Chapter Text
Spring, 2008
Someone somewhere said any two people on earth can be linked with only 6 degrees of separation. Shane played this game in his head sometimes, when he walked to and from training.
How could a Tibetan monk be linked to a hairdresser in Tampa Bay? He would make up maps of these 6 degrees of separation, just for the exercise of it. Maybe the hairdresser had a client at one time who was a professional dancer. Maybe that dancer was on tour somewhere and met a choreographer. Maybe the choreographer had a husband who had to travel a lot for work. Maybe that husband once stayed in a hotel in Thailand where the bellboy was running away from his problems. And maybe those problems had to do with a monastery bleeding money and parents that were cold and cruel because of it. And there, the connection was mapped.
Shane often made these maps, with real people or imagined people. He didn’t think about how he might be 6 degrees of separation from Ilya Rozanov, because he didn’t know Ilya Rozanov existed.
Shane liked telling these stories in his head, mapping these connections, because his real life was very boring and very small and lacked few real connections. He didn't complain. That was how he liked it. That was safe.
Shane’s life was in neat boxes. His parents. His few friends. His MMA. Okay—being a top UFC fighter was, by default, not a boring profession. He fought in front of crowds. He traveled. He got injured. But he found a way to keep it boring. When he wasn’t fighting for a crowd, Shane was training with his coaches, or reading MMA theory in books, or meditating. The meditating was an important counterbalance to the emotional and physical upheaval during fights.
Shane wasn’t very big for a UFC fighter, but he was fast and intuitive, and obsessive in his studying and training. He was one of the best fighters in his weight division, and he was forever grateful that weight divisions existed. At 6 foot flat on a good day (hair included) and 200 pounds-ish, there were guys that had 7 inches and 100 pounds on Shane in the UFC. He could be the fastest fighter in the world and still get flattened by one of them.
Shane liked the fighting because it was, in its own way, a form of art. He liked the way it used his body as an instrument. He liked the way everything else went quiet in his head when he was in the octagon. He was just there, anticipating moves, mapping out his next ones like the maps of 6 degrees of separation he made for fun.
Shane had been practicing martial arts from the age of four, when his parents signed him up for a class because he didn't have friends in preschool and was too cautious to use playground equipment if other kids were on it. He was afraid of the other kids, afraid of the height of slides, afraid of the way the play structure bridge wobbled.
So they signed him up for karate, hoping it would help him build some confidence. It ended up doing much more than that. Shane became singularly obsessed with martial arts, wanting to learn more and more and more, and his parents supported him. David and Yuna were just happy he had something he loved, even if he was a little bit too intense for it for a seven year old. So they drove him to all his sessions, to the competitions, to the showcases. They were at every belt ceremony.
When Shane graduated high school, they asked what he wanted to do next. Shane was smart. He was good at school, especially math and science. Numbers and physical laws made sense to him. He could have gone to a good college and studied something practical, but Shane cared about one thing and one thing only: becoming good enough to be scouted by the UFC.
So Yuna and David supported him, because they loved their son and they always supported him. Sometimes Yuna supported him a little bit too much, managing him to the point of death, but he understood and never objected. Because Shane was like that. He was understanding and careful and forgiving and quiet. He was precise and graceful in the octagon. He fought smart and fast, not mean.
Shane was scouted to the UFC within a year after graduating high school. He packed up his room in his parent's house in Ottawa, filled his shitty Toyota Corolla with his boxes, and moved to an apartment in Montreal, where he would compete.
Shane's parents didn't cry when he left, because he would only be two hours away, and because they weren't criers. Shane didn't cry for the same reasons. He just hugged them, told them he loved them, and drove away to his new life. He played the 6 degrees game in his head with his music turned down low for the whole drive.
He mapped out 6 degrees of separation for a lawyer in Texas to a newborn baby in Vietnam. For a dog-walker in Mexico to a celebrity game show host. What he didn't do was map his connection to Ilya Rozanov, because Ilya Rozanov had yet to walk into his life and crash down all 6 degrees of separation in one reckless fell swoop.
Shane didn't know it, but he was already 6 degrees away from Ilya Rozanov. Because Shane was driving to Montreal, and Montreal was where a modeling agency he didn't know the name of was based. And that modeling agency recently put an ad out for a new campaign. That ad was seen by a girl named Svetlana who had curly hair and a quick, smart tongue. And that girl had called her best friend, Ilya Rozanov, and said, “There's work for you in Montreal, if you're good enough.” And Ilya Rozanov had been good enough, and was finally, finally getting out of Moscow after 19 miserable years. And those 6 degrees of separation would soon be just 1, because Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander would be existing in the same city without either knowing the other one existed.
Ilya Rozanov did not have a lot to his name. He had a city that only accepted half of him—the half that he showed, with the women and the bars and the facade—, a brother who resented him, a father who was cruel in the casual way that you didn't notice if you weren't paying attention, and a dead mother who had loved him but would never come back. He had had a best friend, Svetlana, but she had moved to Canada three years ago on a student visa, and then stayed on a work visa. It was Svetlana who called him one Tuesday night, because it was morning for her, and said in Russian, “An agency I do publicity for is looking for a new man for their campaign. You're the perfect fit. If you're good enough.”
Ilya was interested. He was more than interested. Russia was his country, but it had long ago stopped being his home, since his mother had gone, since his brother's hatred had traveled from his words to his fists, since Moscow had become less and less safe for someone like him.
So he applied in secret, because to his father and to his brother and to most of Moscow, being a man and a model also meant you were something that was now illegal, for all intents and purposes. And Ilya couldn't even deny it.
He liked women—kissing them, sleeping with them, dancing with them—but he liked men, too. He was curious about men. He found their bodies beautiful and their mouths inviting and he didn't see why he had to limit himself to only one group of people.
