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“It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes sense to me,” Ilya responds with a shrug.
“So make it make sense then, Roz! Tell me what I’m missing, because I don’t get it. None of the guys get it.”
Ilya lets out a long sigh. He’d be lying if he told himself he hadn’t been expecting this, but it doesn’t make it any easier. The truth is that he’s been incredibly lucky to have spent the formative years of his career here in Boston, with a great coach on a team that hadn’t necessarily been great to start, but had been built – over the years he’s spent here – to become the veritable force that it is now. He knows plenty of guys who aren’t as lucky, who bounce around from team to team every season, unable to find their stride, eventually retiring after a mostly forgettable career.
It’s not luck, says the voice in the back of his head that sounds a little like Shane. You’ve earned this. And he has, he’s willing to admit that to himself. One man doesn’t make a team, but Ilya is proud of the way he’s contributed to cementing Boston as the dynasty it has become, a team that the city can be proud of. He’s done more in the first half of his career than most people do in a lifetime, and he knows he could retire tomorrow and have left behind a legacy to be proud of.
It still doesn’t make it any easier to leave.
Ilya vividly remembers walking into the Raiders’ training facility on the first day of his rookie season. The city had been buzzing all summer with the excitement of landing the number one draft pick, and expectations for him had been sky high. And yet he’d heard all the stories before; guys picked first who were expected to be generational superstars, only to choke partway through their first season, unable to keep up with the more experienced talent in the league and eventually fading into obscurity. If the only thing he’d been risking by taking on the pressure to be great was greatness itself, he thinks it would have been easier. But hockey had always been his escape, his salvation, his ticket out of a life that probably would have destroyed him, and so Ilya – at the tender age of eighteen years old – had known that he had no choice but to rise to the occasion.
Fast forward eight years later and that first day walking into the building as a Boston Raider is still the most nervous Ilya has ever felt in his life, but the day he’d entered his coach’s office to let him know he wouldn’t be re-signing with the team is now a close second.
“I’ll be sad to see you go,” LeClaire had told him diplomatically. “We all will. But at the end of the day, it’s business. I respect that.”
Ilya had nodded as if he was in agreement, as if the word ‘business’ was the first that came to his mind, too, when he sought to describe the first place besides Moscow that has ever been a home to him. LeClaire had even offered to tell the team himself, but Ilya had felt one last duty to them as their captain. “It should come from me.”
Which is how he finds himself seated in the room typically reserved for the Raiders’ video meetings, surrounded by his teammates who all sit there in varying stages of shock following the announcement he’s just made. Under any other circumstances it would almost be comical.
Marleau, understandably, is taking it the hardest.
“Is it a money thing? Because I’m sure if you just talked to someone they’d–”
“Is not about money,” Ilya interrupts firmly, in a tone that is meant to discourage any further speculation.
It doesn’t work, of course. “Then what happened? Because–”
“Nothing happened, Marly. Is just what makes sense for me.”
“Nothing about this makes sense,” Marleau argues, and Ilya resists the urge to sigh again because as long as they’re in this room, surrounded by people he doesn’t trust to hold the full truth, they’re going to keep talking in circles.
“You have time for a beer?” he asks instead in a low voice.
“Does this mean I’m going to get an explanation?”
“Maybe.”
The bar down the street from the practice facility is, mercifully, empty at 11am on a Wednesday, and the two of them sequester themselves in a corner with pints poured by a bartender who has served enough Boston Raiders players over the years to not ask any questions.
“Okay,” Marleau says after he’s taken a long pull of his beer. “Start talking.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know why you’re leaving this team to sign with fucking Ottawa, Roz!”
“You want to yell that louder?” Ilya asks sarcastically. “I think there is part of Boston that did not hear you.”
Marleau glances pointedly around the empty bar, but lowers his voice all the same when he replies, “Sorry. I’m not mad. It’s just…this team has a real shot at the Cup again this year. It’s not like you to throw that all away for no reason.”
Ilya nods slowly, taking a sip of his beer to buy himself time before he responds. He’d known when he’d agreed to have this conversation that he’d have to trust Marleau with at least a part of the truth. But he also knows that the whole truth doesn’t belong to him alone, and he would never share any of Shane’s secrets without explicit permission. It’s a delicate balance, and it’s one he still hasn’t quite figured out. “Is not for no reason,” he says finally.
Marleau looks like he desperately wants to say something but is holding it back, so Ilya waves one hand between them, an invitation. “Go ahead. Whatever it is, just say it.”
Ilya lifts his glass to his lips once more just as Marleau says, “Is this about that time you drove to Montreal in the middle of the night last season?”
Whatever Ilya’s expecting, it’s not this. He chokes on his beer, pounding his own chest as he coughs and splutters. When he finally surfaces, his face burning, it’s to find Marleau staring at him from across the table with his eyebrows raised.
The words how do you know about that are on the tip of Ilya’s tongue but that is an admission in and of itself, so instead he takes a moment to collect himself before saying, “What makes you think I was in Montreal?”
“You were five hours away when I called you. There’s only so many places you could have gotten to in that time, and I’m pretty sure you weren’t in fucking Bar Harbor.”
