Chapter Text

27 November 2010

They manage to get a Men’s Health shoot scheduled in November, just after Thanksgiving. Boston and Montreal both have three days off in a row, which is the best they can hope for before Christmas.

Farah arranges transport for Yuna and Shane to a hotel near where they plan to shoot: a luxury chalet in a faux-rustic style that costs upwards of sixty thousand dollars a week to stay at in the off-season.

Rozanov meets them at the hotel. He doesn’t have a parent with him, or even his manager.

Once all the paperwork is signed, Yuna leaves the boys in the hands of the Men’s Health team. The photographer and her crew are efficient and professional, and based on their joint shoot with CCM in the summer, Yuna is aware that the best thing she can do is give everyone some space.

She lingers around the edges of a conference room as the boys try on the outfits they’ll wear tomorrow; today, a pair of unexpectedly punkish young women mark them up in chalk for hasty tailoring. Yuna snoops through the clothes rack and takes notes on potential labels to pursue. In between outfit changes, Shane and Rozanov sit shoulder to shoulder in hoodies and sweatpants. Rozanov ignores his buzzing phone in favour of joking around with Shane, even managing to make him laugh once or twice. It settles Yuna to see that no matter how much of a brute Rozanov can be in a game, he’s a decent young man off the ice.

Last night there’d been an incident when Shane was halfway to gnawing his fingers off, when she asked, apparently, once too often if he was sure he was alright with Rozanov. A mug had been smashed. Tears had been shed. David, the guardian angel of her entire goddamn life, pulled levity from depths even she wasn’t aware he was capable of, and said: “I know the saying’s about milk, but are we crying over spilt sencha now?” then took Shane out for a jog. When he came to bed, he tangled his fingers in hers, and told her Shane wasn’t scared of the shoot, he was scared of the interview.

So: the worst was yet to come. But what a relief, all the same, to have her son hug her in the morning, and watch Rozanov come sidling over the instant they arrived, and insist if they were going to keep meeting like this, they should exchange phone numbers. God help her, she liked him, not just for the way he put the wind back in Shane’s sails, not just for his nonchalance of the part she asked him to play. He just seemed like good people. Pity about Boston.

She leaves them having a whispered conversation while the tailors wrangle them into a pair of suits that probably cost more than same as a mid-size sedan, and goes outside to sneak a cigarette.

The hotel is strictly no smoking, but Yuna exits via a door marked STAFF ONLY and finds an empty beer can serving as an ashtray exactly where she expected it. She fishes her pack and lighter out of her purse.

Despite the fact she’s fifty-two, and she’s cut down to a scant one or two every now and then, she’s never gotten out of the habit of flailing like a schoolgirl to hide the fact of her smoking, which makes her feel utterly ridiculous when the person barging out of the banging door is Rozanov, catching her in the act of stubbing out a barely-touched cigarette in the snow.

“Well. This is surprise.” He pauses. Assessing. “Good surprise. I have only two left. Not enough for very long day.”

“Here.” Yuna passes him the pack and lighter, and, like any two smokers anywhere on the planet, they build an immediate companionship from the rigmarole of extracting, lighting, losing the flame in the wind, shaking the lighter, cursing, turning their backs and cupping their hands, and finally leaning back against the wall and inhaling.

“So,” Ilya says. “Another race for Hollander to win. First to come out of the closet in the NHL.”

Yuna promptly chokes on her next inhale and has to cough like a teenager with baby’s first menthol before she can rasp, “What do you mean?”

Ilya makes a so-so gesture with a long, elegant hand. It’s really a crime he doesn’t have a jewellery sponsorship yet. “Is that not the way to say it? First openly gay player, then.”

She almost drops the cigarette. “Shane told you?”

Rozanov looks wryly amused. “He is telling everyone, no?”

“Yes. Right. Okay.” Yuna’s face does something complex. She clenches her teeth around the filter and breathes smoke.

Ilya must read something in her face, because he exhales – turning his face away politely – and hastily says, “Is okay. I have, uh, same secret. Well, not secret for Hollander, after the interview, but…”

“You mean you’re – like Shane?”

“Not exactly like, but not straight, either. Uh, ni to ni sjo. Biseksual. What is it in English?”

“Almost the same. Bisexual,” Yuna offers. Which isn’t the point at all, but dammit, she needs a fucking minute here.

Ilya Rozanov is attracted to men. Ilya Rozanov shot a commercial with her son in July, when they all stayed in the same hotel. Shane mentioned that a man had hit on him over the summer, and had presumably been intrigued enough by the offer to spark off this whole chain of events. Hell, Montreal and Boston played each other right before Shane went to that Halloween party.

