Chapter Text
An oak green grows in the bay;
A golden chain entwines the oak:
A learned tomcat by night and day
Commits around it his walk;
Rightwards he goes singing songs,
Leftwards – a fairy tale he reads.
There are wonders: there Leshy roams
He was standing in the rafters of the Iceberg Skating Palace watching Joe’s short program—Joe who wasn’t very good, according to the judges. Shane couldn’t really tell who was good or not, unless they fell down; it all seemed equally improbable and also not particularly like a sport.
The score was 76.85, which seemed like an embarrassment to Shane, though Joe looked perfectly happy with it. Shane couldn’t understand being satisfied with being anything less than the best, but he’d come to learn that it was rude to say so. He frowned, and mentally ran through the performance looking for something he could point to, something like “great job on the triple axel!” (He was pretty sure that was one of the jumps he’d seen.)
“Shane Hollander?”
The accent was Russian, which ought not to be surprising considering they were in Russia, but other than absolutely creaming the Russian team (now that was an embarrassment) Shane hadn’t actually encountered very many Russian people. The Olympic Village was siloed away, so mostly he only saw fellow Canadians as well as, now and again, typically outgoing Americans who would descend upon him when he was trying to have a quietly celebratory scoop of ice cream in honor of defeating Latvia.
“Yes?” Shane said, a little wary. The man was tall, muscular-looking beneath his black coat. His expression was serious, not to say blank, but his eyes were alight. Shane’s dad always talked about his mom’s sparkling eyes in a way that made everyone around them a little uncomfortable, but also Shane hadn’t really known what he meant: eyes didn’t sparkle. And yet, this man’s eyes sort of did, catching the dull fluorescents of the stadium and reflecting them back in vivid blue-green the color of a river of snowmelt.
“Ilya Rozanov,” he said, and offered his hand for a shake.
Shane took it because that was the polite thing to do. The stranger’s hand was dry but cool, strangely uncallused. Shane didn’t know anyone with smooth hands, except maybe his lawyer. “It’s good to meet you,” he said. “Are you, uh, on the Russian team, or…?” He had the glutes for skating, certainly.
“No, no,” Rozanov said. “I just like to watch.” He released Shane’s hand and leaned against a pillar, one side of his mouth curving up. “I like to watch you,” he added pointedly.
Shane hunched into his Team Canada fleece and tried not to blush. “Thanks, that’s nice of you. I’m just trying to, you know, represent my country and all.”
Rozanov eyed him up and down, taking his time about it. “Gold medal game tomorrow, yes? Are you nervous?”
“There’s always a bit of nervousness,” Shane recited, “and that’s good, it keeps us sharp, it…” Rozanov raised an eyebrow, and after a moment Shane admitted, “No. I’m not nervous.”
He didn’t know why he said it. It wasn’t the right answer to give, especially since for all he knew Rozanov was a journalist and had cornered him to report on Canadian arrogance or something.
But Rozanov smiled wide and warm, an enveloping thing that made the harsh calls of the announcers and the fairly tinny sound of the music fade away into distant drifts of noise, unimportant. “Good. You have no reason to be—you are the best.”
He said it so simply. It wasn’t as if no one else had ever told Shane that—his mother told him all the time, as did his teammates and frankly most sports journalists, although they were just looking to get him to confirm it, and therefore Canadian arrogance, probably.
But the way Rozanov said it—so satisfied, like a good stretch after a long game, like the curling of paper once it caught flame—he sounded proprietary, the way the owner of the Metros had when he’d welcomed Shane to the team. It was odd, and it also didn’t leave room for Shane to demur, to pretend that there was anyone in the MLH that even came close.
“I am. I work hard to be.”
“This is clear,” Rozanov said. “Soft hands, quick skates—these are things that come naturally, but you are more than that. Hockey is an ugly, brutal sport—”
“Well, that’s not quite true,” Shane protested, because even though it probably was, he loved the brutality of it, the way it honed you and forced you to push past whatever limits you’d believed you had before you left them behind.
