Chapter Text
2010
Vancouver, Canada
BC Place Stadium Hallway—The Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony
Scuff
The tread of their sneakers is worn. Shane can tell by the way their feet drag with every other step and their presence fills the empty hallway without shame. This is a person who's been places—especially ones they don’t belong in.
Shane purses his lips as he scans the vending machine rows, looking for a cold Ginger Ale that wasn’t there, and hadn’t been at the last two machines he’d checked either. He tenses when the footsteps stop behind him, suddenly aware of the fact that he’s an Olympic athlete who’s searching for his favorite soda instead of getting ready for the quickly-approaching ceremony.
Ahem
The stranger clears their throat loudly, the way people do when they want someone’s attention, his breath touching the hairs on the back of Shane’s neck ever so slightly as they stand in silence. The soft blue glow of the vending machine fills the dim hallway like a laptop screen at night, making it harder to find a reflection in the smudged glass. Shane manages to make out a sharp, distinctively male face before the man turns his head. He shifts his gaze in response, thumbing at the hem of his suit like he’s been caught doing something creepy.
He opens his mouth, tongue unsticking from the roof of his mouth with a dry sound, but the stranger speaks up first.
“I hope it takes less time for you to decide in game,” he says, his voice blunt, bored, and obnoxiously Russian, “or do you stand there like idiot, staring at puck?”
Shane freezes, watching his blank-faced reflection stare back at him in the scratched-up glass as he drops the hem held between his fingers, which twitch with nothing to hold. Shane shifts his face into something similar to confusion before he turns around, hesitance evident in every inward curve of his limbs. Oddly, recognition is the first thing that hits him when looking at the stranger. Less because of his defining features and more because he remembers the name embroidered onto the breast of his jacket, right below the Russian flag. His friend in figure skating had mentioned the name before, Ilya Rozanov.
He was a familiar face to many people, even those who didn’t particularly care about nor involve themselves in the happenings of figure skating. He was an unpredictable personality with enough medals behind his wall of cockiness to prove himself worthy of it. Rozanov had a tongue sharper than his skates, and an attitude that was a force to be reckoned with.
The media calls him high-strung and proud, Shane just calls him a diva. It’s evident by the smirk on Rozanov’s face that he’s joking with him, but it would probably be more accurate to call it teasing. It’s a bold sentence to introduce yourself to a stranger with, but Shane isn’t as taken aback as he would be—it’s exactly the kind of behaviour he expected from a man like Rozanov
“I’m looking for—something,” Shane says after a moment of contemplation, fighting the urge to stare at the space between Rovanov’s shoes and his own instead of the man's smug face.
“I’m sure there’s more than one vending machine in this arena,” He adds, clearing his throat to get rid of any hesitation that might be lingering there, “so if I’m taking too long for you, find another one.”
Rozanov stares at him for a moment, tilting his head from side to side as if looking for something particular in Shane’s stern expression, then laughs. Shane feels like a child trying to be brave, or a cat with its back arched and hackles raised. It doesn’t matter how brave he feels, though, he is still just Shane Hollander. And Shane Hollander does not give snide remarks to other teams’ players in front of a vending machine at the Olympics.
“But I want this machine.” Rozanov whines, pouted lip wavering beneath suppressed laughter, a petulant child disguised as a six-foot Russian figure skater, “It has appeal. And I want to say hello.”
Shane sniffs, it probably sounds pretentious, but he doesn’t care, “How do you know who I am?”
He could just be bluffing, messing with him after noticing the Olympic symbol on Shane’s own wrinkled jacket, but Shane’s curious nonetheless. Was he, too, trying to find something to entertain himself with between the looping chaos of interviews, practices, and expectation?
“Do not act so modest,” Rozanov huffs, crossing his large forearms over his chest and cocking a hip. He hums, squinting his eyes at him, “You are online, in poster with the cola, yes?”
Shane blanks for a moment, confused, then blinks with realization, “The Coke ad?” he asks, almost with disbelief, and can’t help but scoff whenever Rozanov gives him a single nod.
“Yes, this,” He hums, ignoring the shift in Shane's posture and breath whenever he reaches over his shoulder to tap a fingernail on the glass of the vending machine, where a Coke bottle sat, “I saw and thought you were pretty.”
Rozanov is still leaning over him when he finishes speaking, so Shane can’t see his expression to decide if the man is being serious or not. Instinct tells him to curl inwards at the remark, and an even deeper part of him contemplates the idea that Rozanov only called him pretty because he knew. When he leans back to watch the way Shane’s expression flickers with his overthinking, the smile on his lips isn’t cruel, but something endearingly awkward.
And despite common sense telling him not to trust the man he’d only ever heard bad things about, and has yet to prove him any different, Shane can’t bring himself to get angry. “I don’t think you know what that word means in English.”
It feels like more of an excuse for himself than for the other man, because although Ilya Rozanov was many things, he wasn’t an idiot. Shane turns his head away, toward somewhere far off in the hallway that the light doesn’t reach, shifting under a gaze that makes his cheeks warm with the knowledge of being seen. He hears the squeak of sneakers on the floor as Rozanov shifts his weight, and pretends not to startle whenever he shoves at his shoulder playfully, like his teammates often do in the locker room.