Well, she thinks hysterically. Shane’s always been very literal. Yuna did say fuck Rozanov right up the butt in front of him.

Oh, god, was he on his way to proposition her son when she ran into him in the elevators?

Not the time. Yuna regathers her wits as best she can.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she says, because that’s what the blogs she consulted suggested as a response. “Is there any way I can support you?”

“Mm, not really. Maybe opposite.” Ilya stubs out his cigarette, looking both deadly serious and far too young. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Would it be helping Hollander – helping Shane if I also come out? Same time, maybe?”

Yuna’s brand management brain kicks in. She could definitely make it work, especially with the sleek European styling the outfits so far have suggested. Hell, Daniel Craig was advocating for a bisexual Bond in his promo interviews for Quantum of Solace; that was, what, two years ago?

And more importantly, it would mean Shane wasn’t alone. The league can sideline one gay star rookie; all they’d really have to do was hint that he hadn’t lived up to his potential. But two queer rookies, each of them the centrepiece around which an original six franchise was rebuilding? That would be so much harder to deny.

Then the rest of her brain comes back online.

“Ilya,” she says, because she can’t call him Rozanov right now. Any professional distance between them has been evaporated by the probability that he triggered her son’s sexual awakening. “Coming out is such a personal decision. Don’t let the situation rush you or pressure you.”

Ilya shrugs. “I don’t feel pressured.”

“Still, you should talk to your agent about it first,” she insists. “Get some outside advice.”

“Yes, of course. This is a good idea.” But his tone – the words, even – is the same one she used all throughout the 1980s, whenever her bosses told her she’d get the promotion next time, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to be a bit friendlier (wink, nudge, vomit). “I will call Anatoly. Thank you for listening.”

The door closes behind him with a bang that pierces her clean through. Fuck. She doesn’t have the capacity to mother-agent two prodigious teenage talents. She doesn’t. So she shouldn’t try. She should trust in Rozanov’s own team, though she can concede that it must be tremendously frustrating to try to reign in such a strong will from across the Atlantic.

Wait. Did he say Anatoly? Anatoly Sapozhnikov? The coronary-afflicted, internet-invisible, email-bouncing ghost? She should get his number…

But when she follows him inside, Rozanov’s already making Shane roll his eyes and huff a laugh, making some joke about the tailoring required to fit Shane’s ego into Armani off-the-rack, and she doesn’t have the heart to insert herself into their easy conversation, not when she’s the whip-cracking-no-fun-pragmatist to Rozanov’s breezy companionship, and not when Shane hasn’t smiled like this in the last three weeks.

Yuna calls David from her hotel room that night. She’s jittery and impatient, and David cuts her off before she can even ask about his day.

“What’s eating you, honey?”

“So, hypothetically,” Yuna says, “if there were another queer NHL player in Shane’s draft class…”

“Statistically, it seems very likely,” David says.

“And if that player were, for example, drafted to the Boston Raiders—”

“Ah,” David says. “Well, I think that player – assuming we’re thinking of the same player? – he’d probably have different concerns than Shane does.”

“It can’t be that different, surely. I mean, I know the city of Boston is progressive, but NHL franchises—”

“Actually, honey…” David speaks slowly, each word heavy with some meaning Yuna can’t quite catch. “I wasn’t even thinking about the NHL. I was thinking about … his home. His family, maybe.”

“His team should be his family,” Yuna mutters. Her thoughts turn, as they often have since that day in Shane’s apartment, to locker rooms. What his so-called brothers among the Metros might do to her baby boy.

“When you worked at the CRA, did you ever have to do Foreign Interference Training?”

This non-sequitur is sufficiently jarring that Yuna is briefly concerned David’s had a stroke. “What? No? Oh, actually … I think so? Darling, are you—”

“I’m just concerned.” Stroke victims are supposed to have difficulty with speech aren’t they? Yuna doesn’t recall that an alteration from world’s-most-patient-listener to sudden-interrupter is on the list of symptoms. “About the hockey, yes. But more about the … reception he might have. When he goes home.”

Of course, David’s looking at the world with a wider lens than Yuna is. He’s always comparing trade-offs, thinking through costs and benefits, weighing the costs of contingencies. It’s what makes him so damn good at his job. She hadn’t even considered this angle: if Rozanov is forced out, or leaves voluntarily, how will he be greeted if he returns to the KHL? Yuna isn’t across their locker room culture at all.

“I’ll look into it,” she promises.

