Chapter Text
Your name is Ilya Rozanov, and it is in a Nashville locker room when the rumors about your soulmark start.
The mark rests over your throat, the words wrapping themselves around your neck. They begin at the one side and curl around to the other side in neat, precise writing. Written like a necklace or a rope, what you see every time you look in the mirror: I don’t know that side of you at all.
Sometimes you think that you can feel those words like they are two hands choking you. Sometimes you think that you can feel them like someone else’s pulse. It is hard to tell the difference, most days, between suffocating underneath them and being loved.
The rumors reach Montreal only a week after the 2013 All-Stars match, barely an hour before they play Boston. Shane had somehow avoided the gossip until back with the Metros, when J.J. brings it up. Soulmarks are private, vulnerable things, but when it comes to Ilya Rozanov, nothing is off-limits to many of the Metros players. Taking Rozanov’s every exposed weakness and turning them all into targets for their darts and knives is an old, familiar, comfortable habit by now.
So J.J. says, “Did you guys hear about Rozanov last weekend?”
And Hayden rolls his eyes, saying, “That goal in the third period that everyone’s talking about? Can we please discuss literally anything other than that disgusting play?”
Privately, Shane thinks that it was a great play—disgusting in that it set his team ahead of Shane’s team by a point, disgusting in that it absolutely defied the laws of physics to get the puck to the back of the net, disgusting in how Rozanov gloated about it to him later that night, but a good play nonetheless. That’s the thing about Rozanov; for all that his game is disgusting to his opponents, it is also objectively fucking brilliant.
“No, no,” J.J. says, grinning as he leans over his knees to tie his skates. “So apparently he wears makeup instead of patches to cover his soulmark, even when he’s playing.”
Hayden frowns. “Isn’t that, like…risky? Doesn’t he sweat it off?”
“They make a special makeup for soulmarks, one that doesn’t even smudge without specific wipes,” Shane says absentmindedly, only half thinking about it when he says it.
There’s no reason for him to know that information, because he doesn’t wear that makeup and everyone on the team is probably aware of that. He’s young enough that his own soulmark still has yet to write itself over his skin. It’s not a fact that he’s bothered to hide nor is it something that has singled him out from the group, though it is common knowledge.
But he knows about this makeup anyway, because he’s seen the bottle amongst Rozanov’s things before. He knows that it looks somewhat like a bigger version of a nail polish bottle, he knows the shape of the brand’s logo, he knows that it’s a sensitive subject. He knows Rozanov reapplies the makeup after sex—it’s the first thing he does when he gets out of the bed. He figures it must be the same after games.
Hayden raises his eyebrows at Shane’s comment, giving him a strange look, and Shane just shrugs a little uncomfortably, avoiding Hayden’s eye. He looks at his locker for a long moment, allowing the conversation to move on from him before he turns around to face the locker room.
J.J. keeps going, and Shane is starting to get the feeling that he’s invading Rozanov’s privacy in a way that he isn’t sure he wants to do. If Rozanov wanted him to know anything about what lies underneath that carefully, diligently applied makeup, he would have told Shane. This shouldn’t be coming from J.J. and it shouldn’t be coming out in the Metros locker room.
But here they are anyway: “Livermore told Donaghue who told Lawson who told me that apparently, the mark is on his neck. That’s why he doesn’t wear the patches—he probably can’t get one to stay there with all the damn talking he does.”
Comeau snorts. “More like he can’t suck a ref’s dick and also get a soulmark patch to stay on his whore throat.”
Shane shifts uncomfortably where he’s standing by his locker, his eyes darting around the room. Only a couple of people are paying attention to this conversation; most of the team is occupied with other loud, excited chatter and the remainder are focused on actually gearing up for the game. He carefully schools his face into something neutral, something uninterested, but he isn’t sure he’s pulling off the look when his heartbeat is suddenly pounding so hard at the cage of his chest.
“That’s not the worst part, I heard,” Miitka says, glancing over at them. He had been sitting on the bench, tossing a stress ball between his hands, quietly observing the locker room, but something about the thinly veiled disgust in Comeau’s voice seemed to have drawn him in.
