Chapter Text
Ilya Rozanov has carried so many secrets in his twenty five years that his hands should be full by now.
That sometimes, he wakes in the blue early hours of the morning, sheets sticking to his back like a cocoon, damp from bad dream sweat, panic clawing at his throat, knowing in his heart that he cannot quite remember the precise shade of his mothers honey eyes in his mind.
That, as children, in the bitter Moscow cold on shared ice time down at the rink, in between the frequent citywide power cuts, when he and Svetlana would race across the ice, he would always let her win. Just by a second, carefully timed so she wouldn’t suspect, or it would be taken as such a brutal insult she would have slashed one of her skates across his throat.
Sveta, endlessly, infuriatingly graceful, long-limbed even at ten, couldn’t compete for muscle and that raw lightning power that gave Ilya his edge even as a kid, just beginning to grow into the same broad shoulders as his older brother.
So Ilya would hold back, a space just the stretch of his palm, and let her pull ahead so she would slam into the boards first, hard enough to make the plexiglass ricochet like a car crash. Tiny but fearless as any grown hockey veteran, shrieking with victory, fists pounding the air; the loud opposite of the icy decorum she was supposed to hold during the figure skating lessons she kept up until her teens to please her mother.
Sveta at ten, trapped in sequinned costumes and endless axel drills, when she should have been handed a hockey stick like she longed for.
Ilya, at ten, trapped by his fathers harsh words and harsher hands, drilled deep into his bones that losing was worse than sin, loved watching Svetlana win more than all of it. Eyes shining like the rhinestones stuck to her shoulders, Sveta would tip back her head and howl, more wolf than girl, teeth bared, smile brighter than the flickering stadium lights. Winning set her free, and that was always worth it.
A hidden gift, just for her, all that Ilya could give, outweighing the jeers he got from the other boys for losing to a девочка, girl, slung across the ice like it was an insult. Outweighing the slap his father would give him when he got home if he heard about it.
That, of the countless beautiful men and women that have rolled in and out of his bed since he was a teenager trying to lose himself in other peoples bodies by giving them his own, not one of them has ever gotten close to his heart.
Hands everywhere, taking, taking, taking, but never even close to touching his heart.
Not Sasha, bright and reckless as fireworks on New Year, with his burning fingers and loud mouth, who loved trouble more than Ilya in the end. Not even Svetlana, who Ilya holds in his soul, like a sister grown from different bones, has put her hands on that raw, flayed open part of his heart he sometimes wonders if he even still has. Or if it died with his mother on the yellow-tiled floor of bathroom when he was twelve.
That, even after all this time, kicked dog still seeking a gentle hand, he still longs to hear the words Я горжусь тобой, Илья spill from his fathers hard lips, ice giving way after a hard winter. Ilya, I am proud. Just once. Just once.
The secret Ilya carries in his hands now, as he walks across a Boston parking lot in September, is a cigarette. A black Bears cap sits backwards on his head over his dirt blonde curls, because he’s an asshole, and likes to play at being a perfect white-teethed American.
He flexes his fingers and lights up, furtively checking over his shoulder, committing his illicit nicotine affair. Forbidden fruit tastes best, and all that. He’s reminded of Sasha. In the six years he has played for the Boston Bears, Ilya has now promised a concerned Marlow, countless team doctors, physios, and Coach Le Claire, that he will quit. He has not quit. He is not a natural quitter of anything, he feels. Holds everything too hard, so by the time he lets go, it’s warped. Worse off for being held by him.
But, “Fucked lungs don’t win cups”, as Hayden loves to tell him, just to piss him off. Ilya’s response to this is almost always a middle finger, his and Haydens love language.
Sveta’s usual response is to roll her glitter-painted eyes at him and hand him a lighter, every time he drunkenly swears this one will be his last on nights out when she comes to town, dragging Ilya to the dance floors of Boston. She knows Ilya has never been good at letting go of something once he’s got it in his teeth.
If Ilya had been looking where he was going instead of down at his hands, fumbling with the pack, late morning sun in his eyes as he pulls on his sunglasses against the glare, he would have seen the car door opening in his peripheral.
Years of hockey reflexes and fast hands would have stopped him walking face first into the corner of this door. Those reflexes don’t save him now, as Ilya fights the lighter, looking down, tapping it against his palm when it refuses to catch.
Ilya is not looking where he is going, as he finally inhales the smoke that calms the buzz in his skin that never quite settles, and gets slammed face on by the opening door.
Ilya feels his nose burst in a familiar way that usually comes from dropped gloves or the edge of a helmet, and blood begins to pour between into the corners of his mouth.
“What in the God loving fuck,” he says, elegantly, in Russian.
