Chapter Text
It takes Ilya an embarrassingly long time to clock that something is up with Svetlana.
In his defense, Svetlana turning up at his house without warning or invitation is just another Friday evening. Arriving with takeout from his favorite Eastern European restaurant instead of bullying Ilya into ordering expensive sashimi is unusual, but not unprecedented. Svetlana hides her fussing under a veneer of teasing and hockey talk, but she is a good friend who always tries to be there for Ilya in the way he needs, even if that means stooping to carbs, and right now, Ilya really fucking needs some comfort food.
For weeks, every screen in America has been bombarding Ilya with images of Shane and Rose-fucking-Landry, which Ilya thought was the deepest circle of hell, before he went to the wrong club and had to watch them grind against each other in person. After that, Ilya is in such dire need of consolation and distraction that he entirely forgets his nervous breakdown is a secret and Svetlana should have no way of knowing it is happening. He accepts the warm paper bag she thrusts into his arms unquestioningly, smells the rich scent of barberries, garlic and lamb wafting from it, and feels grateful enough to cry. There exists at least one person who has never fled from his company, and they've brought him dinner.
The clear and present danger of grateful, embarrassing tears prevents Ilya from looking Svetlana in the eye while he sets out plates, cutlery and one of the nice bottles of wine he only gets out for top-tier visitors, and he's still not ready to be scrutinized by the time they're dishing up. Between one emotion and another, Ilya is several mouthfuls deep into his plov before he looks up and sees that Svetlana is also battling tears and, for once, doing much worse than him at something. Her eyes are huge and glossy and sad. Ilya drops his fork with a clatter, immediately alarmed. Svetlana is not a crier.
“What's wrong?” he demands. A little tactless perhaps, but Russian is dangerously free of English's split-second processing delay.
Svetlana looks up at the ceiling and dabs the corners of her eyes with one fingertip, careful with her face out of habit, even though she is wearing barely any make-up, which, now Ilya comes to think about it, should probably have been the biggest warning sign of all. Fuck. This is serious, and Ilya has been so busy wallowing in his own shit that he hasn't noticed.
"Sveta?" Ilya asks, forcing himself to sound calm this time. They cannot both be losing it at the same time. He walks round to Svetlana's side of the kitchen island, so he can put an arm around her shoulders, and wracks his brain for things that might have upset her. "Is it your father? The business?" He is more than willing to buy a new car or two if it will help.
"No, no, I am well, Papa is well, men love to buy Bugattis from me." Svetlana takes a couple of deep breaths, spins her chair to face Ilya, and takes both his hands in hers. Confused, Ilya lets her. Who is comforting who here? He is losing track. "I have difficult news to tell you," Svetlana says.
"Okay," Ilya replies, slowly. Svetlana's lips tremble and it takes a concerted effort not to jump out of his seat. "What is happening? Do I have a brain tumor?" Ilya asks, only half joking. He doesn't think American physicians would keep that kind of news from him, but if they did, it would be just like Svetlana to somehow find out and be the only one willing to tell him.
He does not expect her to say, "You heard that Lipovsky died?"
Lipovsky. The name has the usual deadening effect on Ilya's emotions. He can feel his face going blank as everything drains from him, even worry for Svetlana, until he's as empty as a bathtub with the plug pulled out. "Yes, of course."
It had been quite the topic in the Russian MLH players Whatsapp group, eighty-two messages in less than half an hour. None of the rest of the group had had Ilya's dubious privilege and been personally mentored by Lipovsky—he was picky about his favorites, always thinking of his kingmaker reputation—but several had been on one of the various youth teams he'd coached over the years, and every Russian player over seventeen had at least heard of him.
This cannot be the difficult news. Ilya assumed—was glad to assume—that they weren't going to talk about the death, but if they were going to talk about it, he would have expected Svetlana to get out the celebratory top-shelf vodka and propose a toast before he expected her to cry. Over Lipovsky, of all people. Svetlana had met the man, she knew better.
"Did you know that he killed himself?" Svetlana asks.