“I am joking with you, Hollander. Is joke.” He laughs, eyes bright whenever Shane forces himself to look up, “my friend says, have you seen Canadian ice hockey captain, everyone is talking about him,”
He’s expressive, the moles on his face shifting as he talks and his hands waving to enunciate. Shane can’t stop staring at the dimples on his cheeks, the way his hair falls in front of his ears when he leans forwards, he doesn’t really know why he finds the features so captivating. Shane turns the words over in his head as the other man waits, chewing on his lip in what he can only assume is impatience. Was he jealous of the attention Shane had been getting publicly?
“I guess so,” Shane says carefully as he watches Rozanov’s face, “But everyone is talking about you, too.”
It wasn’t a lie: both of them were front runners for bringing gold medals home to their respective countries, and both had been highly sought after for interviews ever since their attendance in the Olympics had been announced. The oddest thing, Shane thinks, is that they’d even crossed paths in the first place. To everyone else, they were on completely different sides of ice sports, not to mention two completely different personalities.
“They talk about me because I am good,” Rozanov says, like it’s as simple as that, an undeniable fact.
Then why did you come up to me? Shane wants to ask. What do you want? He says neither of these things.
“Wow, you really are full of it,” Shane scoffs, brushing his hands over the front of his shirt and straightening his shoulders in an attempt to look more assertive. He can’t help but furrow his brows in confusion when Rozanov only grins in response.
“Yes, I am full of it, and hot, and good at skating—these are facts,” Rozanov lists off, folding his arms and resting his cheek in his palm in faux contemplation. His smile falters as he turns his attention back to Shane and drops his arms, the skin between his own brows creasing, “Like how you care so much, and I do not understand.”
Shane does not understand, either. Of course he cared about his sport—hockey was everything to him—it’s been the only thing consuming his thoughts since he was seven, the only place he can be somewhat in control of the way he’s perceived. Shane finds it hard to imagine not caring, as any athlete, really. Why else would you devote so many hours of pain and dedication to something? Why else would you fly half-way across the globe, to another country, just for the chance to show everyone that dedication? If you were an Olympian, you had to care. Because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be there.
“What do you mean, you don’t understand?” Shane sputters, blinking at Rozanov’s very serious expression, a part of him wondering if this was another attempt at a joke, “Caring is everything—why would I even play if I didn’t care? Hockey means everything to me, of course I care about it!”
“How can one man care so much about sport?” He asks in response, his voice is exasperated, like he can’t quite wrap his head around Shane's enthusiasm for it all, “I said to myself I will ask.”
His accent gets thicker with his emotions, Shane notices, his tongue catching on the wrong words and his jaw tense in frustration. He’s staring at him like he’s desperate for something, but Shane doesn’t have anything to give him, and the idea of meeting his eyes is making his heart race behind his ribcage. It’s a flight or fight response with a hangnail, a toe over the line that separates a stranger from someone familiar.
Shane swallows the thickness behind his tongue, allowing himself the small comfort of fidgeting with his hands, the steady pattern of his fingertips against his palm grounding, “Why do you want to know so bad?”
Rozanov is watching his hands, curls following loosely as he tilts his head, and there is warmth between their bodies that could be significant if they let it.
“Because if I know why you care, then maybe I can care about figure skating like you care about hockey,” he whispers, the change in his cadence forcing their eyes to meet and the moment to shift into something vulnerable, “and it won’t feel so much like duty, more like fun.”
Shane chews on his bottom lip, following the dim light reflecting off of Rozanov's irises like a dirty mirror. It’s far too much to share with a stranger, he acknowledges, slipping from a desperate place Rozanov had tried to shove away. Shane cannot imagine living in a world where every moment of his life was dedicated to something he didn’t have a reason for.
Rozanov had called it a duty, reminding Shane of obligations, of which were things that they had no choice but to care about. It wasn’t the same, though. Shane doesn’t know what Rozanov saw in that Coke ad that made him choose him, he can’t even find it himself.
“So what—you don’t like skating?” he asks, unsure of how to respond.
“I like having purpose for Russia,” Rozanov mumbles, somewhere far off in his head, picking at the same metaphorical hangnail as Shane—in search of an internal compromise, or perhaps an excuse, neither of which he can make any sense of, “for my country.”
But what good was having a purpose for something that didn’t matter? What good was all the fame and success in the world if the only thing it brings is regret? Maybe it’s different in Russia, or Rozanov was just so scared of disappointing his country that he dedicated his life to a sport he didn’t even enjoy. Shane lifts his head, and Rozanov is the one looking away this time, blinking at the overhead lights and tensing his jaw to the mechanical buzzing of the vending machine.
Oddly, Shane feels guilty. He feels like there’s been an incomplete transaction between himself and the other man, like he owes him something in exchange, a part of himself that’s sacred.
Shane clears his throat, and Rozanov's eyes snap forwards, his jaw softening ever so slightly when he notices the decisive edge to Shane’s expression, “I care so much about hockey because when I’m on the ice it feels like everyone can finally understand me.”
His voice is monotone as he confesses. Not because the statement leaves him without feeling, but rather because he isn’t sure he could convey the feeling with only his tongue. Rozanov wrinkles his forehead, brushes his knuckles together in thought.
“I don’t care if world understands me, this does not matter” he replies, similarly unenthusiastic with his words for a different reason. Rozanov spoke in summary and fact, so sure of his words that there was no need to emphasize their meaning with something extra. And yet, his face was so expressive Shane could tell everything he was thinking anyway. He doesn’t get why being understood matters more to Shane than it does to others, and his eyes keep falling to the curve of Shane's upper lip before flicking back up to his eyes.
