Chapter Text
The light in the kitchen has the wrong colour. Too yellow, too late, too much like four in the morning, which it is.
For a long moment, Ilya considers: I could smash it, right now. The glass in his hand is heavy, quality crystal. His aim is good, even now that he’s half drunk half hungover. One throw—He can picture the sound of it perfectly, how the glittering shards would come down; beautiful, if brief.
He’s sitting down at the kitchen island, somehow; he doesn’t remember how this came to be. The girl left—what was her name? Maria? Marlene? She was fun; about as fucked up by her life as Ilya is, and handling it about as well as he is. Meaning, violently. She wanted him to slap her, he recalls. When he wouldn't, she slapped him first, hard, ring snagging on his cheekbone, drawing blood. Not the first blood spilt that night, but the first drawn deliberately, in anger. Things went downhill from there. Christ.
His phone is there, face down, next to the fruit bowl full of fruit that the meal service people keep leaving and replacing when it moulds. He shouldn't check it. Nothing is there. It’s four AM, the boys are asleep like functional adults. The less functional adults—he can just about predict that slop, word for word. Hey, Roz, hi, there’s this awesome party! Rozy, we miss you baby, come, come, come. Yeah. If he sees another person before he gets some sleep, he will slit their throats upon first contact. There is nothing on that phone worth checking. Leave it alone.
He should sleep. He considers the light fixture again; he can break it tomorrow. There’s—there’s a game, no? He’s pretty sure he’s playing a game—Not tomorrow, though. Day after. Home game against—Quakes, maybe? Does it matter? Point is, he should sleep. He should drink the water the girl had the presence of mind to leave on the counter, next to the glass he’s actually drinking from. What is he drinking? Diluted vodka? Why the fuck is he—Oh, right. The ice had melted. Disgusting. He should pour it out. Eat something. He should do a lot of things.
He picks up the phone.
Nothing. The only chat he cares about has been quiet since November twenty-first. Hand on his heart, swear to Christ, he’s not even mad anymore; he’s not even really tempted to smash the phone into the wall, curse it for what it refuses to give him. No, he’s just—fucking sad about it. Moping like a moody little bitch.
He doesn’t even need to type anything, the page is already open; he pulls it down, refreshes the feed with more pictures, more news. They’re a handsome couple, he can’t deny. Shane glorious in his hideous, boring clothes. Rose Landry, in fur, with shiny hair and a radiant smile. Just the type of girl Shane Hollander should be with. Whirlwind romance, the headlines say. Do we sense an engagement ring in the future?
Ilya inhales a long, shuddering breath, takes a gulp of the swill, and manages to exhale more or less evenly. He swipes away the browser and intends to check his email, but a new notification appears. WhatsApp. Group chat. One of the big ones, the ones that barely ever have anything interesting. Yeah, the time zones make these big chats a bit messy, but nothing like this. Another notification. Another.
You see this shit?
Fuck, man. Brutal.
Jesus Christ. Career over.
Fucking fag—
Ilya’s clicking into the link before his brain even finished reading, a sick whine ringing in his ears, heart pounding in his chest. For a second, half a second, before the page loads, he doesn’t quite know where it is. His hands are tingling, lungs running on empty, heaving. His mind is blank, running in circles. Fuck, it’s him. Of course it’s him. Someone's got something. This is it, this is what happens, what you were afraid of since fuckign rookie season. It’s it, it’s fucking done. You fucked him up, you destroyed his life, of course you had, you ruin everything you fucking touch—
The page loads.
It's not him.
It's some other man. Baseball, looks like. Late twenties, shy smile, the kind of face Ilya wouldn't mind looking at twice. There are photos. There are tweets from a man who used to fuck him. There are statements from his team that read like funeral notices. He's been cut. He's done.
Ilya sets the phone down, sits there for a long time, breathing. The force of the relief is sick, as sick as its shape and make. It's not him. Fuck Cole Garrison. A hundred Cole Garrisons could have their lives ruined, reputations destroyed, mental health wrecked. A thousand. Every single man in the fucking world—God, it’s not him. Thank Christ. Thank the fucking Heavens.
The relief lasts maybe a minute and feels like a lifetime, like he was born, lived, and died in it. He lets himself dissolve in it, bask in the warmth—But it goes away eventually. It always does. What bubbles up in its place is a lot more familiar; warm, too, in its special, infernal, way.
It’s not the quiet, simmering anger he’s been functioning on for weeks. No, this is the real deal, the blinding, red-behind-the-eyes rage. What the fuck are you doing, you snivelling idiot? What was that? You just felt every cell in his body drop out of formation for a man who left you without a word and is currently being photographed at premieres with a woman. A woman who ticks all the boxes, who can go to fancy premieres and hold his hand and come to his fucking games wearing his fucking jersey—What the fuck are you doing? How pathetic are you?