"No." That Ilya hadn't heard. When he'd read the first message saying Lipovsky had died he'd recoiled instinctively, as from a hot stove, backed out of the chat with eighty-one of eighty-two messages unread, and tapped Mute Always before any more could announce themselves.
A mistake, clearly. It would have been better to get the basics, for just this situation.
Since further details have tracked him down and found him, Ilya gives the suicide revelation a moment to settle. It doesn't upset him. If anything, it is satisfying to know that demons tormented the man. Ilya hadn't given him so much credit for human feeling.
It is plausible, if a little surprising, that Svetlana might think a suicide would upset Ilya. Perhaps she has divined, in that barely explicable way she does, that he is going through something, and only misidentified the cause. "You do not need to worry about me because of this," he tells her.
"I know. You are strong." The compliment, so much more straight-forward than the way they usually tease each other, lands almost as hard as Svetlana's distress and squirms uncomfortably under Ilya's skin. He is about to change the subject when Svetlana's face twists in sudden, unexpected anger. "Stronger than him. He took the coward's way out," she spits.
The word coward makes Ilya flinch. He tries to pull away, but Svetlana holds tight to his hands.
"No, I didn't mean it like that." She does look sorry, but is that because she didn't mean it, or because she regrets letting slip her real opinion about people who kill themselves? "But it isn't the same. He was running away from," Svetlana's voice cracks, "what he did."
What he did. Ilya's stomach turns heavy and cold and his face prickles with heat, blood panicking and rushing to and from all the wrong places. Ilya should ask what Lipovsky did, that is what anyone would ask. He doesn't.
"Ilyushka," Svetlana whispers. Her eyes fill with tears again, and she does not let go of his hands to wipe them away, even when they spill over. "You never told me. You could have told me."
"What, did he leave a detailed note or something, confessing all his sins?" Ilya asks, like a fucking idiot, instead of what he should have said, which is obviously 'told you what?' "It does not matter. Whatever he said will be half fantasy."
"He," Svetlana's voice falters. She swallows and forges on. "He made videos, had been making them, for many years. Of him. And boys. After he died, someone put them on the internet."
The news, Svetlana explains a little while later, when Ilya has himself under some semblance of control, is spreading slowly.
"Slower than the average sex scandal," Ilya mutters.
"Don't call it that," Svetlana says, and because her wounded tone is all on his behalf, Ilya does not argue back.
The story is spreading slowly for several reasons. The Russian establishment is embarrassed and repressing it in the home press, and the Western media do not understand the Cyrillic tweets that make it through the net. Perhaps the biggest factor, however, is that the videos exist in a netherworld of uncertainty when it comes to the names and ages of the people involved. Given Lipovsky's predilections for boys on the cusp of becoming men, it is likely illegal to watch or own or distribute most of the footage, and not illegal like downloading the latest episode of Westworld off Pirate Bay, illegal like decent people do not watch these kind of things, and sensible ones consult their lawyers before they publish anything officially.
This reprieve cannot last forever. Even decent people gossip, and not everyone is decent. The American media love a story about evil Russians, and failed Russian coverups, and unlike the media back home, they have the freedom to print whatever the fuck they want. Ilya's face has always been distinctive, and he is the most famous Russian player in the US. The story will break, and here, it will be Ilya's story.
Already, despite Minsport's pressure to keep it quiet, the whispers are widespread enough that Svetlana's father had felt the need to call her and check on how Ilya was handling his public humiliation, and if Sergei Vetrov, who according to Svetlana does not know how to unlock his iPhone and has his secretary read all his e-mails aloud to him, knows, then the KHL players know. And if the KHL players know, they will tell the Russian players in the MHL, who will tell the rest of their teams, who will tell everyone, because they all fucking hate him. If the muted Whatsapp group of Russian MLH players isn't already talking about it, it's only because they've made another group without Ilya.
At fourteen, Ilya had been tall and strong for his age. His videos probably don't look illegal. People can probably tell themselves they're okay to share. That they can pass their phone over in the locker room. That they can laugh about it, and judge him for not fighting harder. For barely fighting at all.
