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Ilya is in a bad fucking mood. One day off between games in the International Prospect Cup semi-finals, and he’s spending it trudging around stupid Ottawa trying to find somewhere to send a wire transfer to his asshole brother. All the banks he finds are closed, and the wind is cutting right through his coat, and he’s just decided to turn around and go back to the hotel when he sees them.
Two fuck-off enormous birds walk through the snow to stop right in front of him on the sidewalk. They just stand there, staring at him with their creepy, beady little eyes. They both come up to his knees, what the fuck. They’ve got big, bulbous bodies covered in black feathers and have an unmistakable air of malevolence. Ilya knows why they’re there: he’s simply too good at hockey, and the Canadian government has sent assassin birds to kill him, or at least break his legs so he can’t beat Shane Hollander again. Or maybe they’re Alexei’s hired goons, and he’s about to be pecked to death for not sending this wire transfer yet. Whatever this is, Ilya doesn’t want it.
He stares at the birds. They stare at him. They don’t move closer. But then Ilya takes a careful step back, and they both take a single step forward. What the fuck, why is their movement so calculated? What is wrong with these scary birds?
“Um,” says Ilya, out loud. So he’s been reduced to this: standing on a sidewalk in Ottawa, talking to birds. “Hey… what’s up, birds?”
The birds, obviously, do not say anything, because they are birds. Their eyes, however, are very expressive, and their eyes say “say goodbye to the International Prospect Cup and also your dignity”.
Okay. Well, he needed to turn around to go to the hotel anyway. So — cautiously — Ilya turns around and just… starts walking. Not running. Walking. At a brisk pace. Surely he is faster than two fuck-off gigantic birds. Besides, the birds surely won’t follow him. He doesn’t have any food on him, so unless they really are assassins, they’ll just wander off to get killed in traffic or something.
After a few metres, Ilya chances a look behind him, just to make sure, and discovers that the birds have not wandered off. They are right on his heels. They’re stalking him. They’re planning on ripping out his hamstrings with their sharp little beaks and leaving him for dead on the streets of Ottawa. He’ll never play in the MLH. He’ll never get to move to Boston. Perhaps, instead of Canadian assassins or Alexei’s goons, they are his father’s goons, and one of his countrymen is going to swoop in to save him and then point out that whatever kind of bird this is, they don’t have it in Russia. Stay in the KHL, they’ll say. Don’t go to America.
Ilya would rather die on the streets of Ottawa, savaged by demon-birds, than stay in the KHL.
He walks faster. He’s coming up on an intersection. Surely the birds will not follow him across the road — surely they have the sense to be wary of cars? Maybe the birds are thinking the same thing, because before he makes it to the crosswalk, they start giving him the business. They’re crowding in on his personal space, now, maybe hoping they can crowd him off the sidewalk into traffic and get a car to do their dirty work for them. They’ve also started making a loud, horrendous noise. In desperation, he turns and kicks snow at them, but they are entirely undeterred. One of them lunges forward at him, but when he kicks his foot out on instinct, he doesn’t even connect — it just hops out of his way and backs up a pace or two, still staring him down.
Thankfully, at that moment, the walk signal lights up at the crosswalk. He speeds forward and into the road, certain that this spells victory for him against these godforsaken creatures. The moment that thought crosses his mind, he feels the hellspawn crowding against his legs again. They have followed him into the road. All hope is lost. Does he start running, or will that anger them? He’s pretty sure running when faced with a bear or wolves is bad because they take that as a sign to pounce, right?
Before he can make a decision, he hears a woman shout, “Hey! Over here!” His head snaps up, and his eyes immediately land on a middle-aged Asian woman who’s sticking her head out of her car window. (She looks vaguely familiar, but she’s definitely too old for him, so he’s really not sure where he could possibly know her from. Maybe she’s in commercials or something.) When they make eye contact, she starts urgently beckoning. Does she want an autograph? There must be better opportunities to ask him for one than this.
“Get in the car,” she says once he’s jogged over, pursued by birds.
