Archive of Our Own

Cliff isn’t proud of it, but his first thought when he sees the video is that he knew Roz was going to be involved in some kind of sex scandal one day. He always kind of assumed there was a sex tape out there somewhere, that would end up spreading like wildfire.

It’s just that the scandal in Cliff’s mind involved something more like the adulterous wife of a Voyageur, and less like the anonymous dick of some guy in a club bathroom.

So, point to Roz, he guesses, for still managing to surprise him after all these years.

He wants to think it’s fake: the lights are low and the quality is crappy and there’s no way Ilya Rozanov, Russian menace, Red Scare on ice, manwhore extraordinaire, is on his knees with a dick in his mouth. So Cliff keeps watching, mostly because he is waiting for the moment it reveals itself to be a fake, and partially because he can’t remember how to look away. Not-Rozanov takes the whole thing down his throat and Cliff can feel his face burning but can’t stop watching. And the thing is that the moles are in the exact right places, and the steep curve of the browbone is too familiar, and Not-Rozanov wears a devoted sort of concentration on his face that is almost exactly the same as the one Rozanov wears on the ice before he plays all his best games. It’s a really unfortunate coincidence. Really unfortunate.

The other guy groans over the distant pulsing of the music like he doesn’t care about being caught, and Cliff can hear the way Not-Rozanov moans around him and he is the most glad that he has ever been that he lives alone.

It doesn’t last much longer after that; Not-Rozanov swallows, pulls back, wipes his thumb across his bottom lip, and grins up and it’s undeniable. That’s Roz. The video autoplays from the start and Cliff is too busy staring dumbly down at his phone to think to click out of it. The cocky —urgh, terrible choice of word —curve of his spit-shiny lips is so specific, and the glint in his eyes is bright even though they’re glassy, and Cliff isn’t sure who he’s trying to kid at this point because it definitely isn’t working.

It’s supposed to be a relatively chill day. A slow morning. They aren’t playing today and practice isn’t until later so the video is already out there by the time Cliff has seen it. His phone is already blowing up with calls and texts from people asking him if it’s real, if Rozanov is really gay. Enough so he starts to wonder if it’s somehow his fault that he missed it, if it makes him a bad friend that he’s just as shocked as everyone else.

He shoots him a text, doesn’t overthink it: Fuck, Roz. That’s definitely you in the video. Because it is. Because Cliff doesn’t know what else to say.

He doesn’t sit down and think about their friendship often. Ever. It’s always been easy, simple. And now suddenly it feels inadequate, shallow. Roz is probably his best friend, has been for as long as they’ve played together, and Cliff had no idea he was gay —and he doesn’t care, really. He’s just kinda shocked. He’ll get over it, but it might take some readjusting. But for Roz? It might take more than just some readjusting to recover from this.

Cliff forces himself to get out of bed, pulls on a pair of sweats that were on his floor, and shuffles into the kitchen to make coffee. He doesn’t look up from his phone once. It keeps buzzing. He starts to wonder what Rozy’s phone must be like if he is getting notifications this incessantly, and it immediately makes the text feel inadequate. It will probably get buried in everything else. The coffee is still too hot but Cliff gulps down the rest of it, grabs his car keys, and walks right out of the house in his slippers.

The drive to Roz’s house is familiar; they both live just outside of the city, albeit on different sides of it, so he has to drive through the congested streets of Boston Proper. It’s always slow-going but today it feels vindictive, like the city is conspiring to prevent him from proving that he is a good friend, that someone has Rozanov’s back even if he’s just as shocked as anyone else is by the news. There are a lot of grey buildings and very few trees and Cliff curses every traffic light he gets stopped at out loud.

Eventually the roads get emptier, and the world gets greener, and there is a long driveway and a square new build that is all sleek lines and windows. It looks, in the morning sun and with his phone buzzing on the dashboard, like a very fancy fishtank. He contemplates, after hammering urgently on the door and receiving no response, peering in but stops himself. It feels invasive given everything else that has happened this morning.

He knocks again, harder this time, like he fully intends to break down the door if he doesn’t get a response sometime in the immediate future. “Rozy! Come on man, I’m getting worried.”

It does the trick. He hears rustling, then the door handle rattles and Roz is right there with his hair a mess and his feet bare, wearing the boxers he probably slept in and his duvet slung about his shoulders like a cape. The corners of his mouth are tense and his eyes are heavy, and he is looking at Cliff like he’s waiting for something else bad to happen.

“You look like shit,” Cliff tells him honestly, because the words are hard to come by this morning. Honesty he can do, tact not so much. He doesn’t have any practice navigating situations like this one.

“Yes, is shitty thing.”

“It’s real.” Cliff wants him to be able to deny it, might even pretend to believe him if he tries, but he knows the truth. Everyone does.

“Is not news I am… promiscuous.”

“You’re gay.” No tact at all.

Cliff wants to scoff at the way Roz rolls his eyes. Mostly he is just trying to look at him without picturing the video. He stumbles over his own feet as Roz pulls him by the forearm into the house. “Obviously I am not.”

“I saw the video, dude.”

“You watched?” Rozanov cocks an eyebrow and looks immediately more like himself and less like he is waiting at the edge of a fast-growing sinkhole. Cliff’s face feels hot. “Whole thing?”
“Roz.”

