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It started with the article, the tabloid page blowing up the phone that had been thrust into his face in the middle of training. For a split second it had just looked like any old piece of trashy celebrity gossip. That’s all it had been until he recognized a smile and a smattering of freckles he swore he could put in their exact places from memory. Tabloids followed the rich and famous, always trying to be the first to air the private business of important people. People like him. People like Rose Landry. People like Shane.
People like Rose Landry and Shane Hollander together apparently.
Ilya had read through every post, every article, every comment section out there for him to find. He’d gotten lost in pictures of freckles and brown doe eyes that he knew exactly how they looked full of desperation and joy and something he absolutely for his own peace of mind could not call adoration. And in each one of those pictures he saw that same unidentifiable last look directed at her. Not him this time. All at that pretty little movie star that looked almost too perfect on his arm.
It wasn’t like he could be that mad about it all. Shane and him weren’t exclusive. They never had been, at least that’s what they’d pretended. In reality, his own hookups had gotten further and further apart and at some point Hollander had become just Shane in his mind. How and when, he had no clue. What he did know was what things were on the diet Shane stuck to that honestly probably could warrant a call to some kind of helpline. He knew what specific brand of ginger ale to keep in his fridge for Shane to sip on the one time he finally, finally got to have him in a place he called home. He knew what Shane looked like when he was trying as hard as he could not to outwardly pout about a small (or sometimes moderate) inconvenience. He knew how Shane usually needed a little pressure to voice what it was that he wanted. He knew how he craved order and a plan for every move he made, how terrified he was of the unknown. Ilya knew how hard it was for Shane to let go and just feel good for a little bit. That one was hard for him too.
He knew everything he was allowed to know about Shane, and maybe, probably, just a little beyond that healthy line of separation. Maybe she knew more. By this point, Rose probably knew what little things made him smile, what little treats could and would make it past his rigid diet. She probably knew what little stupid fears he had that made him jump. Not the looming, dangerous threats that Ilya saw, but the brush off things like spiders or sounds in the dark. She probably knew how Shane’s nose would scrunch when he was sitting on that fine line between annoyed and upset. She probably knew how easily tears would fill those pretty brown eyes when he was overwhelmed. She probably knew how easy it was to make him a whimpering mess with just a few calculated touches-
No, he shouldn’t think like that. Thinking like that would just make him feel worse. He hoped they were okay. He hoped they were good together. He hoped Shane was happy, that he was getting all the attention and warmth and public freedom that Ilya couldn’t give him. Everything that Ilya wanted to give him if they both weren’t massive cowards.
Hopefully Rose was taking care of him, reminding him to take breathers when the stress got too much. As much as it pained him to think about, he hoped she was experiencing the utter euphoria of seeing Shane in that syrupy, blissed out state he would get to when things were just right. That was a look for Ilya only, but if it couldn’t be him, then he wanted someone to make Shane feel like that. Maybe she had a good strap to use on him. Sveta had mentioned those a time or two in her stories and Ilya knew how Shane disliked giving instead of receiving. Maybe that would make things hurt less. Maybe this whole situation wasn’t hurting Shane at all.
For all Ilya knew, Shane was out there having the time of his life. He got to go on dates, go have fun, be himself as much as he could. He could love and be loved without having to hide behind game schedules, code names, secret hotel rooms, deleted pictures, anything. He was free. Ilya wanted that for both of them so badly, just under very different circumstances.
None of that mattered in the long run. It had been days of his mental battle with the information. Ilya had barely slept, concerned about if they were happy, if she cared as much as he didn’t want to admit he did.
Then, in the midst of his buried inner turmoil, he saw them out when he was trying to escape the thoughts about them. They were freely out dancing, enjoying each other, big smiles and sweet kisses and wandering hands. Ilya had been in a rush then. He needed to distract himself. He couldn’t just leave, that friend of Rose’s had seen him, and to leave so soon would just be admitting to himself how horrible he felt. To lose a game. To lose Shane. To lose himself in the process of it all.
