maimed and blinded Mr. Rochester. Better that it had killed them both painfully. What an injustice that he didn't die with her.

She cooks sometimes, still. Turns the stove on and watches the flame. On good weeks.

She isn’t supposed to, but Irina prays directly to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Word of God, who tried to undo all the bad Eve brought upon womankind in the Garden. Eve, who made women submissive to their husbands, who made them toil in childbirth. This is all her fault, isn’t it?

Irina wants to be Mary, but she knows she would have eaten the apple. Even now, she still desperately craves to know what is right and what is wrong. She desperately needs to know which sin is worse before she makes her decision.

A week before she kills herself, Irina goes for one last drive. Alone, this time. No one pulls her over. There are no other cars on the road.

+++

Irina is in her thirties. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she sees a woman who is still beautiful. Her hair is thick and full, and it won’t grey or darken for another few decades or ever. She doesn’t have smile lines around her mouth or eyes—she is totally unwrinkled, as if she hasn't lived at all. She has moles, and maybe one day she will die of melanoma like her uncle, but it feels silly to wait for that.

She is funny. She knows it. It’s always been one of her worst traits—she was the class clown, and the girl whispering behind her skating coach’s back so often that she was benched from important tournaments. Boys could joke like that if they were good enough to back it up, but never girls. Even Grigori thinks that she’s funny, though sometimes pulling laughter from him just makes him angrier. He doesn’t want to laugh. Her children think she’s hilarious, though they’re getting old enough to be more embarrassed about that than anything else, including her baby. Her baby is a class clown too, and he talks back to coaches sometimes, and he never gets benched.

She doesn’t have friends. Her sense of humor has gotten meaner over the years. When she isn’t putting on a face for her sons, she doesn’t know how to keep her wit contained and polite. The other hockey moms sit slightly apart from her at events, and she learns again and again how to be quiet and how to be alone. She doesn’t know how to pretend she is happy all the time.

She’s smart. It’s killing her. Maybe if she didn’t know that she was capable of more, she would be satisfied with what she has.

She has been very unlucky in her life. She never got to choose what she wanted or where she wanted to be.

She’s so trapped, and she is so bitter. The first time she gave birth, that was all she could think about—that more than ever, she couldn’t run away now. Something was anchoring her in place. She tried to convince Grigori that one son was enough, but he never listened to her.

She mothers and smothers and she watches her baby, who loves hockey and gets to play it, and she drives him to every practice and washes his gear and feeds him six meals a day, and she feels bitter. Irina never dreamed of being a mother. She dreamed of being a figure skater, and she never got to do that.

She loves her kids, she does (both of them, because she sees herself in both of them, in her oldest’s cutting, witty cruelty that he didn’t inherit from his blunt father, and in her baby’s lust for something more, or something else) and harbors an extremely private, extremely deep-seated resentment against them because she didn't want them. She hates them, too. When they were babies, she could hold them at the same time, one in each arm.

She tries not to take it out on them. They get enough of that from their father. But it builds up, it does, and there comes a day when she wants to lie in bed and sleep forever, but instead she has to wake up early and cook her family breakfast, take them to school, wash four loads of laundry (the laundry never stops), then go back to the school because her oldest son got into a fight and she has to deal with him and punish him because Grigori is working, always working. She makes lunch, makes dinner, cleans the house, and she has no one to talk to or even to complain to. She can’t complain to her babies because then they’ll know. They’ll know how much she hates this.

It all builds up until. She snaps at Ilya, she screams at Alexei, she pulls at her hair, and she sees how shocked they are, sees that they had no idea how close to the end of her rope she's been getting, and she realizes she prefers it that way.

She would rather they know nothing about her at all, than know the truth.

She could be a good dream, maybe. Someone to think fondly of. She wants them to think she was created for the purpose of loving them. It’s so much kinder.

Irina prays to Mary, Make them think I was perfect. Irina thinks Mary is more likely to answer than God, and idolatry is the least of her sins.

+++

She has another dream, right at the last moment.

She recognizes her boys even though they are grown now, no more baby fat or softness on their jawlines. They would tower over her if she was still around.

Alexei is standing in a kitchen, arguing with a brunette woman in hushed tones while he rocks a baby girl with soft blonde curls against his shoulder. The argument looks old and well-worn, and both parents are taking care not to wake the little girl. Their daughter is restful, and after a moment, still whispering angrily to Alexei, the mother puts a hand in the center of the baby’s tiny back and strokes gently but unthinkingly, a quiet affection for her that doesn’t leave even when they argue. Irina thinks, probably, the baby's name is Irina, too.

At the same time, in the same dream, Ilya is standing next to a bright orange sports car, the kind that Irina has only seen on television and salivated over, imagining just how fast she could drive in a car like that, how the wind would whip hair and blind her or pull it straight off her scalp, and then she would be really free. Ilya and his beautiful car are parked next to a gorgeous modern home in the middle of a forest on a gravel driveway. She wants to shout, "Careful, you’ll chip the paint!" but in the dream, she isn’t really there, and she doesn’t have a mouth. Ilya is staring through the trees, and Irina can glimpse the sparkling surface of a vast lake somewhere close by. The door to the car is open, and he has one hand resting on the roof.

He’s handsome, her baby. He looks strong. She’s always been a city girl so nothing about the vegetation can clue her in on the fact that this is not Russia, but she knows it anyway. He got away. Ilya got out. Maybe he’s even visited Berlin, once or twice.

The door of the beautiful house opens and a man steps out. He is strong and tall, too, wearing a light blue cotton shirt. Ilya turns his head to follow his progress from the front door to the car, eyes tracking him instinctively as a wide, toothy smile spreads across his face. It’s matched by the shy grin the man wears as he approaches Ilya in a direct line.

He stops next to Ilya and kisses his cheek, and Irina watches curiously, not sure what exactly she’s witnessing.

They start speaking to each other. She can’t hear what they say. Ilya returns the cheek kiss, reaches between their bodies, and squeezes his hand.

Ilya is wearing her cross, Irina realizes. The gold stands out against his black t-shirt. It looks unblemished by age, well cared for. He carries her with her.

The man lets go of her baby’s hand and rounds the car, and she sees him rolling his eyes and saying something with a sarcastic tilt to his mouth. Whatever he says makes Ilya throw his head back in laughter as he slides into the front seat and closes the door behind him, shutting Irina out.

The other man lingers for a second longer, his gaze sweeping over the house, the forest, and the lake. She imagines that his dark eyes land on her for a second, and then he looks away.

They both get in the car. They drive away, spitting gravel beneath the tires.

They leave.

Irina leaves too.