Svetlana doesn't make fun of Ilya when he throws up in the kitchen sink. She rubs his back and strokes her nails up the nape of his neck, into his hair. For the first time in a decade, it makes Ilya's skin crawl. The ruin sets in that early.
At first, Ilya thinks that not knowing when the story will boil over is the worst feeling in the world. For two and a half days, he is constantly on edge, struggling to find the English to answer the simplest questions from journalists, unable to tell if Marleau's searching looks are evaluating Ilya's shitty mood or evaluating if Ilya is the one from the sex tape everyone was watching before he came in the room. Ilya is scared to open notifications on his phone, or look up into the crowd at a game, or answer his goddamn door. It is like being a child again, poised all the time on the edge of fight or flight, his body too stupid to understand that all his reflexes are pointless, that he is small and powerless and has nowhere to go.
Speak to your lawyer, speak to your agent, Svetlana urges him. Hire a PR person, hire a therapist. She may as well tell him to build a time machine and stop this all happening. It's impossible.
So yes, Ilya thinks the uncertainty of the gathering storm is the worst feeling in the world, right up until TMZ runs the headline HOCKEY PLAYER'S TRAGIC ORDEAL. That's worse.
The subheading on the article is Boston center remains silent on abuse scandal rocking Russian hockey, which Svetlana, incandescent with rage, says will read like complicity to the casual headline skimmer. It is one of many things Ilya should bring up with his hypothetical crisis management team. The actual article is full of a cloying false sympathy that Ilya detests even more, simpering over a victimhood Ilya doesn't feel. At least the subheading is fucking accurate. He is remaining silent. Silence is how you get through this kind of shit.
TMZ publish their story in the evening, and Ilya is summoned to a Raiders crisis meeting at 7am the very next day. It's small and low key, just LeClaire (pale, sweaty, avoiding eye contact) and the Raiders' PR manager (almost vibrating with the level of sympathetic understanding she is trying to project) in attendance, which is tactful, but doesn't prevent the meeting from being extremely unproductive.
A rejected suggestion of a friendly journalist Ilya could give an interview to ("nothing tasteless or sensational, you'd have input on the final edit"), becomes an offer to workshop Ilya's own statement with him ("this is our area of expertise, you can use us as much as you need, we want to help"), becomes a request for a quote to go in the Raiders' statement ("Abigail will disseminate it through the official Twitter account, you won't have to deal with any of it"), becomes a borderline desperate plea for ratification of their draft statement ("the wording would be 'and Rozanov', nothing specific"), and Ilya cannot do any of it. If he looks directly at what happened and opens his mouth, he doesn't know what will come out.
Ilya doesn't even have the decency to shuffle off the ice into the shadows like they so desperately want ("take as much time as you need, Rozanov") because if he stops, if he pauses long enough for any of this to catch up to him, he has a horrible certainty it will crush him and he'll never be able to start again.
And so, defeated, confused, exasperated, they release Ilya to practice. What else can they do? Technically, or at least as far as they can say without being strung up in the court of current public opinion, Ilya has done nothing wrong. It's still too early for anyone else to be in, but Ilya gets into his gear, puts his headphones in, and waits for the rest of the team arrive, head down so that the shuffling feet surrounding him are the only clue to the awkward fucking atmosphere. When Marleau puts a tentative hand on his shoulder, Ilya figures it's time. He stands, shrugging Marleau off, and the locker room falls silent.
"New rule. If anyone talks to me about anything other than hockey, I will rip their tongue out," Ilya announces. And whether it's fear, pity, disgust, or the fact that as soon as he's on the ice Ilya skates faster and harder than he has since the last time his father came to a practice session and he physically cannot hear them through his dust, no one does.
That is the one blessing. Ilya's hockey doesn't suffer.
It turns out that you can channel the sense that you're being actively pursued by a searing inferno of all your mistakes into some incredible skating, and that a suffocating glass wall coming down between you and the rest of the world is helpful for both ignoring jeers and laughs, and severing you from physical sensations like exhaustion and bruises.
Before their first game after the article, Ilya is surrounded by worried glances and hushed cut off sentences. Deep down, he's maybe a little worried himself.