“So then you have to find your own reason, I guess.” Shane says, and it is by all means, a fact.
His blunt delivery seems to do the trick, because Shane blinks and Rozanov is grinning at him like a fool again. Like the last five minutes of contemplation had never happened in the first place. It's so jarring that Shane finds it hard to pull himself out of the vulnerability they’d been standing in, not used to putting up the same walls Rozanov did. Shane didn’t hide behind cockiness or personality, he hid behind hockey.
“I will buy you soda next time we meet, yes?” Rozanov smiles, offering a hand, jacket rustling with the movement. It’s strange, and Shane lets his sweaty palm press against Rozanov’s anyway. They don’t shake, they just hold their hands there, but Shane finds it comfortable.
“In Sochi?” He asks, returning his smile with his own awkward, lopsided grin that’s far more genuine that he expected it to be.
Rozanov laughs, it’s loud and accented, and Shane knows he’s going to find it when he’s passing between games; despite the abundance of every other athlete there, and the fact that the chances of them crossing paths again were close to none. He’s going to think of it when he’s shifting beneath the hotel sheets, searching for a rest that never comes.
“In Sochi.” Rozanov says through a grin, then turns to leave. His head still lingers over his shoulder, watching as Shane shifts where he stands and attempts to scrub the smile from his lips with the brush of his knuckles.
“Пока-пока, Hollander, get the Coke-of-Cola.” he shouts as he walks away with amble, the way his accent curves lazily around the words endearing, and impossibly human.
Shane stands in front of the vending machine for another fifteen minutes after he leaves, shoving the significance of such a pointless conversation in the same sore spot he shoves that damn laugh.
2013
Alberta, Canada
Rogers Place Arena—The Stanley Cup Finals, Montreal Vs. Edmonton
Snap
It feels like the sound reverberates throughout the rink, but as Hayden would tell him afterwards, it’s a much quieter affair of tragedy for the fifteen-thousand hockey fans in Alberta’s home arena to witness than it is for Shane.
For Shane, it is a deafening loop within the small, pathetic slump he’s made of himself on the ice.
He draws a significant breath, during which he realizes that he can’t feel his toes; only an aching pulse somewhere past his shin that he knows, logically, is his ankle, but he can’t identify by feeling alone. Somewhere between an inhale and a whimper of an exhale, Shane comes to terms with the idea that everything following this moment will be different. An idea that is, in itself, significant enough.
Harsh breaths warm the watery ice beneath his chin, the series of accolades he’s saved a spot for in his future tipping over their shelves. Later, Hayden will ask him how he knew, and Shane won’t have an answer he can make any sense of. How do you articulate with words that there are certain moments in one’s life when you know, for certain, that something is over?
It’s not unlike the soft hush of accepting change, a feeling scarily similar to the certainty he’d held in his chest the first time he’d ever won a hockey game.
“Shane, are you alright?” someone—Hayden—asks, his voice fuzzy in the same way his vision is as he tries to look forward, “Talk to me, what are you feeling? What hurts?”
Shane groans, squeezing his eyes shut when he light hits them, and his head throbs in response, “’m okay– I just–”
He tries to lift his upper body from the ice again, but his arms collapse as soon as his legs shift, that tingling pain crawling up his side again. An arm slides beneath his torso when he slips, and Shane can feel the warm sting of Hayden’s palm as he taps the side of his cold cheek, urging him to focus on his face. But Shane can barely focus on the way his limbs feel, much less the details of Hayden Pike’s expression, which he can only assume is somewhat close to panic at this point.
“Hey– you stay right there buddy,” he soothes, adjusting the two of them so that Shane’s torso is propped up against his side where he crouches, “the medics are making their way here.”
“I don’t need the medics,” Shane argues, shaking his head to try and clear the fog as Hayden’s face comes into somewhat of a focus, “help me up.”
Someone else slaps his hand away whenever he attempts to lift it, mumbling nervously amongst a crowd of what Shane can only assume is the rest of his teammates, who are looking somewhere else on the ice. Shane whines pitifully when the blade of his skate catches on this ice and his foot slides, Hayden setting his other hand over his knee before it can keep moving.
“Shane, I know you're probably in shock right now,” he says, shushing Shane whenever he attempts to mumble another argument, “but you’re hurt, alright? Like– bad hurt, dude.”
Hayden’s voice shakes, like he’s scared, and so Shane feels his own breath quicken in response. If Hayden was worried, then something really awful must’ve happened, because Hayden never panicked in situations like this. Shane struggles to remember the impact, or what he was doing before it happened, but he remembers the sounds clearly. The scrape of his stick across the ice as he slid, the hush of the audience, the snap.
“Man, did you hear it?” one of his teammates mutters to another amongst the whispers, who shivers and wraps his arms around his torso in response, “Like a pencil, man.”
“I’m fine.” Shane growls, attempting to project his voice to the rest of the team, to show them he was alright even though he couldn’t even convince his own body of the same, “We’re up by two, I can’t stop playing now.”
Hayden's arm tightens where it holds his torso up against his side, and the sound of skates scraping across the ice grows louder before they stop next to the crowd. Someone immediately leans in front of Shane's face to shine a light against his pupil while another kneels beside his ankle; the one he knows is hurt, and he now can see is awkwardly twisted at an angle it definitely should not be able to. Bile stings in his throat.