Hayden rolls his eyes with a breathy laugh, and something sick is beginning to crawl up Shane’s throat. They shouldn’t be talking about this. “What else is there to hear? So what if he covers his mark with makeup? Plenty of people do it like that, probably.”
“Bergen told me that he and Ferguson actually saw Rozanov’s words after the game,” Miitka tells them, voice low. “He must’ve not applied the makeup well enough or whatever, and they each saw either side of his neck. Guess he got lazy.”
Rozanov, lazy, doesn’t compute in Shane’s head, especially not about this. But no one else seems to recognize that.
“Shit,” Hayden breathes out, somewhat disbelieving.
Soulmarks are personal things. No one should have taken away from them the choice to keep their soul to themselves and the people they trust. No one’s soul should be so public as to be the subject of a rivals’ locker room gossip.
For most people, soulmarks are secrets. Even Rozanov deserves the right to that privacy; he clearly wants it. Maybe Rozanov especially needs it, a little more than most of the rest of the world.
This privacy is not something he will be allowed, Shane thinks. Not here, and not with these people.
“He told me—” Miitka pauses for dramatic effect that only serves to make Shane feel more sick— “that Rozanov’s words say that his soulmate won’t want him.”
Shane’s heart stops, and stops, and stops, and stops, and it does not restart. He doesn’t think he breathes again until he’s on the ice, and Rozanov is standing in front of him and grinning and winning the fucking faceoff.
The game starts like that, and it ends like that too. Boston takes the win by a 4-2 margin and Shane feels like shit for so many reasons. He hates losing, hates losing to Rozanov, and he hates the image he has in his head of Rozanov’s words curling around his throat saying I don’t want you.
It feels cruel to even imagine in the privacy of his thoughts, and it just feels wrong to apply to Ilya Rozanov. It doesn’t make sense, when Rozanov is so fucking easy to want, in so many ways.
This fucked up thing between them, this dirty and forbidden thing, is magnetic to Shane in a way that he’s been trying to deny from the start. It’s such a terrible idea for so many reasons that Shane doesn’t have the lifespan long enough to list them all. But it’s something that happened because it’s so, so easy to want Ilya Rozanov. It’s so easy, and it’s so hard to deny him when he wants you back.
Shane wants to—or, no; he wants to want to deny Rozanov everything. He wants to want to make Rozanov beg for it. He wants to want to walk away and leave Rozanov watching him go.
But he’s never been able to do it before, and he’s not able to do it tonight. Predictably, he meets Rozanov in an indiscreet hotel room on the far side of Montreal from where the Raiders are based, and he lets himself get caught up in him.
The only difference between now and every time before is that he can’t stop fucking staring at Rozanov’s throat. It’s the only place on his body that Shane’s never been allowed to touch. He tried to kiss him there once, at the crook of neck and shoulder, and Rozanov froze so abruptly, his entire body going tense before guiding him away with both hands, that Shane never tried again.
He’s seen the makeup before, seen the edges where it blends into skin, seen where the texture of it begins and the smoothness of his skin ends. He knew it was there. But it’s different, now that he knows what’s hidden underneath the careful application of makeup.
It’s not until after they’ve fucked and they’re lying in the bed catching their breath that Rozanov exhales heavily and says, lowly, tiredly, “You’re staring.”
Shane turns away from where he had, in fact, been staring instantly at Rozanov’s neck. His own throat bobs as he swallows. “Sorry.”
Resigned, Rozanov says quietly, “You heard the rumors, then.”
Shane takes a measured breath. He’s not the one who should be freaking out right now. That isn’t fair to Rozanov. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Good. I don’t want to.”
“Okay.” Shane’s voice is small.
Rozanov groans, putting both his hands against his eyes and pressing down. “Fuck. It doesn’t mean anything. Is just a stupid mark. The rumors are exaggerating it, anyway. Okay?”
He sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself than Shane. He sounds like this is a sentiment he’s thought to himself a million times over, and he still has yet to believe it. He sounds as if every time he thinks this, he believes it less.
So Shane says again, “Okay,” and doesn’t believe Rozanov believes it at all. But that’s the end of that. They don’t talk for the rest of the night, until Shane leaves.
You know what you want. You also know what you are allowed to want. These are two different, incompatible things. They always will be, because to exist in your body and soul is to exist in contradictions. You cannot have what you so terribly desire, and this will haunt you for the rest of your life.