Three minutes into the first period, Ilya scores a goal so beautiful and unlikely that it temporarily wipes his tragic ordeal from the entire arena's mind. The crowd cheer, Buffalo curse Ilya's name exactly as fervently as they always do, and Marleau slams in for a congratulatory bro-hug.
"You beauty!" Marleau crows, face alight with the innocent joy that maybe Ilya is alright after all, and when he claps a hand on the back of Ilya's neck and squeezes Ilya doesn't punch him, which is its own victory.
If Ilya is strong enough to harness it, this could be productive, the humiliation a fire even greater than the Olympic failure that propelled Ilya to his first cup. Wouldn't that be ironic? Lipovsky's tough love and firm, unyielding hand pushing Ilya to excellence one more time, even from beyond the fucking grave.
"You want me for press?" Ilya asks LeClaire, after they've trounced Buffalo 5-2, almost forgetting for a moment that he'd rather be castrated than stand in front a journalist.
"Hah!" LeClaire doesn't bother to look anything other than incredulous. "Go home Rozanov. Get some sleep, you look like shit."
Ilya goes home, but he doesn't sleep. He settles down to watch a recording of the night's triumphs.
"Few players respond to adversity like Ilya Rozanov," says one of the commentators after his spectacular first goal. Ilya watches the rest of the game on mute.
Once the story has broken containment, no can fucking shut up about it, even in the Russian press, who give up on denial and move onto blame and distraction. Two active KHL players and one retiree issue brief, eerily identical statements, denying as much as they can deny, liberally conflating homosexuality and whatever it was Lipovsky was doing, and pivoting to the importance of protecting children by promoting traditional family values.
Reading the statements is surreal, like Ilya's most private horrors have been poorly plagiarized for everyone else to see. Next Marleau will be telling everyone about how he found his mother's corpse and Connors will be dishing about Shane Hollander breaking his heart. Fuck.
To add to how warped the whole experience feels, the retired player is Sidorov. Sidorov! He had been one of the greats in Ilya's youth: power and accuracy perfectly balanced, a player Ilya modeled himself on, and the biggest reason he'd been excited when Lipovsky approached Ilya's father about private coaching. Now here Sidorov is, the statuesque god who owned the ice for a decade, reduced to bleating nonsense about weakening modern morality, issuing the statement the full weight of the government would be pressuring Ilya to issue if they had him in their immediate power.
It is stupid, so stupid, but right up until he heard the word "boys", plural, fall from Svetlana's lips, Ilya had truly thought it was just him. Sure, Lipovsky was not a good person, but Ilya's failures contributed. If Ilya had been better—stronger, cannier, manlier, good enough to succeed alone, or have other people to turn to for help—it wouldn't have happened. He would have found another way, or more likely, Lipovsky wouldn't even have thought of doing it.
Over a decade later, yes, Ilya knows that there are predators out there who don't need an excuse and do not simply stop at one victim, but it seems impossible that that is the case here, that such a generic platitude can be applied to his situation. There has always been something wrong with Ilya, something in him that makes people terrible. This is a core truth of his existence.
And yet, the platitude must be true, at least for some of the boys Lipovsky targeted. It didn't start with Ilya, and it didn't end with Ilya. Three Russian players have issued statements, and they are just the three famous enough to be identified from the videos and pressured into talking about it. There are more people out there, praying their face is generic and their legacy weak enough that their phone won't ring and drag them into this.
All of it, the knowledge that he was just one of many, the vileness of the Russian statements, only serves to make Ilya feel even more wrong. He was stupider than he knew back then. He enabled a monster. And now, he is standing uselessly while the government weaponizes what Lipovsky did against queer people in Russia. Ilya should say something, he knows he should, but all he hears if he tries to imagine what that might be is static. If he came out as bisexual would that be helpful or counterproductive? Is he willing to do it, even if it would help? Is it better if he lies about what happened to make it more palatable? Every option is a pitfall, so he doesn't do anything.
The night Svetlana told him, Ilya's first question, once the vomiting had run its course, had been, "Did you watch it?"