“Oh, I love it. I love ugly, brutal things. But you make it beautiful, too, Shane Hollander, with the way you play, and that is what I have come to watch. You are so light on your edges, so crisp and graceful. You are dancing on knives, and everyone else is trying not to fall.” He pushed himself away from the pillar, and Shane held very still, frozen, as Rozanov reached out to cup his chin, gripping it so hard Shane’s lips parted. “Beautiful,” he said firmly.
Shane didn’t know what to say to that. No one had ever called him beautiful before. According to his mom he was handsome, and according to his girlfriend he was cute. Those were acceptable things for a male athlete to be, and he liked hearing it, even if it was a little embarrassing.
Beautiful was something else entirely.
He wasn’t sure he liked it, but he didn’t move away—he just stood there, letting Rozanov touch him where anyone could see. Rozanov held his gaze with those glittering eyes, and Shane shuddered, a chill passing through him like a gust of wind. And then Rozanov released him, giving his cheek a gentle pat.
“Good luck tomorrow,” he said, and then he was walking away, a figure in black that moved down the stairs and through the crowd as if it wasn’t there, ignoring the ice-skating entirely.
Shane watched until he was gone, and then he shook himself and hurried to give Joe his congratulations.
Canada won 3-0, and Shane was responsible for two of those goals and assisted the other. His eyes watered when his team swarmed him to drape the Canadian flag over him, jostling him so suddenly that the Bolshoy Ice Dome spun, inverting itself somehow, so that the ice was the sky and he was being carried across a blue-green river.
“Fuck, I’m gonna hurl,” he shouted, but they didn’t hear him, and he didn’t mean it anyway, because it was glorious, it was everything he’d ever dreamed of.
The best, he thought, and let his head fall back as the world righted itself, as he felt his feet on the ice again.
He skated a lap because fuck it why not, the Maple Leaf flying behind him, and he wasn’t even looking at the crowd, it was just a mass of faces—but there he was.
He must have been incredibly wealthy or incredibly connected—or both—to have seats like that, right across from Canada’s bench. (How could Shane not have seen him before? He hadn’t been looking, but still). Being Russian, Rozanov wasn’t cheering, but he looked pleased all the same, grinning wide and warm, proprietary. And Shane slowed down enough to smile back, to beam at him, to laugh, to let the whole wonderful feeling of winning flood through him where Ilya Rozanov could see, could look at him and call it beautiful.
Shane was a little drunk. There had been a great deal of champagne and even more vodka, but he sort of hated both, so he had swallowed only what had basically been poured into his mouth. Which was a lot, probably.
He stumbled on the curb—it seemed like it was the wrong height, maybe an inch or two off, was that a Russia thing, making their curbs higher than in the West, so as to build character?—and tried to orient himself. He’d thought he’d memorized the layout of the Olympic Village by now, but nothing looked familiar. Maybe they’d left at some point, maybe Bergeron had dragged them all to some bar in the wider city, that sounded right actually.
He was standing on a footbridge, had wandered probably way outside the boundaries of where he was supposed to be—but who cared, he had a fucking gold medal around his neck. He felt, for possibly the first time in his life, invincible.
He stared down at the water. It was too close to the sea and not quite cold enough for it to freeze, but chunks of dirty-looking ice drifted by. He felt a little sorry for them—ice, he felt, was supposed to be clean and pure, marred only with blood.
He heard a man say, “Congratulations, Hollander,” and his heart began to race, though not because he was surprised. He didn’t even look up, but kept looking down at the ice even as Ilya Rozanov came to stand at his elbow.
“Thank you,” he managed. “I’m glad you were there to see it.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rozanov cock his head, and though he couldn’t see it, Shane knew he was smiling.
“This is how you celebrate? You stare down off a bridge like you want to jump off it?”
