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1
Ilya doesn’t really want to go to the hockey practise, but his father says he has to. It’s so unfair, because Andrei stopped going to hockey since before Ilya can remember. Andrei never has to do things he doesn’t want to do.
Ilya’s mom gives him sweets in secret and asks him please not to argue. She says that hockey will be fun, so Ilya does his best to look forward to it. He always does his best for her. He doesn’t think his father or Andrei do, so Ilya knows he has to do extra well so his mom will smile. She doesn’t smile every day, which Ilya thinks isn’t right somehow, but doesn’t know how to fix.
They take the tram to the rink. Ilya likes looking out at the snow and the people all bundled up in their coats and hats and mittens. Ilya and his mom draw pictures in the condensation in the windows together. His mom can draw really well even with her fingers, a whole big picture of animals and trees and flowers. Ilya isn’t too bad himself, but his lines are all scraggly because he never remembers to pause in time before the tram stops and jolts him.
His mom draws a sun and Ilya tsks. “There isn’t any sun today, mama, look outside. It’s snowing.”
“There’s always sun for you,” she says. She says things like that sometimes, things that sound silly but aren’t actually, not when you focus more on how her voice sounds than what the words are.
The training facility is cold and smells like the basement at home, musty and damp. His mom brings him to the locker room and says she will meet him at the rink. He straightens his shoulders and makes himself as tall as he can before going in to get changed. He thinks some of the other kids will be older.
Once he is done changing, he goes out to the rink. His mom helps him put on the borrowed pads and skates and helmet. “We’ll get you your own,” she says. “For the next practises.”
“Only if I like it, right?”
“Yes, of course. Only if you like it.” Her face is doing something that Ilya sometimes notices, even though he isn’t sure he’s meant to. He thinks maybe he will simply have to like hockey, so she doesn’t need to look like that again.
Hockey seems difficult. The other kids are wobbling, some are even falling down, even the ones that look a couple of years his senior.
But once Ilya steps onto the rink, he realises it’s the easiest thing he’s ever done. His feet move smoothly over the ice, he glides, he flies.
The teacher tells him to wait, but he doesn’t. He slides to the middle of the rink and then back over towards the edge, towards his mom.
“Mama!” he screams, turning to avoid crashing into the barrier. Turning is even more fun than going in a straight line. “Mama! Look! I’m flying!”
“I see you, Ilyushenka,” she calls back to him. “Like a bird! So fast! A falcon!”
He laughs, makes another turn, and screams again, this time without words. There’s a feeling inside his chest that he doesn’t think he’s felt before. It’s squiggly and fuzzy and hot. It’s not quite joy – it’s a confirmation of something his body recognised the second Ilya started moving on the ice. This is what I am supposed to do. This is something I am great at.
He changes direction and skates towards the sticks and pucks piled up off to the side. He wants to find out what he can do with those.
2
Ilya wakes up alone, gets ready alone, heads to the rink alone. It’s no different from any other day, but he feels it more than usual. Any of his teammates who have someone in their lives will have them at this game. There won’t be anyone watching Ilya except the millions of fans all across the continent.
The game is brutal, which Ilya expected from a Cup final. He doesn’t feel the hits, though, he merely checks back, he chirps, he plays fucking hockey, and he knows they’ll do it. He will drag them there, will score and assist and shove and kick his entire team to a win if it’s the last thing he does. During games like this he’s sometimes suddenly certain that there’s no point to his life if he doesn’t win.
The seconds are ticking down, and Ilya plays with the same ferocity he always does, even as his teammates are starting to slow down. Stupid fuckers, much as he loves them. That’s why he’s a league apart, all by himself.
Not all by yourself, he thinks for a destabilising second, but fuck that traitorous little voice in his head today.
Fuck everything today, except his Cup.
