Chapter Text
Ilya figures out the key to escaping the time loop on the third consecutive Tuesday. It isn’t exactly hard.
All things considered, it’s not one of his better days—if it were, nefarious cosmic forces or the universe or whatever the fuck else probably wouldn’t have made him relive it. It’s not his worst either, which isn’t saying much. That superlative was won years ago and will remain constant forever, never to be usurped.
Russia loses to Latvia in the morning. It’s not a devastating loss—2-3 in overtime—except for the fact that it is. Because this is his home country and this is his national team and he is 22 and was trusted to be their captain anyway. And he let them lose to fucking Latvia.
The problem has been apparent since the training camps: there was never any chemistry, and Ilya enjoys the envious ways players look at him usually, but these guys are all too busy letting it make them bitter to let it make them better. They’re mostly KHL guys, and it’s not that they aren’t good, but the NHL is the better league and the best Russian players tend to jump ship. The Olympic committee had been apparently more concerned with prioritising players who were loyal to Mother Russia than they were acknowledging this fact, so the team is Ilya, Alikin who plays defence for Calgary, Fadeyev who goal tends in Anaheim, and twenty KHL players. Ilya is the youngest of them and any respect they give him is grudging and tinged with jealousy, and he’s been placed on a line with an enforcer, Dolzhenkov, who is almost forty and well past his prime but too beloved to overlook. Ilya has never once needed an enforcer. He can fight his own battles and has proven it hundreds of times. And this is Olympic hockey: there is next to no fighting. Dolzhenkov is a waste of a roster spot, let alone a first line one, and what the team really needs is a play maker who can keep up with Ilya on the ice.
All Dolzhenkov is good for is cross-checking Latvia’s centre halfway through the third, and giving them the power play that lets them tie the game and take it into overtime. Ilya gets in his face after the last whistle, and shouts until he is lightheaded, and it doesn’t make him feel any better. Doesn’t reverse the loss.
All in all, it probably isn’t Ilya’s fault. But knowing something and believing it are different things, and Ilya doesn’t believe it at all.
He can’t stand to look at any of them after the fact. The game is over and their Olympics are over and Krasnodar Krai is close enough to home that the language is right even if the accent is wrong, and his father has made the trip for the occasion. It’s all wrong in every other way—too small, too few trees, the smell of the sea and the shadow of the Caucasus—but it’s Russia and the Winter Olympics so the expectation, the recognition, that frequently borders on too much has become entirely suffocating and he can’t get away from it.
The rooms in the Olympic village are all shared. Three of them on three single beds. The rest of the team heads back to them to mope, at least until they’ve regained enough energy to leave and drink until there are things more lurid in the mind than regret, and Ilya needs to be anywhere else. The list of places to go is limited.
It takes him to the nosebleeds above a rink that smells a little like home because they all do. It takes him to a place where he can watch male figure skaters skating their short programs to dramatic, wordless music from a distance that obscures the details. Smooths them out. The grand sweeps and leaps and spins are distinct and decisive, and every one that doesn’t end in a fall is perfect. He wonders if those men are lonely out there alone, if any part of them wishes there was someone to pick them up when they stumble, like Ilya sometimes wishes he were able to win or lose under his own power and nobody else's.
It makes him think about his mother, who could never do more than slide forward on skates, but would watch the ice dancers whenever she got the opportunity, until she could recreate their routines, the footwork adapted to better suit the creaky hardwood of their apartment floors. Who, whenever she had the energy to talk, had also had the energy to dance. Who had clapped and cheered when he had demonstrated every flashy, wobbly spin, jump and glide he had managed to reverse engineer on hockey skates and never shown to another soul unless he had managed to find a way to turn it into hockey.
Nobody will be looking for Ilya Rozanov here.
