Chapter Text
March, 2016.
It’s nearly two in the morning, but it’s Ilya calling and so Shane picks up.
“Wha,” he says, trying to force the cotton-dryness of sleep out of his mouth. “‘lya?”
For a second, there’s nothing, just a staticky canyon of silence. Then: “Shane,” Ilya says, guttural, like the word’s been ripped out of his chest half-formed and covered in blood.
Just that, nothing else. It’s enough though, enough for Shane to shake off the last of the cobwebs at the corners of his mind and jolt forward in bed, phone pressed up to his ear and heart already picking up speed in double time. “Ilya?”
There are a dozen questions on his tongue. He tries to fit them all in the two syllables of that name, doesn’t know if he succeeds. The line is quiet, just the sound of irregular breathing. Distant traffic, maybe, but that could be from Shane’s end, not Ilya’s.
“I fucked up,” llya whispers finally, on a thousand year delay.
Shane blinks into the darkness of his bedroom. Then he swings his legs off the bed, flinging the covers off him as he goes. “Where are you?” he demands, sliding his palm along his side table until he can hit at the light. It flickers as it turns on, four hours ahead of schedule, casting a dull yellow light around the room. “Ilya? Tell me what’s going on. Tell me where you are.”
Ilya makes a protesting noise, a grunt that could mean a hundred different things. Shane’s head is empty, static and electricity, different thoughts sparking into existence and disappearing without lighting a fire, without issuing commands to his brain.
Where were the Raiders supposed to play? Did they just have a game in Nashville or was that Dallas? Are they on the West Coast, in Vancouver, are they back in Boston? Shane doesn’t know, can’t remember, hasn’t been tracking the days like he should, has just been letting them spin past him in a blur of going through the motions.
“Is nothing,” Ilya says and maybe he can hear the way Shane’s breath has picked up. Maybe he can hear his machine gunfire heartbeat, all the way across the phone line, all the way across the fucking country.
It’s not nothing or Ilya wouldn’t be calling. They don’t do that. They don’t call each other, not over nothing.
“Ilya,” Shane says, and even to his own ears it comes out helpless. He’s standing in the middle of his bedroom. He’s not even wearing a shirt, just boxers and a pair of socks. He’s in Montreal, and that’s the one place Shane knows Ilya is not. Helpless, pointless, useless energy courses through him anyway. His hands are shaking. His voice, also. “Ilya, you gotta say something, mon chou.”
It’s a holdover from Zürich, the French affectionate. A holdover from that day back in November, when they’d done nothing but snipe at each other in Russian and French until Shane had broken the stalemate by pressing their lips together and riding Ilya into the couch cushions, spitting out petnames like they were insults just to get the weight of them off his chest.
He reaches for them instinctively now, sinking down onto the edge of his mattress and pressing his phone so hard against his ear that it hurts. “I am in California, in hotel room,” Ilya tells him, and his tone is pinched, angry, but not the kind of anger Shane is used to hearing from him. There’s no competitive edge, no cocky angle to it. Even to Shane, it sounds self-directed, pointed inward. “I fucked up, Shane, is bad.”
“What happened,” Shane asks, tearing at his lip with his teeth. He wants to demand to know what Ilya thinks he’s done, but there’s no way the words won’t come out sounding like an accusation and that’s the last fucking thing they need right now.
California is miles and miles and miles away from Montreal. If he pisses Ilya off, he’ll just hang up the phone, and then Shane’ll never get the answers to his fucking questions. He’ll never get to know whether or not Ilya is okay, and that’s not a reality Shane thinks he can live in right now, despite the fact that he’s been forcing himself to get used to that lifestyle for the last three months.
Okay. Okay. California.
Ilya is in California. Too many fucking teams in California to know anything more specific. San Francisco Sea Lions, Anaheim Dukes, Los Angeles Aces. Raiders could have played against any one of them tonight.
Okay. Okay. He’s in a hotel room.
His? Shane doesn’t know that either. He fucking knows what he wants the answer to be, but—until Ilya says, until he tells him, he doesn’t know.
Ilya’s speaking again, but it’s jumbled Russian, words tangled up in pauses, tripping over each other in fits and starts, and Shane can’t understand any of it.
“Ilya,” Shane snaps, sharper than he intended, but he’s tired and he’s angry except he’s not angry at all; he’s just sort of scared. And displaced—his body doesn’t feel quite like his, doesn’t feel like it’s where it should be.
