Chapter Text
“It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
What’s the worst that can happen?
Ilya hates this phrase. North Americans, with their vapid optimism born from consumerist luxury, throw it around with ease. Mostly in movies and on TV. Ask the boy out. Go for the promotion. Quit your job and travel. Follow your dreams. But he’s known teammates use it too. Take the girl home from the bar while your wife’s out of town. Stay for another drink even though you said you’d watch the kids tonight. That was before. Now it’s more — so you’re on call-up from the AHL, you’re playing a couple of games, just do your best. Because sure, what’s the worst that can happen?
Move from Boston to Ottawa. From a team you’ve built from the bottom up, that’s moulded itself around you like they put up churches over the sites of holy springs. A career choice so insane it’s all commentators will talk about when you play, even two years later. What’s the worst that can happen?
You lose and you lose and you lose some more and the best years your body can give you for this sport are slipping by and you’ve used them not for glory but for this.
Ilya did it for love. He did it for that first confession in the cottage in the comfort of the dark, and he swore then he’d never felt anything like it. Now he’s not so sure. He remembers the first time he had sex with Sveta, thinking — I could do this forever. He remembers hooking up with Sasha, thinking — Maybe my father will catch us and he’ll actually kill me. Put his hands around my neck and squeeze.
In other words, he remembers the bright allure of the thing, whatever it is, that promises to rewrite the script. He’s ready, always, for his life to change — violent, uprooting change that will efface whatever came before.
Two hour’s drive but they are still so far apart. Their schedules are a nightmare and never align and they can’t seem to get the balance right, in the snatched hours, between fucking and having a real conversation. Too little of the former and Ilya can practically feel the way Shane starts thinking — are you bored of me already? He won’t say it, he’s too stubborn, but it means Ilya takes on the weight, not just of his failure of a team, but of making sure each time he and Shane meet he seems hungry enough, desperate enough, tears his clothes off quickly enough, even if all he wants to do is curl into a ball and sleep for a hundred years.
Too little of the latter... Well. Weeks in the cottage start to seem like a distant dream. This is their life, and has been for ten years. They get together, they fuck, and one of them leaves.
Ilya’s not stupid. He knows he’s depressed. Badly, maybe even terminally, depressed. He looked it up once, the heritability of it, and didn’t like what he found. He’s depressed but he sure as hell won’t take any pills for it, and what good could possibly come of paying someone to make him talk in circles around everything that’s gone wrong? Shane’s not stupid either. He asks — are you ok? And Ilya lies. He says yes, he’s fine. Yes, he looks tired, but he’s sleeping. Yes, it’s an adjustment, but he’ll make it work. And then, when those lies aren’t enough, he says, yes, actually he’s started going to therapy. Because yes, it’s been hard.
The look on Shane’s face at those words. It’s been hard. The guilt. Ilya thinks, sometimes of what would happen if he said — actually, I can’t do this. It’s killing me. I need you to come and play in Ottawa, too. It’s a bad line of thinking, but Ilya’s brain seems to specialise in those.
How about it, Shane? Sure, Montreal looks set to win another cup this season. They can probably go back to back. They love you, you’re the greatest captain they’ve ever had. Would you give that all up, for me?
Ilya really, really, really misses winning.
And then — it’s not like he doesn’t miss it. It’s more like the ability to feel anything with any intensity at all deserts him. So he’s left looking at what he’s lost, Boston stumbling a little their first year without him, but then, like a great ship righting itself, they find their even keel, return to battling for the playoff spots in the Atlantic Division, and the best Ilya can muster about it is a dull ache.
What’s the worst that can happen?
Lose all sensation, so that when flashes come, you have to chase them in case they’re the last. Like when there’s a rookie whose view of you hasn’t been tarnished by the fact you came here, or the fact you’re definitely not playing well enough to justify what they paid for you and you can’t bring yourself to care. There’s a cherubic and innocent beauty to his face and it’s like the faintest shadow of the thing you called fun, once, to buy him coffee and turn his cheeks a little pink. To ask him if he misses home. To learn a little about his family, the languages he speaks. You agree that you’re both slightly different people in your mother tongues.