“Maybe you’re a little gay too.” He shrugs and Cliff can only see through the artifice of it because he is looking for its edges now, in a way he has never had reason to before. He sort of wants to scoff, say something like if that’s a little gay I don’t want to think about what a lot gay is.

Instead he just says “Rozanov.”

“I am bisexual.”

And that… actually makes a lot of sense. Cliff will have more time to unpack it later, to picture years of drunken outings and sideways glances he might have misinterpreted at the time or imagined entirely in hindsight, to consider every clue, every joke he has ever made about Roz being European. Every time Cliff ever called him a cocksucker even though he never meant it, and the strange way Roz would grin in response, half sly and half something else entirely. For now all there is to do is say as much and be there. Share concern from the team without sharing any of the actual words they’ve said.

“They hate me,” Roz concludes, and Cliff has a hard time saying no outright.

“I think they just want to hear whether or not it’s really you.”

“Obviously is me. Was not trying to hide face at the time”

“You could still deny it.”

“Nyet. Anyone who believes is not me is idiot.” Roz lets out a long breath and shakes his head. “Could not go home anyway.”

“What?” There’s something sincere about the way he says it that makes Cliff’s hair stand on end.

“Hockey players, not the smartest people.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No interest in international politics. Russia does not like people like me.”

This hasn’t been a funny morning by any means, but Cliff has been going about it with the unspoken assumption that there will be drama and stress and then it will end and he will be a better friend and they’ll laugh about it one day, about how it was obvious this was going to happen. About how there is no more Rozanov way to come out than that. The assumption dies quickly, immolates in Cliff’s mind and turns to ash. “This is a big deal.” And Cliff does what he can to fix it, which is nowhere near enough.

He wants to ask what exactly it means when your country doesn’t like you. What that means for your family and your citizenship and your visa, for your safety if you ever have to go back. He can’t find the right words so doesn’t say any.

He asks what happens next and Roz can’t answer. He asks about the guy and Roz doesn’t know either.

“You suck many guys off in public bathrooms?” Cliff asks.

“Your type is anything with a pulse,” he says.

He tells Roz “I heard gay guys were better at giving other guys head than women were.”

He sticks his big fucking foot in his mouth over and over and over again and it’s embarrassing but at least there’s not a video of him all over the internet with a dick in his mouth. He thinks about his sister —who he really should talk to more often, because he’d probably be much better equipped for this sort of thing if he did —and the disappointed way she’d look at him, the way she’d laugh openly in his face anyway. The way that every wrong thing he says makes Roz smile, just a little, like maybe his life isn’t over.

Cliff is there when Roz tells management to go fuck themselves, when he decides that denial will do him no favours, when he tells them that the mess is his and he will be taking it into his own hands. Cliff was 21 when they met, and Roz was 19, and he was all alone in a new county where he barely spoke the language. He was always good at seeming confident, landing quick quips, picking up girls in loud bars where his body could do the talking, but for a little while there the most Cliff ever heard Roz speak at once was in hushed, frustrated Russian down the phone from the next room over. Fresh off of his own rookie year and still intoxicated with the lifestyle and the overindulgence it opened up for him, Cliff was never the right person to offer him any sort of stability. But he was the only person that tried and that was that. Roz was Cliff’s baby brother whether he liked it or not, whether Cliff did a good job or not. All of which is to say, Cliff is proud of him for how he handles it.

To Cliff’s knowledge, this is the first time in years Roz has needed that from him. The guilt of doubt haunts him the whole drive home.

Cliff is also there when Roz texts Jane for what must be the first time in months, is there to see the strange not-quite-happy way his expression shifts. It’s not a bad shift, just a strange one. One that Cliff takes note of even if he doesn’t know what to make of it.

The actual statement isn’t released until long after Cliff gets home. He spends the hours in between monitoring all of the team’s group chats and trying to regulate the worst of the freaking out. They go quiet eventually, more or less, in a sudden and decisive way that makes him suspect some of the guys having the worst reactions have moved to a brand new secret chat that Cliff can’t police. He grimaces at his phone and calls his sister.

She doesn’t say hello, she says “you only call me when you need something.”

“How do you know I need something?”

“Rozanov,” she says flatly. “I have the internet, Cliff.”

“Why would I call you about Rozanov?”

“Because I’m the only other gay person you know.” Which isn’t untrue. She’s seven years older than him and she came out when she was fourteen, when he’d been too young to think about it, so he’s always just known and never had any feelings on the matter. She went off to college when he was eleven, and by the time she came back he was getting sucked into the chaos of youth hockey, and then she was gone again. She lives in Portland and they see each other like twice a year, and he loves her but they don’t really know each other and it’s fine. Kind of. He found out two years ago that she had proposed five months after it happened, and six months after that when he hadn’t heard a word about the wedding and just sort of assumed with only a little hurt that he wasn’t invited, learned that they had split less than amicably when her fiancée didn’t come over for Christmas. They love each other but they do it distantly, and that’s just the way it’s always worked.

“He’s Russian, Kate,” Cliff says, still reeling from the idea of never being able to go home again.

And, because she’s better than him and smarter than him and understands things about the world it has never even occurred to him to think about, she responds somberly; “I know. I don’t know what to do about that though, I’m not an immigration lawyer.”

“I never thought something like this could be such a big deal.”