He’s up on his feet again, pacing around his bedroom that’s half shadow, half-light, and he can walk as many circles as he wants and he’d not be anywhere closer to Ilya.
God help him, but he’s scared.
“We were out after overtime win,” Ilya says, and his voice is thick with Russian, despite the English words. Out after an overtime win means he’s been drinking with the team. Okay; okay.
There are hundreds of ways a scenario like that could have gone wrong. Maybe Ilya slept with someone; maybe Ilya forgot a condom, or it tore, or it fell off. Survivable, theoretically, despite the way Shane’s stupid heart rolls over at the thought.
Worse: maybe something happened to Ilya. A fight, fists meeting flesh under a club’s strobe lights, out by the backdoor of the club. Did someone hurt him? Did someone spike his drink? Take advantage? Is he hurt, is he alone? He must be, if he’s calling Shane. Does he need—what does he need?
It’s awful; Shane’s mind keeps spinning, trying to fill in the blanks like the world’s most fucked up pre-dawn game of Mad-Libs. He just doesn’t know. Can’t figure out what could have happened to ever make Ilya Rozanov’s voice sound like that, and that’s the only thing he has to go on.
“Okay,” Shane says when Ilya doesn’t continue. “That’s okay.”
He feels a bit like a doctor trying to set a bone, running his hands over unbroken skin attempting to find the point of fracture.
“There is video,” Ilya tells him flatly, sounding torn between angry and despondent and then just sounding torn, straight down the middle and bleeding with it. “Someone asks me—asked, tch—if I miss it, and I say, yes, obviously, I miss—it.”
Shane tries to take a breath, but it stalls out somewhere in between his mouth and his lungs. Yes, obviously, I miss it. There are so many things it could mean, but Shane thinks–he knows. He thinks he knows immediately what Ilya means.
“It has been months now, I didn’t think people would care still,” Ilya adds, drunken frustration pouring over the phone. “But she ask what I miss about Switzerland and I say you talk in your sleep. And is on video, she posted it.”
“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Shane says, and everything around him freezes. Something cold and inescapable starts to slither through his veins. One thing at a time.
“You do,” Ilya disagrees, immediate, visceral. “And I miss it, solnyshko. But I did not mean to say so and there was a camera, and now there is a video, and it is online and it would look worse if it is taken down but it is so bad now. Is not what you wanted.”
Shane blinks at the darkened doorway to his closet. His brain is static, operating on a delay where he hears something and thinks something else and nothing is related to each other and nothing makes sense.
Ilya is still talking, like he can’t make the words stop now that he’s started. “I said, after, you take naps before games on the couch in the living room. I said that. Is not only explanation and people will talk and people know and you did not want people to know and I’m sorry, solnyshko, I can fix this—”
“But you’re okay,” Shane interrupts blankly. It’s the only thought he keeps circling back to, over and over again. The only thing that sounds out crystal-clear within the jumbled ringing of his head. “You’re okay?”
“I—yes, I am back in hotel room for the night, I told you. We fly out early tomorrow. But Shane—”
“It’s okay,” Shane says, cutting him off. He wants to close his eyes. He’s sitting down, but he sort of wants to sink to his knees too. That’s how strong the relief is when his body catches up to his brain.
Ilya is okay. Okay.
Everything else is survivable.
“Is okay,” Ilya repeats, incredulous. “You were angry about the stupid shoes, but I tell the world you talk in your sleep and is okay.”
Shane huffs and drags his hand down the side of his face, giving into the urge to flop back onto the bed.
How the fuck can it not be okay? Inconvenient, maybe. Embarrassing. Maybe even dangerous, skirting too close to the line of what they are in public and what they’d been behind the closed doors of their house in Zürich. For Ilya to know Shane talks in his sleep, he’d have to be there, beside him when he’s sleeping. But they shared a house and a couch, so it’s not far-fetched to say Shane took naps somewhere outside of his bedroom. Hell, the Zürich team took buses to different games, stayed in hotels on the road. Ilya could know about the sleep-talking if they shared a room in a hotel, if they shared a row on a bus. There are a dozen other explanations than the truth. It’s a bit dangerous, maybe, anyway, to have Ilya admit to missing something that’s probably a little objectively annoying.
But how the fuck can it not be okay, when Ilya is whole and safe and unhurt?
