Work Text:
Irezumi
The MLH season was delayed from its original Oct 2012 break due to the lockout by the team owners. The resulting compressed 48 game sprint had no traditional mid-winter interruptions once the play began in January of 2013. From then until June 2013 Shane Hollander played like a mad man, focussed, determined, any and all of the words that leading sports commentators would use to describe a locked in, laser focused athlete that didn’t need or want a break from anything or anyone unrelated to hockey.
If only they knew how little truth there was to that.
Only Shane was aware of his wants and needs as they pertained to one Ilya Rozanov, and how they didn’t fall into any of those neat little boxes.
Consequently, the complete drop in texts, chirps, messages and even eye contact from the player who fought and matched his stats on a regular basis, combined with the chaos and theatricality of his off-ice persona that highlighted their differences, hit Shane hard.
It was whiplash.
Going from a tender (& to be frank, romantic) kiss at the bottom of the stairs of his apartment complex to complete and utter silence. Nothing, nada, in terms of basic human contact. While Shane had vowed never to let himself acknowledge let alone speak it out loud, it stung in a weird way that bruises yellowing under the skin ached when you have forgotten their existence and then a body hits you just so and it flares back to life.
Like it was saying
I am here you whiny arrogant thing!!
Admit it!
Show me you know I am there.
Something happens then, that rips him sharply from the reality of MLH and Ilya, into the reality of human relationships that still existed in his periphery, silent but present.
His baachan, obaachan.
Yuna Hollander has maintained a connection with her homeland through her parents And when they decided to return to Japan for an extended holiday. To visit with family, gossiping, telling the stories of Canada and the life that is so different and so difficult baachan says before she busses a kiss, pats his hand as she says goodbye and toddles off.
Now, the news that she has had a fall. A simple trip over cobblestone when she was laughing at something the little cousins did in the distance. Not so simple when she has injured herself enough to send zings of worry through his unflappable mothers’ face. Broken hip, fractured leg, knee surgery words flung around with no thought to how they sliced at her frail body.
Shane watches as Yuna picks up the neatly folded piles of clothes packing them into the bags with trembling hands, eyes slightly squinted in thought, the beginnings of tension lines highlighted at the corners of her mouth, between her eyes.
“Mom,?” Shane reaches out and clasps his large hand over her delicately trembling ones. “I can do that for you, if you want to go talk to Ojiichan. Keep him calm?”
His mothers’ eyes lift to his, tears almost but not quite building and she nods gratefully.
Shane steps up and takes over packing the remain articles of clothing, thoughts a whirlwind inside his head. Would it be too much to ask to go with? He hasn’t been back in over a decade, ever since hockey became his life focus. But this season has been brutal and what else does he have to look forward to? It would give some comfort to his mother, with his dad unable to get away from work and support his wife.
His thoughts flit to and away from a chat that has moved further and further down the list in his phone, a name that no longer exists to ring sparks through the incoming message tone. Rozanov has shut him out, shut whatever they were doing down and disappeared from any and all communications.
So why the Hell not?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sochi 2014
Shane shoves the door to his room at the Olympic village shut in frustration and it doesn’t even give him the satisfaction of a hearty slam. Flimsy useless door!! Flimsy useless feelings!!
What had he hoped to accomplish in this entire scenario? Reaching out, talking to Rozanov, almost begging to be seen only drove home the fact that whatever he had hoped they had was definitively done.
Shattered, he lay back on the cot, staring blindly at the drab ceiling, contemplating his choices, those that got him here and those that he needed to make. Resigned but still miserable because what the fuck??
Shane slowly rubbed a hand over his bicep, where Rozanov had brushed past him in his haste at making it known he could not even stand to exist in the same space as Shane breathed. His harsh words ringing in his ears, flushed and angry and still so heartbreakingly beautiful to him.
Over his fleece he moved his palm over his chest as though he could feel what lay beneath. He had hoped somehow, somewhere here in this foreign harsh country, he could show Rozanov what he had acquired just these months past. Show him how he was different too now. Unique. Special.
6 months ago
Walking the streets of Okinawa was the perfect remedy to maelstrom of Shanes thoughts.
Seeing his baachan so frail and his stalwart mother so shaken seemed to have welled up something harsh inside of him and he was choking from it. The streets were bright and beautiful but his heart like his thoughts were shrivelling up inside him, desiccating and collapsing like ash from the ends of a lit cigarette.
Fuck!!
His mind skittered away from that line of thinking. It didn’t lead anywhere good.