She sighs. Most of their conversations end up in her being disappointed in him. “That’s because you weren’t paying attention, bud.”

“Fuck. I’m such a bad friend.”

She’s kind enough not to remind him he’s a bad brother too.

Some of the guys are nicer than the others. Connors and St-Simon ask him how Rozanov is doing once the shock has started to fade somewhat, which makes them good guys in Cliff’s eyes. When Roz announces a TV interview out of nowhere they are the ones Cliff invites over to watch it with him, mostly just because he doesn’t know how to sit down on his big couch in his cavernous sitting room and stare at his expensive TV alone right now. How to watch the friend he would have sworn, this time last week, he knew better than anyone else in the world, tell a stranger things he never would have told Cliff, without hating himself.

The first thing Cliff notices is that he sounds different. He looks the same, cool and comfortable under hot studio lights, smiling like he expects anyone to believe it. But he sounds tired, he speaks slowly, carefully. He’s thinking before speaking, labouring over his sentences, about what he is revealing and how his English sounds, and it makes him nineteen again. His English is worlds better, of course, but he’s trying too hard, like he doesn’t believe it.

Rozanov does interviews all the time, is almost always sent out to press scrums. He’s funny and he knows what he’s talking about, and back then he was a wunderkind and now he is someone who has lived up to his own legend. Those are nothing like this.

St-Simon suggests popcorn and Cliff says no because it feels inappropriate. Connors brought beer and when he goes to the fridge Cliff tells him to just drink the ones that were already in there because they’re actually cold, and to bring him and St-Simon one too. Cliff isn’t sure if he liked these IPAs when he bought them, but now they taste sort of stale. He drinks his too quickly anyway.

They watch the interview in almost-silence. Team gatherings are never quiet but this is hardly a team gathering, and it’s tense, and the fact that Connors and St-Simon don’t know what to say either doesn’t make Cliff feel as much better about his own inability to speak as he thought it might.

“He should hate us,” Connors concludes, somewhere around the halfway point. Cliff isn’t sure if he means them or the team or the NHL or hockey in general. He thinks he might agree regardless.

It becomes almost normal; Cliff sees so many burning jerseys he just deletes Twitter, he goes to practice and calls out his teammates to their faces, he reminds everyone that Roz will be back and just as good as ever soon, and that he will still be Roz when he does it. He glares at Carmichael when he scoffs. People keep texting. He calls Kate once every other day to prove he doesn’t only call her when he needs something, even though he never has anything to say. He talks about Roz because he feels like the closest thing they have to common ground these days, and she complains that she probably knows more about this man she has never met than Wikipedia does at this point, but she never hangs up on him.

Roz is benched, which is bullshit but also out of Cliff’s hands. He comes back to practice and it becomes apparent that nothing is actually normal and Cliff hasn’t managed to convince anyone of anything.

The tension is apparent and awful. Everything about how Roz moves on the ice makes it hard to ignore that he knows he has something to prove. Every time Cliff catches his eyes they are dull.

He folds himself into a corner of the locker room like it has suddenly occurred to him to be aware of how much space he takes up. He stares at the wall. Cliff invades the little space he carves out for himself because nobody has ever respected anybody’s personal space in here and it would be weird if Cliff started now. From within the bubble he notices that Roz is texting Jane again. Frequently. He smiles at the notifications, almost blushes, and Cliff is a few too many conclusions deep to consider himself anything even close to a genius, but he isn’t a complete idiot: it’s obvious that their on-again-off-again is back on.

So he gets to thinking about Jane, who has never been more than one of the handful of contacts Roz actually bothered to transfer every time he got a new phone. Who has never been anything more than a specifically pleased smile Roz tried to pretend didn’t exist, and occasionally the most stilted, almost insulting sext Cliff has ever seen. She has been a topic of conversation for a long time, one of the few things that felt possible to tease Rozanov about when they had all sussed out that family was strictly off-limits, and Russia was kind of sketchy —and now, Cliff supposes, he might have more of an idea why —and the longer she remained strangely constant, a deviation from Roz’s usual patterns, the more the team started to theorise about why they never got to meet her or see pictures or learn anything about her besides her name and the city she lived in.

There’s an ongoing betting pool, even though they all pretty much accepted that they weren’t going to be getting answers any time soon a long time ago; Cliff put fifty bucks on her being married which had felt like the obvious answer at the time. It seems like there might be a new obvious answer now, but Roz is clearly tired and annoyed and itching to hit something after going toe-to-toe with LeClaire, so Cliff doesn’t ask. Just files it away for later. Jane. Who is different because she is a secret but also because she is important.

Cliff can be honest enough with himself to admit that he is starting to feel a bit like a needy girlfriend trying to ward off an imminent break up. The texting is constant. Roz missing calls and messages sitting in his inbox for a couple of days at a time —longer over the summers, when he was spending time at a home he can’t go back to anymore —is not new. It just feels different now. Like every silence is an emergency, an opportunity for something else life-ruining to happen. A chance for Cliff to miss it. It’s probably selfish of him, he realises, when he complains to Kate about it for what is maybe the fifth time, to be so worried about how good of a friend or a brother he is when Roz is obviously miserable and Cliff’s feelings, rightfully-so, probably aren’t even registering to him over all the noise.