The phone doesn’t survive, unsurprisingly; it’s a wonder it lived this long. He’s been going through them a bit, recently, so Svetlana sent a box over last week. He has some more, he’s pretty sure. Fucking—
This. This is the message. The universe takes some poor kid and ruins his life so that Ilya, three thousand miles away, can sit at his kitchen island at four in the morning and finally understand that Shane was right to leave.
Fuck.
Fuck that.
Fuck him.
He picks up the glass, drains it, picks up the bottle, pours another. His hand is shaking and it makes him angrier.
He doesn't sleep.
The next weeks happen to other people. That's what it feels like. Ilya sits inside his body while some dark, unknowable force drives it around.
He doesn't go to the All-Star.
He sends an excuse—sick, family thing, his dad—and the team accepts it because nobody wants to ask. They're all walking around him like he's a time bomb, a corpse lumbering around, breaking things. Management hasn't said rehab yet. They will. He can see it in Harrison’s face every time they pass in the corridor, that careful clinical look people get when they're costing out a problem. He’s their best player. He’s their biggest asset. He is flaming out, everyone can see it, and the PR people are keeping a lid on it with increasingly ludicrous amounts of money.
Hollander brings Rose Landry to the ASG. There's a photo of her in his jersey at a sponsor party. Ilya finds it at two in the morning, drunk, idly considering a third gram, and laughs and laughs, until even the soul-dead groupies that followed him home flee in fright.
He drinks from sundown. Then from earlier. The hangovers are worse than the drinking so he takes coke to flatten them out, and then he can't sleep so he drinks more, and then he can't get up so he takes more coke, and on it goes. He plays. He plays well sometimes, in a mad kind of way, because the only thing that quiets the noise is spilling blood, his own or other people’s. The Bears are losing anyway. Nothing he does matters.
He gets into a scrap with a kid from Buffalo who said something—Ilya can't remember what—and would have shattered his jaw if Lyosha didn't drag him off. There's a fine, talk about a suspension, a press conference Kisel handles like a pro. The few people in Russia he hasn’t blocked yet send him admiring messages on Signal, compliment his balls, his form, his attitude. Hammer flies into Boston to take him out for steaks afterwards. Kid, listen. Calm down. What is going on?
Ilya doesn't listen.
Aleksei calls from their father's house, drunk, asking for money, while in the background his father shouts for Irina, Irina, Irina, and Ilya hangs up and sits on the floor of his bathroom for forty minutes thinking about whether he could fly to Moscow and kill them all and be back in time for the next game.
He decides probably not.
He calls Svetlana instead. She tells him that she loves him, that she will handle it, that he needs to stop. He nearly chokes on the tears he’s trying to suppress, which is doubly humiliating. That he’s crying like a child is compounded by the even more humiliating sin of trying to hide it. Of her having to stay on the line until he sleeps, because Ilya fucking Rozanov can’t even survive on his own.
When he wakes up there’s a message on his phone. Stop it. Don't be a coward. He doesn't stop. Whatever is happening, it feels so far out of his control, there is nothing for him to do. He’s strapped in, going where he’s going. The only thing left to do is to is make peace with the approaching abyss.
Marly comes over on a Thursday.
This is not, on its own, alarming. Marly comes over all the time. He has a key; he has had it since Ilya bought it, and the one before that, all the way back to the rat-infested hole he rented back when. What's alarming is the way he comes in—no shout, no shoes toed off at the entrance, no opinion delivered before he's all the way through the door. Huh, Ilya thinks, hazy. Marly’s not wearing a coat. Why the fuck is he not wearing a coat—
Marly sits on the coffee table, not the couch. On the coffee table, facing him, knees bracketing Ilya’s two scorching-hot touchpoints of life. God, he’s always run hot, but it’s not that cold, is it? It can’t be—
"I love you," Marly says.
"Oh fuck."
"No, listen. I love you, you're my best friend, I'd take a bullet for you. So I'm gonna say this and you're gonna shut up and let me. Okay?"
Ilya nods, because it's easier.
"You're killing yourself."
Ilya opens his mouth.
"Shut up. I said shut up." Marly hasn't raised his voice. He’s not grimacing, not shouting or snarling. There's just something tense about his voice, a note of dread Ilya has only heard once, years ago when Nicky was in a car crash. Ilya drove him to the ER himself, and could barely comprehend what fear had done to his friend. “I don't care about the games. I don't care about the fights. I care that you’re going to kill yourself, or kill someone, and I don't know which one is closer at this point, only that they're both close."
Ilya looks at the floor.
"Talk to me. Please. What the fuck is going on?"