Shane feels like—like a secret agent in one of those action movies JJ always makes them watch during team movie night, the one who cuts the right cord to disable the bomb a second before it’s going to blow. He’s, like. Looked the worst case scenario in the face now, experienced five different stages of grief and had to confront his own helplessness. He understands how it feels to be thousands of miles away from Ilya Rozanov and not know if he’s okay.
And he is. He sounds like he’s gonna be hungover in the morning, or at least really tired and embarrassed, but he sounds okay too.
So of fucking course it’s okay. Doesn’t Ilya know what they’re dealing with? Shane hadn’t known, for a few minutes, and he’d thought the worst.
He doesn’t say that though. It’s too soon, not enough time has passed yet, from the beginning of the phone call to now. Shane doesn’t know how to put it all into words yet.
So he says, instead, “I wasn’t angry about the shoes,” even though he kind of was. But not at Ilya. Not really. “I just didn’t want them to know because then they’d talk about it.”
It was theirs, the shoes. Shane’s and Ilya’s. The house was theirs too. It still feels like theirs, all these months later.
Shane has been trying to avoid Ilya’s post-game interviews, but what that really means is that he only watches them very late at night when he’s on the road in some hotel room, headphones on and phone brightness dialed to low. And he’s noticed that whenever Ilya talks about Zürich, he uses present tense: I play, I sleep, I like, I eat. Shane knows it’s probably just a disjointment in his second language, a translation error Ilya’s making in his head by mistake. Tenses are slippery things, constant math equations to calculate on the fly. He wonders though, sometimes, if maybe it’s as hard for Ilya to move forward as it has been for Shane. Like maybe a part of him is still there, present time. Playing and sleeping and eating.
“I will fix it,” Ilya promises. “I can fix it. Give them something else to talk about. I can make it okay.”
“Ilya, it’s fine,” Shane says, half-way around a yawn. The adrenaline has mostly fizzled out, and the exhaustion of the sudden early morning’s set in. “You also said I took naps in the living room, right? That’s good, that’s fine, normal for roommates to know. It’s not—it’s not optimal, but it’s not like the end of the world or anything, mon cherie.”
On the other end of the line, Ilya is quiet for a second. Maybe processing Shane’s words. Hopefully realizing that Shane isn’t mad at him. Maybe a tiny bit annoyed, in the heart of him, the way he was about the shoes. But not angry. Not when it could have been so, so much worse.
“Maybe someone will pick it up, spin it or something,” Shane says, wincing up at the ceiling as he imagines the articles. “But it’ll go away. We’ll play hockey. We’ll be more careful. It’ll get buried by itself.”
It’s only really a news story at all because of how tight-lipped Shane has been about the whole thing. Ilya has followed his lead on this one since the shoes back in January. The things the press and the world know about Zürich can probably be counted on one hand, and so everyone’s rushed to fill in the blanks themselves with rumor and speculation. Something like this is small, embarrassing, only a little dangerous, but it’s also unignorable because everyone’s going to refuse to ignore it.
But it’ll get buried by itself. It’s not like Ilya said anything actually damning. Anything undeniable.
“Sveta has a friend,” Ilya tells him, apropos of nothing. “I think—artist maybe. Or model. I don’t know. But we are back in Boston in two days. I will meet her when I get back, and she wants the exposure. It will bury.”
“What?” Shane says. He’s sitting up again, even though he doesn’t remember moving. The sick, icy feeling from before is back; even his veins feel cold. He shakes his head even though Ilya can’t see it. It doesn’t do much to get his thoughts in order. “What the fuck.”
“Is convenient,” Ilya says, and he can hear the shrug in his voice. “No one will care about Switzerland if hockey accounts post photos of me with Russian model in fancy restaurant.”
I will, Shane thinks. He has to bite his tongue to hold the words back. I’ll care.
He fights to keep his tone light when he says, “I hate to break it to you, Rozanov, but pictures of you with blonde women aren’t exactly newsworthy anymore. That’s just like, your standard weekend plans.”
Or it was. Shane hasn’t caught sight of any of Rozanov’s dates or hook-ups on social media since Zürich, but then—he hasn’t been looking. He’s been trying really, really hard not to look.
“If I spend a day with her, is different,” Ilya says, sounding stubborn now. Digging his heels in. “It will fix this.”