For the first time in his professional career Cliff is dreading a game. He’s been nervous about them, sure, pretty much every time they’ve made it past the first round of the playoffs, but he hasn’t dreaded one since he was seventeen and had the flu and had forced himself to play anyway because they all knew his team would lose without him. They lost with him too, and he threw up all over the dressing room.

He feels a little bit like he could throw up now, looking at Roz playing captain to a team that can’t meet his eyes, looking at Roz's face and still seeing the ghostly vestiges of the video every time he makes a similar expression. They’re probably all seeing it too, imagining Rozanov on his knees and wondering how they are supposed to respect him on the ice —it doesn’t matter to them that he is better than they are. That he always has been. That he’s been just as gay the whole time.

And the thing is that it’s a game against Ottawa; the writing should already be on the wall for them. They’re the worst team in the conference and Boston very much is not, but Ottawa probably aren’t falling apart from the inside like they are so, just maybe, things have evened out. And how humiliating, to all of them but especially Rozanov, who is their captain and making his big return after being benched, with brand new eyes on his back, brand new people expecting him to succeed to prove to the world that he still can, it would be to lose to Ottawa.

Roz knows that. It’s obvious he knows that from how he shouts to the locker room because that’s the only way most of these guys are going to listen. He has to prove himself even though he has been doing just that for years, and Cliff is trying very hard to be a better friend, so he doesn’t miss the way that his fingers find the crucifix around his neck and drag it slowly across the chain he has pulled taut. It’s a nervous tic. So is the way he is clenching his other hand into a fist, tight, then shaking it out over and over again —the way a person expecting to be hit might express their nerves.

“You’ll show them,” Cliff tells him, squeezing his upper arm briefly. They don’t really hug but they can do this.

Roz holds his gaze too long and too intensely. “I do not care if people hate me, Marley.”

“Looks like you care to me, dude.”

“Not about them.”

And that’s it. Roz is on the ice and a significant sector of the crowd is determined to prove to him that he’s welcome there, that they still love him. They’ve made signs, painted them and themselves and the lettering on their Rozanov jerseys bright colours. And they’re playing in Boston, so these are mostly their fans and enough of them are cheering for their captain that Cliff almost doesn’t notice the ones who aren’t, like this is just another game.

Ottawa is Ottawa, so Cliff is ready to step in and defend Rozanov with his fists because that’s really all he’s ever been good for, but he is pretty confident he won’t have to. Their centre skates to the blue line to say something to Roz, too quiet for Cliff to overhear, and his expression is pleasant if awkward and Roz just sort of nods at him in response, so Cliff assumes it’s nothing bad.

And then the game starts, the puck drops, and Roz wins the faceoff like it’s not even a competition. Cliff catches his pass and sends it back his way and lets himself be awed by the speed and the agility and the concentration Roz is applying to this game that means nothing and everything all at once. He is a monster, only on the ice, when he wants to be. Scary to look at, hard to look away from, awesome to watch. The longer the game goes on, as Roz scores his first, second, third goal and steals the puck back from any Ottawa player unlucky enough to gain possession of it, the clearer it becomes that most of Boston aren’t really playing with him. Cliff and St-Simon are doing their best to keep up but Connors is on another line and everybody else is doing this stupid thing where they try to pretend they don’t need Rozanov. As if the team wasn’t floundering before Roz joined. As if he didn’t save their sinking ship when nobody else could.

Ottawa are just fine throughout. Bad at hockey for NHL standards, but they wouldn’t be Ottawa if they were anything else. Nobody says anything incendiary. Roz doesn’t look at any of them like he is expecting them to. He chirps as usual and they stutter more than usual before throwing insults back like they refuse to go for the cheap shot. Every time there is a lull or they’re sitting on the bench, Cliff catches Roz looking up into the crowd, face intense and moody and Slavic. It’s not a new expression by any means, but Cliff has never figured out how to read it.

The media scrum afterwards makes up for the other team’s niceness. They ask questions only to Rozanov, only about Rozanov, and they are very narrowly skirting the rules of what they are allowed to say.

“How has the atmosphere changed in the locker room?”

“What has the effect been on team morale?”

“Have recent developments affected how you conduct yourself around the team? In the showers, for example.”

It makes Cliff wish that Ottawa had been awful, because he would have at least been able to punch them.

He takes Roz to a bar that night, an old, familiar haunt because, after a long internal debate and then a phone call with Kate she had cackled through, he had decided maybe taking him to a gay bar wasn’t the right move. It’s not like he has any experience of gay bars either, wouldn’t know a good one from a bad one. Roz probably would though, if the video is anything to go off—and it is all Cliff has to go off, really—and he’d laugh in Cliff’s face when he inevitably got the whole thing very wrong.

They, mostly Rozanov, attract more attention than usual. He dresses in the same way as he always has and Cliff wonders how much his fashion sense is actually just European. Women flirt and he buys Cliff top shelf vodka even though Cliff is ostensibly the one taking him out, and he talks to strangers over the music and they hang onto his every half-drowned word. He is still the same big presence. The same confident presence. At least here in this room where nobody who is doubting him is bold or stupid enough to say it to their faces.

Even so, Roz doesn’t go home with any of them. Doesn’t even make out with any of them on the dance floor. There are beautiful women everywhere, and even one guy who is bold enough to approach them, and Roz keeps his hands to himself.

“I think it’s too late for celibacy,” Cliff tells him.