One of Team Canada’s skaters finishes with a grand flourish. His shirt is long-sleeved, made of dark fabric that clings to the sweaty skin beneath. It is studded all down the arms with something that glitters garishly beneath the bright, white lights. Ilya envies him on principle, for any number of nebulous things he doesn’t want to dwell on. His mother is a distant enough memory that he can’t tell whether the routine was a good one. If this man has any chance of medalling.
He spots Hollander in the audience a few moments later. He is already staring, all dark eyed and obvious like someone who doesn’t understand quite how big the everything Ilya stands to lose is. He saw Ilya first, and Ilya doesn’t know how long he has been watching.
Ilya can say nothing to him. It's either that or too much. He cuts his eyes away in the hopes that Hollander might understand that what he means is not here and maybe not ever again. Not anywhere. Not with me. But it has always been part of Hollander’s charm that he misses these things. That on the ice he notices every minute detail faster than almost anyone else can, and off it he needs everything to be stark and obvious or else he can’t react to any of it. People will notice if Ilya shouts “Don’t!” across this arena so he says nothing. So Hollander excuses himself and heads Ilya’s way, and, as much as Ilya knows they can’t speak, he wants it enough that he forgets he can just leave.
“Go away,” he says anyway, because Hollander up close and in his Team Canada fleece is soft around the edges. Ilya envies him too, for some of the same reasons. Hollander looks at his lips when he talks rather than his eyes. Ilya knows this so looks back down at the ice.
Hollander tries anyway. To get through to him, to have a conversation, to pretend they have ever been anything resembling friends. To ignore that all they have ever had to offer each other is fleeting pleasure and the sort of truth that inevitably undoes everything else. He’s hard to hate in a way Ilya makes up for.
He leaves anyway, eventually. Because his patience is far from infinite. Because Ilya is listening to every cue from his fear and none from his instincts. Because here at this intersection between failure and Russia and Hollander, Ilya feels less than human and more than doomed. Hollander doesn’t need to share his mess.
And then a party. As if that could possibly be how he wanted to end this day. It had been planned weeks ago, when everyone involved had felt safe in the assumption they’d be celebrating a win. He’d bought the suit, got it tailored, cared about how it fit.
He ties his bow tie himself and is indifferent to the fact that he’s probably doing it slightly wrong. He stands in a big, empty room inhabited only by his body and his reflection, and the two stare at each other, each waiting for the other’s composure to break first. His expression is hard and flat. The burn of the alcohol tightens it at the corners rather than loosening it from the inside out. His father comes in, presses another glass into his hand, fiddles with the tie and remembers Latvia, that it was Ilya’s fault, but forgets that the mother of his children has been dead for a decade. He exists somewhere outside of time, where the present can persist without the past.
Ilya speaks to Sergei Vetrov, then Svetlana Vetrova who has made it her job to save him for years now. He follows her to an ornate bathroom—a display of opulence and excess nobody needs and, by that same virtue, everybody wants—where Sasha is waiting with cocaine and loose shoulders and an easy posture Ilya has almost forgotten to remember is as much a performance as anything else.
Sasha gets it in a way Hollander can’t. That to be Russian and bisexual, which is what he guesses he is, even if every circumstance of his life has conspired to make the label useless regardless of how comfortably it fits, is to be ultimately dishonest. You sleep around in France or North America however you’re inclined to, so long as the circle of people who know stays small enough. Sasha’s circle gets to be bigger, because he doesn’t feel the weight of the fame and the way the law makes it heavier, because his life in Paris isn’t as fragile as Ilya’s is in Boston, but he still understands the circle. The fact that it can never become common knowledge back home because home isn’t safe and is getting unsafer. Because home needs to remain a place you can go back to, a place you can marry a woman who is or is not part of the circle, and you and everybody else involved will decide to forget that there was ever a secret to keep at all. Because if you have the option to be normal you know you don’t have the option not to take it.