Pain always takes him back to his mother tongue. Pain sounds like home, or home sounds like pain, he supposes. Ilya screws his eyes shut as a blunt ache blooms, thick and pulsing across his forehead, rippling through his top lip like a kiss. His black Raybans have somehow managed to stay on, through all this. He still holds his cigarette between his lips, which has somehow come out unscathed, unlike his face.
On reflex, he inhales.
“You really shouldn’t be smoking,” a panicked voice says. It’s so absurd that Ilya starts laughing, blood bubbling at the movement, and he grits his teeth at the pain.
“Shit, man. Shit. I’m so sorry,” says the voice, less panicked now.
It’s a nice voice. Level, deep. Not, perhaps, American, by the sound it makes around an ‘o’. Ilya reaches for the bridge of his nose to try and stop the blood flow now trickling down the tendons in his neck, seeping into the collar of his leather jacket.
He hears footsteps, and steady hands are suddenly on his face, beating him to it. They pull the cigarette from his lips and it drops to the concrete like a shooting star.
“Tilt your head,” says the voice, and now the fingers are on his chin, doing it for him. Said delicately, as if this is his first ever nosebleed. He likes the idea that the slammer of this door thinks Ilya is a stranger to violence. It’s a gentle thought, another Ilya from another life, who isn’t familiar with blood in his teeth and broken bones. Ilya cracks his eyes open.
The first thing he sees are strong elegant hands, tan skin, nails clean and curved, pale pink like seashells.
Ilya absently wonders if those hands have ever played piano, thinks it’s a shame to get such nice hands dirty, before the blood covers them. Ilya, ruiner of all things lovely. He looks past them and finds a face.
The man standing cupping Ilya’s jaw, taking his spilled blood like it’s nothing, is unfortunately as lovely as his hands. Deep eyes, currently wide with guilt, and darker hair. Full lips, a dip above them like someone pressed their thumb there and left a permanent imprint. Freckles. So many freckles.
The man lifts his fingers to Ilya’s nose in a practiced way Ilya instinctively knows is him checking for a break, before he says it.
“It might be broken, I’m so sorry” he says, regretful but calm. The man says this like it’s a professional opinion.
Ilya pushes his hand away.
“Is not,” he says, checking for himself, far less gently.
Ilya has had two broken noses in his life, and knows the feeling well enough that he can tell he’s gotten away with it this time. The first break came when he was thirteen, courtesy of his brother Alexei.
It had been the middle of summer, after Irina was buried, and Ilya remembers the tan line left behind by Alexei’s watch before he sold it to pay off a gambling debt, a pale band like a slice of the moon around around his brothers wrist.
Ilya had wanted to put his hand to it, pulse to pulse, to see if their hearts beat the same way.
Alexei had been running practice drills with Ilya, as he was often pushed to do by their father, rage and humiliation sweating out of him at being reduced to practice.
Like Ilya was something real, and Alexei was just a failed first attempt. Alexei had been second best on and off the ice to Ilya since it became clear to Grigor Rosanov, when they were four and six, that only one of his sons could hit pucks like it was a gift from God, and he had never quite let his eldest son forget it.
That day in summer, when Alexei hit Ilya across the face with the flat of his hockey stick and gave him his first broken bone, all their father had said to Ilya was
“Next time move faster.”
Alexei had said nothing at all, just stared at his younger brother with the green eyes their mother had given them both, looking down at the blood between their skates. It was the last time they were ever on the ice together. Alexei never put on skates again.
The second break came at World Juniors when Hayden Pike, before he was drafted to the Bears himself, caught Ilya off guard with a headbutt. Hayden has never let him live this down, to his delight, no matter how many jokes Ilya makes about being surprised he could reach up that high.
The man scoffs, like he doesn’t trust Ilya’s opinion on this, and shakes his head. Wise not to trust Ilya at all, he supposes.
“Hold on, sit down,” and suddenly his hands are on Ilya’s shoulders, pushing him to the hood of his car.
“Sorry,” the man says, as Ilya sits down hard, caught off guard by this stranger for the second time this morning.
The push manages to shift all 6ft3 of Ilya with ease, and he now wonders about the body beneath the zipped up North Face jacket in front of him, if the golden skin of his hands is the same warm shade on his shoulders, if there are freckles there too.
Ilya is ultimately curious too, about anyone that can get him to sit, like a trained dog. He watches the man duck into the backseat of his car and pull out a kit bag. The man returns with antiseptic wipes and a wad of cotton gauze. Medical kit.
“What, are you some doctor?” Ilya asks him, eyebrow quirked.
It would explain the practice of his hands, how unphased he seems by the blood now beneath those perfectly trimmed nails.
The man smiles at that, lips quirking softly and slightly to the left, and Ilya smiles back before he can stop himself.