“I’m not celibate?” Roz seems genuinely confused.

Cliff gestures at the room at large, at the way they are almost at the centre of it. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Roz rolls his eyes and drinks the rest of his vodka without the flinch Cliff has learned to suppress but not completely erase. “So I am celibate and you are, what, a nun?”

“You don’t have to feel weird about it.”

“About what?”

“The video.”

“Why would I feel weird about that?” He lifts the cross from his sternum to his lips and inadvertently gives something quietly away. “Was not like it was private and whole world has seen it.”

“I thought the whole world had already seen your dick.”

“My dick was not in video, Marley. You should know this. You watched it. Multiple times. You told me, remember?”

He does remember. Vividly and with more than a little regret. His face feels hot. He’ll blame the alcohol if anyone asks about the flush.

“Is it Jane?”

“Shut up.”

“I thought you were over for good last time it ended. I thought I was over for good when you made us all skate suicides afterwards.”

“This is because you are a baby.”

“I am a human.”

“I know, is one of your many flaws.”

The season goes on that way. Roz plays like he did post-Sochi and Cliff fights to keep up, and, slowly, more of the team comes around because they’re finally becoming convinced that six years of prodigious play wasn’t a fluke. Rozanov being bisexual doesn’t undermine the fact that he’s better than all of them and they’ve all been at peace with that for years now. There are more games against more teams that have more to say than Ottawa did, and Cliff has been icing his knuckles every day for the past month because he doesn’t have time to let them recover properly between uses. His hands are constantly swollen and stiff and his knuckles have adopted a whole palette of ugly colours and it’s worth it, even if the lady at the bank last week had stared at him the whole time he was there with nothing short of outright fear on her face.

“You’re like a gay vigilante,” Kate tells him.

“He’s my friend,” he says, because it really is that simple.

“It means a lot,” she tells him honestly. He can hear it in her voice. She doesn’t specify if it means a lot to her or to Roz or to hockey fans or to queer people in general but he understands what she’s saying anyway: he isn’t a bad friend anymore, maybe not even that bad of a brother. “I’ve never watched this much hockey before.”

“Because we finally have a queer player?” It’s a word he still feels weird saying but one he’s trying to use because he’s been told it’s inclusive and correct, and it feels like he’s doing all of Rozy’s years of manwhoring a disservice by calling him gay. It feels weird, honestly, to be a professional hockey player and learn things at the same time, but it’s probably making him a better person. “You should check out the women’s game.”

“No, dumbass. Because you’re my brother.”

“I’ve always been your brother.”

And all she does in response to that is hum.

They play Toronto, which they all knew in advance was going to be a shitshow because Dallas Kent is the sort of asshole Ilya Rozanov isn’t, and his poison is obviously catching because his linemates are almost as bad. The things he says are obvious and unfunny and it becomes apparent that he’s being very genuine about his disgust because Ilya responds with cheap shots of his own—the very simple implication that Kent’s apparent interest in gay sex is anything less than extremely heterosexual—and Kent stops pretending that he’s trying to be funny at all.

Cliff doesn’t get the chance to punch him. He’s trying to be good about not fighting Roz’s battles for him, God knows he can defend himself, or at least not to step in before back-up is needed. He’s across the ice when Kent snaps, gets the first hit in. He gets close enough to hear Kent’s nose crack under Roz’s fist before he’s being ushered away by a ref who definitely could have been doing his job better.

They win the game because they have to. Roz finds himself a corner because he feels like he has to. Cliff invades it because it would be weird if he didn’t.

There isn’t much to say, really. Sorry, maybe, but Roz has heard that word too much recently, and only in the sort of way that makes Cliff doubt it means anything at all. It feels wholly inadequate. He tries to think of something better, but Roz’s phone starts buzzing and he answers it just slowly enough for Cliff to see the name of the contact. Even if he didn’t he could have guessed.

He only gets to hear one side of the conversation. Roz is dismissive in a way that’s not entirely convincing—”Not the first time I have been punched”, “Maybe yes, maybe no. Have heard worse”, “Kent is worse player than me, and it wasn’t even a good punch”—and it gives away the fact that Jane is calling because he’s worried. Because he cares. Because it has allegedly been just sex for much too long for that to be true. Cliff isn’t trying to eavesdrop, but he hears everything Rozy says and doesn’t try to stop that happening.

“Someone special?” He already knows the answer of course, but the teasing is the fun. Is familiar and comfortable in a way things haven’t been since the video leaked. He knows more now, but at this moment it’s easy to pretend that nothing has changed in a way that matters—he knows why Jane is a secret and that’s a fact that can exist on its own for 30 seconds, without any repercussions.

“Go away, Marley.”

“Hmm.” He shoves Roz around a little, because Roz is his baby brother and it’s his right to shove him around. They’re both sweaty and gross and that’s not something they’ve truly cared about once in the years they’ve known each other. “You know I would’ve thought you’d be sleeping with more people than ever. Now that the whole, y’know, is out of the way.”

“Get to the point.” He flicks Cliff’s ear just hard enough to hurt.

“I know you and I haven’t heard about you and anyone since the video happened.”

“My own friend thinks I am a slut.”

