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People online are fucking weird.
Shane knows better by now than to be looking at social media. All that noise is bad for his brain and should mean nothing to him anyway, except he lets it mean something.
He developed this…habit last season, the first season he made it to the playoffs with the Centaurs, of obsessively reading comments. Maybe just because he needed something to keep his fire going, to keep him pushing. First, it was only the most openly vitriolic comments, often discovered purely by accident, which he found lit him up the most on the ice.
You played better hockey when you were straight—Shane got a goal and two assists.
This dude is so gross he needs to stop bringing his woke shit into this sport #NotMyHockey—he made sure Ottawa dominated a 6-1 early season game against San Francisco.
Too bad you can’t skate fast enough to escape hell—Shane scored a hat trick that night.
He’d read insult after insult, until he was so sick he’d run to the bathroom and throw up. Each time, Ilya would rub Shane’s back and take his phone from him for the day. Yet still, Shane would show up to the next game and be unstoppable on the ice. He’d been anticipating this homophobia for an entire decade of his life, and with each win profited off the anonymous hatred of strangers, the more vindicated he felt.
The vomiting got to be too much for Ilya. A few arguments later, Shane agreed to start disabling comments on his posts and locked himself out of social media apps. They hadn’t even won the cup in the end, so clearly it wasn’t as effective as he thought. Once he was able to snap out of the poisonous, addictive effects of the online world, he could see his comment ritual for the self-flagellating behaviour it was. Ilya was right: Shane was too intense about hockey sometimes, and the balance between his career and the rest of his life was still hard to manage in a post-coming out world.
That was last season, though. This season, their game is still strong, and the team is doing well. Shane’s relationship to hockey is noticeably healthier. Even the comments he can’t avoid seem to get a little less intensely bigoted.
But they turn…not hateful, but weird. He starts to notice a trend of comments that fuck with his head in a way that doesn’t help his hockey at all. Teenage girls start likening his eyelashes to those of a pony, other gay men start spamming the hashtag demanding for #HollanderHentaiNow on videos of his gameplay. The trolls move from outright disgust to saying things like awww Rozanov brought his exotic little pet to Ottawa, or looks like I might have a thing for Asians.
Suffice to say, it gets to him. His game never suffers all too much for it, but the commentators pick up on a level of agitation from him that only builds with each game.
Case in point: today’s game. They host Nashville. Ottawa’s coming off a long road trip of away games and nobody’s at their best so they’re not surprised when they exit the second period with only one goal to Nashville’s four. But Shane has no patience today, so Ilya’s locker room speech about how there’s still time to turn it around falls on deaf ears.
They enter the third period and Nashville immediately scores another goal. Fuck. Shane had it in the offensive zone, he really did, but Nashville’s new left winger, Carter McGowan, does some dumb trick that Shane should know better than to fall for and it works on him. Sure, Ottawa’s defensive line needs serious work, but Shane can only blame himself for the breakaway he gives to McGowan.
McGowan, young and cocky, takes the opportunity to chirp Shane.
“Hey, Hollander,” he calls over from ten feet away, “you made that way too easy for me, buddy.”
“Not your buddy,” he retorts dryly, trying to cool down and wait for everyone to fall into a face-off position.
For some reason, McGowan looks disappointed by Shane’s non-response. “Wow,” he scoffs. “Somebody’s in a fucking mood today. No need to be such a whiny queen about one goal.”
“You won’t mind when I score two then, I assume.”
“Not at all,” McGowan shrugs. “If your squinting little eyes can see where you’re shooting the puck now.”
Ah. There it is.
Shane’s heart starts pounding like a war drum. There it is again, that fire teasing him, threatening to set his whole world ablaze, a lack of control.
Against his better judgment, he skates closer and subtly shimmies his gloves off his hands. “The fuck did you just say?”
McGowan’s confusion looks almost genuine. Almost. “What?” He asks, looking around condescendingly. “I just mean you gotta keep up, right? I don’t know what kind of Asian you are, but you squint more the older you get when you’re a big fuckin’ ch—.”
Shane punches McGowan square in the face.
McGowan is shocked completely when Shane throws the punch. This surprise throws him off kilter enough to give Shane time for a second punch, and when he hits him again, McGowan’s skates give out from under him. He wipes out hard on the ice, but not before grabbing a fistful of Shane’s jersey and pulling Shane down with him.
McGowan does get a few hits in, but very soon, with Shane on top of him (and Shane can already imagine the snide jokes that will be made about him being on top), it stops being a fight and starts being a beatdown. Refs grab him and pull—or at least various sets of arms are pulling at him, some of which might be refs. Shane can’t really tell. In his world, there is only his aching, hammering fists and the increasingly bloody man beneath him.