“Nothing’s fucking broken, Ilya!” Shane snaps back, harsher than he meant to be, but now it’s all he can think about: Ilya with some pretty woman on his arm, out to dinner with him, sharing a fucking appetizer, hand on his chest, tongue in his mouth. No one’s going to care about Zürich if they think Ilya’s dating someone, but Shane is going to spend the rest of his fucking life caring about Zürich, no matter who’s standing by Ilya’s side, and he’s just—he’s so— “So don’t fucking go out of your way to date someone you don’t even like for my sake, Jesus, I’m saying it’s fine. There’s nothing to fix.”
“You are angry,” Ilya replies, annoyance bleeding through his own voice. “I can hear it, Shane. Let me fix it—”
“I’m going to be angry if I have to see pictures of—” He makes himself shut up by biting at his cheek. It takes him ten seconds, counting up to five and then back down to one, before he trusts himself to speak.
He’s got no fucking right. That’s the probelm. Ilya can do whatever he wants. He can be seen with whoever he wants. Telling Shane about it is a fucked up sort of courtesy; that doesn’t mean Shane gets veto powers or whatever. The fact that Shane feels physically sort of sick and nauseous at the idea of it is his own problem, his to carry. Same as the love.
He’s standing now. Oh, he hadn’t realized he’d left the bed at all. The same useless helplessness from before threatens to overcome him for a second as he stares at his socked feet pushed into the soft thread of his bedroom rug.
“Shane?”
Suddenly, Shane is so fucking tired, like the jet lag’s back with a vengeance. California is thousands of miles away; Zürich is too. And Boston. Everywhere important is somewhere Shane isn’t, and that’s not—Shane never signed up for this. “Do whatever you want, Ilya,” he says, pressing his fingers over his eyes. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing to fix and I’m not angry, but if you want—fuck, I don’t know—an excuse to date a hot blonde or–or whatever, then that’s—” terrible, awful, heartbreaking— “whatever.”
“What do you want, Shane?” Ilya snaps, and at least he sounds frustrated now too. There’s some kind of twisted comfort in that, that Shane’s not alone in feeling like he’s clawing at the walls and walking in circles and going nowhere. “What do you want me to do? I will do it!”
“Not—that,” Shane says, pushing harder against his eyelids. “Jesus, Ilya, I don’t know, just—do whatever you want. I’ll live.”
It sounds weak to his own ears, like a fucking question instead of a statement.
Ilya lets out a gusty sort of sigh, and there’s shifting on his side of the phone call, like he’s turning over in bed or standing as well. “Is not important, what I want, solnyshko. Please, just let me fix this for you.”
The image of Ilya, thousands of miles away, pacing in his hotel room with his fingers in his hair and his phone up against his ear, the perfect mirror of Shane, makes the words loosen in his chest. Or maybe it’s Ilya’s tone. He sounds just as exhausted as Shane feels. Just as displaced.
“Don’t—don’t date her,” Shane whispers even though he has no right to ask. “Don’t get pictures with her or, or take her back to yours, or….” He trails off. No right, no right. Even if it kills him. He’ll just have to find a way to live with it.
“What do you want me to say when they ask?” Ilya’s voice is softer now. They’ve toed around this conversation before, months ago. “If I cannot bury, they will ask, solnyshko. What do you want me to do?”
Shane breathes out, goes to sit back down on his bed and accidentally falls onto his back instead. The ceiling is the same as ever when he blinks up at it. “I don’t want them to ask,” he says.
Over the line, Ilya’s breathing is heavy. He’s tired too. It’s not as late in California, but maybe that doesn’t mean anything. Jet lag doesn’t really care what the sun’s doing. Jetlag’s just the body’s way of keeping score despite how fast you’re trying to get away, despite how many timezones you put between yourself and the thing you’re running from.
“Kotenok, you are impossible to make happy,” Ilya finally tells him, and Shane closes his eyes, turns his face into the rumpled duvet beneath him.
“I’m not,” he says.
“No? Then maybe I am just very bad at it,” Ilya replies just as quietly.
Shane wets his lips, shakes his head. “You weren’t,” he whispers, because it’s the truth. Ilya was really good at it, making Shane happy.
But maybe they were different people then. Maybe they changed for Zürich or Zürich changed them and now they’re back to normal and nothing fits right, machine parts that have rusted or warped and can’t slot into place.
The agony of the now doesn’t change the memory of the soft beauty of the then. It would be kinder if it did, maybe. At least it would make it easier to bear.
October, 2015.