“You are a slut. The whole sex tape thing probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” Cliff is hardly celibate, nor super into commitment. Really, the only thing that has ever separated him and Roz in this regard is the success rate. He’s not really sure what it is—the curls maybe, or just the entire face, the way he holds himself like he isn’t the least bit scared of his own body. “You slept with too many women and had to move onto men-”

“Have been sleeping with men since I was a teenager. Try again.” Foot meet mouth, meet friend who is somehow okay with it, meet man with a gay sister who would know better if he had decided to be a better brother before he had felt obliged to.

“Okay, fine, so maybe not that. But you sleep around, dude. And we’re all in awe of it.”

“Maybe not all of it.”

“No.” Cliff shakes his head. “I recognise and respect the game even if the game is gay.” He means it.

“Something you want to tell me?”

“I want you to tell me something.”

He sees the second Roz’s walls go right back up. The moment his posture changes and his eyes scan the room like it is filled with threats rather than teammates—the line between the two things has been blurred in a way that doesn’t feel fixable. The doom feels like tar in Cliff’s chest as he looks around, at all the things Roz is seeing and how totally unremarkable they are, and he realises that something will have to change sometime soon and the status quo can’t keep trucking on forever when they all know it’s dead. “I will tell you nothing.”

And Cliff does him the favour of not pushing, not because he doesn’t want to. “Okay dude.” It sounds like giving up in a way Cliff really doesn’t want it to. So he tacks “I’ll drop it for now but you can’t get away from me that easily.” onto the end of it.

The season pauses for All Stars and Cliff is used to not being invited and looking forward to having the opportunity to actually let his busted knuckles heal. Roz flies south like he does every year and Cliff doesn’t usually miss him but his absence is large now, conspicuous and yawning. People keep trying to ask Cliff how he really feels, now that cocksucker isn’t here to overhear. The healing isn’t going too well.

He checks into the All Stars game, well-aware that he shouldn’t be expecting an exceptional level of hockey even if it’s being played by an exceptional group of players. But they’ve put Rozanov-and-Hollander on the same team for the first time ever and Cliff isn’t going to miss that. Not when everyone knows they’re both hypercompetitive freaks doomed to take every game seriously. There’s a reason Boston Vs. Montreal games are so electric and Cliff has seen it time and time again—with one notable exception, a few months back, when the captains hadn’t clicked and both teams had felt the strange absence of tension all game. He, like everyone else, needs to know what Rozanov-and-Hollander could be on the same line.

The answer is plain to see. Obvious. Roz is a monster and Hollander is a hockey robot, and together they are superhuman. It’s like they can read each other’s minds. Like they’re both thrilled to finally be matched up with the only other person on par with them. Finally there is someone on Roz’s line who can really keep up with him and it’s exceptional to watch but it makes Cliff feel a little bit guilty. Like maybe he is more handicap than teammate. He reminds himself he knows better than to compare himself to either of them but isn’t sure it sinks in.

And then Roz makes a frankly impossible pass through a channel Cliff is almost certain doesn’t really exist—because they’re playing the sort of hockey the other players can’t help but respond to, that is obviously something special and would be a real lost opportunity to waste—to a spot where Hollander definitely wasn’t a second ago, and Hollander makes a masterful slapshot before the opposing goalie can even register that any of it has happened. Hollander grins, open and honest and human, the camera catches it, and Roz skates over with a smile on his face that makes him look impossibly younger. Like an alternate history that Cliff never got the chance to see. He presses a kiss to the side of Hollander’s helmet and he’s done the same thing to Cliff a few times but he didn’t look nearly as gooey when he did it, and Cliff didn’t turn like Hollander does, like his body is reacting before his brain can catch up and it knows that the sensible thing to do next is to lean in.

Oh.

Shit.

Jane. Shane. It isn’t even fucking clever.

Cliff wants to talk about it. He gets the sense it’s something he really isn’t allowed to talk about so he keeps his mouth shut. It’s not an easy thing to do.

But he gets it now, kind of, after watching Roz deal with being the only guy out in the whole league and everything that means and the way that he has quietly accepted that his home is now an entire massive country he can never go back to, where his mother’s grave is, where the flowers he left last time he visited are either dead or gone now: he can’t tell anyone about Hollander. Definitely not about Hollander-and-Rozanov.

He never really gave any thought to gay hockey players before the video leaked, but if you’d asked him he probably would have admitted to thinking that there were no out players because there were no queer players. Hockey was a dude’s game and locker rooms were always loud and not very friendly, so even gay guys who were good at the game would be turned away before they ever became good enough for it to matter. He knows better now. He knows Roz has a whole mental list of players he suspects, whose names he won’t share. He knows that there are no other out players because the queer players are scared. He knows that they’re right to be.

So he operates under the assumption that nobody else has joined the dots. The Hollander thing is top secret and Cliff, in knowing it, has adopted the task of protecting it. He doesn’t even know for sure, he reminds himself, but it’s not very convincing. He saw what he saw and, after missing the gay thing entirely, he had decided he was going to pay more attention in future. Now he knows something nobody else knows, that he isn’t allowed to know, and it might be killing him slightly after a week.

He wonders how Roz kept the whole ordeal secret for so many years, and stumbles upon the answer that he had to. That if he didn’t he risked losing everything, like his family and his country and the job that he loved that gave him a home outside of it. A home like a fishtank where everything is glass and he only started remembering to pull down the blinds consistently recently, and anyone who knew where to look could peer right in.