The Hotel Nikko Alivila was beautiful, light filled and stunning. It was located 20 kilometres from the Okinawa Prefectural Chubu hospital, but he had booked it because he needed his mother to be able to separate the exhaustion of waiting and the tranquillity offered within the Spanish colonial architecture, the beaches at sunset and the practicality of knowing that at some point Yuna will go insane from the words sprung on her by her mother and would need distance to decompress.
It didn’t make for ideal timelines with distance equally a 35-minute car ride one way. But it did make for prime summertime relaxation when the situation called for it. And boy did this ever call for it.
Drifting through the streets, air muggy as it swirled around him, Shane was overheating in his sweats berating himself at the ignorance of not preparing for the heat waves hitting Okinawa at this moment. His eyes caught on the older women walking past with their shopping, feet moving with purpose, lightly wrinkled faces filled with history. One woman in particular drew him in. Her fingers adorned with dark deep arrows, ovals and rings and dots over the knuckles and the front of the hands.
Stopping but not meaning to be rude, he tried in his rusty Japanese to ask for the meanings behind the design. To his good fortune she was willing to indulge his ignorance, and despite Shane not speaking her exact dialect she understood his curiosity. In broken English and a voice bearing the history of her ancestors she explained how these were marks of her rite of passage from girl hood to womanhood, signified in the dots and swirls embedded beneath her skin, now wrinkled in age. A passport of sorts into the afterlife, so her ancestors would recognise her when she finally made her passage into it. Despite the efforts by governments of men long dead, to ban the practice her culture prevailed, and her existence was the living proof.
As Shane smiled and thanked her for her time a seed of thought took root in his mind. What had he ever done to highlight and not diminish his culture and the differences it brought out in him?
He had his legacy building up from his skills at hockey, for sure.
He knew deep in his heart however that he’d spent most of his life hiding behind the claim of being Wasian. Almost always forcing his cultural identity into a palatable box in order to “fit-in”. Hockey was, he silently acknowledged, a rich person’s sport. The gear, the ice time, the training, the camps, the uniforms he outgrew year upon year. He knew his talent made him different; just as he was aware his genetic makeup shoved it in everyone’s face. Often times the visible difference he could never hide from, had slurs slipping out of people’s mouths at the most unexpected moments.
Until one day it was just an expectation. Something to be shrugged off, dismissed as jealousy and bigotry, and definitely not worth his time.
He was still young, still just as talented as the first time he had shot a goal and heard crowds roar and still vilified for not looking like the cookie cutter European descended goon on ice.
And he was finally going to do something about it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yuna held back her surprise and the words that came with it as she listened when Shane told her of his plans.
Her son had never done anything in life without careful thought, meticulous planning and a detailed assessment of the pros and cons.
However, this she had not in her wildest imagination nor the years spent being his mother ever expected. Still she nodded and hummed as he outline his goal. This was not something to talk him out of she realised instantly. Shane hadn’t come to her for permission. He was too grown, too rich, too careful about everything for her to presume he was. Her son, who treated his body as a temple to the athlete gods, who never let anything into his body that didn’t meet his rigorous dietary standard, who worked out diligently to be always at peak performance levels, was going to do something that was just………so out of character and unimaginably wild, she had to take a moment.
She took a sip of the chilled white wine he had poured for her from the bottle they had ordered, sitting in this exquisite courtyard, breathing in the setting sun and tried to settle herself. She couldn’t guess why he had ordered the bottle when she was definitely not going to finish it alone. Hmmmm, perhaps he hoped her misgivings would be less…vociferous if she was mellowed out on a couple of glasses of wine. An internal contained shake of the head and she met his slightly anxious eyes. He was concerned that she would have strong opinions, but she could see the decision made inside his eyes.
Setting her glass gently down, she leaned forward palm up for his hand. Shane reciprocated and slipped his hand into hers, large and all encompassing. When did her baby boy get so big? She smiled.
“You’ve decided, yes?”
“Yes” He shrugged.
“It will make you stand out…...more than you already do”, she murmured. “But you already know that don’t you Shane?”
“Yes” punctuated by another shrug.
“Then I have nothing else to say, do I?”
Shane lifted his eyes from their joined hands and met hers. “You do though. I know you do”
“Yes, but I know your mind is made up. You could tell me why now…. if you liked. That wouldn’t hurt”
And so, the rest of the evening was spent listening to her son put into words what being here in her parents’ homeland meant to him. What the conversations with the local woman, the culture that swirled around existing in the trees, the land, the people and how being immersed in it these past weeks had changed the way Shane felt about himself, his place here and even his place back home in Canada.
All culminating in this choice he now stood firm on.
