Chapter Text
“Marlow, are you still open to hosting one of the rookies?”
It’s not really what he was expecting to hear when he was called into LeClaire’s office on what was supposed to be a day off. All things considered, it’s a best-case scenario, in fact. He tries not to give away that he was prepared to be chastised for at least one of the things on his ever-growing list of minor infractions that would swiftly add up against him. He tries not to give away that there is a list at all.
He nods. “For rookie camp?”
“At least. I’m hoping he lives up to expectations and sticks around.” LeClaire is almost smiling to himself as he says it, like it is some sort of private joke and he is a man who has never smiled wide enough to show teeth anywhere Cliff could see it. He takes just a moment to process. Slowly.
“You want me to host Rozanov? I thought you were asking Koslov. Did he say no?”
“Rozanov didn’t want to billet with a Russian. Thought it would be better for his English to live with a native speaker for a little while.”
“I’m not the right person to learn English from.” It’s not that Cliff is trying to get out of hosting. Really. It’s just that it’s true. He passed high school English by the skin of his teeth, and he only managed that by cheating. He doesn’t remember the last time he read a book. The entire team complains about his sober texts being harder to read than anyone else’s drunk ones. He doesn’t think he has ever used the comma on his phone’s keyboard, let alone the apostrophe.
“If he can understand you he’ll be able to understand anyone.” LeClaire shrugs. “Look, you can back out if you want. Most of the young guys don’t even offer themselves up for these things. But if you don’t want to do it, tell me right now so I can organise something else.”
“No.” Cliff shakes his head. He had made the offer in the first place because he had wanted to help, and if helping meant filling up a little of the empty space in his brand new house then so be it. It’s his first year off his entry level contract—after two full seasons, and a post-NCAA debut late enough in the season that they had already been eliminated from playoff contention and had nothing left to lose by playing their new rookies—and he has perhaps been enjoying his new-found wealth a little too much. The house is one of the more responsible purchases he has made, and one of the first, and he maybe went a little crazy. Or, not crazy so much as just too much.
He grew up in an apartment in Atlantic City, where his bedroom was a converted office, and then it had become clear that he was good and he started billeting. The homes were different, as were the locations, and it had felt odd but not lonely, because there were always other families there, and Cliff has never struggled to make friends. It’s part of being a hockey player, he thinks. Part of playing a team sport. Especially a team sport where it’s basically expected you’ll bleed for a teammate’s honour.
But now his house is too big and it’s a house, and it has guest rooms because it’s supposed to, but the only guests that ever stay the night sleep in his bed. He hadn’t realised how much it would take to properly furnish the place either, and now everything feels half-finished and impersonal and nothing like home. If he hears a noise it’s just the house settling or a bird outside, or his neighbour’s stupid tree tapping the glass. He’s started missing the sound of his dad’s obnoxiously loud sneeze, which can’t be a good sign. He’d get a pet if he wasn’t on the road so much. As it stands, a rookie is probably close enough.
“I’m just surprised, is all. Still happy to host.” He’s nervous too. He doesn’t know if that’s just because it’s Rozanov. If it’s because he’s expecting a language barrier, or because he’s been assigned the only rookie that has already been designated a legend to live up to. Or maybe he has just, in all of his efforts to learn how to live alone, forgotten how to live with anyone else.
“Good.” LeClaire nods once, twice, pauses to look at Cliff with something that is too intense to be gratitude, and nods again. By now Cliff is able to recognise that this is how LeClaire says go away, so he leaves.
Rozanov is due to arrive today. Cliff isn’t freaking out. Not even a little bit.
He has done a grocery run and only gone a little bit over the top because he has no idea what this kid will like. He asked Koslov, the only other Russian on the team, and Varkov, who has Russian grandparents, what he should buy and took every recommendation a little too seriously. He stared at a shelf full of bottles of vodka for too long, wondering how different they could really taste, and whether or not he should be encouraging under aged drinking. He tidied before his cleaner came over. He organised his fridge. He’s feeling very casual and normal about the whole thing. He has the word privyet written in sharpie on his left palm because every time he tried to say zdravstvuy he sounded like a cat hacking up a hairball.
He leaves for the airport thirty minutes earlier than he has to, which is a new personal best that beats the previous one by about forty-five minutes. He drives through the rain and is more aware than he has been in a long time of just how grey Boston is. From the sky, to the buildings, to the pavement and the clogged roads, to the water of the Charles and the bay. He turns on the radio to something bright and poppy and unfamiliar. He sits in traffic and fidgets in his seat.