Cliff doesn’t even talk to Roz about it, because he understands that he isn’t allowed to know. It would be embarrassing to bring it up and be wrong, of course, but he isn’t really concerned about that. He’s more worried about the freak-out. About pushing a bruise that already hurts.

So Roz gets back from All Stars and he’s happy in a way that is weird, and that makes Cliff realise that maybe he hasn’t been exactly happy for maybe the entire time they’ve known each other. And Cliff lets that be what it is. He lets the Hollander secret fester and grow in his brain. He lets Roz smile at all of Jane’s texts and not even hide that he’s doing it. He lets the rest of the team notice it too, and doesn’t say anything about the fact that none of them are teasing Roz anymore.

He isn’t sure if they just don’t think they’re allowed to, or if maybe they’ve figured out the basics too. Put two and two together and realised that the Jane secret suddenly makes a lot more sense.

He keeps telling himself that he’s going to bring it up eventually. That they’ll square away a day and Cliff will go to Roz’s house with too much beer and they’ll drink and talk until they’re loose-lipped enough to admit to things they wouldn’t otherwise. Cliff will be a good friend who knows what to do. Someone with solutions to offer. The beer will be a bonus, rather than the entire point of being friends with him.

It doesn’t happen. They play more games, they have more shallow conversations, Roz tells specific jokes only to Cliff because he’s the only one who will be receptive to them and it’s obvious that he’s wanted to tell them for a long time. And then Roz answers a phone call and his face falls and his dad is dead and he’s leaving before he can tell Cliff where he’s going.

The logical answer would be that he’s going to the funeral. Going to the funeral would be a totally illogical thing to do. Cliff isn’t sure whether that means Roz is definitely catching a flight to Moscow, or if he hasn’t even thought about it. He just figures it’s definitely one of the two and he calls and he texts as soon as they’ve lost the game Roz missed and all he gets is Hi, this is Ilya. I will never listen to your voicemail. He knows from experience that the message is true.

They fly to Nashville. Cliff worries so much he barely sleeps and plays like shit. Rozanov still doesn’t answer.

Cliff isn’t exactly any more convinced than he was to begin with that Roz actually went back to Russia, but the more time passes the more worried he is. If Roz got in, mourned, and got out he’d be back by now. If he flew into Moscow, got arrested or attacked or- then the ongoing silence would make a lot more sense.

He calls Kate twice a day while Roz is away, and not even because he is trying to prove anything.

After a week of silence Cliff drives to Roz’s house. Peers in. Finds it empty. Sits in his car in the driveway with his head in his hands because he’s never been good at coming up with plans. And then the rumble of an engine, the crunch of tyres over gravel, the distant thrum of Russian rap that is definitely familiar even though he definitely doesn’t know a single song by name.

“Where have you been?” Cliff follows Rozanov into his home and decides that there are bigger problems at hand than whether or not he has been invited. "Roz, you disappeared and none of us knew where you went. I thought maybe you’d gone back to Russia, to the funeral…”

“Would not do that Marley. I’m not stupid.”

“No. But your dad just died. And you can’t go home and you weren’t here.”

“Is not really home. Not if I can’t go back.” Cliff doesn’t know how to believe that. He still thinks of his grandparents’ house as a home and the old bungalow was demolished when he was seventeen.

“So where’d you go?”

“Away.”

“Not good enough.” Cliff feels a little bit like yelling it. Or maybe sobbing. Laughing so hysterically he falls to his knees on the hardwood.

“Marley.” It’s a plea if Cliff has ever heard one. He’d probably be more inclined to listen were he not pleading right back.

“I’m not leaving until you tell me.”

“I am grieving. Leave me alone.”

“I’m worried about you. The big secret is already out, yeah? So why not tell me?”

“To see a friend.”

“Jane?” It doesn’t matter that Cliff already knows. He needs to hear it.

“No.”

“I know you guys have been talking again.”

“You know nothing.”

“I’ve seen her name on your phone. I always wondered why you got so sketchy about her-”

“Marlow. Do not.”

“-but then the video…”

“Please.”

“Jane’s a dude, right?”

“Ask me any other question.” It puts every previous plea to shame. Cliff scrubs his hands across his face hard enough that his stubble makes his palms numb.

“Roz, I already know. I don’t care. You know that.”

“Just stop asking.”

“Just tell me you were with Jane and I’ll get back in my car.  Make it believable.”

“Yes, I was with him,” Roz admits after a moment. Cliff wants to say more, to ask if he’s really Shane Hollander, if it’s really so bad that he’s definitely Shane Hollander, if hockey is foreplay, if the sex is as athletic as he assumes it must be, if they’re admitting it’s more than just sex by now, six years in. Instead he nods, only once, and keeps his mouth shut.

“Thank you,” he says, because there’s something too final about goodbye.

He tells the guys that Rozanov is safe. He didn’t go to Russia. He’s back and intact and fine enough to play. Grief looks strange on him. He wants to say that their captain spent the week at his boyfriend’s, that he maybe traded one home for another, that the whole ordeal was worth it or maybe just something close. But the guys have made it clear that they won’t be reassured by that news. They don’t want to know about Jane, now that some of the truth about Jane has occurred to them. Roz kept the secret for so long and they all wish he had kept it longer. So all they get to know is that he’s safe. He’s home. Cliff is the one who has the news because he is the one who cared enough to find it out.