“Hi Shane, do you think you can try and stand up with us?” a soft, careful voice asks as hands wrap around either one of his arms in preparation to lift him from the ice. They don’t wait for him to respond before he’s being raised, head rushing with the sudden shift from horizontal to vertical. The lights are too bright, the rink is too loud, and he can’t find Hayden in his peripherals anymore.
“Fuck–” Shane hisses when his weight catches on the injured ankle, the people holding him quickly adjusting so that he’s leaning into his other side as they guide him towards the bench.
“It’s alright buddy,” he hears Hayden reassure from somewhere close by, the voice of his friend a somewhat soothing noise amongst the chaos of everything else, “they’re gonna fix you up, so don’t freak out.”
“‘m not freaking out, Hayd” Shane slurs as he freaks out, his heart racing against his ribs in time with the throbbing of his head, and the pulse of his ankle inside his skates.
There is no scenario in which Shane leaves this rink the same person he was when he entered it, and the thought of such a distinct truth makes him dry heave into his shoulder. Everything hurts, and despite the fact that so much is happening, a part of him is still stuck out on the ice, replaying the same moment over and over again. He feels like a machine in lag, one that even a good bang on the side can’t fix.
The doctors helping him are saying something about hospitals when they lay him on the bench, Shane moaning in pain when they try to slip off his skates, his weak attempts at thrashing away from the feeling held back by other hands. He wanted everyone to stop touching him, to go back in time and not attempt to block that left-winger’s pass.
“What?” he manages between scattered shouts of sharp pain, his voice hoarse, “I don’t need the hospital, I don’t–”
But he knows they’re going to take him anyway, because he’s known since the snap.
The further the moment passes, but before the x-rays and the clipboards that held his fate on cheap printer paper, he realizes it’s become a constant. How could he not know—sprawled on this ice, his bones aching and teeth rattled—that everything in his life had just shifted to the wrong side of finite? It didn’t feel like falling on the ice and getting back up, it felt like leaving himself behind there.
(At the same time.)
Moscow, Russia
Sokolniki Arena—Skating Practice
Swoosh
The newly sharpened blades of his skates scrape against the ice as he pushes forwards, away from the responsibility of being socially competent, and the classic predicament of change.
“Ilyochka, you are acting like a child again,” Svetlana yells in Russian from across the rink, her impatient voice a change in pace from the constant stream of people who were trying to tell him who to be.
The micro-management wasn’t new—it’s something he’s dealt with since he started competing. Every public moment, word spoken, and angle presented was perfectly curated to present him as a particular sort of person. And that sort of person just happened to be conceited. It wasn’t even that Ilya wasn’t a smug bastard off the ice, It just wasn’t the same kind of smug they wanted him to be.
The difference now, he supposes, is that instead of trying to present him as one half of a pair, they just have him. And for some reason, that changes everything.
Ilya doesn’t remember why he chose pair skating in the first place, but he thinks it was because he was a lonely child who clung to his mother’s side until he was eight. He’d never felt right by himself, an ingredient, a single step in a much larger routine. Or perhaps it was because he was good at skating, but his personality was too much to handle alone.
Despite his inconsistency in appeal, he’s always refused to be someone who he isn’t. Ilya thinks he’d rather lose a limb than tone down, and that was one of the reasons he was adored. Sometimes, it felt like the confidence he held in who he was as a person was the only thing keeping him together. However, a very significant portion of his behavior had only been accepted because of the far more tolerant attitude of Sasha Polyakova.
“If I wanted to act like a child,” Ilya shouted back, slowly making his way toward where the woman was slumped over the side of the player’s bench wall with a lazy smile on her face, “I’d be rolling around and slamming my fists on the ice.”
He comes to an abrupt stop in front of her, ice shavings scraping up as he does. Svetlana doesn’t startle, just straightens her torso and leans forward into his space.
“This is basically the same thing, no?” she teases, rolling her eyes and waving her hand towards him, pretending to be disinterested, “Skating around the ice. Stomping your feet.”
Ilya scowls and swats her hand away, “I am not stomping my feet.”
Sure, he was skating at the same level he had when he was ten and couldn’t even tie his skates yet, but he was not stomping. Skating was something he found therapeutic, despite all the chaos it brought to his life. His mother used to tease that he could skate better than he could walk. Recently, though, he felt uneasy on the ice, blade slipping where it hadn’t before, knees buckling when he lands a jump he’s performed since before his Junior Championships.
Svetlana glances off to the side while he’s lost in thought, where his management team is a short ways off, discussing something quietly in a circle. Their pens scratch against wrinkled notepads and their eyes look tired.
“You should talk to them.” She says quietly, not meeting his eye. Her long fingernails tap against her metal rings as she fidgets with them and swallows thickly, waiting for a response. The conversation is awkward, the way it usually is when someone's forcing you to discuss something you’ve been avoiding.
Ilya manages to force himself to stay put, and let the muscles in his jaw soften with an exaggerated exhale. He hadn’t been there when he died. He hadn’t cried when he’d found out, either. It didn’t affect him the way everyone thought it should’ve, an ache comparable to pressing a bruise, yet it still changed everything.
He’d never gotten along with Sasha. Most of the time they’d just fucked, practiced when they’d needed to, and fought whenever they’d lost. Unfortunately, there was something characteristically significant about losing a piece of yourself you’d held onto for ten years of your life, no matter how insignificant that piece may have been before.