When he’s finally successfully pulled away from his prey, the entire arena feels dead silent. This is bad. Not five-minute minor bad, not ten-minute major bad. More like, he’s looking at a several-game suspension and disciplinary action from the league. That type of bad.
There’s ringing in his ears. By the judge of McGowan rocking in the fetal position and holding his ears, Shane thinks McGowan’s ears are ringing too, for a very different reason.
What happens next is a blur. A stretcher gets carried out around the same time Shane gets carried away, booted from the game and shepherded into the dressing room by one of the coaches. Doors opening and shutting, teammates staring. Ilya, calling out to Shane from the bench. Ilya? Shane turns his head to try to find him, but the instinct making his heart cry out for someone to let his husband come with him dies out when some voice is telling him he has to keep walking. Finally some silence. The dressing room. When did he sit down on the bench? Wiebe, putting a solemn hand on his shoulder, uttering some words of wisdom that Shane is too spaced out to register. Teammates coming and going—the game must have ended.
“Hollander, man, I thought they told you to get out of here and go home. You should rest, man, you don’t look well,” comes from Eric.
Troy chimes in. “I can’t believe no one helped you wash up. Coach, why’d no one help Hollander?”
“Back away from him, guys. Back up now, c’mon,” Wiebe scolds with swooping gestures to keep them from crowding Shane. “Troy, I tried, but the man’s in shock right now. He’s not responding to anything. You guys just need to shower, get changed, and go home.”
“I know but…shit He’s damn near catatonic.”
“What? I don’t know what that means,” Ilya dismisses, eyes never leaving Shane. “Coach, you are right, everyone needs to move out of my way.”
“I meant you too, Rozanov. I…” Coach Wiebe begins to interject, but then sighs and waves a hand of defeat. “Oh, what the hell. You might actually be the better man for this situation.”
Ilya holds him by the chin and jostles his head around to examine his face. For wounds or for signs of consciousness, Shane doesn’t know. “Shane? Shane, are you alright?”
There it is. There’s that voice Shane’s heart was crying out for earlier. Who does it belong to again?
“Ilya.” Out of his reverie, Shane looks at the familiar face leaning over him, Ilya examining him with a worry that settles deep into his brow.
And he should be. Ilya has snapped him out of his reverie, and with reality settling back into sharp focus, Shane feels the horror hit him hard, full force, knocking the fucking wind out of him.
Whatever softness was in Ilya’s gaze is lost the moment he sees some shift in Shane’s face, right before Shane makes the wise decision to bolt to one of the change room toilets and promptly throw up.
When he looks up from the toilet, he notices the red handprints on the edge of the seat and looks down at his shaking hands.
“Shit,” he mutters to himself, and the strain on his voice elicits a cough. The backs of his hands are completely wrecked: his skin has split around his knuckles, the blood trickling down his wrists from various cuts and cracks, getting between his fingers and coating his sweltering bruises. What a mess.
He can hear everyone getting more worried—variations of “Shane, man, are you okay?” and “Yeesh, that doesn’t sound good.”
“What is going on in there? Tell me,” Ilya insists.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he calls out hoarsely, though he starts to have trouble breathing and clutches at his chest. “Go home, guys. You did a good job tonight. I’m…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Coach Wiebe hangs around by the stall door, promises to meet with him first thing in the morning to discuss the details of Shane’s suspension, and then shoos the rest of the team out of the change room. Reluctantly; after some hushed conversation, he agrees to let Ilya stay instead. After a long shuffling of tired feet and massive, clunky hockey bags, the dressing room is now empty apart from Ilya.
Probably for the best, since Shane is having a full blown panic attack right now.
He manages, miraculously, to stand himself up and walk back out into the dressing room, but sits himself down as quickly as possible. The worst part is his hands are still covered in blood and stinging like hell, but he’s in such shock that he can’t physically picture what taking care of that problem looks like right now. With his hands in front of him, all Shane can do is kind of wave them around frantically.
“Oh, woah,” Ilya says worriedly. “Sweetheart, you do not look well.”
“I’m…I’m…” Shane pants heavily even when Ilya comes to crouch down in front of him.
“Breathe, okay? Take deep breaths,” he tells Shane, rubbing his hand up and down Shane’s thigh while taking a deep breath of his own in demonstration.
Shane tries to follow suit. Breathe in, breathe out. In and out again. Ilya repeats it three times. The exhale provides welcome relief, but Shane’s lungs tremble with each inhale and his breath still teeters on the edge of hyperventilating.