When Ilya gets out of the shower, Hollander is nowhere to be found at first, which really means he is not in Ilya’s room nor is he in the room he doesn’t sleep in, and Ilya can’t hear him moving about in the kitchen below.
So he pulls on a pair of joggers and a sweatshirt, and he goes to look for him.
Practice was good today, the kind of brutal that sinks its teeth into your bones and leaves an indent. Ilya will always appreciate that flare of post-practice, muscle-sore pain, but it doesn’t exactly make it fun to go wandering around the house, navigating staircases, when all he wants to do is lay down.
He sees Hollander as soon as he gets into the living room. He’s out on the balcony, door mostly pulled closed but left open a few inches. Ilya can see the stiff way he’s holding himself in the small metal chair, the way his legs are pulled tightly in beneath the table, the way he’s gazing out at nothing and spinning his phone between his hands without even looking at it.
He isn’t even wearing a jacket for Christ’s sake, despite the faint early October chill in the air. He’s flushed from the rink still, but that’s going to wear off and then he’ll be cold.
Ilya stares at him, the set of his jaw, the distance in his eyes, the flex of his bare arm as he moves his phone.
Then he goes back upstairs and grabs a sweater from his closet, something black and soft and recently washed.
“Catch,” he tells Hollander as he throws the sweater at his head. It hits Hollander in the cheek and falls down against his shoulder, making him jump in surprise, splutter and then turn to glare at Ilya.
Ilya makes sure to have his smirk already stretched across his face as he takes the other seat and sprawls out in the chair until his foot is close to nudging against Hollander’s. He doesn’t, yet. Doesn’t touch him. Yet.
They don’t give out hockey awards for self-control in the European leagues or the North American one, but Ilya thinks they should really consider it.
He tosses a pack of cigarettes on the table and Hollander shoots him a look, all offended eyes and lips pressed tightly together. “That shit’s gonna kill you,” Hollander snaps, because even when he’s in a mood, he can always take breaks away from brooding to bitch at Ilya. It’s sort of comforting. Ilya makes a big production out of pulling a cigarette out of the box and lighting it with an easy one-two press of the spark wheel and the stone.
Hollander makes a disgusted sort of noise, but he doesn’t move to go back inside either. It’s enough of a victory that Ilya finds himself pushing for another one. His father has always called him lazy, but his mother was the first to call him greedy and Ilya thinks she was right. She’d been laughing as she said it, pulling him up into her arms and letting him sit beside her on the couch. Greedy little thing, synochek. But she’d been right then, and she’s right now, too, even though she’ll never know it.
Ilya pushes his foot forward, tapping his toes along the line of Shane’s ankle, and Shane doesn’t move away.
“Put it on,” Ilya nods to the sweater that Hollander’s been running his hands over. “Is cold.”
“I’m fine,” Hollander says, and Ilya taps his cigarette against the edge of the ash tray at the table’s center.
“Put it on,” he says again, tilting his head to the side so he can watch Hollander from the corner of his eyes, no nonsense, no room for argument.
Hollander puts on the sweater.
Good boy.
“I don’t want to talk right now,” Shane says quickly, tugging the sleeves of the sweater over his hands and crossing his arms. Maybe he is trying to look threatening, firm in his convictions and ready to continue to brood through the afternoon, but he is very far away from the mark. He looks like an angry kitten.
“That is fine with me, kotenok,” Ilya replies easily, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray again. “I am not here to talk.”
Shane narrows his eyes at him, all furrowed brows and distrustful moue of his lips.
“What?” Ilya says, innocent. “You yell when I smoke in the house, so I smoke out here instead and you yell some more? Hollander, you are impossible man to please, and I like to think that I am usually very good at pleasing men.”
“Stop it,” Shane bites out, cheeks flushing a dull red. He really is so very easy to fluster. Ilya has lived with him for four weeks now, and he has not gotten tired of it. Sometimes, all it takes to have Shane blushing and trembling in his arms is standing behind him at the stove while he’s cooking something, bracketing his hips with his hands and resting his chin on his shoulder.
Ilya’s never smelled more burning food in his life; his dick is starting to make associations.
“What’s that mean anyway?” Hollander snaps, looking at Ilya for a moment before his eyes skitter away. “Cotton-neck.”
“Kotenok,” Ilya corrects instinctively. And then, he lies just as automatically, “I call you this when you are being a very broody and sad man, Hollander. It is like living with weeping ghost. I felt it in the shower.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Hollander says, but his shoulders have loosened a little and he leaves his foot pressed against Ilya’s, so he means it about as much as he means, I don’t want to talk right now.