So he didn’t leave, he didn’t run like a coward. No, he was worse. It wasn’t even close to a challenge for him to get a girl plastered to his front, dancing and grabbing and doing all the things he was used to in clubs. It felt wrong, her perfume too sweet and her sweat at her neck too sour. Then, to top it all off, he’d caught Shane’s eyes just as he was scraping teeth over that woman’s neck, making her throw her head back as his hands roamed over her. Shane looked so lost and all Ilya wanted to do was take him home, wrap him in a blanket, and sit him down with a soda can and a shitty movie he’d seen a thousand times. Anything to make him look less hurt and out of place.
He couldn’t do that though. That wasn’t his job. That was never his job. That’s what Shane had Rose for. Hopefully she’d pick up on his discomfort and do that for him. Ilya couldn’t. All he could do was grind up on that lady a little harder until he had a reasonable break to get away. If he ended his night alone with nothing but a pillow and a snoring roommate beside him, that was nobody’s business.
All of it came to a head at practice a few days later. Just long enough out that nobody would be suspicious, not that it was the intention. If he could have, Ilya would have kept the whole thing bottled up like a good Slavic man would until the day he died. No, some force in the universe had to have a sense of humor, specifically one targeting his misfortunes.
Everyone was playing sloppy. There was a whole one person on their A-game in the entire arena and it was the fucking janitor cleaning up from the previous night’s game. It had been a rather devastating home loss, 5-1 to fucking Chicago of all places. Ilya had scored the only Boston point and it was by pure accident, shot just as he tripped which threw their goalie off. Coach had laughed at it so hard he had actual tears on his face but Ilya knew what it was. A fluke. A mistake. Another thing on the pile of wrong, wrong, wrong.
That feeling followed him home, staring at the ceiling in an empty bed that he swore he could still feel the missing weight in. Those few stolen moments that had given him hope for the future now just felt cold. He didn’t sleep, instead memorizing down to the brushstrokes in the textured paint above him. He’d spent too much money on it for what it was. Those strokes were sloppy too.
They’d been playing a scrimmage, just getting their bearings back together after their string of losses. If Ilya could help it, he wasn’t going to let them continue it. One moment, Ilya had the puck. Before his brain caught up to his feet, someone’s stick caught on his skate just right to knock him off balance. In a desperate effort to save the play, he slapped the puck off to a teammate that was foolishly left open. He caught it, and to Ilya’s utter disbelief, shot it off to one of the rookie players instead of taking the clean, perfectly open shot at the goal he would have noticed if he’d just picked his head up.
It was out of his hands, all Ilya could do was look on in bewildered horror as the rookie took his sweet sweet time lining up the shot, absolutely in no kind of hurry and dodging defensemen as he moved around way too slow to sink the shot perfectly. He made it in just fine and gave an enthusiastic fist pump, seemingly unaware of the pure idiocy he’d just been part of. Players from both sides were laughing with him about the sheer chaos that had went down, none noticing Ilya standing back in quiet anger.
When Ilya found his voice, it was shaking. His whole body was. “What the actual fuck was that?”
The rookie froze, the smile on his face crumbling as he turned to face Ilya, finally taking in the death glare from his captain. “I, um, I don’t know, Cap. I scored it though!” He flashed a nervous smile that disappeared just as fast as the first one as a nerve visibly twitched in Ilya’s jaw.
“Fucking mess is what that was.”
“I was just trying to get lined up for the perfect shot-”
“You have to take the shot at all! It doesn’t matter if you’re perfect lined up. Just take the fucking shot!” Ilya could feel the strain in his throat from how loud he was getting, could hear his own voice echoing off the ice and plexiglass. The kid looked at him with more fear than understanding, and finally something just snapped.
“You’re not going to be perfect, but you need to do something! Just shoot! Go for it! You are here to put puck in goal, not to dance around until things look nice and pretty! If you don’t try, you don’t score. The longer you fuck around like that, the easier it is for someone to take it from you!”
“Roz,” Marleau had slid up next to him at some point, Ilya couldn’t tell when. He placed a hand on Ilya’s shoulder to try and calm him down, but if anything it just made him crumble worse.
“You get it taken from you and it’s so much harder to get it back! You don’t know if you ever will and you just have to sit and watch it go! Watch someone else take it along and do what you never could and you just- you just have to… I…just… watch it-“
All too quickly, everything hit Ilya like a full speed freight train. He was aware of the eyes on him, looking in concern and pity as their strong captain was cracking at the seams over a lucky goal. Tears that he hadn’t noticed coming in were streaming freely down his face and he couldn’t pull enough air into his lungs to keep up with the yelling he’d been doing nothing but embarrassing himself with. Before he could even register how truly pathetic he looked, his skates went out from under him.