When he gets to the airport he stands and waits with Welcome to Boston Rozanov! written on a whiteboard, which sort of undermines the whole low-key, anonymous, dark sunglasses and cap pulled down low thing he has going on. Boston isn’t the biggest hockey city by any means, but these people care about their sports enough that it isn’t shocking when he gets recognised. Especially not when he’s holding a sign with the name of the most notable prospect the NHL has had in years written on it. Well. Tied most notable prospect. Made all the more notable by his equal. By the fact that there has been no one like them for a long time and now there are two of them at once.
Cliff has no idea what to expect from him.
He’s almost prettier than Cliff is anticipating. He has a cap on, pulled down, and his blonde hair curls around its edges, and he moves through the crowd like it isn’t even an obstacle, and Cliff gets the sense people would be looking at him even if they didn’t know who he was. He has a suitcase and a duffle bag and that seems like not very much at all for someone moving their entire life halfway across the world.
“Privyet,” Cliff says.
Rozanov shakes his hand. When his eyes meet Cliff’s they are blue and bright under the artificial light and Cliff can’t read them. “Hello.”
He doesn’t talk much on the drive home. He isn’t impolite, he nods to show he’s listening, squints sometimes before he does it like he is thinking something over. But he is quiet. When Cliff starts to run out of things to say he switches the radio back on, to the same station. Rozanov scoffs and it sounds almost like a laugh. He rolls his eyes at Cliff and reaches a hand slowly to the dial, like he is giving Cliff the opportunity to tell him not to do it, and turns it slowly, methodically, until he finds a station he likes.
“We’re really excited to have you on the team,” Cliff tells him, after he has been silent for too long and he can’t even pretend to be distracted by driving because they’ve been stuck in traffic for the past ten minutes.
“Yes,” Rozanov says.
He gets out of Cliff’s car as soon as it is stationary in his driveway, stretching out his long, pale limbs until the joints crack. It’s the most noise he has made so far. He looks up at the facade with a face that is blank and gives nothing away, and refuses to let Cliff carry either of his bags. He slips his shoes off his feet as soon as he’s through the door, which Cliff has never done before but does now, in case leaving them on makes Rozanov think he’s some sort of slob. Maybe he is, just a little bit, but Rozanov can learn that later. It doesn’t need to be part of the first impression.
He gives him a tour. Nothing special, just “Here’s the kitchen, help yourself to whatever is in the fridge. The lounge is through there. We can play some Chel later, if you want. There’s a bathroom through that hallway. Laundry’s in the basement. Bedrooms are upstairs. Yours is the second on the right.”
Rozanov says, “thank you,” and they persist in almost silence for another ten minutes. Cliff offers him food and buys them both takeout and powers up his console because he can’t carry one-sided conversation indefinitely. Cliff worries he is the wrong rookie to make his house feel more lived in.
He stops worrying after he loses the third game, after having already lost the second and first. Rozanov relaxes into the couch with his feet tucked beneath his body, and he stares at the screen and mutters to himself in Russian that Cliff can’t understand but that breaks the tension anyway.
“Do not have to let me win,” he says in deep, heavily-accented English.
“Fuck you,” Cliff responds.
“Not my type.” Rozanov shrugs and wins again.
He still doesn’t say much. His grasp on English, or at least his confidence in speaking it, is clearly not great—still much better than Cliff’s wholly non-existent Russian. But he starts to relax and becomes immediately expressive. He gestures widely, flings his arms to the sides and sighs and groans and can communicate an awful lot with eye contact and a cocked eyebrow. He smiles and it consumes his face utterly. He sprawls across Cliff’s couch and into his space, and he smells nice. Like good cologne. That would probably surprise Cliff even if he hadn’t spent his morning on a long, international flight.
He’s nothing like Koslov. Cliff figures that out pretty quickly. He has a harder time deciding which of the two of them is weird. Probably Koslov. He’s a goalie; it’s basically a requirement. Rozanov is just very European in a way that catches Cliff off guard.
Cliff drives him to rookie camp and sticks around to watch it unfold. Rozanov tells him he doesn’t have to, which he already knows. He wants to. He wants to see if he lives up to expectations. He wants to know how anyone could ever live up to expectations like those.
He stands out amongst the other rookies. Not because he is the only one of them who is cocky or arrogant. Not even because he’s the only one of them who is good. There’s just something about him. The way he stands and the way he cocks his head to listen, and the way he twirls his stick in his hands and all of it is both careful and lazy at the same time. He is fast and strong and unafraid and he is funny in the practice games they have to play. He checks another rookie into the boards, chirps something short and biting that makes Cliff laugh, steals the puck and scores on a breakaway. It’s becoming increasingly clear that his English, sparse as it is, is oddly careful. His vocabulary is carefully curated. For hockey. For talking about hockey and making one liners that are funny and cutting and easily understood mid-game.