But liking men in Russia was dangerous. Liking modeling as a man in Russia was also dangerous. At least, if you were Ilya Rozanov, and your family was your family. His father was too connected in the military, had too many opinions, too much face to lose. And his brother was following in the same footsteps, albeit with less gracefulness and more cocaine.
So the modeling had always been a secret, something that Ilya aspired to, practiced for, behind closed doors—the same place where he liked men from. He worked his job bartending and applied to job after job that would get him anywhere—London, Boston, Vancouver. He booked none of them. He had very little to show—polaroids he had taken, shitty film he had collected by himself with a tripod. He would never get out if someone didn't take a swinging chance on him.
And in the spring of 2008, someone did. Svetlana called him, and told him about the job. He sent the polaroids and the headshots and the film. He interviewed with his thick Russian accent and broken English he was embarrassed of. They had him pose and walk over video call. He told them he needed visa sponsorship to move to Canada.
He booked the job. Somehow, all the way from Russia, with his shitty film and shittier wifi connection and even shittier English, he booked the job.
“We think you have something special,” they told him. So Ilya took all the money he had been carefully saving up since he started working at fifteen years old, booked a flight to Montreal, and packed two large suitcases.
Svetlana helped him find an apartment he could afford, at least for a little while, and she helped him with the visa paperwork as well. She lived in Quebec City, not Montreal, but it would be closer than they were now.
Ilya's father had nothing good to say about Ilya moving to Canada. He asked what for. Ilya said he found work. He asked what kind of work. Ilya said “advertisement,” because it technically was sort of true. Ilya's father asked if he would ever come back to Moscow. Ilya told the truth, which was that he didn't know.
His brother had no questions. He had one demand, which was, “When you start making that Canadian money, you had better send some of it over. As payment for abandoning me to take care of Papa as he ages.”
Ilya had only said, “Okay, Alexei.” And that was that. He did the paperwork, found the apartment, took his two suitcases, and flew across the ocean to start a new life in Montreal.
Ilya didn't know he was knocking the 6 degrees of separation between himself and Shane Hollander down to 1 by moving to Montreal, because he didn't know Shane Hollander existed. He didn't even know about the 6 degrees theory.
The first job went well. Better than well. Ilya had a natural talent, he was told again and again—a gift for modeling. He was booked, and then booked again, and then booked again. By the end of the first year, he had moved to a slightly better apartment, and he was getting flown to all corners of Canada to walk or do photoshoots or ads. It felt good—being good at something. Being in demand.
He found he was also in demand in other ways. Women everywhere wanted him. They liked his golden curls and his hazel eyes and his cocky, playful grin. They liked his accent and his terrible English and his enviable body. And Ilya liked the women back. He slept with all sorts of women—other models, strangers he met at bars, flight attendants he was able to seduce over four hours in the air. And, for the first time, Ilya felt safe to explore his attraction to men. It wasn't the same as it was with women. He wasn't as open, it wasn't as frequent, and it usually was quick and efficient, exploratory in a clinical kind of way. It wasn't a secret, but it wasn't advertised. Svetlana, who he saw as often as possible, knew about the men. His friends, other models or industry folks from Russia he had connected with over the year, did not. The other women did not know, or at least didn't ask.
It was near the end of the first year, on a frigid February day, that Ilya became aware of the existence of Shane Hollander. It was a day off, and he was sitting at home flipping through TV channels, trying to walk (or lounge) off a hangover. He had just smoked a cigarette leaning out the open window, and the freezing air and nicotine made him feel steadier than he had all day.
He paused his channel flipping when he saw a UFC fight. Ilya didn't normally watch—the sport never really interested him before—but the man on screen made him stop. He was small for an MMA fighter, maybe 6 feet, and muscular but lean. Ilya's eyes were drawn to his movements the way that eyes are naturally drawn to watch the flickering of flames. The man was quick, efficient, powerful. He currently had someone who was at least two inches taller than him pinned under his elbow.
Ilya couldn't say why, but he sat there and watched the whole fight. The man, whom the announcers deemed Shane Hollander, won the fight. Ilya wasn't surprised. There was an interview after, and Ilya got to see him up close. He was young, probably close to Ilya's age. He had dark brown, uptilted eyes. One had a scratch along its side that was bleeding. Dark eyebrows. Dark hair flopping over his forehead, plastered in sweat. Full, interesting lips. And freckles—a smattering of them across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. They reminded Ilya of the splatter painting he used to do with his mother, how she taught him to flick the paintbrush to make stars in the sky. He couldn't look away from them.
The interview was in French, so Ilya had no idea what he was saying, but he watched how he held himself. Shane Hollander held himself in a way that screamed his life was built around control. His shoulders were tight, his face was tight, even his voice was tight, flat. He offered small, professional smiles. He was not overcome with emotion from his win. He nodded, he answered in succinct, short sentences, and held himself rigid and straight. Ilya had a brief, mad need to know what this stranger looked like when he lost all that control. He wanted to know what that powerful body would be like loose and relaxed, splayed out….
Ilya shook his head as if waking himself from a trance and shut the TV off. That was weird.
Only, just by chance of course, Ilya ended up watching the next fight that included Shane Hollander. And then he ended up on Google, looking at fight schedules. That's how he learned that Shane Hollander lived in the same city as himself. He read Shane's short bio on the UFC website: 19 years old, like himself. From Ottawa, Canada. A perfect family with two parents and one son. Practicing MMA since he was 4 years old. All of this fascinated Ilya to a point it should not have, but it was those damn freckles. They sang to him a language he had never heard before but somehow understood.
Those freckles were why Ilya began to watch UFC at home alone, sitting on his couch with an unlit cigarette resting in his fingers, staring at Shane Hollander.