So, she sighed and she smiled and she patted his hand with hers and squeezed her approval all the same. And watched the flames of the firepit on the beach flicker shadows over them and Shane’s smile.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finding an artist that understood his time constraints was one thing.
Finding an artist that was willing to incorporate that into the specific design he had decided upon was another.
The dragon with its plumes of dark smoke swirling around the brightly coloured underbelly. The lightning bolts around the ornate dragon head, waves from the implied motion of the tail of of the large black Koi fish bursting vivid deeps blues and the depths of the charcoal ink interspersed between indicated hours upon hours of pain and soreness. He also managed to sneak in a smaller red koi fish after looking up the representation…love. Strong deep and abiding. He brushed past the sensation it evoked in his chest. It was a coincidence he thought, red was a good strong masculine colour that melded together his vision for the final design . The deep oranges and reds of one koi fish for his forearm reminiscent of the sunset on the beach with his moms’ eyes shining brightly in joy and pride.
Shane had been warned about too much too soon. So he nodded his head and listened to the description of the sheer level of strain this piece would put his body through.
He ignored it.
Shane’s belief in being an athlete used to pain, translated naturally into an arrogance in other aspects of his life. In his mind and experience there was no world where a few hours sitting under a tattoo needle could be equivalent to the rigours his body was used to as a high-performance professional athlete.
He was of course wrong. Spectacularly.
What Shane hadn’t exactly factored in was the level of discomfort the ceaseless buzzing of the machine over his body in close proximity of his ears, minute upon minute, hours bleeding into each other. How it could be equated to losing his mind to the sound of the dripping of a leaky tap echoing in the bathroom of the shitty hotels he stayed in early in his hockey journey.
There were many things he detested about the entire process. He absolutely abhorred the healing time. The full body shivers immediately after, the ooze of the fluids out under the wrap, the smell of dying white cells trying to reject this art that he had forced upon himself, the peel of skin and despair when one small section of dark scale was lost to a reaction from being slammed one too many times during the healing process. His roar of pain and anger driving him harder on the ice.
He hated wearing compression shirts to hide what he had accomplished between sessions. But he hated the incomplete work much much more.
Nobody was going to be allowed to see – he was good at getting in early and getting on his compression gear before anyone comes in.
Nobody was going to see – he was good at being the last one to leave after a game, citing tape, coach discussions, media et al
Nobody sees at first –He would not reveal this body art until he was ready. And he would be ready when the last drop of ink was embedded into his skin.
He did not of course complete it in one sitting. He did not even complete the piece in one trip. Anyone who has incorporated a larger detailed tattoo would tell you this. But Shane had no one but his artist and his research and some theories varied too much to verge a guess toward the complete timeline of session and healing and session and healing over and over again.
As it was, his Hikae and Nagasode took forty-four hours of work total, spread over six separate 6- 8-hour sessions, completely unmindful of time ticking away in his schedule between breaks and games.
Determined as he was to compress the timeline down the drain, he managed to convince his artist to complete the works in 18 months, making the arduous twenty hour flight from Montreal to Okinawa at times and then back again.
He was even referred to an associate artist with the same skill level and same level of dedication to the craft in Montreal. And between the two he kept going until that aching, itchy, angry part of his soul was quietened.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MLH Awards 2015
“What the fuck do you want Rozanov??”
Shane couldn’t believe the gall of this asshole. He had ignored him with a violence bordering on a slam to the boards and now stood there fucking grinning, leaning with his arm against the hand dryer, his body loose limbed and frustratingly divine.
Something flickered behind Rozanov’s eyes for a second, before he seemed to pull himself together in the aftermath of Shanes vitriol. And then he sauntered over into Shanes orbit.
What followed after in that tiny space, was a shock and a relief, words and breaths and movements merging into one unholy mental fog that ended somehow with Shane agreeing to a ridiculous deal he didn’t even remember making. Saliva had pooled in his mouth and his brain had gotten spacey and with his body shuddering through sensations he could not explain, like experiencing heat after being out in the freezing cold winds of Montreals winter.
And now, now he was here and he wanted to sock himself in the face so he could violently eject his person from whatever he had turned into standing here like a dog begging for scraps from a elusive, aloof, forgetful master.
FUCK!!
Walking into the Penthouse suite he knew, HE KNEW, Rozanov would be an asshole of monumental proportions. What he hadn’t factored in, mind dropping off line in the instant he agreed hungrily to this, was Rozanovs possible reaction to his new body art.