Like reflex. Like a nicotine inhale. Addictive.
Ilya hopes he’s going to wipe his face for him, put those hands back round his jaw, but the man just rips the top off the wipes and hands them to Ilya instead.
He cleans himself up, a little disappointed. With Ilya leaning on the hood of the car, and the man standing, he has to look up at him.
He feels, for a moment, like someone else entirely. Someone smaller, gentler, that knows how to be soft. Knows how to hold things carefully, leave them better than when he found them. From this angle, he can see the sweep of the other man’s lashes above his cheekbones, casting shadows like slow blooming petals across the bridge of his nose in the late morning sun.
Brown eyes look down into green. Green look away first.
“Nope, not a doctor. Physio, actually.” says the man. He hooks a lanyard from under his jacket with his thumb, showing his medical ID, and the pass that shows he’s clearly here to work for the Bears. “First day here, actually,” he says after a beat, softer, a little shyer.
Before it can drop back to the mans chest, Ilya catches it in his hand. He lifts the ID with his index finger to read it.
It tugs the man closer, close enough that Ilya sees his eyes widen with surprise for a beat, before setting steady, refusing to be thrown off.
He’s taking Ilya in his stride in a way most people don’t. Most people bend for him, easier to turn away in the face of all that chaos. But not this man.
He’s standing near enough that the citrus and ginger sitting on his skin cuts through the blood filling up Ilya’s throat.
Ilya spits, wanting more, to inhale, reflex, hacking blood onto the ground by his shoes. The man grits his teeth at this, but doesn’t speak on it.
“S Hollander,” says Ilya, rolling the R at the end. “From Ottawa. Far. Ah, yes, knew you must be Canadian,” he says, just to be an asshole. He drops the lanyard.
“Yeah?” says Hollander, raising an eyebrow, unsure if he’s amused.
“You have said sorry three times in row. So very Canadian.”
Hollander huffs a laugh and shrugs at this like he can’t deny it, passing Ilya the wad of gauze. Their fingers brush, and Ilya feels his palms itch.
Hollander gestures with his hand for Ilya to press it to his nose. Ilya rolls his eyes like yes, no shit.
“Is that what S is for? For sorry?” Ilya asks, unserious.
He doesn’t get an answer, because Hollander is now watching the gauze soak up blood, rose bloom in clean snow, biting at the pink corner of his mouth. He peels a strip of his chapped lip with his neat front teeth, fraying like his patience, clearly feeling responsible.
Ilya could ease the guilt, say it was in fact his own fault for looking down and not where he was walking. Could say, if he had quit smoking like he’d promised Le Claire, he wouldn’t have been holding a cigarette in the first place. But he doesn’t. Ilya doesn’t often know how to make things easy.
“I am genuinely sorry,” says Hollander, running a hand through his hair, guilty again. Ilya watches a few strands stick up, curling above his ear, disrupted. “I just didn’t see you at all. Are you okay?” He’s so sincere.
“Have been hit harder.” Ilya shrugs it off because it’s true and the pain is fading to a dull throb now. He doesn’t like how serious Hollander is looking, wants that left-leaning smile from before back. Ilya is not often seen as something than can be hurt, and it makes him feel exposed, like he’s suddenly shirtless in a crowd, eyes everywhere.
“Could probably be hit harder by someones grandmother,” Ilya says. “If door was backhand, it would be weak as shit.”
Hollander rolls his eyes, unimpressed. Ilya enjoys this reaction more than he should. “Is this why you are physio? You make a habit to injure people so you can fix them up? How you keep your job, as you clearly are shitty at it?” Ilya continues. This clearly touches a nerve.
“Look man, I said I was sorry. Genuinely.” Hollander is scowling now, brow creased. Ilya’s starting to get under his skin, as intended. “If you come with me, I can get you some ice for it. I was heading into the rink anyway.” He gestures to the stadium over his shoulder, as if Ilya isn’t heading there himself. “I’m actually already late now so…” he winds his wrist, like the time is passing from his own hand.
Ilya grins, a shit eating grin he often uses at face-offs, situation slowly clearing for him.
Hollander hasn’t recognised him. Maybe because he’s been coated in blood, his hands covering most of his face as they hold his busted nose, or maybe because he’d been incognito in the sunglasses and cap. He plays along.
“Wow, wow, now you are doing me a favour even though I am so inconvenient making you late? How will I ever say thank you?” He says. Hollander crosses his arms, looking genuinely pissed off now, jaw ticking. A ripple in previously calm waters.
“You don’t have to be an asshole about it.” He bites. “Are you coming in or not?”
A drop of blood hits the hood of the car, red rain, and Ilya swipes it away with the pad of his thumb. It stains. Hollander watches.