He was still hunched over the sink, unable to turn around. The idea of Svetlana—the only person Ilya could plausibly claim both knows him and loves him—seeing him like that, doing those things, was so awful Ilya couldn't actually hold it in his mind.
Svetlana hugged him, despite the awkward side-on angle, arms around his chest and cheek pressed against his shoulder.
"No. No of course not," she said. "I would not do that to you. I will never watch it. I promise."
The thing is, whether they watch the video not, whether they think you are a victim or a pervert, people do treat you differently after something like this. They can't help it.
Svetlana tries, but Ilya makes her sad now, all their old ease and laughter dried up. Ilya's agent back in Russia fades away almost immediately, unwilling or unable to handle a crisis this huge and politically sensitive. LeClaire is constantly assessing if Ilya will be a liability in any given situation, and judging by his frown, finding Ilya wanting. The team only look at him when it's time to pass the puck. The internet talks about Ilya in a new way that he can longer pretend he is in on, split between pity and disgust.
Even Alexei, the one time he calls, doesn't demand money with his usual verve, like he isn't sure he wants it anymore. That really fucks Ilya up. If he is no longer something his brother despises and rages against, the crab at the top of the bucket Alexei will do anything to drag down, what is he?
The only one who doesn't behave any differently is his father, which sets the bar for just how medically fucked you have to be. Alexei, the fucking snitch, will have run eagerly to him with the tale of Ilya's disgrace, but in a rare win for dementia, it doesn't stick. Never has Ilya been so grateful to have his father bellow down the phone that his mother must have been out fucking other men all day like the whore she is because she's not there to make her husband dinner. Not only does his father not know, the version of Ilya that Grigori remembers is truly free of it, has a mother to run to and a part-time coach that's only half paying attention to him. It's positively nostalgic. Ilya doesn't want it to end and for once, his father is one who hangs up.
Oh, and there's Shane. Shane doesn't treat Ilya any differently. He's already decided Ilya isn't someone he wants to be around.
Ilya doesn’t go to All Stars. Days hanging out with the biggest egos in the league, none of them with a motive to keep Ilya sweet by pretending nothing happened? Endless press opportunities without a coach motivated to keep the journalistic horde focused on the team? Rose Landry in a series of stunning outfits, or worse, her Hollander jersey, blissfully ignorant that she has competed for Shane's affections, let alone won? Shane himself, whose inevitable pity and relief will be as obvious and unaffected as all his emotions always are? No fucking thank you. Fuck that. Fuck all of it.
And the truth is, a few weeks in to his current hot streak Ilya is feeling a bone-deep exhaustion, because there is a difference between a rigorous campaign for the Cup that maximizes performance by encompassing training, diet and sleep schedule, and a blind, desperate sprint that is more from something than to something. If ever there was a year for Ilya to take advantage of the rest break that the vast majority of the league get, it is this one. No problem.
It's actually good that Shane ended things between them before any of this happened. A gift. Ilya is grateful. He never has to endure a moment's uncertainty over how much baggage Shane could put up with, because he already knows it's none. Ilya doesn't have to watch Shane wait for the most sensitive moment to separate himself, or discover if he's selfless enough to make the break himself if Shane won't. Having moved on to America's sweetheart before things got tough, Shane doesn't have to feel any responsibility for Ilya's emotions or actions at all. He's free.
Which is good! The flip side of Shane's freedom is Ilya's freedom. They owe each other nothing. There is one less person for Ilya to disappoint and hurt on a list so short it's barely a list anymore. One less person who might think they should have done something if-
Ilya should have gone to All Stars. He realizes that the first morning he wakes up with no game or practice to go to. Five days of rest sounded great when he was exhausted enough to go to sleep, but now that he has slept, it's five days with no distractions.
Most of his usual options are off the table. Ilya can't play hockey, because there is no hockey. Scrolling social media is off the table, because if the people in Ilya's algorithm aren't talking about his sordid sexual past, they're talking about Shane's blissful romantic future. The awkward discomfort of any teammates who haven't left town for the week will be worse than nothing. Ilya can't text Shane, because he already scared him off, and even if Ilya is willing to accept Svetlana's affectionate, misplaced sympathy, it's too late to ask for it, because she's in Palm Beach for the Cavallino Classic, and he'd rejected her invitation to tag along.