As yet incomplete, but truly spectacular in what he had achieved thus far into his journey to reclaim what he viscerally felt was a missing part of his personal history. What was there was a testament to his hard work, his pain, his tolerance, his hope all inked into his chest piece. Running from his left pectoral around his nipple, pale brown amongst the vibrant orange and rust, the deep black, the swoop of a fin, the curve of a scale, signifying constant motion and the ripple effect built painstakingly over his shoulder. It dipped down over the tracing of further artwork drawn but not filled in yet.
Shane knew what came next with his tattoos, the direction he wanted to take the art, how the finished product needed to look to feel complete.
But he didn’t know what to expect when Rozanov asked him to strip, to put on a show . For him.
With a deep sign and a clenched jaw Shane moved.
As the first pass of his fingers over the small buttons of the exquisitely cut shirt revealed the shadows of what was to come, he heard a sharp intake of breath. Shane peered up through his lashes, a tiny concept of a smile twitching over his lips. The sudden expulsion of air from his opponent sparking tingles in his spine….and this was unmistakably a game that Shane was determined to win.
Rolling his shoulders, first the right and then the left, he slipped the white shirt off and raised his eyes to meet shocked sea foam. Riotously angered and stunned, mouth agape, glass tumbler halfway to his lips Ilya gasped as though struggling for air as he took in Shanes transformed figure.
“Gospodi”, it was whispered as though in the presence of something holy. Rozanov set aside the barely sipped vodka, glass slamming with a thud on the little side table. He stood stock still eyes roaming, gaze flicking between shoulder and chest, resting infinitesimally over his nipple and zipping onto the ornate koi that traversed his body like it would take nothing to set into motion over his body.
He sat down with a thump still wordless, still breathless, still stunned.
And Shane continued his task unwilling to break the delicate hush settling into the room. It has taken on a different note now. He could feel the power flow from Rozanov to himself. A stark transfer of power, the battle nearly won. He continued his ministrations over the shirt, folding in neat lines and setting it aside, before turning and stripping off his pants and briefs in on go. Wincing a little, but Rozanov couldn’t see that with Shanes back turned to him.
Another sound shattering the room as Ilya took in his back piece. One that merged into the front but with the dragon taking form. Jaws gaping towards Shanes spine surrounded by fire and earth, claws extended to grasp what it could. The tail was a work in progress of course , its final resting place meticulously planned to span and wrap over his bicep trailing into his wrist. But Rozanov didn’t know that yet. All he could see was scales and colour and how the muscles of his back brought the dragon to life.
Turning around Shane asked “On the bed?”
At Rozanovs mute nod, he stepped in, leaning back and got ready to put on a show for the so-called winner of the award night, knowing now that he had left his own mark on Ilya instead.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The low hum of the elevator as it travelled through the posh hotel lent him the silence he found himself constantly craving, yet as he stood in it, he felt slightly hollow inside.
They hadn’t even kissed.
The past hours spent in that room, in that bed, with that man and now he felt almost empty in comparison to how sensation had rippled through him when Ilya first laid eyes on the art partially covering his body.
The night was coming back to him in flashes, the spacey content feelings almost dissipated entirely. Those barely bit back groans of pleasure, the hands grabbing his chest, a tongue licking repeatedly over his nipple and the artwork framing it. It had seemed like Ilya had slowly unravelled as he worshipped the tattooed body under him. Grasping fingers pressing into his shoulder, then his arm. Stroking his cock with one hand while thumbing over and almost claiming the koi and its scales as his. Rozanovs mouth tasting the dragons’ fangs as he sank deep into Shane, biting where his neck met his shoulders, where the tattoos ended and unmarked skin yet remained, starkly marking where the collar of his shirts would mask what lay beneath them.
Even when he’d had both hands gripping onto Shanes hips, was driving mindlessly into him, even when each thrust was accompanied by a low groaning exhalation in a language Shane had yet to learn, Shane somehow knew the words muttered low and harsh were describing this new version of his body and what it did to this particular Russians mind.
When it was over, when he had received his reward of the foul-tasting vodka, he’d so naively asked for and wallowing in his yearning for a kiss to dilute the rough raw taste of despair rising up in his throat, even when he had dressed and walked out feeling worse that he had over the several months gone before, all Shane could think of was those eyes and how they had travelled over him. All Shane could see was Ilya Rozanov shattering as he let him leave, mirroring Shane’s heart breaking into tiny pieces, dispersed into the rogue wind that stormed inside him.
He determinedly exited out of the chat to Lily, after deleting the half-arsed message his distraught mind had started to type out. Opened up another far more relevant one and booked his next appointment for when he was back in Montreal.