The horn blares, the game is over, he’s done it. Occasionally after intense games, he feels almost empty even if they’ve won. Today there is a restless energy still fizzing inside him that he isn’t sure how to get rid off. A tried and tested method is fucking Shane Hollander, but Hollander isn’t here. Wherever he is, he’s probably pissed that Ilya won the Cup first. Ilya wonders how it’ll affect his playing next season. He feels new excitement bubble through his veins as he imagines it.
His teammates careen into him, and he returns their cheers, hugs, and celebratory punches.
He shouts fuck you, at his father, at his brother, at the team at home who blamed the fucking Olympics on him.
He shouts I love you at his teammates here, because they’re the closest thing to family he has nowadays.
He shouts thank you at god knows who, because everything Ilya has, he’s earned without anyone else’s help.
He doesn’t cry, why would he? He’s happy, fucking ecstatic. Still, when he’s handed the Cup, he feels like someone punched him in the solar plexus. Something starts to settle inside him at last, and his eyes burn.
He knows his mother is watching him proudly from wherever he is, but he wishes he could see her in the stands, cheering him on.
As he lifts the Cup over his head, Ilya screams as loud as he can that this is all for her, so loud that wherever she is now, she has to be able to hear him.
3
Ilya moves to the wing happily, despite making a big deal out of it to anyone who comments on it. He packs nice clothes and one or two stupid shirts for fun. He gets a haircut and smokes fewer cigarettes.
He wants to play his best, even though All-Star Games aren’t that serious. But he isn’t going to let Hollander show him up at this thing. Ilya wants the more impressive performance between the two of them. He keeps telling himself that that’s all it is even as he knows better.
Hope is dangerous. He got a reminder when he bought ginger ale, and spread mayonnaise and tuna on bread, and had Shane in his lap, everything good until it suddenly wasn’t. Everything sweet until Ilya was fucking stupid enough to say Shane like he’d been thinking it for so long.
He should know better than to hope.
Still he can’t quite smother the little flame of it, flickering warm in his chest, because Shane said Ilya then, too. Because Ilya hasn’t seen any pictures of Shane with Rose Landry in a while. Because when Shane walks into the hotel bar, he’s so beautiful that Ilya thinks it might be dangerous to look right at him, like the solar eclipse his mother had only let him see projected into the box they’d made out of cardboard and aluminium foil. Just like he did during the eclipse, Ilya sneaks a couple of glances anyway.
When Shane crosses the room to sit down next to Ilya, he’s warm and bright like the sun, too. Ilya knows they can never be anything. He also knows he can’t bear them being nothing any longer.
Asking about Rose Landry is like poking a bruise, but Ilya needs to know, no matter how much it hurts.
Please don’t be engaged to her, he thinks. Please don’t throw me away for her.
He doesn’t think Shane is particularly eager to be with Rose, but he is the kind of man anyone with a passing interest in marriage would want to marry. And Shane is scared, Ilya knows this, even underneath the mix of hope and anger and regret he still feels about everything since that day at his house. He understood Shane was scared as soon as he went rigid in Ilya’s arms and stumbled back and lied about forgetting a team meeting. Ilya knows that Shane could feel safe with Rose in ways he never could with Ilya.
But Shane doesn’t shy away or shut him down. Shane looks at him like he isn’t scared of anything right now. Shane looks like he wants this weekend.
Shane orders a beer and says he feels a little wild, and goes all sweetly and awkwardly Shane about admitting he hired a stylist. It makes Ilya want to rip out his heart and press it into Shane’s hands and watch Shane take care of it, responsibly and methodically, like he takes care of everything in his life.
When they play, there’s no one else on the ice. There’s never going to be anyone else, anywhere.
Shane scores off Ilya’s pass, and it’s perfect. Ilya has seen better goals on a technical level from both himself and Shane, but they all pale in comparison. This one is theirs.
Ilya screams around a laugh, he has no words in that moment, he screams and laughs and skates into Shane, pressing a kiss to the side of his helmet. Shane’s adorably bashful smile knocks something that was hanging by a thread inside Ilya’s chest all the way loose.
He’d like the puck to keep, but he knows it would seem strange if he asked for it. It’s okay, though. He has the memory.