“Good.”

Geneviéve Lee (GSA)

27 Nov 2010 at 8:45PM

Yuna Hollander

Gen! SOS! Shane came out to one of his friends, and now ANOTHER baby pro athlete has come out to me! Help!

Geneviéve Lee (GSA)

ohhhh yeah that can happen

sorry Yuna you’re the cool mom now

Yuna Hollander

You take that back!

I have been hip. I have been chic. I have even (briefly) been punk. I have never once been cool.

Geneviéve Lee (GSA)

but you’re going to the mattresses for your queer kid which is about as cool as it’s possible to be for a teenaged closet case

also you problem solve instead of react which is … pretty much the ideal form of comfort for a terrified man lol

Yuna Hollander

… fuck.

28 November 2010

Yuna scrolls through the coverage of what people are already calling Cablegate as the boys are led away to hair and makeup. Presumably, there’s significance to all the secret documents WikiLeaks has published beyond what it means for her specifically, but all she can absorb is a vague gratitude for the all-consuming headlines. She and Farah had worried that they had hours to days before Shane was outed by someone with a higher profile than Sainte-Catherine Scoops!, but now everyone with an audience has much, much bigger fish to fry.

Discordantly, while the world discusses Washington’s spying on Ban Ki-moon, three people dress Ilya in a black Brioni suit with delicate gold details and a vodka martini; Shane gets an Armani topcoat in Metros blue cashmere and neat whiskey. Or something that looks like it, anyway; Yuna imagines it’s more likely to be coloured water, to make sure it shows up well in the photographs. These details are more important to her than the intelligence assessments suggesting North Korea has supplied nuclear weapons to Iran. Teenage Yuna is disgusted.

The boys are within an inch of each other in height, and at this point in the season they’re both a little north of two hundred pounds, but the styling and the way they’re posed draws attention to their differences; it’s like seeing James Bond and Jason Bourne side by side. Ilya lounges. Shane looms.

The boys change back into sweatpants and hoodies while the crew set up for the next shoot in the gym.

Shane seems lighter than he has at any time in the last four weeks: with the notable exception of when he’s on the ice. Whenever Yuna seems him like that, lissome and racing and rosy-cheeked, the coals in her are stoked anew. She’ll disarticulate the fucking league, defenestrate management, burn down headquarters, take a baseball bat to players’ knees before she lets anyone ruin this for her son.

She wonders, sometimes, how many other mothers have made a similar vow. She wonders how they sleep with the failure.

Ilya’s phone buzzes again. He picks it up, mutters something she’s very sure is swearing – the tone comes across, even if the specific curse is new to her – and excuses himself to answer it. His voice automatically deepens, his consonants crisper as he walks past her; his shoulders are rigidly straight. His manager, maybe? Someone who stresses him out, by the tick in his jaw. That’s no good; a young athlete needs someone they can be comfortable with, someone they trust. Not someone who makes them look like a schoolboy called to the principal’s office.

Shane has his headphones on. He’s scrolling on his phone. He looks comfortable.

Yuna fishes two cigarettes out of her pack and waves them at Ilya, who jerks his head at a side door. She steps outside and finds a place where, if she presses herself up against the wall, she can just about avoid the wind slicing through her. Ilya joins her a moment later.

“Everything okay?” Yuna asks, once they’ve both lit up. “That phone call seemed … bad?”

Ilya turns his face away to exhale smoke. It’s subtle, but Yuna recognizes a teenage boy trying to compose himself into maturity; she can see it in the way his knuckles flex around the cigarette as he looks at her.

“The article writer reached out to my family for comment,” he says, very flatly. “My father is… concerned.”

Yuna takes her own turn exhaling a plume of smoke as an excuse to look away. When she’s choked down the first few choices, she asks, very neutrally, “What part of the article is he concerned about?”

“He worries too much.”

“Rozanov.”

“It is no problem.”

“It might be.”

“You see, you worry too, Mrs Hollander,” he concedes, with a pointed, ash-tipped gesture. “But you find a way to help your son. My father, he just says: ‘you are not thinking clearly, this is bad idea, Russia will have proble—’”

“Rozanov. Ilya. What’s a bad idea?”

“To stand next to a gay man.” Rozanov spreads his hands wide and waggles his fingers, evoking the appearance of the monster at a campfire story.

Yuna frowns. “So your father has a … problem with gay people?”

“He says whether he has a problem doesn’t matter. Vladimir Vladimirovich has a problem, so…” Ilya trails off and shrugs one shoulder, a fluid, irritatingly eloquent gesture. It really is a crime he doesn’t have better sponsors. He has a natural elegance that puts Yuna in mind of a big cat, a sort of languid power that would look incredible in the right TV spot.