Still. He does cocaine like they are still sixteen. Like he has nothing to lose. Like his body is just a place he lives and not the only thing he has to offer. He kisses Ilya like there is no interstice. Bites Ilya’s lip the way he usually likes but now is only annoyed by. Because this is dangerous. And somewhere along the line that has ceased to be part of the fun.
He leaves and he’s barely tipsy and the mattress is hard and the air is stale and he thinks that tomorrow will be better because there aren’t many ways it can be worse.
He wakes up on Tuesday. The light is the same and the air is the same and the way that Ivakin curses him out for the early alarm is the same. They had been in juniors together, something between six years and a lifetime ago, and he still calls Ilya Ilyukha. Still remembers the legend of him. He’s only a year older than Ilya is. Smiley and loud and lacking intensity, lacking urgency. Still coming upon his success by happenstance. Still believing he’s owed it.
Ilya feels fuzzy as he heads down to the canteen for breakfast at the same time as he did yesterday. He sees the same faces in the same hallways, all the way down to the Latvian centre who stops him on the stairs to wish him good luck in clumsy, mispronounced, over-practised Russian with a genuine smile on his face. He accepts, perhaps too easily, that the first run of this day was probably a premonition of sorts. Divine intervention. The universe telling him No. Do it again. Better this time. Mostly because he doesn’t know what he gains by deciding it’s all just a weird coincidence. Hockey players don’t believe in those; everything has weight to it and weight turns into superstition turns into the only way you can win this game is if St-Simon leaves his garage unlocked again.
So canteen. Careful breakfast that is heavy enough but not too heavy, that adheres to a loose diet plan that is still too restrictive for his tastes. Conversation he has had before. He starts telling Alikin’s jokes before he can, because the way he quickly becomes confused and distressed is much funnier than the jokes ever were.
Ilya tries to think of ways to change the trajectory of the game without pulling Dolzhenkov aside and telling him no cross-checking under any circumstances. He tries to remember the minutiae—the tells in their feints, the weak points in their defence, how he had managed to tip the puck past their goalie the first time. He tries to replay the whole game in his head and his memory is good but not perfect, and he can still only see the ice through his own eyes.
He tells the team what he remembers: 17 cheats left, 63 is faster than you think, 56 wants you to forget he is on the ice. Don’t. It’s probably cheating, but nobody will ever be able to prove that, and he cares more right now about being able to look his father in the eyes than integrity.
Dolzhenkov still cross-checks but Russia’s penalty kill is better informed. Fadeyev blocks the shot he let in last time, the angle sharper than it should be because Alikin is right where Latvia’s 56 wants to be, and Ilya steals away with it on the rebound. Takes advantage of the fact that he is the fastest player on the ice and races it into the neutral zone before anyone is even on his tail. He wastes as much of their time as he can and then their power play is over and Ilya is back on the bench at the end of his shift and there are five minutes left in the third and Russia is still a point ahead. Latvia keeps trying for as long as they have the chance but that’s it. The game is over. Russia wins.
Subsequently the rest of the day changes shape around the victory. There is no commiserating, no running, no reckless abandon because there are still upcoming games they have to be in tip-top shape for. Ilya heads back to the Olympic village with his team and isn’t bothered by the weight of heavy arms across his back because these are people who are happy with him. Whose respect has turned honest. Who smile and mean it. Who are thinking of new jokes Ilya didn’t get to hear the first time around, that aren’t any better than the ones from the morning but are better received.
Ilya doesn’t run to the arena where the figure skaters fight gravity and mostly win. He doesn’t see Hollander. He doesn’t think about his mother any more than he usually does, doesn’t stop to wonder if she would hate him like his teammates would if they knew what he was. He barely even thinks, in a locker room drowned in sound, surrounded by cheers of his own name pronounced correctly for once, about how quickly he could turn this whole thing sour. Because he won’t. Because he has been lying for so long that it is second nature and the truth doesn’t scare him so long as it never leaves the circle. Because he has always been a little bit obvious and he could still count the number of people who have ever been able to see through him on one hand. Or at least the ones willing to admit to it.