Marleau caught him before he fully hit the ice, but he still went to his knees hard. It wasn’t much, just an arm at his back to keep him stable. Ilya couldn’t look up to face him, terrified of what he’d see in his expression. Confusion, fear, annoyance, anger, maybe even pity? He couldn’t bear it.
“Rozy,” Marleau’s voice wasn’t very clear, like he was in a hallway outside whatever room Ilya was in. “Rozy, chill out, breathe, man. You’re giving yourself a panic attack.”
Ilya shook his head. He’d had panic attacks before, some, not many. His were usually the quiet kind, the dissociative ones where he didn’t quite feel attached to his body. He felt every single fucking thing right then. Every stitch in his gear was pressing into him and the cold from the ice beneath him was seeping into his skin through the layers. His whole body was trembling with it. He still couldn’t breathe.
Everyone around him stopped cold. They’d been listening to the yelling, probably marking it down in their heads as just another moment of the Great Ilya Rozanov being an asshole for no reason. No one had expected his voice to crack. No one expected him to cry. No one expected him to go down like that, and now that he was there, no one knew what to do. Ilya couldn’t blame them. He wouldn’t want to step in either. He did everything he could to ground himself where he was. They weren’t going to help him. They were going to watch until he got his shit together, so he needed to get it together now. Too bad for him that the pressure only made the air harder to attain.
Before he knew it, he had hands hauling him up to his feet. One set was probably Marleau, the other he couldn’t place. Maybe Coach? He thought he was hearing Coach’s voice nearby. The touch felt wrong, sharp and suffocating even if it was just at his arms. They held onto him as he got his footing. One, two, three attempts before the blades of his skates found enough traction to keep him upright. That wasn’t like him, and he could almost feel the worried glances getting thrown over his shoulders.
With a little pressure he got scooted off, and the hands only remained on him until he had shakily stepped off the ice. No, that wasn’t true. One hand stayed on his shoulder for a brief moment, only long enough for Ilya to hear his coach, far away just like Marleau’s had been. There was a sigh that sounded an awful lot like the familiar tone of disappointment in the steady delivery. “Go shower and cool off a bit, Rozanov. Go home and we’ll try again tomorrow.” One solid clap to his shoulder and Ilya was alone in the tunnel.
With a deep breath, he pushed his feet to move. For the first time since he was a kid, he was unsteady on his skates. It almost felt like he’d been drinking. He hadn’t been, at least not in the last 12ish hours. The fog settled around him as he walked into the locker room. At very bare minimum he could follow coach’s orders. He’d already fucked up practice, he wasn’t going to let himself fuck that up too. He just had to get changed, shower, and go home. He could do that. It was easy.
Ilya didn’t even make it to the showers.
He got as far as striping down to his boxers and his compression shirt before he was sat on the floor with his back to the sharp corner of the bench, the sobs taking over his body. His vision was totally blurred out and he couldn’t honestly tell if it was from the tears or the lack of oxygen. Most likely both.
He’d hit rock bottom, and it wasn’t fair to take the pain of his failed love life out on his team. The team was supposed to function together, to build each other up and correct mistakes and to make each other play better. He was supposed to be a leader of that. He was loud, rude, unfiltered, everyone and their mother’s dog called him an asshole, but he’d never been outright cruel like that before. They were supposed to be a working unit. The guys liked calling them a family. Ilya didn’t have a good example of that in Russia to model off of, and he’d really let that show this time, hadn’t he?
Oh God, he was becoming like them. Like every last one of them.
His beautiful mother, full of humor and masks for every occasion, hiding each emotion that wasn’t joy until she was suffocating under the surface. Ilya sat back against the bench, still trying and failing to catch his breath. Was this how she felt? So tired and so upset that she couldn’t even get the voices saying she was too much and yet still not good enough to stop long enough to so much as breathe? Was this going to be his reality from now on too?