There is always a certain buzz in the room before they face off against Montreal. The weirdness has morphed it a little, but can’t conquer it completely. Cliff runs through his usual ritual—left sock, left skate, right sock, right skate, left laces, right laces, unlace the left and retie them slightly tighter, tap twice on the side of his stall, untie the left lace skate again to make the laces looser again. Roz calls to the room and only Carmichael doesn’t respond.

Cliff feels good about this game. Good about the team for the first time in a while. Good about the Montreal buzz and the way Hollander has been on the exclusive list of opposing captains who haven’t been weird about the whole thing. Cliff is on the even more exclusive list of people who know why.

The Rozanov-and-Hollander tension is back and better than ever and so blatantly sexual now that Cliff knows how to interpret it. He checks Hollander into the boards as soon as he gets the excuse to, hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to do any real damage. If Roz asks, which Cliff knows he won’t, he was testing a hypothesis. In reality he is probably just looking to see how Roz reacts. The way his eyes go dark. The way he and Hollander are definitely hockey freaks even if they aren’t actually monsters or robots.

And then there’s Comeau. Contributing nothing to the game until the moment he decides to barrel right through it, towards Roz who had the puck for all of one second and got rid of it long enough ago that Comeau could easily redirect if he wanted to.

He doesn’t want to. That much is obvious. What’s not obvious is how Cliff is meant to fix it.

Hollander does it for him, evidently. Or tries. He puts himself in the way and absorbs some of the hit and Cliff watches in the same helpless way as everyone else does when Comeau takes them both down. Hears up close the way Roz’s wrist snaps under Hollander’s helmet. Assumes privately that he put his hand there on purpose the same way Hollander put his body in the line of fire on purpose.

Cliff feels useless again. Feels like a terrible friend again. Feels like someone who is doomed to watch things happening to Roz again and again and never figure out how to intervene.

Comeau isn’t even a little bit injured and is blatantly a lot smug. There are medics on the ice. The game has stopped. The crowd is the sort of quiet that means they are scared rather than disinterested. Cliff rips off his gloves and punches Comeau in the face before he even sees him coming.

Hayden Pike, Hollander’s Cliff Marlow he supposes, lands another punch on the other side of his face to even it out and there’s a silent understanding Cliff means to convey when they meet each other’s eyes. He can only assume Pike gets it because he looks precisely how Cliff feels. Because nobody socks their own teammate for no reason. Much less Hayden Pike. He’d probably be more memorable if he was in the habit of doing that.

Cliff hadn’t predicted his day would end in a hospital in Montreal. It had taken a few minutes to convince the man at the reception that he wasn’t there for his abused knuckles or busted face. Even when Cliff had insisted on visiting Ilya Rozanov he had been winced at and told, in the sort of Quebecois accent he still thought was funny, that he really needed to be checked out. He had said no enough times that eventually the man just sighed and gave him a visitor’s pass and a room number and sent him on his way.

“You look like shit,” Roz tells him, like he isn’t sitting injured in a hospital bed, looking too much like himself at the same time for the image not to be disjointed. Just absurd enough to be funny if Cliff wasn’t still so mad.

“You should see the other guy.”

“Tell me you did not kill him.”

“No, Roz. I didn’t kill him. I know nobody is gonna catch an assault charge for a fight on the ice but I assume that doesn’t extend to murder.”

“Good.” Roz nods sagely. His hair is fluffy, rumpled, oddly charming. “I will do it myself.”

“I need you out of prison, dude.”

He rolls his eyes like that’s a ridiculous concern to have. “Will not get caught, Marley. Am not complete idiot.”

He sounds so sure of it, Cliff has to ask the question he has asked at least once a year since they met, just to double check. “You’re sure you have no Bratva connections? No shady uncles?”

He scoffs. “Plenty of shady family but all police. Different kind of organised crime.” Cliff chews on the less sore side of his split lower lip and does not ask if Roz’s own brother would have him arrested if he was given the chance.

“How’s Hollander?”

“Concussed. Will recover. High on drugs.” He sounds too tired to try not to be fond. Or like maybe he is on enough drugs himself to forget to pretend to be anything else.

“How’s Shane?” He tries to say it with just a hint of Roz’s accent, the way that makes it sound almost exactly the same as the way he says Jane. His eyes go wide, panicked. The meds soften the edges enough that he doesn’t run away or summon a nurse to force Cliff to leave.

“Fuck.” They apparently also slow him down enough that it doesn’t occur to him to lie. Or maybe he just can’t think of a way to do it quickly enough.

“You two are just the right kind of insane for this to work.”

“You make me feel so loved when I am injured.”

“I love you dude, and also you’re a freak of nature.”

“Flattering.”

“Whatever. We’ll talk about this properly when I don’t have a flight to catch and you aren’t on the good stuff-”

“Low dose.”

“-and you’re back in Boston, recovering.”

“We’ll talk soon,” Roz agrees, more easily than he has ever agreed to anything Cliff has ever asked of him.

“I’m going to ask you so many invasive questions, you’re gonna be sick of me.”

Roz rolls his eyes. “Cannot wait.” He couldn’t sound less like he meant it if he tried, which paradoxically makes it sound almost sincere because it’s Roz saying it.