All that really leaves is Ilya's old faithfuls: clubs and casual sex. Their appeal may have waned over the course of his preoccupation with Shane, but since that's over, it could be time for a renaissance. All Ilya would have to do is face roomfuls of strangers without knowing if they know, or if they watched any of the videos. Any one of the strangers might ask Ilya about it, or let him pick them up because they feel sorry for him, or reject him because of what he did, or hell, get off to the memory of the video in the privacy of their own head while Ilya fucks them and never even tell him.
Ilya can cope with that, he has to, because he needs something. One by one, his options have been closing off, and as they do it is harder and harder to ignore the one option that is always there.
There is no plan. Ilya has never had a plan, not a concrete one. Just an awareness of a potential exit. A thought. Sometimes he glances at it, and thinks about what he wouldn't let it be—a mess for anyone who knows him to walk in on, something he'd get an innocent person, like a train driver, directly involved in, a failure he'd have to live through and with—if he did it, not that he would.
The frequency and severity of the thought has always waxed and waned. Usually it's an ankle deep flash flood, fleeting and easily ignored, but sometimes it's a wave, high enough to slap him in the face, strong enough that the undertow nearly pulls him over.
The morning of Ilya's 7am crisis meeting, he'd been driving, radio on to fill the silence, when Sports Hub had turned to discussing the fucking scandal. Automatically, Ilya had noted how quiet the road was, free of people nearby who might get hurt or have an opinion on how recklessly he steered into the next corner.
Two games ago, Ilya had taken a hard check from a Floridian giant with boulders for shoulders and the doctor had asked how bad his pain was on a scale of one to ten. It would only have taken a few words to get his hands on some pills.
Countless fucking nights it's been 3am and Ilya has lain on his bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering if the light fixture would support his weight long enough for him to suffocate.
Sometimes it gets worse, and Ilya grits his teeth through it, and eventually it gets better. That's how things have always been, and he has always handled it, and he'll handle this too. Change down a gear and turn sensibly round the bend, hands at ten and two. Lie and say, "only a 2". Get up from his bed and stare at his living room ceiling instead, where all the lights are recessed. Brace himself against the wave and let it wash over him.
At one minute past noon on the first day of the All Star break, Ilya gets the vodka out. Of course it's stupid to drink when he's in a mood like this, and self-control is so important. Ilya knows that. He fucking knows that. But what else is there?
Ilya has a drink, and another. He watches one and half Fast & Furious movies. He drinks more and wonders when he can go to bed, despite the fact that it's so early not even Shane would be contemplating going to bed.
Christ, Ilya has four and half days of this still to go. How the fuck is he going to do it?
He thinks about watching porn, but the idea makes him feel slightly sick. And then he thinks—poisonous thought—how hard is it to find these videos anyway? Maybe he's been blowing it all out of proportion. Maybe they've all been deleted and only perverts who go on the dark web, whatever the fuck that is, know where to find them. Maybe Ilya can sober up, go out, get drunk again in a less depressing way, and easily find someone who has no idea who he is to distract him.
It takes Ilya less than half an hour to find one on Pornhub, because the world is a goddamn cesspit. Before he does, Ilya isn't even sure if he'll recognize one of the videos, not in passing in an endless parade of fleshy thumbnails, but the moment he sees it, he knows. A single, small, pixellated still, and it's like Ilya is there. The desk. The filing cabinet. The bench against one wall. The humid stench of sweaty equipment heaped up nearby. Ilya knows, without clicking on the video, the exact set of messy shelves where the camera must have been hidden. The place where he'll drop his gear when he's told to strip.
Ilya closes the tab, closes his computer, flees the room, then his whole house, and is dancing under the pulsing lights of The Grand before midnight. So what if some strangers pity him? Let them. Ilya is pitiable. It's better than being alone with nothing but the video and one exit.