4
Ilya feels vaguely unmoored in time, sitting in an airport and hoping that his flight to Montreal won’t get cancelled due to bad weather. The last time that happened, he was frustrated with not getting to fuck Shane as soon as he’d hoped. This time, he thinks he might cry if he doesn’t get to hold Shane in his arms and tell him everything will be okay tonight.
Are there any more delays? What time do you think you’ll get in? Shane texts.
Ilya taps his phone against his knee a few times before typing. There hasn’t been an update in a while. I don’t know, we’re waiting to hear something. The weather is very bad.
Please will you still come to mine even if you get in late? Ilya stares down at Shane’s new message. Shit. Of course he still will, but the fact that Shane has been repeatedly asking with barely concealed desperation is making something tighten in Ilya’s chest.
He knows Shane has had a shit week, a bad loss at home and too many meetings and Hayden fucking Pike trying to set him up with one of his wife’s friends. Whenever they’ve talked, Shane’s said he’s ‘fine’ and then deflected any and all questions about details. Ilya knows that once he’s there in person, he’ll be able to coax Shane to talk and cuddle and fuck, and make him forget. Make things easier and more comfortable and less stressful for Shane as much as he can.
Ilya’s about to text back a promise that he will be there no matter what time he gets into Montreal, when LeClair calls out, “All right, no more flights out today! Back to the hotel, everyone.”
“What? Fuck, no, no,” Ilya is saying before he can stop himself. “Can we do something -”
“Rozanov, let’s go,” LeClair says. “There’s no chance, they’re grounding flights everywhere, not just Detroit.”
“Fuck,” Ilya breathes. He hasn’t seen Shane in a month, and if he doesn’t get to Montreal today, their schedules won’t line up for another three weeks.
A heavy arm lands on his shoulders. “Cheer up, Roz,” Marlow says. “Your girl isn’t going anywhere. If she stuck with you through all these years, she won’t be pissed with you now over a cancelled flight.”
Ilya barely hears him. “How long to drive to Montreal from here?”
Marlow stares at him. “You can’t drive from Detroit to Montreal in this weather, that’s fucking dangerous. It’s ten fucking hours or something. And we need to be in Philly the day after tomorrow. There’s no point. They’d never let you, anyway.”
Ilya doesn’t give a shit whether anyone will let him. He imagines Shane at home, reading Ilya’s text that he won’t make it to Montreal at all. He feels nauseous. He’ll have to call at the very least, instead of texting.
Back at the hotel, he checks his phone to see Shane’s latest messages. Ilya? Are there any updates? Will you have to go to the hotel first or can you come straight here?
And, eight minutes after that, Please come straight here ok?
Ilya knows what it takes for Shane to send that kind of message. Shane rarely asks for things. He usually doesn’t need to – Ilya can tell what he needs, and gives it without thinking. Not being able to do that in general is awful. When Shane is so bad that he actually asks and Ilya can’t comply, it fucking kills him.
He kicks the dresser, hard, again and again, and screams, and screams. It feels like it goes on forever, though it can’t be longer than a few seconds. By the time he’s done, there’s frantic knocking on his door.
“Roz? Rozy?” It’s Marlow.
“Fuck off!” Ilya yells at him. He wonders if the others decided that Marlow was the best person to check on him, or whether he was the only one to care enough to try.
“Open the fucking door!” Marlow’s voice is loud and urgent. “It sounds like you’re beating someone to death in there!”
“Go back to your fucking room!” Ilya’s chest is heaving, and his skin feels clammy with cold sweat.
“Open the fucking door before I kick it in,” Marlow calls.
Ilya’s hands are shaking so hard it takes him a few attempts to move the handle. He pulls the door open, fully intending to shout at Marlow and potentially start a fight. The shocked look on Marlow’s face makes him stop, though.
“Fucking hell, Roz,” Marlow says, pushing Ilya back into the room and following, then closing the door behind them. “Are you sick? You look like shit.”