You know who your soulmate is now. You know who your heart belongs to, and who can best read you. You know who in the world can understand the shape of your soul best. You know who you will always, in some way, be beholden to. Pulled towards. Stitched next to in the fabric of the universe.
You also know what your words mean, now. You used to hope that maybe they were just misleading; you used to hope that context would make them hurt less. Now, you think that maybe the context hurts more than the words do.
The truth is that you will want this boy for the rest of your life, and you know he will never understand it.
The first soulmark Shane sees that isn’t his own belongs to Rose. She’s good at covering it up when she’s in the public eye—she’s a celebrity; she has to be good at hiding her words if she doesn’t want crazed fans trying to write themselves into her destiny—but it only takes one slip up. They’re in bed together, covered only by a thin white sheet and the encroaching dark of nighttime.
They’re both clearly exhausted from a long day—Shane had a game against Seattle that afternoon; Rose had been shooting the X-Squad movie she seems to hate mostly out of habit—and Shane is telling himself that’s the only reason he doesn’t want to fuck her. They’re both kind of just staring at the ceiling in silence, and Shane figures they’re thinking about the same thing.
He knows he should want to fuck her. Rose is beautiful and kind and genuine, and she takes it in stride that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. She’s everything that he could ask of a girlfriend, and he’s determined to make this work. He’s determined to fix this thing in him that doesn’t—
That doesn’t want her.
Because that’s the truth of it, at the end of the day. He doesn’t actually want her. It makes him feel sick with guilt and perversion and hopelessness that he doesn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less true. He doesn’t want her and yet still, he’s determined to make himself want her eventually. So he lies there in that bed under the thinnest sheet in the world and he very carefully tries to make himself want to have sex.
Rose has been so good to him, has taken it with grace every time he’s said that he’s too tired or something’s sore from practice or he’s just not in the mood. She’s never pushed him to do anything once he says no. But it must be bothering her; she’s a world-famous celebrity and constantly paraded as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. It has to be bothering her that he’s so resistant to anything physical.
Shane knows it’s sure as fuck bothering him.
It only bothers him more when the soulmark patch she wears slips away from her wrist. She’s usually so careful about replacing it once a day, as soon as the stick on it starts to wear off from sweat and movement.
She’s reaching over for him, the light from the streetlamps outside bleeding through the blinds just enough to illuminate her wrist. It happens in slow motion: the patch is peeling up at the corners, warping the colorful pattern she prefers over the neutral skin tone patches, and then it’s fluttering to the sheets between them.
Shane doesn’t mean to read it; it just kind of happens instinctively. There are words in front of him and so he reads them.
She snatches her wrist away from him as soon as she notices, snapping her hand close to her chest and wrapping her other hand around her wrist to cover it. Soulmarks are private, personal things. It’s normal not to want anyone to see the words written onto you, even a partner, no matter how long you’ve been together.
The words are meant to be something someone will say one day that proves they know you. They see you. They understand you in a way that no one else ever can. This is how they will love you.
It’s important, Shane thinks, to keep that kind of thing private. Secret. A short sentence or two that supposedly offers a window into your soul—it’s something no one but you and your soulmate needs to know. Shane’s words are fairly generic, but even he doesn’t want to share them with anyone. If he does ever tell anyone what they are, he wants it to be his choice to show them.
That choice being taken away from Rose makes him ache for her a little. He doesn’t mean to see, but he does.
“Fuck,” she says quickly, something uncharacteristically fragile in her voice. “Um. I’ll replace it. Can you—in my makeup bag—”
Shane swallows hard, still kind of processing what’s happening. The old patch is sitting between them on the sheets, a bright color standing stark against the white sheet. He looks at it for a long moment before Rose clears her throat and he realizes that she’s waiting for a response from him.
“Oh—” and he’s such a shitty fucking boyfriend to her but he doesn’t know how to be better when he doesn’t want to be hers in the first place— “Yeah, of course. Sure.”
He climbs out of bed in a hurry, nearly getting caught in the sheets and falling before he figures out how to move right. He finds her makeup bag in the bathroom and digs out a new patch. This one has cartoon rainbows and clouds and raindrops on it. Something about the naive brightness of it makes him mildly annoyed; enough to fish out a different one that has a more generic paisley pattern.