He goes back to the apartment of a woman who laughs a lot with her friends and asks his name like she really doesn't know it, and to Ilya's relief, it's fine. It's fine. She has a Raiders mug in her kitchen, but that could be there for a thousand reasons, Ilya doesn't know the story of every random mug he drinks from. She doesn't doesn't mention hockey, and her bedroom has reassuringly bare, empty walls where not even the tiniest, most discrete nanny-cam could be hidden. She gives up on conversation when Ilya plays up his lack of English, falls asleep quickly after a couple of orgasms, and only rouses enough to grunt "bye" when he slips out at dawn. Perfect.
For two days and nights, Ilya makes it work. He hits the gym like he's Shane Hollander, early and focused, and the clubs like he's Ilya Rozanov, raucously and late. It's not restorative, given it involves about three hours sleep in a stranger's bed, but it's fun. He's having fun.
Late on the third night, just as Ilya thinks he's nearly pulled a hattrick of distraction off, the brunette he's dancing with sweeps her hair seductively over one shoulder, pulls Ilya down so her lips are pressed to his ear and says, loud and wet in his ear, "I think you're so brave."
That night, Ilya goes back to his own home, alone. He has another drink. He watches the video.
The thing is, it shouldn’t make a difference, Ilya knows what happened, he was fucking there. The mainstream opinion pieces, the sympathetic people online, the Raider's PR Department, even Svetlana, all have their idea of what happened, based on them being good, normal people. Ilya hasn’t pushed back hard on the narrative that he’s an innocent victim, however much it makes his skin crawl, because he’s not a fucking idiot. Anything that might give people a way to ignore this, to reach for sympathy not condemnation, is what will keep him in this job and this country, or keep him alive and free if he has to go back to his. That doesn't mean he agrees.
Technically Ilya was a child, but not a normal one. He already had responsibilities and pressures on him, on and off the ice, that meant he had to grow up fast. So he didn't want it. So fucking what? It was one of many times in his life where he only had bad options. He could have fought harder, made more of a fuss. Instead, he chose not to squander his father's investment of time and effort. He chose not to upset his famous, powerful coach. He chose to keep hold of his best chance to maybe, one day, get out of Russia. Ilya chose.
It shouldn't even be that big a deal. If you take a step back, it is just a thing that happened. Another unpleasant physical experience to be got through, worse than a beating the way that a beating is worse than a bag skate, but still on the same scale, if only other people weren't so hysterical about it. A price to pay, later justified by Ilya's success. It's precisely because he made the right sacrifices then that now he gets to be a famous multi-millionaire and play a game for a living. He understood, and he decided, and he was right. It's what Ilya has told himself for a decade.
Except, when he watches the video, that’s not how it looks on screen, like a clear-eyed bargain. That’s a child. Even before he takes off the bulk of the protective hockey padding and shrinks even further, a child. And he’s not stoic, he’s terrified. He cried.
Ilya stares at the light fitting until dawn fills his bedroom.
Day four slips by in unpredictable fits and starts, like someone has given a toddler the television remote, and they're hitting pause and fast-forward and skip-scene without knowing what any of the buttons mean. Ilya observes himself at a remove as he moves around his house, looking at his knife drawer (messy), his medicine cabinet (unpredictable), his oven (electric), his car collection (messy and unpredictable). Ilya looks at all these things, and then goes online and books a hotel room at a Back Bay hotel known for its excellent views.
Existence is still a first person video game someone else is controlling as Ilya drives to the hotel, checks in, and has a (last) drink at the hotel bar, a vodka good enough that Ilya is almost sorry when he realizes he's downed it without a thought. In some lingering reflex of his former self, he buys drinks for everyone in the bar, but the succession of grateful cheers don't feel like anything to do with him.
It's only when Ilya is finally alone in his Deluxe Junior Suite with Balcony that time seems to settle down into its usual flow and his body returns to him, acceptance of why he's there already settled, fully formed, in his mind. Everything is in place. All Ilya has to do is see it through.
The view is, as advertised, spectacular, a view across to Cambridge bisected by the glimmering ribbon of the Charles river. The more important factor to Ilya right now is the long, steep drop directly below the balcony, but he still appreciates having a last nice thing to look at. A proper city should always have a river.