The car had crashed into a telephone pole. He’d been drunk driving, even though Ilya had told him he needed to stop months ago. Ilya went to the funeral, he talked to the grieving crowd about their successful career together, and then he lied about missing him. He did everything they expected him to, but even that wasn’t enough.
Afterward, life became a blur. For six months Ilya was stuck in a haze of moments that felt impossible; the kind only obtainable by miracle, or certain illegal substances. He always smelled like booze and sex, he bought two cars he couldn’t drive, he did things because they felt good, and everything had felt good then. It was an impulse-driven series of stills in his memory, a dopamine-high that had almost let him forget he had any responsibility at all. That there was a life outside of that high.
Then, he’d crashed.
“No.” Ilya answers. It’s the same answer he’d given her the last two times she’d tried asking.
“Ilyaochka.” she scolds, but keeps her voice steady, sounding more like the daughter of an acclaimed sports physician than she usually did.
“I already know what they want.” Ilya scoffs when she doesn’t continue, her narrowed eyes watching him expectantly as his hands curl into fists at his side, “They want me to find a new partner—to compete in championships this year. But I will not do it, Svetchick, and they cannot make me.”
He can feel the tips of his ears warm with his temper, watching as the impatience in Svetlana’s expression grows into something more exasperated. He does not owe her anything, he doesn’t owe anyone anything—he knows this, but it doesn’t make the guilt sitting in his gut at the thought of disappointing them lighten.
“And why not?” Svetlana snaps at him, curls bouncing as she leans closer with frustration, her breath touching the curve of his nose, “Maybe it would be good for you to skate with someone else again!”
Ilya presses his lips together, and tries to convey as he stares back at her, the weight of the irrational change Sasha had left behind for him to carry. He cannot tell her how the thought of skating with someone else makes his hands shake, because he cannot explain why it matters so much, or why he cares more about this than he cared about him dying.
Svetlana must find something vulnerable in his eyes, though, because after a moment her face softens, and she leans back again with a quick shake of her head.
“It could be fun, Ilyaochka,” she whispers, her brows wound tight, then reaches out to brush the hair from his temples, fingertips lingering on the line of his ear, “I know you still enjoy it—you haven’t stopped skating.”
His lip wobbles as her fingers trace their way down his face, finding the silver chain he wore around his neck. She starts to fix it where it’d gotten twisted with his skating, her knuckles catching on the lump in his throat, but he abruptly grabs her wrist. Ilya opens his mouth, tongue twitching against the roof of his mouth but finding no traction there. He can’t handle her gentle touch, not right now; when his vulnerability is contagious and his thoughts are a consensus of fragility.
“Svetlana, he died six months ago!” Ilya shouts, ignoring the looks his outburst was gathering, the sticky spots where he was aching boiling over into anger, “I’m not just going to replace him with a new partner just so I can go win another gold medal!”
But Svetlana doesn’t back down, she responds with twice the spite, because if she were any other sort of woman Ilya wouldn’t be here in the first place, “You’re not replacing him, Ilyaochka, it’s what he would’ve wanted!”
Ilya lets out a sharp, cruel laugh at that, and pushes away from the wall hard, just so he can throw his hands against something, “Don’t fucking talk to me like you know what he would’ve wanted, because you don’t. You did not skate beside him for ten years, you did not stand beside him on the podium.”
He doesn't know what Sasha would’ve wanted him to do now, but he knows he probably wouldn’t have listened to him, anyway. Ilya knows more about the way the man touched than the way he thought, and that was something that they would never understand. The faint memory of fingertips on the bow of his kneecap, of body hair on tongues and the smell of sex in the back of his throat that always seemed to linger even after he brushed his tongue.
Something about it had been fun, but he can’t remember what it’d been now—only the things he hadn’t done. Ilya didn’t have to start caring about a dead man because he was dead, but it felt like he should.
Svetlana seems to accept that she’s lost this battle, shoulders dropping stiffly with an aggravated and dramatic huff. She crosses her arms over her chest tightly, head turned away in a childish display of vex. Ilya watches her with his fingers twisted together behind his back, nose wrinkling in a way that he’d never admit was just as immature.
“Then why don’t you skate singles?” She offers, still refusing to meet his eyes, but he watches her brows furrow from the side, the way she holds a pause in her mouth before speaking, “They’re all talking about it, you know. It’s the logical thing to do, you’d be able to showcase your talents and still have a career.”
These are all things Ilya already knows. Not because someone had explained them to him a hundred times before, but because he is not an idiot. He knows that he is talented; the tricks and techniques always come laughably easy to him. Ilya hears the things they say about him online, too. One of a kind. The best in the sport.
Everyone in figure skating is expecting him to pursue singles now, and frankly, he would thrive there. But Ilya doesn’t like things that are good for him—they're boring and, more often than not, leave him wronged anyway.
“I won’t.” Ilya swallows the saliva beneath his tongue, lets his fingers unfurl to brush the sweat from his palms away on the front of his shirt. Like if he doesn’t acknowledge the way his voice breaks, or the watery pull in his throat, then maybe she won't, either.
“I can’t, Svetchick. I cannot stand in that rink alone, I do not know how to.”
Svetlana sniffs, nods her head once with a chuckle, “You’re wasting everything you’ve built.” she says, but then looks at him with a smile that tells him she knows. She knows that nothing can change Ilya’s mind, not even the world.
