Chapter Text
The brand shoot had been fine.
This was Ilya's assessment as he walked, hands in his pockets, no particular destination, aimless through the streets of Manhattan. Fine. The photographer had been professional, the lighting people had been professional, everyone in the room had been professional and also approximately twelve years old, which was something Ilya was noticing more and more lately and chose not to examine too carefully. Scott Hunter would have something to say about that. Ilya could hear him already, that particular laugh, the way he'd say welcome to my world, kid like he was some ancient sage dispensing wisdom from a mountain and not just a man who had been playing hockey for approximately one thousand years and refused to stop.
They had played Hunter and the rest of the octogenarians yesterday. That was a good word he had learned just in case he got to say it to Hunter. It came out sometimes like marbles from his mouth, but he still practiced in case one day he could smile and say it sweetly to Hunter before scoring seven goals.
It was one of his favorite day dreams. Up there with…others. Less PG as the kids would say.
But the Bears had won, but only by a point, which was okay but also irritating. They were in the slog right before the playoffs where the games mattered but also did not, the points mattered more sometimes, and now they were back to Boston for a game or two before the road again, and Ilya’s body was already pre-seeding its weariness. A marathon before the marathon.
Boston had a chance this year. Not a great chance, not like a few years ago, but a good one. It was irritating that somehow the Admirals and the Voyagers had great chances but the thing about hockey was things were always up for grabs if you tired hard enough.
Another turn. He was headed down 9th Ave now. No real destination in sight. The team had stayed near MSG as they always did, so at some point he would turn back towards there, but he was in no real hurry. The weather was cold, as one should always expect in New York in February but it wasn’t Boston cold - that cold was brutal and whipped through you and Ilya was never allowed to complain because everyone thought Moscow had the worst winters - but Boston had a way of leeching the warmth out of you in the dark and icy depths of January and February.
I'll see you boys in the morning. He'd said it so easily. Tapped the doorframe of the bus twice that would bring the rest of the team to the airport, the way he always did, some superstition he'd picked up somewhere and never put down. Cliff had given him a look — Cliff always gave him a look, like he could see slightly further into Ilya than other people — and then the doors had closed and the team had gone back to Boston and Ilya had gone back to the city. This was common enough, a brand deal in New York keeping him overnight when the practice schedule allowed. Not often, but designer watch photoshoots for spring collections had to happen at some point, and his one single day off was its sacrifice.
Ilya had smiled for the camera for two hours. He was good at that. He was good at most performed things. The smile, the press conference voice, the way he could walk into a room and immediately become the largest thing in it without trying. His English was good enough for interviews, good enough for chirping, good enough for the particular kind of conversation that happened in locker rooms and after games and in the lobbies of hotels in cities that weren't Boston or Moscow.
He was not thinking about Shane Hollander.
He turned left on 37th street. He had vague recollections of a pastry nearby that someone in the den of locker room chatter had mentioned. Maybe he would get a treat. He had smiled for many hours today. The city moved around him, indifferent, which was the thing he liked about New York. Boston knew who he was. Moscow knew who he was in a different and heavier way. Both watched him with eyes open at all times while New York just pushed past him on the sidewalk and didn't care, and there was something that felt almost like calm in that.
The photo shoot had been combined with boring meetings with his team. He still wasn’t quite sure when that had happened. Ha. Him and his “team” that was not the other 19 men who he laced up with. But he had them, and they said lots of boring words. The meeting had been about endorsements, contracts, the particular machinery of being “Ilya Rozanov”, half of the face of Hockey, that ran quietly in the background of his actual life. He'd sat across from two people from his “team” and nodded at the right moments and signed things.
Shane Hollander’s “team” was his mom and that made Ilya smile and also sent deep pangs across his ribs in a way he would not ever acknowledge.
The meeting had ended, and one from the assortment of women who escort people like him in and out of rooms offered him a car and on a whim he had said no. The woman - girl really - bright eye shadow, Ilya noticed these things - had only blinked once and said okay, before jetting away to take care of a hundred other small things most people would never even realize had to be done.
So there he had been. Standing on the sidewalk outside a building in midtown, the whole night ahead of him, and an early plane ride in the morning. He just…he just started walking.
His brain was full right now. The upcoming playoff run. Cliff’s left knee that was bothering him more this season but they were all ignoring. The rookie who tried so hard but had already been farmed out to Falmouth for a year. Alexi, who had called again, and he had left ringing. His father, and a conversation that had almost been pleasant, because his father had thought he was an old buddy from his twenties and not his disappointment of a son.
He wasn’t sure what it was now - what you called it when your father was gone but his body was still here. Not grief exactly. Grief’s waiting room perhaps. Maybe English had a word for it. English always had a word for these types of things but it would be hard to pronounce so he didn’t care to learn it anyways. Not like octogenarian. That was a good word.
Hockey was going well. Boston was going well. He was captain of a team that respected him and played for him and he would go to the mat for every single one of them without hesitation. That part felt solid. Reliable. He knew what he was doing there.
The trade deadline was coming up, and the front office was making noises about a defender in St. Louis, a goalie from Las Vegas of all places, and a winger from Kansas? No, Toronto? He wasn’t sure. They sometimes told him these things, but not always. Most of the time, one of the Assistant GMs would show him scouting tapes of acne-riddled-faced Juniors and tell him about how they looked in comparison to when they had first scouted him, which was interesting and annoying all in the same breath.
He had never had acne.
And he was thinking about the other thing. The thing in the corner. The thing from hotel rooms and secret sex condos. That thing with freckles.
A cab honked. Someone bumped his shoulder without apologizing. The city moved.
Shane Hollander was having an excellent season. Ilya knew this not because he was tracking it — he wasn't, that would be insane — but because it was simply information that existed in the world and Ilya lived in the world. Shane was leading the league in points. Shane had given an interview last week where he'd said something humble and precise and slightly annoying about his linemates and Ilya had watched it twice.
For no reason.
They had a game against Montreal in two weeks. Ilya was not thinking about that either.
He thought, sometimes, about a night four years ago in a hotel bar after some hockey related event. He and Shane had ended up next to each other at the bar in the specific way that felt accidental but probably wasn't, and they'd talked — actually talked, not chirped, not performed for cameras — for almost two hours. Ilya had switched to water after his second drink. Shane had switched to water after his first, which was very Shane. They had talked about hockey and then about other things and at some point Shane had said something quietly true about loneliness that had made Ilya look at him differently. The most amusing part is that for the life of him Ilya couldn’t remember what they had been there for. A charity? An award show? It didn’t matter, that part had never mattered, what had always mattered was the way time seemed to orbit Shane Hollander like the sun.
Since then it had been—
The crosswalk man appeared.
Ilya stepped off the curb.
He didn't see the car until it was already happening.