Ilya feels sick. It’s very hard to breathe, and his eyes can’t focus on anything.
“Dude,” Marlow says. He grabs Ilya’s shoulders and pushes him down until he’s sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. Marlow sits down next to him, close but not close enough for them to be touching. Ilya is grateful. He couldn’t bear anyone touching him right now. Except Shane, who he wants achingly, pathetically, constantly, and won’t have for so long now.
Marlow eyes wander around the room and stop at the dresser. Ilya’s kicked one of the drawers loose. Hot shame washes over him at the sight. He’ll pay for it, of course, but he still shouldn’t have broken the hotel’s furniture. Shane would tell him to leave some ridiculously generous tip, so Ilya resolves to do the same before they check out.
“Do you need me to call someone for you to talk to?” Marlow asks. “You’re – you’re fucked up, Rozy. You’re having a breakdown, shit.”
Ilya shakes his head. Dark spots dance across his vision. “Fine,” he chokes out.
“Fuck’s sake,” Marlow mutters. Ilya feels him get up.
He squeezes his eyes shut and leans his back against the wall. He draws shuddering breaths and tries to talk to himself how he’d talk to Shane in this situation. You’re safe. Everything is okay. Nothing bad is happening right now. You’re okay. It barely helps. How the fuck does Shane ever get through these moments?
A cold water bottle is pressed into his hand. He opens his eyes to find Marlow sitting back down next to him, looking at him with what Ilya thinks is genuine concern. “Is she okay? Your Montreal girl?”
Ilya shakes his head.
“I’m sorry, Rozy.”
“I should be there,” Ilya says. His voice comes out ragged. “Make it better.”
“You wouldn’t be much good to her in this condition, huh?”
Ilya wants to laugh, but the sound gets stuck in his throat. He nods. “No,” he agrees. He untwists the cap of the plastic bottle and drinks. The cold water helps.
They sit in silence for a few minutes, until Ilya’s head stops swimming, and he says. “Sorry, Marly. You have to leave. I have to call -” He can’t lie, he can’t say her, not right now. “To call and say I will not be there.”
Marlow nods slowly. “It’s okay, man. I’ll go. Just…” He trails off.
Ilya raises an eyebrow at him.
Marlow clears his throat. He looks extremely uncomfortable, but he presses on. “I know you said she’s not doing good, either, And obviously I don’t know how bad things are for her. But when you call, will she, I dunno. Do what she can to make you feel better?”
Ilya smiles a little at that. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, always.”
5
“I will give you so many kisses when you score,” Ilya promises as they cross the parking lot of the rink for their first game of the season.
Shane gives him a stern look in response. Well, he tries. It’s fucking adorable, as always. “Absolutely not. We have to be professional.”
Ilya blows a raspberry at him. “Boring. You will see. You will let me kiss you on the ice.”
“Maybe after we win our first Stanley Cup together,” Shane says.
“Well, yes, then definitely,” Ilya agrees. “We have to do better than old man Hunter. But you will let me before, just wait.”
Shane sighs, exasperated and fond. “I am telling you, we are role models for the younger players, we have to demonstrate appropriate behaviour in the workplace.”
“Uh-huh,” Ilya goes. “Wait until we score together on the power play. You will look at me with your kiss me, Ilya eyes, so I will kiss you. I cannot say no to you, you know this.”
“I do not have kiss me, Ilya eyes,” Shane says.
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t!” Shane is pouting a little, and his eyes are definitely screaming kiss me.
“You are making those eyes right now.”
“Fuck you.”
“Ah, when you say ‘fuck you’ it also means kiss me, Ilya.”
“All right, stop, we’re at work.”
Ilya takes Shane’s arm to stop him outside the door to the facility. “Not yet,” he says. “We are outside work.”
Shane rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “Ilya,” he says quietly.
“Shane.”
Shane’s lips twitch upward at the corners. He looks around, then quickly leans in and presses a kiss to Ilya’s mouth. “Let’s go win, yeah?”