So Ilya hums in simple agreement and turns his head from Hollander to blow the cigarette smoke away from him.
He’s gotten better at handling Hollander since moving to Zürich. He knows how to wait him out now. Through his long and overly complicated showers, his focused and forgetful silences, his bouts of early morning sleepiness that leave him half-dozing in the passenger seat until they get to the rink.
It’s not even a surprise that Ilya’s barely halfway through his cigarette before Hollander is tapping his fingers along the tabletop. Before he’s two-thirds of the way finished, Hollander is opening his mouth.
“My mom called,” Hollander tells the ash-tray. His fingers are still drumming rhythmically against the table, but it’s not any rhythm Ilya’s familiar with.
“Oh?”
“She had some news about the lockout,” Hollander nods and then shoots Ilya a sideways look. “Negotiations aren’t going anywhere yet.”
“Hm,” Ilya says, tapping the cigarette against the ashtray again. Shane’s eyes follow his movements, and he shifts in his seat. Ilya should have made coffee, he thinks. Shane looks tired, like he hasn’t been sleeping well. But that’s not true; he’s been sleeping fine. Ilya would know otherwise, would feel him tossing and turning in his arms otherwise. Just one of the many benefits of sharing a bed with Shane Hollander.
“She said they’re projecting after American Thanksgiving, at the latest,” Shane says. He hesitates. “I think she knew more, maybe, but she didn’t want to tell me. Like, over the phone.”
Ilya snorts before he can stop himself, but Hollander is too sweet sometimes. “Kotenok,” he says, probably too fondly, stubbing out the remainders of his cigarette. “This is negotiations between MLH and the Association, is not Soviet Russia. Your mother can talk about it on the phone, no one is wire-tapping her calls.”
The flush deepens for a moment, and Shane reaches over to shove at his shoulder. “Shut up,” he says, but he hooks his foot around Ilya’s ankle, and Ilya lets him. Ilya holds himself very, very still so that he can let him.
But then the half-smile melts away from Shane’s face—no—and he looks back down at the table. “Yeah,” he admits quietly. His fingers have stopped moving. Ilya doesn’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad sign. A part of him wants to ask, but he knows he never will. The question is too hard to word; the intent behind it too nebulous to pin down.
“Yeah,” Shane says again. He clears his throat and adds in a voice he probably thinks is very level and unbothered, “I guess if, uh. If she’s not telling me something, then there’s another reason for it. Like. She can, she just—doesn’t want to.”
Ilya blinks at him. Hm.
“Maybe,” Ilya says. Carefully, leadingly, he adds: “I am surprised your mother knows so much about the lockout since you are not in the room for these conversations.”
And—there. It’s a small thing, but Shane flinches. His eyes flicker away, past the ashtray, down to the street below. It’s just a small reaction; it’s just enough of one though.
“Oh,” Ilya says before he can bite his tongue. “I see what this is about.”
Shane’s gaze snaps up to his, eyebrows furrowing in a way that might read as angry if it weren’t for the perpetual wetness of his waterline. “You do?”
“Yes,” Ilya tells him with an exaggerated shrug. “You think she is angry at you for coming to Europe to play hockey instead of staying in North America for boring meetings with the Commissioner like other captains did. And you have never disappointed parents before. You do not know how.”
Whatever he’d been expecting Ilya to say, it must not have been that, because Shane’s head rears back like Ilya’s tried to stick him. “What, I have—I definitely have,” he splutters, and Ilya raises an eyebrow at him.
“Oh, yes? When?”
Hollander opens and closes his mouth, but he doesn’t say anything.
“When you were drafted second overall?” Ilya asks, pitching his voice high and folding his lips down into an exaggerated pout that has Shane glaring back at him.
“No, asshole, of course not, they’re my parents. They were fucking proud of me on Draft Day,” Shane snaps, eyes all fire and hand tightening into a fist on the table top.
Ilya grins back at him. An irritated Shane Hollander is a much better creature to deal with. A morose Hollander, Ilya does not yet know how to handle. He is afraid of it, if he’s being honest. Of being shown the quiet cracks in Hollander’s soul and widening them when he only meant to glue them shut.
Shane’s still fumbling around, English suddenly worse than Ilya’s has ever been, and Ilya sits back in his chair to look at him. It would be too cruel to tell him the truth, he thinks. To point out that Ilya’s father would not have been proud of his son for achieving anything less than first overall in the MLH draft.
