Chapter Text
*~*~*~*~*
Katya Rozanova is nine years old when she is told she will not see her Uncle Ilya again.
It has been over two years since she saw him last, at her grandfather’s funeral. She remembers that event as being gray and black and somber. She remembers that he was unusually quiet, and the unhappy cast to his brow, and that every room they shared was stuffy and tense, and she did not get a chance to play with him the way she did during his usual summer visits.
Katya’s grandfather died when she was seven, and that summer, she and her parents moved to a new apartment. Katya’s new room felt like the best birthday gift, because it was larger and more beautiful than her old one. And amid the whirlwind of the move, neither of Katya’s parents said anything about Uncle Ilya’s visit. And Katya did not either, because they had both looked stretched thin and tired, and Katya did not want to bother them.
And after all, he had been there only a few months before. And his pretty friend, Svetlana, stopped by after they moved to give Katya her birthday presents from her uncle, addressed to his Katyushka.
So it was not until the following spring that she asked her mama if they would see Uncle Ilya again in the summer. And her mother hummed and answered maybe in a way that sounded like no, and Katya did not badger her, because she could see the tension in her mother’s face, and did not want to make it worse.
And another year passed with little mention of her uncle, except that sometimes her parents would say his name quietly, like they didn’t want her to hear. And once, before Christmas, Katya caught it written on a package that her mama swiftly squirreled away. Katya did not ask her mama about it because she could tell she was not supposed to.
But in the spring of 2019, Katya is nine, going on ten, and she has not seen her Uncle Ilya in two years, so she works up the courage to ask her parents at dinner one night if they will see him in the summer.
And Katya’s mama’s eyes go wide, and her papa’s face gets very red, and he snaps at her in a voice that sends ice through her veins not to mention that – and then he says a word that Katya has only heard from the mean boys at school before, and that makes her mother cover her ears.
Katya does not say anything else until her dinner is finished and she is excused.
That night when her mama tucks her into bed, Katya asks her in a whisper why her question made papa so angry. Her mama tells her, just as quietly, that her Uncle Ilya has left their family behind, and does not care for them or for Russia anymore, and will not be coming back again. But it will be okay. Katya does not need to miss him, because he does not miss them.
She does not say more when Katya asks her why. She only tucks her into bed, and kisses her head, and tells her it is best not to talk about it.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya Rozanova is twelve years old, and she is beginning to suspect that her family may be less happy than some others.
Their house is nice enough, and there is always enough food, and Katya always has clothes and school supplies. But her father keeps strange and unpredictable hours, and Katya notices that her mother is often watching the door. Sometimes, when he comes home late at night, he is loud enough that it wakes Katya up.
Her mama is very quiet, and her mouth is often pursed and tight. She does not like it when Katya is not tidy with her things, and will often scold her to pick them up even if Katya is not finished with them.
Her parents argue about money a lot, and it is always awful and tense. Her mother tries to be subtle about it, but sometimes on those late nights, Katya can hear their sharp words echoing around the silent apartment. Sometimes, she listens at the door even though it makes her stomach turn, because she cannot help herself. She finds herself keeping careful tabs on her parents’ location within the house at all times, listening to their footsteps and voices and the opening and closing of doors. Just so she knows what to expect when she enters a room.
And sometimes, in talking to classmates, she is suddenly aware of how very small her family is. She is her parents’ only child. Her grandfather is, of course, dead. She never met her grandmother, who died before she was born, and no one speaks about her. Her mother has no siblings for Katya to call aunt or uncle, and she has no cousins she has ever met.
And then there is Uncle Ilya, who Katya used to know. But there is not much to remember by the time she is twelve.
She remembers that he was taller than her father, and would hoist her onto his shoulders. She remembers he would play with her hair and call her his little twin, because it was curly like his. He never arrived at her house empty-handed, always bringing her snacks or stuffed toys, and her mother said he spoiled her. She remembers that he was very loud, and laughed often, except for the last time she saw him.
Sometimes she thinks she misses him. She knows her mother told her not to. And it feels silly to miss him, since she hardly knew him at all, and there isn’t much of anything to miss, anyway.
But sometimes she misses the idea of having an uncle, and of being special to someone, and having people who are hers.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is fourteen when the internet opens her world up. She’s had a smartphone for a few years now, but she is in high school when her classmate shows her how to download a VPN.
It is thrilling and rebellious to look at things she isn’t supposed to see. At first, it is simple things – music and TV shows only available in other countries that Katya and her friends share back and forth in group chats like little artifacts from other worlds.
But Katya has always been precocious, according to her teachers. Too smart and too curious and too confident at times for her own good.