The silence stretches. The fridge hums in the next room. Outside someone honks. Ilya thinks: I could lie. I could lie pretty easily. I've lied for years. I could lie until Marly gives up and gets a drink after all and we go do some dumb shit.
He thinks: I can't do this anymore.
He thinks: literally. I literally can't.
He thinks, bizarrely: I don’t want to die.
"Hey, man," he says. "If I did something—really stupid. Like—really, really stupid. Would you—Would you stay, after? With me?"
"Yeah, bud. Ride or die."
He says it without missing a beat.
"You haven't even—"
"Don't need to. Whatever it is. Ride or die." Marly watches him for a second. "Does it have something to do with Montreal Jane?"
Ilya's face must do something. He doesn't even know what. The urge to throw up is becoming concerning, but he’s known how to push that shit down since he was in puberty.
"Yeah," he says, eventually. "Well. Not really but sort of. I just—I want to do something about that."
"What, like, get her back?"
"No, I—" His mouth has gone dry. "No. That's—They’re—There's a new partner. Good one. Yeah, it’s a whole thing. I just—I want to do something."
Marly studies him. Marly has many faces. This is the one he uses when he's about to tell Ilya he's full of shit, but kindly. "Roz, listen to me. I'm with you if you wanna kill a man. All of us are. AK has got cement-laden caskets at the ready; this is not in question. But what is this about, man? What are you telling me?"
Ilya stands up. Sits back down. Stands up again. His legs don't know what to do. He walks to the window and back. He says, to the ceiling, fast, before he can chicken out —
"I fuck men." It comes out louder than he meant. "I—men and women. Always. My whole life."
There's a pause.
"Okay," Marly says.
Ilya turns around.
"Sorry?"
Marly is sitting on the coffee table looking at him with an expression Ilya cannot parse. Something between ‘okay’ and ‘and?’. "Sorry, was that a secret?"
Ilya stares at him.
"Like—I just assumed we didn't talk about it?"
"What?"
"Oh, man." Marly's face does a complicated thing. "Oh boy. You—you did. You thought you were—Ilya. Bud. We had threesomes."
"We fucked girls."
"I mean," says Marly. "Barely, right?"
Ilya sits down on the floor.
"Sorry," Marly says immediately. "Sorry. It's none of my business. I don't know anything. Thank you for telling me."
"No. No, what? I didn't—I never fucking touched you."
Marly gives him a look of such patient, kind pity that Ilya’s mouth sort of goes dry. "Bud," he says. "I don't know what you think straight guys do. In my experience, if your dick touches your best friend's dick in a sexual situation, for no reason except that you wanted it to, you might be doing some gay shit."
"Hold on. But then you—"
Marly shrugs. "I don't really think about that stuff. I like who I like. Never fucked a guy, but, like, a couple of girls have fucked me and I liked it well enough. If it happens, it happens, you know?"
Ilya is, for one long bright second, almost laughing.
"And—people know?"
"Mm. Pretty sure most of the team thinks you and I hook up when we room together."
"We do not—"
"Roz, that blonde girl. Laura. You were telling her how to blow me, like, in great detail. That's—I mean. You have to know that is not very straight behaviour, right?"
Ilya tries to remember. He was drunk. The girls they were with were kinky, liked being bossed around, Marly is the softest person alive and wouldn't bully a worm, so Ilya had—taken over. A little. As a favour. He shuts his eyes.
"Okay," he says. "Granted. Maybe that one was—adventurous."
"It's fine," Marly says, gently. "I want to be clear that it's fine. I figured you are like me. You liked what you liked, didn’t see the need to throw a parade. And, you know—the Russian thing. I get it."
Ilya feels like he's standing on a deck in a storm.
"Lyosha. Pasha. They—they didn't—"
"Buddy." Marly's face is doing the pity thing again. "Listen. I'm sorry. I know you're going through it, and I'm not trying to mess with you. But—they have eyes, man. And we've played together since the day you got drafted."
"They've never—"
"They've never said anything because, Hammer would have broken arms and legs and made them say please and thank you after. More importantly, you've been our Captain for years. They would storm the White House on your say-so. Or, like, the Kremlin or whatever the fuck."
Ilya laughs. It comes out wrong, too loud, bloodied, bruised and beaten, but it's, at base, a laugh. Marly watches him do it. Then he stands up off the coffee table, crosses the small distance, and pulls Ilya bodily up into a rough hug. Ilya goes like a man who's been waiting to be moved, who was falling for a long time and hadn't expected being caught was on offer.
"Jesus Christ," Marly says into his hair. "I can't believe you thought we didn't know. You're the least subtle person in the whole world."
"You’re such a fucking liar Marly."
"I am not."
"You said we cuddle. We never—"
"Bud. The Orcas game. Two years ago. You crawled into my bed and passed out on my chest like a fucking lapcat."
"You will not survive what I am going to do to you."