Or, more accurately, that Ilya has still never been able to find or achieve what exactly would make Grigori Rozanov proud of his son. First overall, Captain of the Russian Olympic team at twenty-three, Stanley Cup engraved with his name—nothing has worked so far. Ilya has simply stopped searching, these days.
“I mean, what, have you ever disappointed your parents?” Shane demands, and Ilya snorts out a laugh before he looks over at Shane and realizes he’s serious.
He can feel his eyebrows raise, but he is not going to be cruel to Shane. He doesn’t like to be cruel to Shane, these days. It’s a by-product, he thinks, of spending so many nights with him tucked up into his arms, head resting over his heartbeat.
“Yes, Hollander,” Ilya tells him honestly. “I am expert in this topic.”
Shane blinks at him, bewildered. “Wait, I don’t understand. How could they be disappointed in you? You’re—” he waves his hand through the air like it’s saying more than his words ever could.
It is a nice, if blunt, reminder that Ilya’s decision to treat Hollander with kindness is his own; Hollander, as far as Ilya is aware, has made no such resolutions.
Demonstrably.
Ilya gives him a careful, polite smile, the sort he reserves for the reporters in the media scrums who speak too fast and jump over each other trying to ask him questions he’ll never be able to understand at that volume, all jumbled up.
“Hollander,” he says. “They will get over it. Is small thing, only few months in a distant country. Is small disappointment.”
Hollander’s lips purse out, jaw clenching. Stubborn, digging his skates into the ice. Perhaps he has already decided that his mother hates him for leaving. That his parents will never forgive him for going to play hockey in Europe for the lockout. Maybe he has already decided that he should have stayed in Montreal, forced his way into the closed-door meetings with the MLH and the Players’ Association and been an advocate and leader off the ice.
Maybe he is already regretting coming to Zürich.
The thought makes Ilya’s stomach twist and tighten into knots. He doesn’t know what to say to Hollander if that’s true. He doesn’t want Hollander to regret living here. It’ll strike too close to the foolish, aching heart of his.
But then Hollander slumps back into his seat; his fingers start tapping again, and his eyes dart from Ilya’s to the table and then back. “You think so?” he asks, and his voice is small.
It makes Ilya want to fold him into his arms, grab his hand, lace their fingers together, and tug him into his lap. But he can’t. This is not something they do. They fuck, and they sleep together in one bed for practicality’s sake, and they share a house and a routine. But they do not comfort each other with those kind of touches. They do not hold each other close except for when there are considerably less clothes involved.
But Ilya is starting to think that maybe Hollander is cruelest when he isn’t even trying to be, so all he does is smile back at him. It feels soft and real on his face, the sort of smile he’ll never let the media see if he has the choice.
“Yes, Hollander,” he says, and he almost calls him Shane by accident. He catches himself at the very last moment. He clears his throat and swallows the name back down. “They raise a boy to play hockey, they cannot be upset that he has decided to play hockey. Is the natural order of things.”
“Natural order of things, huh,” Shane says.
“Yes,” Ilya agrees. “Anyway, what would you be doing in conference room, Hollander? Making trickshots into trashcans with crumpled up pieces of paper until the Commissioner agrees to extend the no-trade clause for rookie contracts? Pah, you are the second-best hockey player in the league. You should be on ice, with me, the first bestest.”
That makes Shane laugh and bite his lip which is devastating in a way Ilya has grown very used to. Like he is a town built too close to a flooding river; every year promises devastation. He has mostly learned to survive it.
“It’s not bestest,” Shane mumbles. “You’re the best.”
“Ah,” Ilya says, raising his eyebrows. “So you agree, I am the best hockey player.”
“God, fuck off,” Shane says, but he’s still smiling, head cast down and looking up at Ilya through the gentle fan of his eyelashes. The blush has returned and he looks—soft. Relaxed. His phone is turned facedown on the table in front of him, like he’s forgotten it’s there at all, and Ilya has to fight the urge to grab it and throw it from the balcony just in case Shane’s parents decide to call him and undo all of Ilya’s hard work.
Maybe it is not their fault at all. Maybe they are not even disappointed with Shane for leaving. Maybe his mother has just wanted to inform him of the lockout negotiations because she thinks he will find them interesting. But somehow the thought has wormed its way into Shane’s head anyway, into the tap of his fingers, and that is enough for Ilya to feel…protective. A little.