Do Canadians just let random men in their cars? Middle-aged women in Russia certainly don’t make a habit of letting strangers into their cars. He considers refusing, but one of the birds nips at his pants, so he doesn’t really have a choice. The light will probably turn green soon, and this may be his only chance to escape the assassins. Besides, she is a random woman, and he is a very big and strong man who is about to be killed by birds, so she is the one going out on a limb here. He flings the rear door open and practically throws himself into the seat behind her. Peering out the window, he sees that the goddamn birds are still standing there, staring up at him. He’s briefly afraid that they know how to open doors, but they just peck ineffectually a few times. Then the light changes, and the woman floors it. The birds are left in the dust.
“Hah! Stupid birds!” Ilya shouts, craning his neck to watch the birds disappear behind them. “You are no match for nice lady and her car! Thank you, random lady!”
“Oh my God,” says a voice from the front passenger seat. A familiar voice. A voice Ilya’s almost certain he recognizes. He turns back around slowly. The man in the passenger seat has turned to stare at him… and it’s Shane Hollander. The Shane Hollander he will destroy in the finals. The Shane Hollander who had taken direction so nicely and drunk from Ilya’s water bottle in the hotel gym after the draft, and who Ilya has accidentally pictured while jerking off more than once. (Which makes the random lady Hollander’s mother, probably? She had looked familiar because Ilya saw her at the draft, and at the rink in Regina last year.)
They stare at each other wide-eyed for a long moment before Hollander says, “Rozanov?!”
“Hollander,” Ilya responds, unsure how to proceed.
“Ilya Rozanov?” Hollander’s probably-mother says from in front of Ilya.
“Yes,” Ilya says. “Thank you for saving me from… what the fuck were these?”
“Turkeys,” Hollander says immediately. “They’re kind of all over the place in Ottawa.”
All over the place?! Who knew Ottawa was so dangerous? Ilya immediately starts re-evaluating Hollander based on this new information. He’d thought Hollander was a boring boy from a boring city, but it turns out that Hollander is actually from a lawless place where the streets are ruled by birds spawned by Satan himself. He feels an unwelcome pang of admiration, knowing that Hollander survived what must have been a terrifying childhood and kept his kneecaps intact and un-pecked long enough to become a great hockey player.
“Do people not… shoot them or something? To protect?” The only creature Ilya has ever been intimidated by was a moose in Losinoostrovskiy Ostrov. Luckily, it had absolutely no interest in Ilya, and was far enough away that Ilya didn’t have to worry about it. He assumes if moose escaped into the streets, someone would shoot them before they could be hired as assassins and/or goons.
Hollander, to Ilya’s mild outrage, is now obviously struggling not to laugh. “Well, no, they’re pretty much harmless,” he says.
“Harmless?! They tried to kill me, Hollander,” Ilya protests. “If not for your wonderful sister, I would be dead man. And then you win Cup finals! Is not harmless!”
“She’s my mother,” Hollander says, at the same moment that his mother says, “Maybe we should let you back out to take your chances with the turkeys, then.” Betrayal.
“Mom,” Hollander says. “I can beat him without letting him get mauled by turkeys first.”
Ilya wants to protest that Hollander certainly can’t beat him, because Russia is absolutely going to win the Cup again, but he has the sneaking suspicion that Hollander’s mother might really make him get out of the car to give her son the edge. Instead, he huffs, slumping down into his seat. Harmless. Yeah, right. He saw the look in those turkeys’ eyes.
“Besides,” Hollander adds, “I’m not sure we need to worry about him. He couldn’t even deal with a couple of birds.”
“Maybe you get out of car to fight birds,” Ilya says. “You will not be so brave when they kill you.”
“Please. Unlike you, I can handle myself.”
Ilya bites down on his tongue before he can blurt out, Yes, I would like to watch you handle yourself. He resolutely does not take that thought any further, because if he gets a boner in Shane Hollander’s mother’s car, embarrassment will finish him off where the turkeys had failed.
“As lovely as this has been,” says Shane’s mother, “is there somewhere I can drop you off, Rozanov? Shane and I were on our way to go skating on the canal.”