Cliff wonders if that’s how you get good enough to be part of Hollander-and-Rozanov. By making hockey everything. By learning a language for it. By leaving everything that isn’t hockey behind in Moscow. By continuing to take it deadly seriously, even when it’s obvious you’ve already won.
Rozanov receives a pass to the tape and doesn’t stop to look for the pass Cliff is scanning the ice for. He makes a slapshot from the point. Right on goal. It’s fast and it flies straight and the goalie takes it to the mask, hard enough to pop the straps. Before he can raise his hand and have the play stopped to fix it, one of Rozanov’s linemates has caught the rebound and poked it over the goal line.
The whistle comes after, and the goalie’s face is a little pale, a little shocked, and the writing is probably already on the wall for him; he’ll be sent down to the AHL for development and, if he’s lucky, he’ll be called up eventually. That’s the problem with new goalies: how easily their confidence is knocked and how simple it is to cut them down at the knees by throwing them in at the deep end. Rozanov is the deep end. Leaning on his stick with his hip cocked and his posture easy and his face still pretty beneath the visor. And the thing is he is so far from unassuming. It’s just that he’s something else entirely, and Cliff doesn’t know how to interpret it.
At home, Roz cleans up after himself. He fills up Cliff’s bathroom with expensive shampoo and conditioner and wordlessly throws out Cliff’s trusty three-in-one. He cooks for Cliff and it’s simple but it isn’t bad. He starts to give away the fact that he’s the sort of annoying person who is apparently naturally good at everything he does. He becomes Roz most of the time and Rozy occasionally. He is loud, if not talkative. He is angry in Russian over the phone and his voice sounds completely different. He holds easy conversation with one of the most beautiful women Cliff has ever seen in what must also be Russian but that sounds entirely softer, with his head in her lap and his feet on the arm of the couch. He gestures wilder, smiles wider, becomes loose at the joints and soft and honest in a language Cliff does not speak.
He brings girls home, occasionally two or three at a time, and doesn’t bother trying to sneak them in or out. Cliff appreciates having people to fill the space, and he has noise-cancelling headphones for when the noise changes shape, and Roz never lets Cliff catch him having sex on the couch so all is well and good. The beautiful girl, Svetlana, is the only notable repeat. Sometimes she even comes over for lunch that Cliff is looped into even if the conversation is lost on him, and then leaves. Roz comes home after most nights out, but not all.
They go out with the team, when everyone is back from their summer vacations and rookie camp is over and everyone is confident that Roz is exactly what they thought he was going to be. When he has proved that he won’t buckle under the weight of that. He has already met most of them. Made the sort of good impression that sets him up as irritating and annoyingly likeable. He beats the rest of them at darts until they get the point too. He makes every bullseye look lazy. His slightly gaudy, half-unbuttoned silk shirt makes the rest of them look cheap. There is something artful about the rumpled but not messy way his hair falls. Cliff is trying to formulate a non-pathetic way to ask him to share his secrets.
He dances. He drinks. Nobody checks his ID and he acts very much like he doesn’t expect anyone to. Cliff tries to point out pretty young girls in the bar. A few of them are obviously staring at him. Roz is unresponsive, too busy staring at the bartender, being bizarrely intense.
“He overcharge you or something?”
“Something.”
“Something?”
“Mm.”
It isn’t an unusual conversation to have with Roz. Stark and vague and empty. All barrier, no language. Cliff likes Roz well enough to not dig and prod and make him self-conscious about these hockey-less moments when his English falls short. He doesn’t usually need it in times like these. When his easy body and his artful hair and his pretty face can do the talking for him.
He ducks outside for a cigarette and the bartender slips away for a break and Cliff turns to Koslov in Roz’s absence.
“What do you think of our first draft pick?”
Koslov hums along to the pop-rock playing through the speakers, picks methodically at his cuticles, and adjusts the collar of his polo. He’s older, somewhat stoic, not an easy guy to be friends with but somehow harder to dislike. He doesn’t talk much. Something about Roz has made Cliff wonder for the first time if living a life in his second language has anything to do with it. “He’s good,” Koslov says, “Cocky.” He pauses to chew on his thumbnail and look at the door Roz slipped out of and has yet to come back through. “Not how I thought he’d be.”
And the thing about that is Cliff doesn’t know whether he completely agrees or couldn’t disagree more. Doesn’t know what he was expecting but knows that Roz stands out. With the way he dances and the way he holds himself and the way Cliff has met plenty of Europeans through hockey but none have ever tried so little to assimilate to being North American as Roz has. “What do you mean?”
Koslov shrugs and sips his beer. “Nothing much. He’s just from Moscow. City boy, I guess,” he says, which doesn’t mean anything in particular to Cliff.