She’s still lying in bed where she had been when he returns from the bathroom. She’s cradling her wrist against her chest protectively, and Shane kind of wants to tell her it’s too late, he already saw, and he knows, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to say anything. When he opens his mouth to try, something with barbed wire clogs in his throat and he chokes on the words.
“Thanks,” is all she says, quiet, when he hands the patch to her. She sits up and turns around when she puts it on, her back to him and her head hunched over herself.
He should tell her, but he can’t. She didn’t want him to know, and so he’ll have to pretend that he doesn’t know.
With the patch safely back on, Rose rolls back over in bed to cuddle with him. They don’t talk about it, but it’s all that he can think about the rest of the night. She’s warm and soft against his side while she falls asleep. Even if she were to talk, Shane doesn’t think he’d even process that she said anything. He’s too deep into his head now.
He stays awake long into the night, despite how exhausted he had been only moments before this, the words swimming behind his closed eyelids.
It sounds like something he could say, maybe. Maybe. But that doesn’t matter, not really, because the handwriting isn’t his. It’s choppy and messy and emboldened; he always writes with thin, precise lettering. There’s no way that he’s her soulmate.
He should break up with her, probably. But maybe there’s still a way to salvage things. Maybe he’s not her soulmate but that doesn’t mean they can’t work. Plenty of people have relationships with people they aren’t sure are made perfectly to fit their soul. Plenty of people date and fall in love with people they don’t know are the perfect match. It’s not out of the norm at all.
But she deserves so much better than him. She deserves this other person who knows her. Knows her in a way that he never can.
He falls asleep eventually, curled against Rose and thinking about how he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to be able to love her like she deserves.
He dreams of Rozanov, because of course he does.
In the dream, they’re on the ice. The rink is, for some reason, outdoors, and it’s entirely empty except for the two of them. The stands are barren and ghostly. The ice is hard and comforting under his skates, and they’re bent over to take the face-off.
Rozanov is grinning at him, wide and with all his teeth. There’s something contagious about his smile that makes Shane want to smile too, and he hates himself when he gives in to the urge. Rozanov laughs, bright and joyful and unburdened. Shane doesn’t think he’s ever actually heard that sound—Ilya Rozanov, unburdened—but fuck, he wants to so badly.
The puck drops out of nowhere, and they battle for it. Rozanov wins, and this time it’s Shane who laughs. It feels like being a child again, fumbling around on the ice and trying to learn all the tricks to picking up speed. Playing against Rozanov is fucking fun. Every time they play, it brings back a joy to the game that Shane thought might have been otherwise lost forever.
God, the feeling of it. Flying carefree down the ice, not concerning himself about the score or picking up points or a team relying on him to win or a dynasty resting on his shoulders. Just the two of them, playing a game. The fucking indescribable feeling of it.
They’re cornered behind the goal and Rozanov is battling for the puck that Shane’s got trapped with his stick when the dream version Rozanov whispers it.
“Good morning,” he says, voice low and tempting, “I like you.”
Shane freezes at the sound of it, and Rozanov takes the chance to steal the puck. As he skates away to the opposite side of the rink, he tosses a glance back and yells, “Time to wake up, Shane Hollander!”
He jolts awake, sitting straight up and breathing rapid and hard, before he can even begin to think about chasing after him. His heart is panicking, running wildly in his chest.
Rose, who rolled over to the other side of the bed at some point, hasn’t stirred. Shane looks over at her with something untamed in his gaze, something terrified and animalistic in its fear, and tries to ground himself with the sheer sight of her. His girlfriend. White sheet pushed down to her thighs. Bare skin of her shoulder where her oversized t-shirt has ridden down. Hair spilling onto the pillow behind her. A strand caught at her lips.
It was just a dream. It doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t mean anything.
He puts a hand to his left bicep, gripping hard until it hurts, all while trying to calm his breathing. He digs his thumbnail into the words tattooed there, covered by the thin patch. He digs his nail deeper and deeper, until it stings, until it aches like a cut open bruise, like a heartbreak.
He doesn’t know who the words belong to; he doesn’t know who his soulmate is. It was just a dream.