They celebrate together, lay out plans to beat Finland, review game footage, and leave as a unit. Leave with Ilya at the front of the group because they’re celebrating him.
His father doesn’t try to fix his tie this time. He doesn’t have anything to say about Latvia whatsoever. Or about Ilya’s mother. His eyes are cold and blue and hard and there used to be an unalienable anger in them but now they are dull. The information of this big empty room and this gala Sveta is less incentivised to rush Ilya away from, barely even seems to register. Grigori Rozanov fills space without inhabiting it. He shrinks beneath the weight of all those polished medals on his lapels, the shine of them beneath the chandeliers. Gaudy and glittering. He looks nothing like a Canadian figure skater and Ilya honestly feels little for him besides pity and the vestige of a fear he should have long since outgrown. He certainly doesn’t feel any envy.
He and Sasha talk less this time around. Ilya still doesn’t kiss back.
When he wakes up and it’s Tuesday again Ilya does some reflecting while Ivakin groans. Three repeats makes a loop, not a premonition. Three repeats means what the universe took issue with was not the hockey.
There isn’t that much else it could be. The situation is thrown into sharp relief, and he can acknowledge that a more stable person might have a harder time accepting an impossible situation for what it is, but the answer comes simply to him. Plainly. If the problem isn’t hockey then it’s Hollander. He’s the only other thing on Ilya’s mind, the only other significant part of the original day. The lingering infatuation Ilya needs to forget.
So this day in February is playing on repeat. So to get out of it Ilya has to talk to Hollander—maybe shut him down for good, maybe be honest about why, maybe admit what he wants, maybe explain why he can never have any of it. So time means nothing, and responsibility means nothing, and the eyes on Ilya’s back won’t go away but they won’t remember anything either.
Ivakin slides out of his bed and onto the floor and Ilya lets himself fall just a little bit in love with the time loop.
He takes it easy this time, just in case he’s wrong. Just in case the loop breaks. He takes unnecessary risks in the game, sure, but Russia wins anyway, by two points rather than one. And the game is actually fun because it doesn’t matter. Because it can just be hockey and not reputation. Because hockey is a game he gets to play for a living, and right now it is one without politics. He takes a high stick to the jaw in the second and Dolzhenkov throws a punch before the ref can call a penalty.
He drinks too much afterwards because it makes the party more bearable. He kisses Sasha back because he’s drunker than he should be. Because the fear has turned dull at the edges. This time around, with the brand new bruise blooming, the bite hurts. The kiss doesn’t feel right. Sasha is like an old pair of boots that doesn’t fit right but are still better than trekking barefoot in the snow. The alcohol is expensive and it tastes bad on his tongue in Ilya’s mouth.
Another Tuesday. It occurs to Ilya that his body won’t hold the memory of practice but his mind will. He fine tunes skills he has never had enough time to iron out perfectly. He stops thinking about Latvia and starts watching videos of Hollander’s best moments and justifies the obsession by recreating them, improving them where he can. He turns a fluke into a new move. He stares at freckles whenever the camera gets close enough for him to see them.
He plays Latvia this way and that way and wins in overtime one game because he got too experimental in regulation time, and scores two goals and three assists in another. He watches the way people around him react. The surprise. The way he is different from how he was yesterday. The way he is watched enough for people to notice it.
He does the cocaine when he is offered it. He fucks Sasha without kissing him because the kissing is wrong. Svetlana finds him later, chides him for being reckless, and cares about everything she thinks he is risking. Will never understand that he is risking nothing because nothing matters.