“Shane,” Ilya says again. He can’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that they’re about to step onto the rink and play a game together. He wants to hold Shane in his arms, and score off his passes during the power play, and fuck him, all of that, right now. He can tell by the look on Shane’s face that he knows what’s going through Ilya’s head. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing.
They have a game to play, though, and Shane is Shane Hollander, so he tells Ilya, “We can’t be late, especially you, captain. You should be the first to arrive.”
Then he takes Ilya’s hand and leads him inside.
Playing against Shane was always exhilarating, every single game for a decade. Playing on the same line at the All-Star Game in 2017 was a revelation.
Watching Shane now, on a line with Luca and LaPointe, wearing the same team’s jersey as Ilya, smiling at him after his goals, bright and unguarded? It’s fucking heaven.
Shane has always been brilliant on the ice, but now he is open, free, enchanting, and he makes the whole team strive to play to their full potential, go above it, even. The guys can’t hope to match him, of course – only Ilya is allowed to do that.
Ilya screams along with the crowd and the rest of the bench at each of Shane’s goals, and he screams along with them when Shane comes on to join him for the power play, and when Shane passes to him so excellently that anyone could have scored off it with their eyes closed.
“You said you’d kiss me,” Shane breathes, once they’re skating off the ice. His tone is almost accusatory that Ilya didn’t.
Ilya winks at him. “Ah, I said you would make your kiss me, Ilya eyes, so I would kiss you. But this -” He traces a finger around Shane’s face and leans in close so no one will be able to hear. “Is your bend me over, Ilya eyes. And I do not think I can do that on the ice. Difficult on skates, you know.”
Shane flushes. “Shut up,” he says through gritted teeth. His eyes are dark and his breathing, which calmed down after the game ended, is getting a little heavier again. “You can’t talk to me like this in public.”
Ilya laughs quietly. “But on the other hand, you like the idea of being watched, so…”
Shane hisses to cut Ilya off. His fingers are grabbing onto Ilya’s jersey. “We’re getting off the ice, and then we’re going straight home.”
“We have to celebrate with the team.” Ilya can’t stop himself from smirking as he says it, because Shane’s eyes narrow just as he expected.
“We’ll join them later,” Shane says.
“I cannot believe this.” Ilya tries to sound very disappointed. “Shane Hollander being so irresponsible and saying that I, the captain, should join late for a team night out? This is a tragedy. This is a scandal. I have to inform the league. I cannot -”
“Rozanov. Off the ice. Now.”
It was a really, really fucking fun game, and the rest of the day will be even better. Ilya can’t wait to play Montreal next week.
+1
Ilya wakes up before dawn with the familiar urge to scream or die. He swallows it down, all the way down, because Shane needs his sleep, needs his routine. What Shane does not need is Ilya waking him because he had a stupid nightmare that he doesn’t even remember now, only feels the aftershocks of in the too-fast beating of his heart, the clamminess of his skin.
He knows why the nightmares have been more frequent these past few days than they were earlier in the summer. He doesn’t want to leave the cottage and start the season. He feels nauseous at the thought of it. The cottage is like a dream he gets to disappear into for a few blissful weeks each summer between the demands of the playoffs, the charity camps, and training camp. At the cottage, he is allowed to be happy. Anywhere else, things become by degrees more complicated, and he doesn’t feel equipped to deal with complicated feelings at the moment.
Shane sighs in his sleep and nestles closer. Ilya’s eyes burn. He blinks at the ceiling in the dark, trying not to cry. Shane is so good, seeing Ilya through all of this, and loving him still. Ilya sometimes can’t understand how he can be depressed when he has Shane, who makes him happier than he ever thought he’d get to be.
Shane shifts in his arms and his breathing hitches softly, as it does when something’s woken him up. “Ilya?” he mumbles.
“Shhh,” Ilya makes. “Go back to sleep, Shane.”
Shane shakes his head against Ilya’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” He’s yawning between words. “Did you have a nightmare?”
Ilya hesitates. After a few seconds of silence, he feels Shane’s fingers gently slide into his hair. “How bad is it?” Shane whispers.