Shane is here, in Switzerland. Playing ice hockey with the Lions, with Ilya. That was his choice. They should let him be here. They should give him grace. Give him room to enjoy the experience.
It is hard enough already, the first time you realize being here means not being there. No matter the here, no matter the there. The least Shane’s parents can do is keep their disappointment to themselves. They have the kind of son who makes it easy to love him across timezones. They will be fine.
“Were, uh…were your parents…disappointed?” Shane asks, and Ilya blinks at him. “When you signed with Zürich, instead of a Russian team. For the lockout,” he adds, like Ilya is going to become confused and wonder if Shane thinks he’s signed a multi-year contract with the Lions.
It’s Ilya’s turn to tap his fingers against the table. Some newly created part of him wants to tell Hollander the truth. Start with My mother is dead, and work from there.
But if she were alive, I think she would be disappointed, yes.
But if she were alive, he probably wouldn’t have signed with Switzerland over a Russian team. If his mother were alive, he thinks, maybe he would never have gone to the MLH in the first place. But this is a hypothetical, one he tries not to think of too often. He has always been a son meant to leave the shadow of his father; he’s never had to find out if he could be a son who left his mother’s arms as well.
Is his father disappointed that llya is not playing for a Moscow team? Maybe. It depends on what his father has remembered. Some days, the MLH is not in a lockout. Some days, Ilya is a boy again, only out at practice and inexcusably late returning home. Some days, Grigori does not have a second son at all, nor does he recognize his first.
“Is…complicated,” Ilya finally tells Shane. The lie feels heavy on his tongue, but it’s not really a lie. Technically. It is just a weak response. “My family is complicated, sometimes,” he says when he can’t swallow against the urge to add something else. To give Shane something in return. Some shred of honesty.
“Oh,” Shane says. Ilya thinks he should feel relieved; at least it isn’t a fucking question about what complicated means.
He waits for the relief to come, but it doesn’t.
Shane blinks at him again, something considering and weighted in his eyes that wasn’t there before. “I guess the most important part is that we’re not disappointed,” Shane says like he’s deciding this for the both of them. “That we’re here. Right? I like Zürich.”
Ilya doesn’t know what his face is doing. He feels hot and pinned down under the sudden intensity of Shane’s eyes, so he looks away and pulls out another cigarette. He doesn’t even fucking want another cigarette. He just wants something to do with his hands.
“I like Zürich also,” he says after he’s lit it and brought it to his lips.
“Yeah?” Shane asks. He sounds quietly pleased. Ilya knows he’ll be smiling if Ilya looks over at him, so he doesn’t. One of the things you learn if you live with devastation at your doorstep long enough is what’s survivable and what must be outrun at all costs. The way Shane smiles at him sometimes, crinkled eyes and exposed teeth and a scrunched up nose—this afternoon, that feels like it falls wholly into the second category.
Ilya grunts and taps his cigarette onto the ashtray, which is the kind of dismissal Shane must recognize after four weeks living with him, because he unhooks their feet and stands up with a stretch.
“I was thinking chicken for dinner,” he says.
“You are always thinking chicken for dinner,” Ilya points out, glancing up at Shane and then away. It is late enough in the afternoon that people with regular schedules are getting off work now, bustling home. No one looks up at them; no one takes any notice of them at all.
Maybe Shane sees this too and the anonymity makes him feel brave, or maybe he’s just feeling especially cruel today. Either way, he runs his fingers over the back of Ilya’s neck, right at the edge of his hairline.
“It’s still a few hours til then though,” Shane murmurs, suggestion dripping heavy from off his lips. He tugs once, gentle, at one of Ilya’s curls, and then he steps away, steps back towards the door to their living room. “So you’ve got time to finish that cigarette if you want, Rozanov.”
“Maybe I do,” Ilya replies, pointedly tapping it against the rim of the ashtray. “Unless you have a better offer, Hollander?”
He hears the door slide open and Shane’s footsteps retreat inside. A moment later, something soft and familiar hits the back of his head, looping over his shoulder. He gropes at it instinctively.
His black sweater. And, tangled within it, Shane’s shirt.
It is a very convincing argument.
And Ilya lets himself think, just once, privately and quietly, that he probably loves Zürich.
Probably, he falls in love with Zürich a little more each day.
It’s the sort of devastating he isn’t sure he knows how to survive.