He brings his fingertips—numb with the constant chill of the rink—to his lips, which curve upwards against his will. He is surprisingly enamored with the prominence of being understood, the warmth in his belly somewhat selfish, and far too exposed. Ilya gives Svetlana a pointed, faux-serious look, waits for her eyes to narrow before blowing a raspberry. It was admittedly childish, but they often felt like children when they were together, something about the past.
Svetlana attempts to cover her resulting giggle with a straight face, but it’s a futile effort between the two of them. Their foolishness draws a glance from his team, whom Ilya still refuses to meet eyes with. Then he says, with far too much certainty for the moment, “You know damn well I didn’t build anything. They did.”
There was nothing to say to that, despite the way Svetlana’s mouth sits open, waiting for something to fall off the tongue. Because it was true, and sometimes the truth was bitter. Something that had to sit a while before it could be argued.
“Is your hip better?” She asks when the silence stretches to a snap, glancing purposefully toward where he stands, leaning all his weight into one side.
Ilya straightens on the ice, tapping the frost from his blades as he clears his throat, “Da.”
He brushes his fingertips over his hipbone, tracing the pulled muscle that was weeks old at this point, only an ache now. But Svetlana still asked every time she saw him, because she liked to annoy him, and cared far too much about him, too.
“Okay.” She says simply with a shrug, trusting him to be honest with her, something he certainly hadn’t earned, but was given anyway.
Ilya rolls his eyes, smiles too wide, opening his arms out at his sides and leaning over the wall of the rink with a grunt, “I will see you tomorrow, when they try to interrogate me again.”
Svetlana barely wraps her arms around his shoulders before he’s skating away again in a hurry, feet scraping against the ice with intent, “Lyublyu tebya, illyaochka.” She yells after him, most likely clicking her tongue or folding her arms. But he knows that, despite the poor attempt at feigning annoyance, she means it.
Ilya doesn’t stop pushing forward.
2015
Moscow, Russia
Sokolniki—A Busy Street
The best modern physical therapist in sports medicine lives in Moscow: the fluttering heart of the otherwise rather dull country that was Russia, and a place where Shane didn’t fit in not because of his abundant particularities, but because he smiled at strangers.
In Canada, smiling at strangers was a common expression of greeting, one Shane had spent all 24 years of his life making a habit. Because, like most other social expectations, it had never come as naturally to him as it did for everyone else. Here, it seemed illicit.
With this, Shane felt a familiar rush of shame. It was the same kind he’d first felt during his rookie season, when he’d noticed just how different he was from everyone else around him. When he was still learning how to navigate blending in with a world he didn’t quite understand in the same way. His mother told him that Russia was honest, so he’d fit right in; but for all his honesty, Shane found that even his blunt tongue wasn’t enough to convince the city he belonged.
He looks up from his phone, squinting against the sun with a shaky hand cupped above his brows, eyes scanning the list of businesses printed on outside the small building he stood in front of. ‘Vetrova PT’, Shane read it a couple of times over, making sure it was the same name he’d put into his phone half an hour ago.
Shane jumps at the sudden presence of someone leaving the building, and the cry of the door hinges as they reach their limit. It’s enough to shake him from his daze, and he curls his fists with determination as he steps into the old building himself. The doorknob is worn, and the cold metal bites at his palm whenever he turns it, a small, dingy waiting room waiting for him behind.
It smells old, like his fingertips would come back with dust if he ran them along the walls, but there’s also a soft warmth in the space, and a middle-aged woman behind a receptionist desk.
He steps toward the desk, lips already fumbling around a sentence he’s already rehearsed four times in his head between the door and where he stands now. The woman looks up from her computer, tired eyes observing Shane and his nervous fidgeting before she finds her screen again with a long, bored sigh. He opens his mouth to ask her about checking in, but the door at the far side of the room slams open before he can.
“Mr. Hollander?” A woman (Svetlana Vetrova, he recalls from the link his mother had sent him) calls cheerily, her breath short as she scans the room quickly. Svetlana’s smile brightens when she finds Shane, the clipboard she holds against her chest slipping as she shifts a hip against the door, “Hi, come this way, please.”
She waves him over, and Shane hesitates for a moment before he nods slowly, following her as she walks into a short hallway, her heels clicking against the old tile with every confident step.
“I assume you’re already familiar with how this goes?” Svetlana asks with her head turned over her shoulder, she’s stopped at a door, its handle catching a few times before it finally clicks open and a warm light fills the hallway.
“Unfortunately.” Shane swallows, a bitter taste in his mouth as he remembers the dozens of consultations he’s had in the past two years, each one ending in a hesitant dismissal, a careful letdown.
He peers into the homey office, where Svetlana slouches into a worn leather chair with a dramatic huff, clipboard thrown on the messy desk in front of her. Shane stands in the doorway with his lip between his teeth, unsure of many small things, of which have everything to do with the small, harmless room. The wheels of a chair roll against the carpet, and when Shane looks up he finds Svetlana staring back at him with exasperation, a smirk finding her lips as he awkwardly shuffles in the room.
She clears her throat, clicking a pen in one hand while she shuffles through the mess of papers on her desk with the other, “Well, I assume you're here in hopes that this will be one of the last, yes?”
She smiles at him, waiting, so Shane nods once in response. His mouth is dry, tongue tracing the back of his teeth in idle.
“I went over your records, but I want you to tell me how your ankle feels today,” She explains while leaning forward in the chair, a gentleness in her tone that Shane wasn’t expecting based on her proud demeanor, “Did it bother you when you were walking here? Does it bother you now? What sort of pain does it give you—a sharp pain, or something more achy?”