He skips the game because he doesn’t want to play it. He finds a shady bar and lets a man who knows his name buy him a drink and touch his hands, his jaw, his lips. He lets the day turn to night and does everything that feels good in the moment and hellish in the aftermath because there will be no aftermath. He doesn’t think twice about where the drugs are coming from. He lets the drinks be free even if he has more money than he needs and they cost him in other ways. He feels the thrum of music and smells the sweat of bodies packed in close and sprayed in all manner of different colognes. A camera flashes, his phone starts to buzz in his pocket and doesn’t stop. He stays awake past midnight and doesn’t go back to the village and his head swims and his body slumps and he wakes up in a bed he didn’t return to. Another Tuesday. He isn’t counting them.
He plays a violent game. Takes three minors for roughing before a ten minute misconduct for a hit that was entirely unprovoked, that he only threw because he could. They lose that one. He skips the party.
He beats Latvia. He makes a show of it. Just in case this is the one that sticks. And then he does what he has been too scared to do this whole time and finds Hollander who is right there in the audience at a figure skating final, right where he had been the first time around. Performing the same loop.
He excuses himself and heads up to where Ilya is waiting in the nosebleeds, and Ilya speaks to him without really saying anything. Because he misses speaking to him. Because the loop is starting to feel lonely. Because he wants to see the freckles and the soft edges and the dark eyes that don’t realise how much they’re giving away.
“How does it feel to be home?” Hollander asks, and he says it too genuinely. Ilya scoffs and admires him up close without hiding that he’s doing it.
“Does Iqaluit feel like home to you?”
Three blinks. Hollander screws up his nose and everything about him makes Ilya’s palms sweat. “Why would I be in Iqaluit?”
Ilya doesn’t answer him. He thinks about home, about how hockey is the only reason he ever left Moscow, about how without it he would probably be stuck in the same city he was born in and it still wouldn’t fit right. He thinks about being nowhere. He thinks about how the loop is the closest he can get.
Hollander pivots. “Does your room smell like mould too?” The sort of thing you say when you need to say something but can’t think of anything better.
“Probably.” It’s the sort of thing he doesn’t notice anymore. The sort of thing that becomes usual in old buildings, that you learn to overlook because you can’t afford the distraction. A Russian boy, he does not explain, is necessarily like a callus. A person built up via attrition. A Russian boy whose brother calls him pidor needs to be something harder, something a blade won’t slide through. If he was the sort of person who would notice the mould he wouldn’t be the sort of person that survives here.
He leaves before he can say anything more revealing. He goes to the party. He behaves. No drugs and no Sasha. Just in case.
It doesn’t matter in the end. Another Tuesday. He steps in front of a car because it’s the simplest way he can think of to find out what dying feels like. The answer is a lot, then not very much at all. He gets to feel it only briefly before it’s Tuesday again, and Ivakin is cursing him out again, and he is impossibly alive.
He does a lot one day and nothing the next. He tries to think of more interesting ways to use the loop. He performs an impromptu dance halfway through the second period in his mother’s memory, and falls flat on his ass. He does it again the next day and the next, until he can stay on his feet even if he’s wobbly.
He interrupts other events. He screams and screams and shouts all the things he has always wanted to say and never been able to because the consequences would be too dire. He tells the truth and his team and his country turn just as sour as he thought they would. He falls asleep on the cold floor of a cell with broken ribs and a black eye and wakes up like nothing has happened in a bed that's scratchy but warm.
He gets bored of catharsis. He falls back into the hockey, the infinite time and the infinite loops. He scores the first Michigan in Olympic history and skips the celebrations to tweet out I like dick too, btw to all of his followers just to see what the immediate reaction is. And it is immediate.
They think he was hacked at first. Or that his phone was stolen. He takes a photo of himself in all his Team Russia gear with his lips pursed giving a thumbs up, types the word cocksucker over it, and posts that too. The notifications come in fast and frequent and intense so he turns them off and keeps reading anyway.
He doesn’t leave the Russian barracks of the village even though he knows everyone will have seen it by the time they get back. Even though he knows they will react with disbelief only briefly before they turn to fists and remind him they all fight for a living. He wants it to hurt. It’s not like he’ll have to live with the consequences.