In fact, now that he's here, now that some kindly higher power or assertive part of his subconscious has made the plan and guided him into place, now that the weight of the future and the paralyzing question of his culpability are lifting, soon to no longer be his problem, Ilya is able to think more clearly than he has in weeks. Perhaps more clearly than he has since he said Shane's name out loud and watched him recoil, the breaking point at which it all started to go wrong.
There are a few final housekeeping tasks he has to complete, if he really wants to do this with a clear conscience. Loose ends to tie up, and if he can, messages to send or a note to write. He'd always wished there'd been a note.
Calmly, Ilya sits with his back to the spectacular view, gets out his phone, and goes into his messages for the first time since the the story officially broke. Ilya deletes his text thread with Jane. He doesn't let himself read the recent messages, a line of gray bubbles that fills the screen. Miraculously, he has been granted executive control of his body without the fear and pain he'd always expected would accompany this decision, which remain behind a window, visible but unable to touch him. But as smooth and clear as the window is, Ilya senses that the right blow could shatter it, and his final tasks are too important to screw up. He knows now how the sins of the dead can come back to fuck the living and he doesn’t want to do that to anyone else, especially Shane.
After some consideration, Ilya also deletes his threads with a few other regular hookups who probably don't want to be associated with him, even though it's been months since he texted, and Alexei, because his wrangling with his brother makes for fucking humiliating reading.
Briefly, Ilya considers deleting Shane’s contact, but he can’t quite bring himself to. Instead he changes it to Hollander, so that no one will connect it to his Jane. It is a little weird to have his rival’s phone number, but not a smoking gun, not without the texts. Next, Ilya deletes his internet history, his tweets, his Instagram, and all his thirst trap photos and dickpics, because they were mostly to send to Shane, and that too feels like something that might one day come back to haunt Shane in some convoluted way.
Then he scrolls back through his photos, looking for any clues he missed. Perhaps, on some level, Ilya is looking for a reason to change his mind. He doesn't find it. What do his photos say about his life? Mainly how hollow and empty it is. The only person he has is Svetlana, and he is only a small part of her life. Other than that it's nothing but parties, and travel to the same thirty-one North American cities, with the same twenty-two men paid to spend time with him, where Ilya sees nothing except bland hotels and ice-rinks, and makes no lasting connections with anyone.
Ilya scrolls and scrolls, back through the years, until he gets to the oldest photos on his phone, the only ones he bothered to transfer from his pre-Cloud phone. Him and Shane, side by side at the award podium, Ilya's hand on Shane's neck, Shane's face tight with disapproval. Despite the way that everything about the photo now seems symbolic of how fucked they always were, Ilya feels a surge of longing, so strong it pushes up against the glassy calm of his resolve. Even if they couldn't be something, they weren't nothing.
Reflexively, Ilya tries to swipe to his conversation with Jane, just to look at the messages. It's something he does more often than he'd like to admit, punishment or reward depending on his circumstance, but of course, he's already deleted the thread. Jane is gone, and under Hollander, there is only silence.
Stupidly, Ilya can't stand the sight. It feels wrong. There should be something.
Maybe Ilya will allow himself a final text. It is late, and Shane will be tucked up in bed by now, so the risk is minor. It's a selfish urge, but isn't that Ilya all over? He goes to all this trouble to fix things up nicely, but can't resist ruining the simplicity of the gesture, setting his greasy fingerprints on the clean window. But what to write? What does he want to say? What can encompass how much and how little they've been to each other, and how much Ilya regrets this fucked up coda to his life, which never should have touched Shane at all?
He considers, I hope you do not think I lied to you. I only wanted to give you the better part of myself and that is such a small part, but that's maudlin as hell.
He considers, The moments I had with you were the best in my life. I will hold them in my heart as long as I can, but what the fuck does he think Shane will do with that?
He types out, Does she fuck you as well I did? before his better angels hit delete.
In the end, the thing he most wants to say is the thing he truly cannot say.
I love you
I love you
I always loved you