Going skating with Hollander, just for fun, sounds very nice, Ilya thinks briefly, before he comes to his senses and realizes that he absolutely cannot invite himself to join Hollander’s date with his mom. That would be crazy for multiple reasons, and he absolutely will not allow himself to imagine himself skating along a frozen river under the clear blue sky with Shane Hollander. Besides, there would probably be more fucking turkeys there.
He clears his throat. “Um, anywhere I can get taxi without more turkey business. Do not want to take you out of way.”
Hollander’s mother nods, and Hollander goes back to facing forward, crossing his arms over his chest. Ilya finds himself staring at him, studying his side profile. Thankfully, he snaps himself out of it, staring out the window instead until Mrs. Hollander pulls over on a busy street, where there are no turkeys in sight and a few taxis driving by. Despite her betrayal, he thanks her profusely as he gets out of the car; she had, after all, saved his life.
“See you in final,” he says to Hollander before he closes the door behind him.
“Try not to get killed by a bird first,” Hollander shoots back, and then smiles at him. Ilya can’t help but smile back. Thank goodness he’s still alive to beat Team Canada’s ass.
- 12 Years Later -
“Shane! SHANE!!!”
Shane immediately drops his book and scrambles to his feet at the sound of his husband’s frantic hollering. Ilya was just going out to his car to grab something he’d forgotten, what the fuck could have happened between the driveway and the front door? All sorts of terrible scenarios flash through his mind as he sprints outside: Ilya’s slipped and broken his leg. Drapeau is outside their house in full goalie gear and he’s out for blood. The Centaurs GM has made a house call to announce that one of them has been traded to Vancouver. There’s a meteor headed straight for Ottawa.
The scene that greets him when he makes it out the front door is not any of those situations. Instead, he sees Ilya standing there, completely intact and unharmed, stock-still on the front path, with three wild turkeys standing in front of him.
“Shane,” Ilya says in a hushed voice, apparently sensing Shane’s presence behind him. “They have come back for me. And they brought a friend.”
Shane goes through a few emotions very quickly: relief, then irritation, and then deep amusement. He can’t help himself — he bursts out laughing.
Ilya doesn’t turn around fully, but he looks over his shoulder at Shane, his expression scandalized. “You are laughing at me? The fucking demon-birds have come to finish the job and you’re laughing at me? You think it’s funny that you will be a widow?”
“Baby,” Shane manages, “you can just turn around and come back inside.”
The turkeys aren’t even looking at Ilya. They’re pecking at a banana peel on the ground that one of them must have dropped without noticing when they got home from practice earlier. Ilya could probably even walk past them to the car without them noticing him.
Ilya eyes the birds distrustfully. “They will wait for me. They will get me when I least expect it.”
Shane tries to get ahold of himself, at least enough to get Ilya to relax and come back in. He was getting bored of his book, anyway. He has more exciting activities in mind for the rest of the afternoon. “Ilya, I promise, if they’re still here in an hour I’ll come out and shoo them away for you.”
“No, you can’t do that,” Ilya says, looking, if anything, more concerned. “They know I love you! What would be better if you wanted to destroy Ilya Rozanov? Kill him, or kill his husband? Obviously it is kill his husband. He will not be able to go on.”
“You’re talking about yourself in the third person again,” Shane can’t help but point out. “And fine, if they’re still here in an hour I’ll call wildlife control and we’ll let the professionals handle it. Okay? Will you come back inside now?” The water bottle Ilya had forgotten can stay in the car until tomorrow.
His beautiful husband, who is not the target of some assassination plot to be carried out by Ottawa turkeys, finally acquiesces and turns to come back in, though he doesn’t turn his back on the birds entirely.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Shane blurts out as a sudden thought occurs to him. Ilya immediately freezes, eyes going wide like he thinks Shane’s going to tell him that the turkeys are about to pounce. But Shane’s too busy fumbling in his pocket for his phone. “I have to take a picture for Mom.”
The pouty scowl on Ilya’s face really heightens the photo. Shane sends it to his mom and then, after a moment’s consideration, sets it as his new lockscreen.