Still, in the back of his mind, Ilya Rozanov, who he left alone in Boston: Good morning. I like you.
You are thirteen years old when your words come in, and when they do, it is with a blinding, searing pain; the worst you’ve ever known. No one warned you about this part—no one told you how much it would fucking hurt for your soul to be written over your naked skin like this.
You think you are dying, at first. It’s in the middle of the locker room after practice with your junior club team; you aren’t captain yet but you’re clawing your way up there, and all you can do when you let out a sob of pain is hope that they don’t lose all respect for you when you cry.
It feels like you are being cut open, like your throat is being slit in the shapes of a thousand tiny, individual cuts. It feels as if your soulmark will kill you. Your neck burns hot and mortified, and you clutch at it with both hands in a desperate, juvenile bid to make the pain stop.
To stumble into the bathroom and out of the huddle of your friends you have to shove through all your teammates, both the ones looking concerned and the ones looking like you’re crazy and the ones already coming up with ways to make fun of you.
You manage to get to a mirror: you look wrecked, tears streaming down your face in silent, wracking sobs of pain; sweat beads at your hairline, and you aren’t sure if it’s from practice or the soulmark; your hands clenched around your neck look like you’re trying to choke yourself.
The bathroom clears out, leaving you alone in the mirror. Laughter comes from the other room. You drop your hands from your throat only when the sensation of being cut open and cauterized stops. In reality, it all lasts only a few minutes, but the pain reverberates in your heart for a long, long time.
When you stare at your reflection, it takes you a few minutes to read the words—fair, given that they are mirrored and in your second language—but once you do, their meaning hits instantly, and it haunts you for even longer than the physical pain does.
It happens just before the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The mark comes in with a pain unlike anything Shane’s ever known before. He’s broken bones and twisted joints; he’s gotten hurt during games, gotten hurt during practices, gotten hurt by falling off of bicycles and with his hand slipping while chopping vegetables and when pressing his thumb too deep into yellowing bruises. He thought he knew what pain felt like.
But this is nothing like that. This is a searing fire cutting into his skin so deep that it’s prying open the bones in his upper left arm. He’s alone when it happens, settling down for the night in his apartment in Montreal, and he can’t help but let out a cry of pain when it starts. He can’t help the tears that spring to his eyes when his whole body tenses and screams in pain.
His eyes dart down to his bicep, and then his whole brain numbs over, static crawling over every other thought. There are words carving themselves in black ink over the muscle of his arm—his soulmark, finally coming in.
Your soulmark is supposed to write itself over your body at any point between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. Shane had never been too worried about his, too focused on a million other, more important, things. Not having his yet is not something that he’s concerned himself with overthinking.
But here it is, now. His breaths are uneven, coming in short, panting gasps that don’t fill his lungs all of the way. He feels like he’s just played a full game by himself, like he’s just lost a full game by himself.
The words settle into his skin as he watches in pain: Good morning. I like you.
And Shane doesn’t know what the fuck to do with that. The words are supposed to demonstrate that your soulmate knows you. That they know you, and love you because of it. These words—Shane isn’t sure what the context could be where something as simple as I like you shows that his soul is seen and loved.
It could be worse, he supposes, once the pain has faded. At least he knows his soulmate will like him.
Still, he stares at the mark for a long time. Flexing his fist just to see the words warp around the muscle. Moving his arm up and down just to see it flash in the corner of his eye. Running his opposite pointer finger over the ridges of the lettering. Pressing the flat of his thumbprint into the G.
Soulmarks are strange, nebulous things. The marks never mean what you think they’re going to mean. There’s always some strange catch, some strange twist of fate to them. Shane knows this well. Despite knowing that, though, he can’t help but wonder at his own. What it means, who it could belong to.
He can’t help, too, but to wonder about everything it isn’t saying. Everything it doesn’t mean. The word like instead of love. The good morning of it; the strangeness of a normal morning greeting being the statement that reads his soul best.
The words are fairly generic. Tender to the touch. Relatively commonplace statements. Strange, given what they are supposed to signify, but otherwise mostly unremarkable. So they could be worse. The mark is large, and he’ll have to invest in maximum size soulmark patches, but even that isn’t the end of the world.
Yes, it could be worse—he could have Rozanov’s mark.