The questions, while standard, are overwhelming to process. Svetlana asks them quickly, in a manner that Shane thinks is a little too enthusiastic for the mood of the conversation. He rolls his ankle where it rests against the couch, wincing when something pulls beneath his skin, ignoring the way Svetlana quits clicking her pen to scribble something accusatory on her clipboard.
“Um—yeah. It’s bothering me now, and it did earlier. It always bothers me, but I don't know what sort of pain it is. The constant kind, I guess? It’s like a muscle cramp that never goes away, if that makes any sense.” Shane explains, tripping over his words in his haste to get them out, because the room feels like a rehearsal and his palms are itchy.
Svetlana nods, making several noncommittal sounds as she writes, “Sounds like a pain in the ass.”
She doesn’t look up, focused on her notes, so Shane finds it easier to sort his thoughts out, to pretend he hasn’t been here before. He licks his lips, cracking with the Russian cold, and agrees, “Yeah, it is.”
At this, Svetlana looks up, she tilts her head at him, more in curiosity than scrutiny, but Shane still fidgets under her gaze, unsure of where to place his hands. After a moment, she throws her clipboard back onto the desk, her office chair creaking when she rolls it to a stop in front of Shane, staying seated the whole time. He blinks at her, she clasps her hands.
“Well, chronic pain is not unusual after an injury like this, Shane,” Svetlana starts with a dismissive shrug, she knows this is something he’s heard before, that he didn’t come Russia to be told his life changing injury had left him with chronic pain, “However, I believe that, with certain methods, we can reduce both the amount and severity of the pain by a significant amount.”
Shane feels his breath catch, fingers stilling where they fidget with the hem of his jeans, and takes a moment to meet her eyes. He isn’t sure what he wants to find in her expression, but the determined line her lips had settled into, the wrinkled nose of a stubborn woman, it felt earnest. Usually when he was at these consultations, the air would be thin, and static would buzz over his thoughts as the same sentences found his ears over and over again.
But Shane doesn’t allow himself to be hopeful yet. He’s filled that pit in his stomach with styrofoam too many times before—it always dissolves into a heavy disappointment eventually, leaving him with the bitter implication of a maybe.
“And how long will that take?” Shane asks, then, realizing his bluntness, darts his eyes around the room in search of something to focus on as his cheeks flush, “I mean—sorry, I’m just wondering because I’m visiting, I don’t live here.”
Svetlana laughs under her breath, bringing a hand to her lips while her heels click against the plastic of her chair, “Yes, I can tell you are not from Russia. But it's a good thing, so don’t worry. Russians are assholes.”
The corners of Shane’s lips quirk at that, and he watches himself pick at the worn skin of his cuticles, shoulders softening ever so slightly. Svetlana sniffs, then continues with a more serious edge to her words, “There’s really no linear timeline for a recovery like this. We base the treatment plans on day-to-day results, meaning they could shift at any time. But if I had to estimate, six months.”
“Six months?” Shane repeats softly under his breath, his mouth suddenly dry.
Svetlana notes the spiral without any real urgency, continuing to speak as if her client wasn’t on the verge of a panic attack across from her, “And you’ll have to continue physical therapy outside of that too, of course—-probably for the rest of your life if you want to keep walking by the time you’re sixty,”
Shane isn’t sure how to respond to her, the heavy words not really processing yet. He swallows the frog he feels croaking up his throat, the senseless arguments he wants to give her, full of avoidance that gets him nowhere but back on that ice—aching and without any purpose.
“Are you sure it’ll take six months?” He asks, stressing the emphasis the same way he holds his limbs tight, on the precipice of that maybe, a stiff contemplation of which way the scale tips this time.
Svetlana pauses, looking intently at Shane, between his focused brows and at the impossible swirl of thoughts behind his skull. Then she leans forward and takes his hand into her own, giving him a second to pull away before she sets the other one on top.
“Shane, is there anything, anything in this world that you want more right now, than to play?” Svetlana asks him softly, her eyes knowing and kind to a fault, the sort of fault that ruins you with the concept of an obligation.
She could tell him the same things the others had—decide it’s a just hopeless effort, or the pipedream of another deadbeat athlete desperate for resurrection. But instead she took his hand.
“How did you—?” Shane stutters, unsure where to place his anxiousness now if not in her hands and struck with the realization that everything he wants has always been written on his face, in the subtle way he shifts his knees apart or chews his lip.
Svetlana laughs as he struggles to find the right words, but it’s not condescending in nature, more like brushing something off their shoulders, a quiet acknowledgement, “My friend does figure skating, went to the Olympics, I’ve heard your name.” She explains, smiling brightly.
“No.” Shane says after a moment, forcing himself to look up at her with teary eyes, ascertaining with his shaky voice an unavoidable truth, "There's nothing I want more.”
It’s conclusive, scarily so, but his words make the room feel complete in some way, the light shifting through the blinds as Svetlana grins proudly and says, “So six months, da?”
Shane nods, not wanting to ruin the admission with more words he’s yet to play out in his head. Svetlana leans back in her chair and stretches her arms above her head, the cheap plastic creaking as she does, her joints popping like the erratic crackle of a fire. When she settles she scoots back over to her desk, rustling the papers again in search of what Shane assumes is paperwork of some sort, before they’re interrupted.
Knock.