Ilya doesn’t go out with the team. He turns each invitation down, until the night he doesn’t. He and Shane keep having almost-fights, conversations where they get right to the edge and then, like the fucking Cuban missile crisis, somehow back down. That evening, it had been about the Centaurs, again.
Shane said, Have you guys ever thought about...
Ilya said, Hollander, since when have you ever told me how to captain my team.
Shane didn’t say, Since you started finishing seasons with half the number of points as me.
So Ilya goes out. He drinks — one beer, another. Three shots. A glass of vodka. He feels a little warmth inside. He remembers why he used to do this. He remembers how, through the haze of alcohol, everything feels kind of funny. Like it’s not real. Dying is real, and everything that comes before is nothing but smoke, you can’t grasp it, you can’t hold it in your hands.
Have more drinks. Go to the next bar. Then the club. The bass throbs and it’s like if your heart can follow the pulse of it, maybe it will keep beating. You’re the last ones left. You can’t go home, because home is where all the rest of it waits. Luca stumbles into you and blushes so easily with blue eyes so wide — desire that he doesn’t know what to do with as his gaze slides to your mouth like someone else you once knew.
What’s the worst that can happen?
*
When the worst thing that can happen happens when you’re twelve years old, you should already fucking know.
*
On Twitter. A set of photos. Two figures — one kneels, one stands. Grainy, and the alleyway at the back of the club is dark. But neither the picture quality nor the gloom is enough to prevent the faces shown being utterly clear.
*
His doorbell rings. He has 8 missed calls from Luca, 4 from Sveta, 1 from Bood and none from Shane.
There’s a delirious moment, as Ilya moves his body down the stairs like he’s the random passenger in the action movie who’s suddenly been called on to fly the plane, when he thinks it might be Shane, despite the cameras he knows are outside. He wants it to be. He wants paparazzi photos of Shane fucking Hollander outside his house looking incriminatingly tear-stained, because maybe pictures taken without your consent are the only way you can fix a moment in time — otherwise everything else is going, going, gone.
Coach Wiebe. His hands clasped in front of him. He usually has a naturally kind face, a mouth that curves up at the edges with deep smile lines. He looks different now.
“Rozanov,” he says. “Mind if I come in?”
Click of shutters outside.
They don’t make it past the entrance hall. Wiebe’s words have the quality of something much-rehearsed. Ilya almost wants to interrupt the flow of them, see if Wiebe has it in him to improvise. Instead, lets it wash over him like the approaching tide. Delicate situation. Taking advantage. Luca’s age — only just twenty one. Statements taken later this week. For now he’s not to come to the facilities. Won’t be playing for the foreseeable future.
At the end, the slightest slip in the mask. Wiebe isn’t here as himself, he’s here as the Centaurs brand. But now, something human in the look he gives. And Ilya, who has kept from vomiting all morning, thinks he might actually be sick if Wiebe says something like —
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. It can’t be easy, being outed like this, no matter what you’ve done.
So he says, “Thank you for coming.”
Astounded at the steadiness of his own voice. At the way he’s able to keep the words to just those ones, watching Wiebe leave. Keep from saying — hey, want to hear a funny joke?
Ilya’s phone in his hand. His finger hovers over the notification from Bood’s call. Instead, he finds his text thread with Harris. Writes, Can you make sure someone checks on Haas.
Meaning can you make sure someone checks on him like a real human being and not like a corporation trying not to be sued. As the message sends he suddenly thinks it might look like him trying to tamper with whatever kind of statement Luca’s planning to give later in the week. Finds it hard to care.
*
He calls Shane.
Shane doesn’t answer.
*
Ilya has been known to be emotional, sometimes. He’s cried in front of Shane — it happened once, in a hotel room in Tampa, and then again and again and again. Each time like the first breath after a long time underwater.
But he has always known that, if taken to extremes, he will pass through emotion and out the other side, into a place that’s numb and cold. He’s played some of his best hockey that way — the post-Sochi run to lifting the Stanley Cup, and it was like when he got his hands on the trophy all the colours and sounds of the world came rushing back with the crowd’s roar.
He didn’t cry at his father’s funeral. Or his mother’s.
It settles over him now. You could mistake for calm or you could mistake for a kind of death. He turns off his phone, places it face down on the table by the stairs. Climbs. Turns out all the lights, tucks himself into bed and closes his eyes.