“I nearly killed that guy,” Shane confesses, a panicked whisper. He moves to pinch at his tears, but then realizes his hands are bloody and he would make a mess of his face.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Ilya sympathizes. “Is okay. You didn’t.”
“But I almost…”
“But you didn’t,” Ilya emphasizes again, stroking his cheek and shushing him lovingly. “You didn’t.”
Shane sniffles. “Is he okay?”
“He will be fine. Broken nose, a concussion, some bleeding from his ears. They say he only fainted from sudden change in air pressure.”
“I feel awful,” he cries helplessly. “I’m awful. I’m an awful person. I hit a man. I hit him again and again, and I didn’t want to stop. I scarred him for life. Literally. And I’ve probably made his wife feel exactly how you felt when I got hit. God, what the fuck was I thinking?”
“You weren’t,” Ilya points out, “but is okay. You’re human. You do not need to be perfect always, moya снежинка. Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Hey,” Ilya says, reaching out his hand to caress Shane’s cheek. “Look at me.”
Even amid his panic, Shane melts. Ilya’s touch beckons Shane’s gaze, so Shane looks up. This is Ilya, after all; if Ilya asks, Shane answers.
So Shane looks up. Meeting Ilya’s eyes makes the world stop spinning. Even when his vision is blurred by the tears in his eyes, staring at Ilya’s beautiful, fine face steadies him. Everything crystallizes into this one moment, there in the silence of the locker room, just the two of them. Exactly how it’s supposed to be.
His breathing slows.
“Better?” Ilya asks eventually.
“A bit, yeah.”
Ilya removes his hand from Shane’s cheek to scoop up both of Shane’s bloody hands in his. He lifts them to his face and places a gentle kiss to Shane’s knuckles, right below where the cuts are. For a moment, the kiss is gentle and tingly and the way Ilya never breaks eye contact the whole time makes Shane’s head spin. Then:
“Wait, stop,” Shane says, halfheartedly pulling his hands away. “You’re getting my blood all over your mouth. It’s not hygienic.”
Ilya rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling into Shane’s hands and kissing them again. “Oh, is it?”
“It’s—”
“Ah-ah,” Ilya interrupts, a drop of blood dangling from his bottom lip. “Tell me in Russian.”
“I can’t,” he says, his lingering panic still behind the wheel. “I can’t think right now.”
“Try. For me,” Ilya adds, grabbing Shane by the chin. “Give me one good reason I cannot kiss it better.”
With a deep breath, Shane tries to remember all his Russian lessons and various tips for improvement Ilya has given him over the years. He shuts his eyes and tries to arrange the words in his mind in the right order. That’s language, really. Every word has its place, every verb tense its rules and exceptions. Shane loves rules.
And so the process follows: my hands, a be verb…and bloody? He only knows the word for dirty. My hands are unclean, he thinks he can manage to say.
“Moi ruki…nechisty?”
“Krovavyy, if you want to be specific,” Ilya corrects, but he’s still beaming with pride. “And I know how you like to be specific.”
Shane smiles weakly and tries again. “Moi ruki krovavyy.”
“My turn,” Ilya says. “Sorera wa watashi ni totte ustu…er, sorry no, I mean…utsukushī.”
They are beautiful to me.
Shane’s eyes go wide. The language sounds clunky when mixed with Ilya’s accent, the tight mouth of Japanese speech incongruous with the alveolar flaps of Russian in the back of his throat. Still, Shane watches Ilya do his best at inflecting each word properly and carefully, and for Ilya’s third language (because he still refuses to learn French), he kind of nails it.
Shane opens his mouth to speak, but apart from a stunned gasp that dies early in his throat, no words form. Only a smile.
“Don’t worry, that one was not Russian,” he assures Shane.
“No, I know,” Shane says giddily. “When did you learn Japanese?”
Ilya, though blushing, shrugs. “Your mother teaches me a few things. Every now and then.”
“Really? All on her own?” He asks skeptically.
Ilya blushes. “I may have asked her.”
“She barely speaks Japanese to me,” Shane says, dumbfounded. “Only when I was a kid. And only in the evenings after Saturday school, to help me remember what I’d learned.”
“You went to school on Saturdays? Nerd,” Ilya teases.
Shane laughs. “Asshole. It was for families with second languages. Cultural education, or whatever. And anyway, I stopped attending when I started competitive hockey.”
“Maybe I should take Saturday school. Then maybe I wouldn’t be so shit at trying to tell my husband he looks beautiful in Japanese.”
“No, it was perfect,” Shane insists, leaning in to rest his forehead against Ilya’s and even placing a kiss on his nose. “I love you.”
“Good,” Ilya murmurs warmly. “I love you too.”