"Mm-hm. Mm-hm."
Later—half an hour, maybe more, Ilya has lost track—they're back on the couch, properly this time, and Ilya is drinking the water Marly has put in front of him, and the world has the strange clean light of post-thunderstorm.
"So," Marly says. "Going back to your original point."
"Right."
"You wanted to do something dumb."
Ilya stares at the coffee table. The empty glass. The light through the window has shifted; how long has Marly been here?
"I want to come out."
Marly goes very still. "Okay," he says. Carefully. "You want to develop that for me? It's none of my business, of course; a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. But—that's a fairly extreme move, buddy."
Ilya laughs. It's at least fifty per cent less hysterical than the last one; he notes the percentage with pride. The part of him that wanted to put a noose around his neck and jump out the window an hour ago has dimmed. Gone quiet. He's not sure he believes it's gone for good, but it's quiet for now and he’ll fucking take it.
"There was a guy," he says.
"Right."
"It was—it was good. I've never—you know I've never been a relationship guy. It's never been—I don't do that. But this time. I thought we had—I thought this was a thing. And he—he didn't betray me. We weren't anything. We couldn't be anything." He hears his voice get sharper. "He took care of himself, did what he should and I can’t—I can’t do it anymore. I can't. I'll go fucking crazy."
"Yeah," Marly says. "Yeah. Okay. Montreal Jane, yeah?"
Ilya doesn't answer.
Marly doesn't push.
"Right," Marly says, after a moment. "Okay. What's your contract like? What does Kisel say?"
Ilya thinks about Kisel. Kisel who once said, in his hearing, that fags should be sent to prison to be fucked to death by the inmates. Kisel who has handled his contracts since he was nineteen.
"He doesn't know."
"No shit, he doesn’t know. What does he say about your naturalization? Where are you on that?"
Ilya stares at him.
"I—Svetlana is American. She is a citizen. I could marry —"
"Man, what?"
"What?"
"You are the Captain of the Boston Bears. You are a millionaire. You don't need to marry a fucking woman to get citizenship, what is wrong with you?
Ilya opens his mouth.
“No. Don’t answer that.” Marly points at him, mock-severe now, mouth relaxed, a little wicked, a little dumb. “Have you drank, fucked, snorted and gambled all your millions away?”
“No?”
“Super. Then I’m pretty sure you can just invest a million in something and America gives you one. Like, just hands it over, I think.”
Despite himself, Ilya blinks. “That’s real?”
“Pretty sure. Pretty sure Nicky’s little boyfriend was moaning about it the other week. Even if it wasn’t, there are other, simpler ways; more options than deportation or a fake marriage to Vetrova.”
Ilya looks away. “She loves me. It would not be fake.”
Marly leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Listen to me. We get a lawyer. An actual lawyer. Ideally, we march your trashbag agent behind the shed and shoot him between the eyes. We do this properly.”
“Kisel is not—”
“Kisel is fucking vermin. We get a lawyer. You bring Vetrova. You figure out where you stand. How long have you been here, what visas, what papers, what permits. All of it.”
Ilya says nothing.
“Then you talk to whoever you need to talk to. Your agent; new one, for preference. Management. PR. The league, maybe. I don’t know. We make a list.”
A laugh catches somewhere in Ilya’s chest, hooks in his throat, causes some fucking damage. Marly sees it. His mouth twitches, but he doesn’t let the moment go to waste. Not all the way.
“I’ll come with you. Hammer will come. The boys will come. Hell, I’ll bring my dad.”
Ilya looks at him.
Marly is smiling now, helplessly, like even he knows this part is ridiculous. Like he’d really like to cry if it was allowed. “My dad will love this. He already loves you, and, regardless, this is like, his Super Bowl, are you kidding? Millionaire immigrant hockey queer in need of legal help? That’s his fucking Cup run.”
“Your dad hates hockey.”
“He’ll make an exception.” Marly reaches out and knocks his knee against Ilya’s. “Point is, the thing you’re not gonna do is get fucking deported to the commies.”
Ilya presses both hands over his face. Calm down, Jesus.
“The org is gonna bitch,” Marly says. “Sponsors might bitch. The press will be unbearable for, like, a couple of months. Maybe longer, because people love being weird about you.”
Ilya’s hands stay where they are. Possibly they’re there to stop the flood of denials, curses, pleas and thanks that are stuck in his throat presently.
“But you won us our first Cup in thirty years. You’re our Captain. You’re our guy. Nobody is spiriting you off anywhere.”
Ilya laughs. It hurts his chest. He doesn’t stop.
“What?”
Who fucking knows?
“Nothing, man.” Ilya wipes his face on his sleeve. He feels, for the first time in months, like there might be a floor under him. “Yeah. Let’s—let’s make something happen.”