“Vladimir – you mean Putin?”

“Da. Vladolf Putler needs to, uh…” Ilya draws a circle with the tip of his cigarette. “Make friends out of the church and the less crazy vatnik, uh, nacionalist.”

“Consolidate,” Yuna suggests. “Bring them into alignment.” Wait, not the point. “Is he worried about legal trouble?”

“Mm, not really. There is no law against it.” Ilya exhales smoke through his nose and gives her a grimly arch smile. “Yet.”

“But it might damage your reputation?”

Ilya gives her another expressive shrug and ashes his cigarette. “Not worse than anything else. Even,” he adds pointedly, “if I come out.”

“Ilya, honey,” she says cautiously, “even if that solved everything, we wouldn’t put you at risk. Shane wouldn’t want that. I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Risk is a problem for me. Not for you, not for Papa.”

“As a parent, I absolutely beg to differ.” She watches him mouth the words, which only proves the underlying point: six feet of height and two hundred pounds of body weight might make him and Shane seem adult, but do not sufficiently compensate for missing decades of lived experience, whether that’s with English vocabulary or risk-reward ratios. “I mean: I disagree.”

“Well, Mrs Hollander, I disagree. And maybe I decide to post this on my Twitter and my Facebook tonight,” he shrugs, and let that sit in the frigid air for a moment. “Or maybe you can help me to make less risk.”

Is it racist for her to mentally frame this conversation like a nuclear armament treaty negotiation? Who the hell taught this kid to play a game of chicken with a big red button like this anyway? She makes a mental note to tell Shane never to bet money on cards with him.

She proceeds carefully, tiptoeing through a likely minefield: “How would I do that?”

“I fire my manager, sign with whoever you recommend. Maybe with you, if you can get me a Rolex deal like Hollander’s.” A flash of teeth and a roguish grin. God, he’s gorgeous. If she was twenty years younger… “And they switch me over to the – I forget the name. Work visa that gives me US citizenship.”

“EB-1A,” Yuna says. “That’s not a bad start, but—”

She snaps her mouth shut as one of the PAs pokes her head around the door.

“There you are!” she says brightly. “We’re almost done setting up in the gym. Can you head back to wardrobe, please?”

“Da, of course,” Ilya says. He gives her a last meaningful glance before he follows the PA inside.

Yuna grinds her cigarette butt under her shoe contemplatively. Then she calls Farah.

29 November 2010

Yuna calls Grigori in the middle of the Russian afternoon, which is 7am for her. The sun has not yet risen, and nor, it seems, has anyone else staying in their hotel. Yuna gets a cup of tea from the (frankly, subpar for the price point) breakfast offerings and takes over one of the business centres.

She has briefly spoken to Ilya about Grigori, and has come away with very little sense of the man. Not a warm paternal figure, the way David is, but then nor was Yuna’s own father. Not everywhere has the same expectations of parents. Yuna is not inclined to judge anyone by Canadian cultural standards, especially not with how much time she’s spent untangling all the ways the “tiger mom” stereotype fucked her up.

Beyond that, Ilya has confirmed that his father speaks English competently and is aware of the legal structures around sports management, although Yuna is prepared to simplify her English around some of the jargon. She spent a while looking up Russian terms for LGBTQ+ people just in case, but it seems like many of the polite terms are cognates. In hindsight, she probably could’ve guessed that, given biseksual, so she’s not sure that was the best way she could’ve spent her time.

At least it kept her from pacing a hole in the carpets.

“Mrs Hollander.” His voice is a blunt weapon, and even though she wields a voice like that of her own when she has to, she still feels like she’s in trouble. “How is the weather?”

“Mr Rozanov, lovely to speak with you. Quite cold here, although I imagine not as cold as Moscow.”

“Yes. I wish to speak with you about my son.” Jesus. This is going to be the longest brief call of her life, isn’t it. Yuna tries to identify the part of her that yearns to be pleasant and likeable and amiable and cow it into submission. “I have many problems with him, and I would be thanking you for helping.”

Right, no problem, she can stamp out that flare of friendliness easily with the fucking audacity of what she’s hearing. “You have ‘problems’ with him? Because of who he is?”

“Yes. He is young, and stubborn. Like donkey. He is only thinking of what is now, what is tomorrow. Never what is next year. I have told him this too much times, now he is thinking I am stupid old fool.”