After a quick, chaste kiss, Ilya gets up and heads into the washroom. He comes back with a pile of supplies filling his arms: a cloth soaked in warm water, some gauze, antiseptic, tape. Ilya presses the cloth to Shane’s left hand, right on top of Shane’s knuckles. Warm water, Shane realizes with the sensation of the cloth against his skin. It feels so good.
Ilya’s eyes remain fixed on the hands he now cleans. “Do you want to talk about what happened now?”
“I thought we just did.”
“You said what happened, but you did not say why it happened.”
“It was stupid, a stupid, stupid reason. I shouldn’t have lost it on him. I’m better than that, better than—”
“Me?” Ilya finishes his thought.
“No, I- I don’t mean it like that,” he blunders.
“You are,” Ilya shrugs, so matter-of-fact Shane almost misses how sweet it is of him to say. “My husband is the best fucking hockey player in the entire league.”
Shane ducks his head and blushes, unsure of how to respond.
And he doesn’t need to. After a beat, Ilya stops his cleaning Shane’s knuckles to add gently, “But my husband does not fight. So when he does, I worry it must be for something really bad.”
“I don’t mean to make you worry, I’m sorry. That guy just…” Ilya applies some antiseptic to one of Shane’s split knuckles and Shane winces, then sighs slowly and heavily. “I guess I just forgot I’ve committed the cardinal sin of being Asian.”
Ilya’s head snaps up immediately. “He said something?”
Nervously, Shane admits, “Yeah.”
“Like what?”
“A word. He called me…a bad word. It’s not worth repeating.”
Ilya seems to understand right away. To be honest, Shane’s surprised. He wasn’t even sure that word circulates in Russia. He kind of assumed Russians had their own special slurs, but he must have heard it somewhere at some point.
Ilya looks back down to Shane’s hands, begins wrapping them slowly and carefully in gauze, and says through tight lips, “Hm.”
To anyone else, this would seem tame for Ilya Rozanov. But Shane can see the storm brewing in him: the way Ilya’s brow turns stern, his jaw tightens. Shane knows Ilya’s only looking down to hide how his eyes have gone dark with something fearsome.
“What?” Shane asks warily.
Ilya rubs his thumb over the side of his nose and sniffs. “Nothing.”
“Ilya…”
“I’m fine, I will behave,” he promises defensively. “I just think, you know…maybe you did not do enough to this guy.”
“Ilya!” Shane tries to chastise him, but it does a fat load of good when Shane can’t suppress his laughter.
“Probably murder is most fitting, I think,” he muses philosophically. “Like by firing squad. You would like gun, yes? To kill this man?”
“Firearms are illegal in Canada, Ilya.”
“We’ll find loophole, we’ll find loophole,” Ilya assures him with a nod. Now finished wrapping the gauze around Shane’s hands, Ilya sticks a piece of medical tape over the ends, pressing the tape into the center of one palm, then the other. Shane watches silently until he hears Ilya say, “There. Good as new.”
“Thank you. For…this. For being you. Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Shane smiles, stretching his hands out even further. “You patched me up good, doctor Rozanov.”
“Yes, but in order to make sure there is no infection, I will order lots of bedrest,” he adds with the wiggle of his brows.
Shane fakes a heavy sigh as he warily stands up from the bench. “If you insist.”
“Oh, I definitely insist.”
Ilya drapes his arm around Shane and Shane laughs. Walking out of the dressing room, Shane still feels shaky, rattled. But warm. A bit closer to himself again.
“Maybe you could do school on Saturdays again,” Ilya suggests when they exit the arena through its side gate. “If you liked it so much.”
This time, Shane’s sigh is genuine, but not heavy. Just…pensive. “I don’t know. Feels like I lost that part of me a long time ago. Feels like I barely ever had him in the first place.”
“Well we have a very big home now,” Ilya reminds him. “Maybe…there is room for him?”
Visions of a third-grade Shane enter his mind. Young, frustrated, struggling to copy Japanese letters his classmates in regular school would later find in his backpack and ask what they were. Alien hieroglyphs, he told them. They laughed so hard Shane felt their spit fly onto him and squirmed out of his seat. Maybe the discomfort was about more than their obnoxious laughter. It would be nice, he thinks now, to find that little boy with his foreign tongue and tell him he’s no martian, tell him he’s a beautiful kid with a big, beating, human heart and make him feel at home. To accept the mess as is, to build a beautiful, imperfect, complex world together.
“Maybe there is,” Shane says.
He nuzzles affectionately into Ilya’s neck. As they make their way to the car, all the noise of the outside world withers away, leaving nothing but an old voice in a dark, lonely corner of his memory, beckoning his return.