And then, because he can’t seem to help but do his job; ”Does it hurt or not?”
Ilya imagines a genuine answer to this. Everything hurts, all the time. Nothing hurts, even when I want it to.
“Yes, getting hit by slow Canadian with weak car door backhand hurts me so bad,” says Ilya instead, dragging a finger down his cheek to mimic a tear.
Hollander rolls his eyes, but coughs out a laugh like he can’t help it, a low sound dragged out of his chest. His frown eases to a small smile, maybe relieved he’s not actually hurt the asshole currently bleeding onto his car.
The blood has stopped completely now and Ilya balls up the gauze in his fist and drags off his sunglasses with a flourish, nailing Hollander with his eyes, caught like a fishhook through a spine, reeling him in.
“But, I will be coming in too” says Ilya. Hollanders dark eyes widen in recognition and it’s almost worth getting slammed in the face with a car door to watch the intricate series of realisations pass across his face.
It starts with recognition, that Ilya is used to whenever he’s out in Boston: oh shit it’s Ilya Rozanov, before flipping to slack-mouthed horror: oh shit I just called Ilya Rozanov an asshole, also a common occurrence with which Ilya is familiar, before settling on wide-eyed panic, presumably: I’ve just hit Ilya Rozanov in the face and possibly broken his nose before I’ve even started my first day.
“Rozanov.” Says Hollander. Stating a fact, voice flat, all levity gone.
The smile has dropped from his face, sun behind a cloud.
He’s cautious, thrown off completely now, unsure how this will play out. Ilya can tell he doesn’t often find himself unsure of things. It doesn’t suit him, man of steady hands, level touches, voice light as rain. He looks suddenly unlike himself, not that Ilya would know what he usually looks like.
“Yup,” says Ilya, popping the p and tilting his head. “Will I tell everyone? New physio beats me up in parking lot on first day? Trying to make good impression maybe?”
Hollander runs a hand through his hair again, more forcefully than before, black silk strands disrupted. Ilya is wearing down his neatness, wonders how much of a mess he could make.
Hollander looks up, tilting his head like he has a nosebleed himself, exposing the soft underside of his chin. A perfect point of smooth skin, with a tiny cluster of freckles to the left. He stares at the sky as if seeking divine answers and patience to deal with Ilya's shit, and huffs a out a breath.
Ilya waits for the snap, for him to bend like most people do.
Will Hollander yell? Grovel? Hit him with the door again? Ilya leans forward on the hood of the car, pressing his palms to his legs to stop himself from bouncing them, anticipating.
Ilya watches the lanyard on his chest rise and fall as Hollander inhales and exhales. Not shallow smokers breaths, but deep lungfuls of intention, seeking calm. Regulating.
His jaw ticks again, that slow jolt of muscle giving him away, not quite as calm as he seems. Ripples in the water.
He lifts his eyes to Ilya, and he’s so dead serious that Ilya has to bite the inside his cheek to stop himself laughing at him.
“Look, Rozanov. It was a genuine accident, and I’ve apologised, and I meant it. Whatever decision you make, I will accept, and I understand if you don’t feel able to work with me moving forward. I hope we can move past this, but I will respect it if we can’t.” And then, Hollander leans forward and holds his hand out, palm steady like a peace offering.
Ilya barks a laugh then, he can’t help it. He hasn’t been confronted with this much raw sincerity in a long time, maybe ever, and especially not in a parking lot.
He can tell that Hollander means every word, and worse, genuinely cares. Ilya doesn’t know what to do about it at all.
Hollander frowns and drops his hand.
But Ilya grabs it before it falls too far, and shakes it. He suddenly wants those hands on him again, gentle and steady. Will take what he’s given.
That itch he felt when their fingers brushed is back, burrowing into his palm, skin warm against Hollanders. He looks at the traces of his own dried blood between the digits on his hand, matching the blood beneath Hollanders nails. Ilya, all over him.
“No, no, no, I am kidding. We can move past this. I am fine, and you are fine. We are fine, yes?” He emphasises this by moving their hands up and down in an exaggerated shake, fingers pressed together. He likes the fit of Hollanders thumb on the back of his hand, slot between the tendons like it's been there before.
Hollander stares him down, trying to gauge if he’s serious, and Ilya almost looks away because it feels like he’s looking straight through him, trying to read the inside of his skull. Ilya doesn’t think he would like what he found written there.
Hollanders eyes flick down to their clasped hands for a moment, before he nods.
He slowly takes back his hand, and shoulders his bag, decisive.
“I won’t make you late,” Ilya grins, pushing off the hood of the car, putting his sunglasses back across his eyes so he doesn’t have to meet that sincere gaze head on again.
It was a little like staring at the sun, looking at Hollander. “Lets go.”