“My son can be stubborn, too,” Yuna says diplomatically. “Many young men are, at that age.”

“Yes,” Grigori says. “I remember this. But as parent, I must protect him, yes? Even from himself, sometimes.”

That gets Yuna somewhere tender, under the ribs.

“I understand,” she says. “I would do anything to protect my son.”

“And you are protecting him, yes? Interview, photos – you protect him with this. Because big threat is to his career, mm?”

“That is one threat, and the threat we are addressing with the interview, yes. Other threats are being handled in other ways.”

Grigori makes an sort of approving grunt. “I respect this. But threats for your son are not the same as threats of mine.”

Yuna has an idea of what he might mean, but she’s also extremely, notably, very much not conversant in modern Russian societal norms. If anything requires clear, blunt language, it’s this. “Could you tell me what that means?”

“This is meaning that my … contacts in ministries are knowing Russian government will be promoting Christian values. Family values. It will be number of years before it is not safe for a boy like … our boys.”

Through the phone, she can feel a hard stare. The stare of a man who made it through the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, she thinks, which must have been no mean feat. “Is it possible to protect Ilya from that?”

“Not if this interview is published.”

And there’s the rub. What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander. And though it hurts her to say it, because if Shane were across an ocean in a strange land, she’d be begging Grigori Rozanov to do what’s best for him, she has to say: “Mr Rozanov, your son is an adult.”

“Mrs Hollander.” Grigori sounds exhausted, in a way Yuna has only heard from other parents of young men. “He is adult, but to me, he is always moy synochek. If I live long enough for him to be old man with grey hair, I will still look at him and see my little boy.”

Yuna swallows to try and clear the tightness in her throat. “He’s your baby.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t wish to cast aspersions on your homeland, Mr Rozanov,” Yuna says carefully, “and I certainly won’t pretend that North America is perfect. But is it possible that the best way to protect your boy is to let him leave?”

“This causes other problems,” Grigori says. Which is not a no. Yuna takes note of this as the start of the negotiations. “He was too young for Vancouver, but already there is noise about Sochi. Pressure from Komitet, pressure from Minsport…”

“Four years is long enough for him to gain citizenship elsewhere, if that would help.”

“Russia will not recognize two passports. He is Russian here, only. Always. Unless he gives it up. And this I do not think he can do, Mrs Hollander. His brother, his niece, his mother’s grave – all here.”

“His father, too,” Yuna says gently.

Grigori makes a low sound – it could be a scoff or an unvoiced laugh or just an exhalation. Yuna can’t tell. “No, no, Ilyushka is very like me. I could not wait to get out of father’s house either.”

“Grigori,” Yuna tries, “you’re still his father. I’ve only spoken with Ilya briefly, but even that was enough to see how much he respects you.”

There’s a faint click and a longer exhale. Yuna suspects Grigori is smoking. She longs fervently for a cigarette of her own.

“Respect is not enough. One hand holds fame, celebrity,” – she particularly enjoys the cadence of ‘celebrity’ in this accent – “money, beautiful girls and boys. And the other is holding his Papa, who he is thinking is a paranoid Soviet starpjor.”

“Grigori. What would you like me to do?”

The silence hangs long enough for her to pull the phone away and check the connection. “I cannot ask you to stop protecting your son. So I cannot ask you to be stopping this. But, my Ilya … he respects you. I hear this in his words. Please, talk to him. Maybe he will be trusting, if it is coming from you.”

“I can try.”

He laughs, loud and unabashed. Whatever she expected from this call, it wasn’t a strong desire to take Grigori Rozanov out for a boozy dinner and share anecdotes of their obstinate boys. “I know this tone. This is what we say to our Ministries when they tell us of unpossible new targets.”

“I will try,” she insists.

“Yes yes, I believe you. And we both know he will ignore you too. Okay. Will you tell me: afterwards, after this happens. How will his team be? Will he be safe?”

Yuna brightens, at once on firmer ground. “I’m sure you know that things are never guaranteed when you’re dealing with this many people,” she says – Grigori strikes her as a man who will appreciate an honest caveat more than blustering surety – “but I am very confident that your son’s team will do right by him. In fact – and I will say this only once – in this one area, Boston might be doing better than Montreal.”

“Naturally,” Grigori says. “Boston had sense to draft my boy first.”

“You can comfort yourself with that,” Yuna says primly, “while my boy beats yours for the Rookie of the Year award.”

“Hockey parents!” Grigori laughs. “All we know is competition.”

Yuna allows herself to chuckle, more relief than humour. “Yes. Even when we’re on the same team.”