The sound is loud against the old wood, and doesn’t stop once it starts, a constant dull thud filling the room. Svetlana turns her head sharply, an irritated scowl already on her lips, “Who is it?” She yells, standing from her chair.
“It’s Ilyaochka!” A bright, familiar voice responds. Shane watches as the annoyance on her face shifts into something more fond, but still pissed nonetheless.
“Excuse me,” Svetlana says, giving Shane a stiff smile before walking over to the door and pulling it open with force, the man behind it stumbling forward in response, “What do you want, осёл? I have a client here.”
The man, Shane realizes with a disbelieving huff and wide eyes, is none other than the famous pairs figure skater Ilya Rozanov. He tries to remember what he’s been up to since they last met, other than his usual shenanigans, and vaguely recalls an article about his partner passing away, a statement about taking an indefinite break from skating. Shane wants to believe it’s an odd, unlikely fact that they’re in the same room right now, but he was, after all, in Russia.
Rozanov’s eyes find him for a second, and they widen in similar recognition before snapping back to the irritated woman in front of him. Shane could tell they were familiar with one another, but couldn’t imagine how it’d happened.
“Good morning to you too, Svetchick.” He grins, blatantly ignoring Svetlana's dismissal, and acknowledges Shane’s presence again with an imitation of shock, “Ah, it’s Holl-an-der, yes?”
Shane stares back at him with a carefully indiscernible face, trying not to focus on the way Svetlana looks between the two of them with sudden intrigue.
“I’m sorry about Alberta,” Rozanov says, any condolence in his tone overshadowed by the exaggerated pout on his face. He brightens again, like whiplash, placing his hand on Svetlana’s shoulder and shaking it excessively while she attempts to slap it away, “with Svetlana, recovery will be fast, yes?”
Shane swallows and looks away, at the various stains adorning the carpet, the fly that sits on an old coffee cup by the windowsill, “That’s what I've been told," he agrees apathetically, rubbing his thumb against the lines of his palm in a self-soothing pattern.
He’s not sure why he feels nervous—Rozanov is just a man he’s met before. A man who’s shared something vulnerable with him some people take to their graves. Maybe it’s just the fact that Rovanov knew him before. That he knew him when it happened, and he knows him now. Or maybe it’s because he's scared of someone else seeing what Alberta made him—the sort of man he’s become in regret.
Rozanov hums loudly to himself, scratching his neck with a lopsided frown as he traces the anxious lines of Shane’s face for an answer, “You come to Moscow just for injury?”
“Yes.” Is all Shane says in reply, swallowing thickly.
A part of him knows that, even if he did manage to explain how important getting better was to him, Rozanov wouldn’t understand. He’s never needed purpose the same way he does. This has been their distinction from the beginning, the defined variable between their dreams. Except now only one of them was still chasing something.
Rozanov nods, sitting into his hip and fidgeting with the wrinkled pack of LD cigarettes in his front pocket, he waves his hand as he speaks “We skate sometime, yes? I show you my rink, give you ginger ale I promise during Olympics.”
At just the mention of a rink, Shane’s heart quickens, the idea of skating with the other man interrupted by the usual flashes of tragedy—the unfortunate reality of memory. But then his chest does something different: it jumps. Not with fear, but with a feeling he’s already forgotten, like the laces of his skates against raw fingers, his cheeks rosy with the chill of the rink. Shane shakes the feeling away before it can linger, scared of what it could mean.
Svetlana raises a thin brow, crossing her arms over her chest as she starts to say something sensible to her friend, who has never been the sensible type. Shane clears his throat, his voice feels flat, like the soles of his feet against his shoes as he leans back. He strains his neck to stare between the slats of the blinds, watching the cold Russian morning yawn into the afternoon.
“Sorry, but I’m not exactly here to skate, Rozanov.” He says, a little petty and not nearly certain enough. Rovanov wrinkles his nose in response, throwing his arms out with a groan that drags.
“Bleh— whatever, be boring!” He huffs like a child, turning to Svetlana to complain when Shane continues to ignore him, “Hollander is so~ boring.”
Svetlana, who up until this point has been quietly observing the two in an oddly introspective way, rolls her eyes in response, smiling toward Shane as he scoffs at Rozanov's teasing.
She hums for a moment, pretending to assess him, then turns to Rozanov again, “He’s pragmatic.”
Rozanov narrows his eyes, hands on his hips while he thumbs the space between his too-short shirt and his skinny jeans. He repeats the word in his thick(er) accent, the only thing more European than his fashion sense, “Yes, prag-ma-tic—boring man.”
He says it with an exasperated sort of amusement, but Shane finds it somewhat fond anyway. Rozanov watches him like he is looking for the same man he’d met at that vending machine, as if the possibility of change had never even crossed his mind. And, although Shane wants to be angry with him—to have him face the same hopelessness he’s carried with him for two years, for him to tell Shane what they would’ve found in Sochi if he’d never slipped—he can’t.
Because, in reality, it scares him: how the thought of stepping back on the ice fills him with just as much excitement as it does anxiety.
Since Alberta, the ice has been a place in his head where he cannot leave, stuck between the sharp snap and the hospital sheets. He’s not allowed to go back there—the ice isn’t home anymore, it doesn’t belong to him the way it did when he was playing, when hockey was everything and he was someone.
So it’s odd, Shane decides, that when he pictures Ilya Rozanov’s cocky smile behind the plexiglass of an ice rink now, the only thing he feels is anticipation.
Impatience.