“You still don’t know that–”
“I never pushed you about it, I figured you had your reasons, but now–”
“I had my reasons,” Ilya interrupts. “I still have my reasons.”
“So you’re not going to tell me, then?” Ilya takes another sip of beer to avoid answering, and Marleau lets out a long sigh. “I thought we were friends, Roz.”
“We are friends, it’s just–”
“Listen, I know you’re seeing that girl in Montreal, okay? I’ve never understood why you’re so secretive about it but it’s never been my business–”
“Is still not your business.”
“It is when it’s the reason you’re leaving!” Marleau exclaims.
Ilya closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and counts to five. It’s a habit he’s picked up from Shane, who calls it ‘centering’, and Ilya playfully ribs him about it constantly but he also has to admit that it helps him to calm down whenever he’s feeling impulsive. His first instinct, which is to defend himself – to defend Shane – has almost caused him to forget that the reason he even brought Marleau here in the first place was to tell him the truth. Or at least, as much of the truth as he can share.
“LeClaire asked who I think should replace me as Captain,” Ilya says finally. “I told him you.”
It’s still not an answer, not quite, and not in the way Marleau wants, but it shows that Ilya has thought about this. That it’s not just some impulsive decision, that he’s thought this through from every single possible angle. That he really wants this, even if no one besides Shane will ever fully understand why.
“No way.” Marleau is shaking his head now and his face is more serious than Ilya has ever seen it, in a way that tells Ilya that he has finally, finally registered that this isn’t a joke. That Ilya is really leaving and has his succession plan in place, and that nothing anyone says at this point will change his mind. “I can’t lead this team, Roz. Not the way you have.”
“You can,” Ilya says, because it’s true. “You will. And then everyone will realize that I am not that great of captain.” This joke has the intended effect, cutting the tension that has been building between them ever since Ilya’s announcement earlier that morning.
“I still don’t like this,” Marleau says, but there’s laughter in his eyes now and he’s the most at ease that Ilya has seen him all day.
“I’m not asking you to like it. You don’t need to understand. But there are…” Ilya pauses, running the words through his head to make sure they come out right. “There are things more important than hockey, for me.”
Marleau nods as he processes this. “So, what? Are you like, in love?”
“Something like that,” Ilya replies evenly. He’d never promised himself that he’d tell the full truth, after all.
“Jesus.” Marleau drains the rest of his beer, setting the empty glass on the table with a loud thunk. “I think I’m going to need another one of these.”
“Come on, Marly. Is so unbelievable?”
There’s a long silence while Marleau considers this, and Ilya uses this time to finish off his own drink, placing his empty glass alongside the one already on the table. “No,” comes the response, finally. “It’s not so unbelievable. You may have everyone else fooled, but I know you’re a lovable motherfucker behind that whole asshole act of yours.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Ilya says, unable to hold back his smile.
“Look, whoever she is, she must be special if you’re willing to move to Ottawa for her.”
“Hey!” Ilya says, laughing. “I hear Ottawa is not so bad.”
“Do I at least get to know her name? Considering she’s stealing my best friend?”
“We will still be friends, Marly.” It’s a poor attempt at a distraction, because this is the part of the line that Ilya isn’t quite sure how to walk yet. Because he desperately wants to be honest about this as well, but it terrifies him. And Marleau is giving him an easy out; he can say nothing and let everyone continue to believe what they believe and leave Boston with the knowledge that none of them ever really knew him, not fully. But the man sitting in front of him is one of his best friends, one of the only people who has been with him since that first day he walked into the arena as a Raider, and something about leaving without telling him why – the real reason why – feels too dishonest.
And yet, what if Ilya has completely misjudged him? What if he tells everyone? What if he hates Ilya for withholding this secret from him for so long?
Or – and this is a thought Ilya doesn’t even want to entertain for a second, but he forces himself to anyway – what if Marleau hates Ilya simply for who he is?
Ilya had come to terms with fundamental truths about himself in a detached way. The realization that he was bisexual had come long before he’d had the words to describe it, and it hadn’t ever mattered. He’d never felt any kind of internalized guilt or shame about it, it was simply a part of him just like his height or the colour of his eyes. And yet he’d learned, without ever really needing to be told, that it was a part of him that had to be kept a secret. And he hadn’t minded that either, not at first, because something about the secrecy added to the thrill of it all.
When he’d watched his mother’s casket being lowered into the ground at the age of twelve, Ilya had put on a mask. And he’d worn that mask for the better part of all the years since, had begun to think that maybe he always would. But now, now he knows what it feels like to have all of that stripped away, to stand in front of someone who knows every last secret and who loves him in spite of them, because of them.
Now, Ilya knows what it feels like to be accepted fully and completely as himself; Shane has convinced him that he’s deserving of that. And something about the way that Shane loves him – wholly, unconditionally – makes everything else seem a little bit insignificant in comparison.
If Marleau is going to choose to hate him for a thing he can’t control, he’s not the kind of friend Ilya wants. And besides, he’s already leaving Boston. What more does he have to lose?
Taking a deep breath, Ilya prepares to take one of the biggest risks of his life. “You can keep secret?”