His father. Cruel. Cold. Unforgiving. So brutally focused on success that small victories were never good enough. That rookie had still made the shot. It had sucked but he still made it and he hadn’t deserved the response Ilya gave. It made him sick. Fuck, it had been so fucking easy to lash out that quickly. He was better than that. He thought he was better than that. He had taken lecture after loud, depreciating lecture from his father and had told himself he’d never be like that. And yet, it had been so fucking easy.
His brother, constantly chasing a high with no regard to the pressures he put on others. The slurs that would fall from Alexei’s mouth when it was just them two rang in his head. He’d avoid throwing them at his little brother when there was other company. No, he was too smart to say something where he could jeopardize his precious allowance check. The words stayed at the forefront of Ilya’s mind. What if the team knew what was wrong, what he was feeling? Would they hate him for getting so involved that he broke? Would they care that he was like this because of a man? He didn’t know. If his brother, someone meant to grow with him and always be by his side, could resent him for it, then what on earth would happen with his team, the people that were paid to stand around and occasionally listen to him?
And just like all of them, he was alone in a crowded space. The sounds of skates on ice and yelled plays echoed even down the hall. Everyone was out there, and there he was, wallowing in his own self hatred. Not an uncommon setup, but usually he was at least still mentally put together and still skating when it happened.
The last thing he needed to be thinking about was Shane. He had a team out there, probably concerned that he was on the brink of getting institutionalized, and yet those stupid dark eyes that haunted everything from his wet dreams to his nightmares were the first thing that popped up. Shane would hate to see him this way. He’d look at him like there was something wrong, start analyzing things to fix.
Ilya couldn’t fix this.
Shane couldn’t fix this. Well, maybe he could. Maybe not entirely fix it, but he could help. Just one kiss, one little smile, one fleeting moment to let Ilya know it was okay and it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t get that from Shane anymore. Those sweet, guarded little smiles were all hers now, and he had to get over it. That was so much easier to say than to actually do.
Ilya had no clue how long he sat there. No one came into the locker room. He heard the door crack open a little at one point, but no one came in and whoever it was kept silent. They didn’t want to bother him. They didn’t want to set him off again. It didn’t matter to him. At least he’d calmed down enough to breathe properly. The humiliation of the whole ordeal finally hit when he had enough air properly in his lungs. There was no way he was going to be able to face the team for a bit. He sent up a desperate prayer that this wouldn’t be an outburst they’d chirp him too hard about.
Finally, Ilya gathered as much strength as he had left, which wasn’t much, to just get dressed. He could shower at home, in his own place, where he could go right into comfy clothes and probably collapse in the guest room like he should have done in the first place. As he tied the strings on his sweatpants, his phone buzzed with a notification. It was only a game, some stupid puzzle thing he’d gotten to fill his time, but it still got the device in his hand.
He opened it, planning to call Svetlana. A small, nagging voice that sounded a little like the woman herself and a lot like Shane floated in his mind, telling him it probably wasn’t good for him to be around after an episode like that. She would pick up, and she would make him feel better with as little as a dish of ice cream and no complaints about his choice of movie. When the screen was open, immediately he went to his favorite contacts. It took him only about a second and a half to realize that was a bad idea.
He only had three contacts favorited: Svetlana, his coach, and “Jane”. His first thought was that he very easily could just call Shane. Either his voice would help or hurt, and Ilya didn’t know what would be better in that situation. What would even happen if he did call? Would that weird little blocked sound come through? Would he get sent straight to voicemail? Would the number have been changed and some random teen with their first phone and no sense of emotional maturity pick up? Even worse, would Shane pick up and have Rose there with him?
Ilya’s fingers hovered over the call button for just a second longer, but he just turned his phone off instead. He’d rather die on the cold concrete floor than be reminded again of what he’d lost.
Honestly, that wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Nobody would really look that hard if they found him dead like that, they wouldn’t know why it had happened. It would all remain a secret, just like how this whole thing had been for years. He’d go in silence, grieving something the world didn’t know existed. He’d join his mom in letting love kill her for holding on until she couldn’t take it. How poetic would that be?
No, he wouldn’t do that. Not there at least. There were nicer places if he got that desperate. Places with sloppy, uneven brushstrokes on the ceiling. Places with an awkwardly empty feeling. Places where the memory of scared doe eyes hung heavy.