“Nothing much would happen,” Shane said easily. “It’s not high enough. I’d break an ankle, maybe.”
“Seems a shame to break an ankle like yours.”
“I’d better not jump, then.”
Rozanov shook his head and stepped away. When Shane didn’t immediately follow him he said impatiently, “Hollander. Come on.”
Shane knew he ought to be wary. He was alone in a strange city in a stranger country, he didn’t speak the language. He didn’t know this man at all. He asked, “Where?” But he was already following Rozanov across the bridge.
It was a longer walk than he’d anticipated; they walked past the long narrow buildings that looked to Shane like train cars strung together. Those ended abruptly as they crossed one of the main roads into a fancier-looking district filled with bars and restaurants, though they walked past those as well. He thought about asking again, where?, and then decided not to because it was just so nice to walk with someone who didn’t need to talk all the time. Occasionally their eyes would meet as they passed something of interest—an aggressive squirrel, once, or a gaggle of teenaged Finnish figure skaters—but they wouldn’t need to say anything about it.
There was an elderly woman with an honest-to-god kerchief who asked, accent thick, “Do you have the time?” as they waited to cross the street. Rozanov told her without needing to check his watch or phone, which was impressive, but Shane didn’t ask about that, either, just raised his eyebrows when Ilya shrugged. The old woman said something to Shane in Russian, and when he haltingly said, “Я не говорю по-русски,” she smiled and patted his hand.
“Веселись, но в воду не лезь, милый.”
“Uh, okay,” Shane said.
She threw back her head and laughed, cackling loud as a crow, and tugged Rozanov down by his curls, whispering something in his ear.
He straightened, irritated, and said, “Не твоё дело, бабушка.” Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound polite to Shane, and he stiffened automatically, for his mother had taught him to be respectful of his elders.
The old woman didn’t seem to mind. She smiled widely, displaying a rotting tooth, and walked off at a remarkably swift pace.
“That was strange,” Shane said.
Rozanov shrugged. “Crazy old lady.”
They walked a little farther, still in that same comfortable silence that seemed to keep the rest of the world at bay, even as the crowds pressed against them. And then Rozanov said, “Are you coming in?”
Shane had gotten so used to walking without purpose that at first he didn’t understand, but then it registered: this was a hotel. A very fancy hotel, from the looks of it, designed in what Shane had been informed at length by Scott Hunter was “Stalin’s neoclassicism,” complete with pillars and sixties-esque rounded rooms, and chandeliers he could see from outside.
“Come in?”
“To my room,” Rozanov said, a little patient, a little amused. “Or to the bar, whichever.”
“The..the bar,” Shane stammered. “Why would we go to your room?”
“I have no idea,” Rozanov said, and took Shane by the elbow, steering him inside.
They sat in a room with windows as tall as a two-story building, where a woman at a white grand piano played music Shane didn’t recognize, though that was hardly unusual. When the waiter came, Shane asked for a ginger ale without thinking.
“I’m sorry, we don’t have that,” the man said.
“No, I know. It’s okay,” Shane said hurriedly. “I’ll just have…”
“Why don’t you check again?” Rozanov suggested. “Just to make sure. And I’ll have Mamont, please.”
The waiter disappeared, and returned very quickly with, Shane was astonished to see, a can of Canada Dry.
“This is a very good hotel,” Rozanov said, apparently by way of explanation. He took a sip of his vodka and grimaced.
“Don’t like it?” Shane said, trying for teasing. “Me neither.”
Rozanov took another sip and swirled it around in his mouth. “It’s not bad. Smooth as a glacier, probably. Maybe I just like it harsher.”
Shane took a sip of his ginger ale and then put it back on the small table between them. He was beginning to wonder what he was doing there, why he’d agreed to this. What would they even talk about? He had a difficult enough time making conversation with people he actually knew.