Ilya takes a few moments to answer. “Is not… so bad,” he says, eventually. There’s a scale they’re operating on nowadays, and Ilya’s nowhere near the deep end.
Shane doesn’t say anything, just keeps carding his fingers through Ilya’s curls, gently scratching in a way that helps Ilya both focus and relax.
Once he’s found the words, Ilya says, “I am worried that it will be like last year again.”
Last winter was tough. Shane was by his side for everything, entire days of Ilya not leaving their bed, the tears and the exhaustion and the fucking numbness that was all Ilya knew sometimes. Ilya feels that they’ve spent all their time since then rebuilding him as much as they can, as carefully as they can. He’s scared that he still won’t hold up to the relentless everyday that’s on the horizon.
“I feel like I have to scream when I wake up,” he explains. “To not want worse things.”
Shane nods, wrapping a hand around Ilya’s wrist and holding on, gentle but firm. “Okay,” he says. His voice is a little rough, but he sounds calm otherwise. Shane has seen Ilya worse. He has practise.
“Do you want to scream now?” Shane asks.
“Huh?” Ilya makes. He understands each word, but the sentence doesn’t make sense to him as a whole.
“No one can hear you here except me,” Shane says seriously. “Or we can go outside to the forest. And you can just scream. Would that work?”
“No, is okay. Do not want to scare the loons in the middle of the night,” Ilya jokes weakly.
“I mean it,” Shane says. “If it helps you, we’ll go now.”
“Is really okay, Shane. Is 4am. Too early, you should sleep. You need rest. We have to leave early for training camp.”
Shane cups Ilya’s jaw and turns his head so their eyes meet. Ilya can see his face in the moonlight shining through the window. Shane’s big dark eyes, and long lashes, and soft pink lips. The light isn’t strong enough for Ilya to make out his freckles, but he knows each one by heart, could map them blind.
“What I need,” Shane says. “Is to give you anything I can to help you.”
What Ilya wants is to stay safe at the cottage, with Shane in his arms, with Anya asleep in her little dog bed downstairs, and not have to face anything. He scoots down the mattress so he can rest his head on Shane’s chest, and holds on tight. He tries to remember all the good things about going back to the city, back to the team, back to hockey. He knows that there are many, but there are times when his mind refuses to recall them.
“You give me everything,” Ilya says, squeezing Shane in his arms.
“I’m so fucking proud of you,” Shane whispers. He presses a kiss into Ilya’s hair. “I know how hard things have been and you – you get up when you can and you try even when you can’t, and you take your meds and do your best, and I love you so fucking much, Ilya. Fuck, I love you so much.”
Ilya burrows closer, pressing his cheek against the cotton of Shane’s shirt, directly over his heart. He stays quiet for a few minutes and lets himself feel the soothing rhythm of Shane’s heartbeat. Even when everything feels impossible, lying together like this makes it all bearable. Makes Ilya believe, makes him certain, that there are things worth getting up for, even if he can’t manage in the moment.
He slips his hand under Shane’s t-shirt, drawing tiny little circles with his fingertips. He wants to be close, needs Shane to remind him that he belongs in this world, that things can be so good, because they can be and they will be again. Ilya knows that often, Shane needs to fuck to get out of his mind. Ilya sometimes needs it to anchor himself to where he belongs. He can tell Shane can feel it in their kiss, because when they break apart, Ilya can just make out his lips quirking up into a smile. Shane knows that Ilya wanting sex is a good sign. He may be treading water, but he’s not about to drown. From here, Shane can pull him ashore.
“If you don’t want to scream, maybe you can make me scream instead,” Shane murmurs, warm and enticing and Ilya’s. “Would that help?”
Ilya winds one arm tightly around Shane and slides his free hand under the hem of his briefs, gently stroking his thumb over the soft skin right beneath the curve of his ass.
“That always helps,” Ilya breathes against Shane’s lips. And, before stealing another slow kiss, “You always help.”