“Yeah, man, of course. But I mean…fuck, who is she?”
“Not she,” Ilya says pointedly.
A long silence punctuates this. And then all of a sudden Marleau stands to his feet, wordlessly turning away, and Ilya is left wondering if maybe he has miscalculated, after all. Relax, says the voice in his head, the one that sounds like Shane, and so Ilya closes his eyes. Takes another deep breath. Counts to five.
When he opens his eyes, Marleau is walking back towards their table with a beer in each hand. He places one of these down in front of Ilya as he slides back into his seat, and Ilya is overcome with a rush of relief so strong that he feels like he might pass out. “Wow. Okay.”
“Is really okay?” Ilya asks, hoping his voice doesn’t betray the anxiety he still feels coursing through his veins like fire.
“I mean…fuck, Roz, I’m not going to pretend I’m not surprised. But…” he shakes his head, downing about a quarter of his beer in a single swallow.
“But?” Ilya prompts.
“A lot of things are starting to make sense, now.”
This thread, in particular, is one Ilya doesn’t want to pull too hard on. He’ll allow Marleau to come to whatever conclusions he will on his own, but he’s dangerously close now to admitting secrets that he doesn’t have the permission to share.
Marleau is staring into his glass as he passes it back and forth from hand to hand. Ilya waits, giving him time. “Can I ask a question?” he says finally.
“You have asked lot of questions without permission first,” Ilya responds with a playful smile.
“Yeah, I know. It’s just…”
“Fucking say it, Marly.”
“Why not Montreal?”
It’s an innocent enough question, except for they both know that it’s carrying the weight of everything Marleau isn’t saying out loud, and Ilya hasn’t quite anticipated that anyone – even the people who know him best – would be able to connect the dots this quickly. He wonders, now, how much of it has always been this obvious, barely concealed just beneath the surface, hidden only because people haven’t been looking hard enough. He wonders how many more people might be able to connect the same dots, if given the right information.
He wonders if it would be so terrible, to have that happen.
Forget the fact that Montreal would never sign Ilya Rozanov. Forget the fact that the league and the fans might implode if it happened. Forget the fact that there would be no way to possibly justify a move to Montreal besides going public with the truth.
If Ilya went to Montreal he and Shane would never be able to hide, even if they wanted to, and Ilya may be ready for that – more so, he thinks, than he’d initially realized – but he knows Shane is not.
After all, he’s not the only one with a secret, not the only one with things to lose. “You know why not Montreal,” he says quietly.
They finish their beers in silence. It’s a silence that still holds the weight of things unsaid, but it’s more comfortable, this time. And the unspoken acknowledgment from Marleau, the one that says I will exist with you here for as long as you let me is more than Ilya could ever have dared to allow himself to hope for.
“I’m looking forward to kicking your ass in Ottawa,” Marleau finally tells him as they step out of the bar and into the early afternoon sunshine. There’s a deeper understanding to his words, now, one that hadn’t been there before. It doesn’t change the fact that leaving is hard, that most people will never understand, that a lot of them will choose to hate Ilya for leaving simply because doing so is the path of least resistance. But this acknowledgment, from one of the only people who has been by his side throughout his entire time in Boston, means the world.
Ilya grins. “I will not make it easy for you.”
“And hey,” Marleau continues, like he can sense that Ilya’s mind is at risk of drifting to less happy places. “You helped build this team from the ground up, all those years ago. Maybe you can do it again.”
“Yeah,” Ilya agrees. “Maybe.”
“Keep in touch, okay?” Marleau pulls Ilya in for a tight, brotherly hug, and suddenly he’s blinking back tears on a Boston sidewalk.
“I will,” he promises, and then he grins again as he shoots Marleau an exaggerated salute. “Good luck, Captain.”
“How did it go?” Shane asks over the phone later.
“It went okay,” Ilya responds slowly. “I think Marleau knows maybe more than he is saying.”
Shane lets out a breath, and Ilya can hear – even through the phone – the way it whistles through his teeth. “He still scares me.”
Something inside Ilya’s chest tightens the way it always does whenever he thinks about that fateful hit last spring, the way he’d stood there on the ice looking at Shane’s unmoving body and wondered for a brief, terrifying moment, if he would ever get up. He remembers his reaction because he’s seen it over and over again, in countless replays of the game footage that clearly showed all the other players responsibly sequestered by their respective benches while Ilya had stood there on the ice alone, never once taking his eyes off of Shane. The commentators had used almost every word under the sun to explain away his behaviour; shock, respect, admiration, responsibility as the opposing team’s captain. But the truth had been there, hidden in plain sight for those with eyes to see.
He wonders if Marleau is reliving this same moment in his mind now, too, given everything he knows.
“He is good guy,” Ilya tells Shane. “Will be good captain for Boston.”
“So were you.” Shane says it in that same earnest tone that always creeps into his voice whenever he gets the sense that Ilya is doubting himself, because somehow he can always, always tell. “No matter what people will try to say about you after you leave, you need to remember that.”
“Will be easy.” Ilya smiles to himself. “If I always have you to remind me.”