Rozanov leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His legs were spread wide, fitted black trousers falling just above his ankles, thin black socks. Shane felt suddenly very underdressed in his jeans and Team Canada fleece, and he cleared his throat. “Do you live nearby? I mean,” he stammered, “not nearby, not if you’re staying in a hotel, but…” He wasn’t sure what he meant.
“Russia is a big country,” Rozanov said agreeably. “It’s very different where I live, not so crowded.”
“It is crowded,” Shane said, shuddering a little. “Montreal—that’s where I live—it’s a city, so it’s crowded there, but nothing like this. This is terrible.”
It hadn’t been, walking alongside Rozanov, the buffer of him, but it felt that way now. They had seats, for a miracle, plush velvet armchairs and even a little table to put their drinks on, but everyone else was standing and talking, laughing, so loud the piano was just another blur of noise.
“It is,” Rozanov said, sounding a little grim. “Too much of a good thing, maybe.” He flexed his palm against his knee, long bony fingers straightening, and then he smiled again. “Tell me about Montreal.”
There wasn’t much to tell, but Shane found himself talking about it anyway, about JJ’s foodie friends and Hayden’s twins. He talked about how he’d bought two apartments next door to each other and knocked down the wall in between to make one big apartment, but that it had ended up being weird having an overlarge open space downstairs, and two opposing loft bedrooms.
“So I was thinking about selling it, and maybe buying somewhere else. I got that place because it was close to the Centre Bell, but maybe it’d be nice to be close to a park. Outremont is an up and coming neighborhood, could be a good investment.”
“Mr. Businessman,” Rozanov said, and he wasn’t smiling but Shane laughed at himself all the same.
“Yeah, maybe not, that’d probably be gentrification, and I’ve got the money, I should probably just buy in an expensive area to begin with, rather than drive up prices in more affordable areas. But then that seems problematic, too, because shouldn’t I be bringing wealth to lower income brackets?”
So they talked about Canadian politics, about which Shane knew little and Rozanov even less. And, of course, they talked about hockey. Shane had been trying not to, because he knew he could be a bore about it, that nobody cared as much about hockey as he did—but Rozanov, it seemed, knew everything there was to know. Mostly about Russian hockey, but that was only to be expected, and anyway Shane had plenty to say about that, too. They talked about the Russian Five who’d defected to the Red Wings in the nineties—Rozanov was dismissive, said there were other, better players, that he’d seen them. They talked about forecheck styles, and Rozanov was dismissive about that, too, mocking North American “dump and chase” for its ineffectiveness, which Shane argued against mostly for patriotic reasons.
He picked up his glass of ginger ale and sipped at it only to suck wet air through the straw. Rozanov was slouching now, his nearly-empty glass dangling between his fingers.
“Another?”
Shane shook his head. He was flying out tomorrow—the Metros had wanted him back as soon as possible, he still needed to find his way back to his hotel, to pack, to get some sleep after a very long day. “I should go,” he said reluctantly.
Rozanov shrugged and finished his vodka. Shane watched the line of his wrist below the sleeve of his suit jacket, its strength and flexibility, the fine golden hairs. “Or you could stay.”
“Stay?” Shane was baffled—stay where? Surely this incredible hotel was fully booked.
Rozanov stood and held out his hand. Shane took it without thinking, letting himself be hauled to his feet. He ran his tongue around in his mouth, and his teeth felt a little fuzzy from the sugar in the ginger ale.
Rozanov tugged very slightly and cocked his head toward the elevators, and Shane’s eyes went wide.
Russia’s not safe for guys like that, Vaughn had said.
But Shane wasn’t a guy like that. He was just someone who was enjoying a conversation, and who would have an easier time enjoying it if they could hear each other more easily, if he wasn’t breathing the same air as a couple hundred other people.
Still. “To…hang out? Is it, I don’t know, safe?”
Rozanov’s smile was all teeth, sharper than Shane thought they were. “What do you mean, safe? Nothing is safe, Hollander.”