Katya dives into the world online, and joins social media sites she isn’t supposed to have access to, and makes friends she has never met from thousands of miles away. She sharpens her English through people she has never seen, and calls herself by a different name. She begs a laptop off her mother and father with promises to study hard, and she does keep her word.
But by night she learns about VPNs, and location settings, and censorship, and password protection, and masking identities, and digital trails, and her world opens up wider than she ever believed.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is fifteen, and she thinks she might hate her father.
He is always drinking, and clumsy in his attempts to hide his drug use. He is terrible with their money, which makes her mother angry and frightened, and the air in their apartment sours daily with an ever-mounting, dangerous tension. When it snaps, her papa lashes out in hisses and screams, red in the face, and her mother silently cleans up whatever he breaks.
Katya is beginning to jump at the sound of closing doors, even when they haven’t quite been slammed. She is beginning to forget a time when her father was not glassy-eyed and short-tempered, or when her mother did not look so thin and so pale. She thinks, as she has gotten older, he has gotten worse.
Or perhaps he is not worse. Perhaps he is just the same as he has always been, and it is Katya who has changed. Perhaps Katya, who is fifteen and reading about feminism and equality and autonomy and addiction and abuse, can see things now that she didn’t have the eyes to before.
One night, after another fit over dinner, he storms out of their apartment, and Katya snaps at her mama that she can’t understand why she won’t just leave him.
She receives an open-handed slap across the face for her words.
Her mother has never, ever hit her before.
She retreats to her room, stunned speechless, and sits in the dark for a long time marveling at her stinging cheek, until her mother comes in, weeping.
I am so sorry my Katyushka, I am so sorry. I will never do it again. Forgive me.
And she is so pitiful and distraught that Katya can’t even feel angry, even though she knows she should.
She cries with her mama, in her dark bedroom, and pleads with her, tearfully, why.
Her mama has no answer.
You don’t understand, is all she says, and Katya thinks that no, she doesn’t.
She doesn’t sleep that night. After her mother goes away to clean up her father’s mess, she lays back in her bed, staring at the ceiling for hours until the sun comes up.
She hears her father come back, sometime in the wee hours. The sounds of the door opening and closing, and his footsteps as they cross the apartment, are all too clumsy. Inebriated.
That night, Katya decides that she will never get married. Not ever.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is sixteen, and it is February, and the stakes of the next few months could not possibly be higher.
University entrance exams and applications loom large over her head. They will determine her entire future – whether she will get her tuition paid, or will be chained to her father’s poor decisions for years, and then perhaps forever. Katya must get into a good school. She must get a state scholarship. She must choose the right degree program, and get perfect grades, and a good job when she graduates, enough that she can support herself. It is imperative that she gets every step of the process right.
But even she takes breaks, when her brain is buzzing too loud to think anymore, and slips away to the little corners of the internet she has come to love.
Scrolling through her tumblr is like an escape. She likes that no one knows her real name or face. She likes that when she joined years ago, she found people through mutual interests, and she likes watching the way their lives have diverged since. Her dashboard is now a mash-up of low-stakes humor and flash-hyperfixations from people Katya feels loyal to only through time, now, and in a way, it’s calming.
Though perhaps some of them could tone it down a notch. One of her mutuals is posting a lot about hockey.
She hasn’t been following the Milan Winter Olympics. The discourse online surrounding the IOC’s decision to ban her country from participating is exhausting to look at, and with everything else, she hasn’t had the energy to spare on internet fights. She has no context for why her dash is suddenly flooded with gifs of the Canadian national team.
She isn’t sure why the post seems to jump out at her.
Among the other hockey-posting there is a gifset of a Team Canada player scoring a goal. The camera zooms in on his elated face, then shows him skate by the bench, fist bumping his teammates. At the end of the line, the last man grabs him by the arm, swinging him around before pulling him in for a quick but forceful kiss.
Underneath the images the caption reads:
First Olympic goal celebration from the first husbands of Canadian Hockey! LOVE WINS (literally)
#team canada hockey #2026 olympics #hollanov #shane hollander #ilya rozanov #hockey rpf #olympic hockey #i’m literally obsessed with them catch me tuning into every single canadian men’s game #no but if they win gold together i’m going to be sobbing i don’t think i can make it
Her eyes catch on the name.
#ilya rozanov
She reads it three more times, just to be sure.
And then she clicks on the tag.
It has a lot of posts.
Feeling strangely shaky, Katya sits up in her bed, pulls over her laptop, and types his name into Google.
She doesn’t study for the rest of the night.
*~*~*~*~*
When the sun rises the next day, Katya is still sixteen years old, and her entrance exams are still looming over her head, and her house is still horrible and tense.
And she knows why her Uncle Ilya never came back.
Katya watches every match she can until the Olympics end. She tells her parents she is studying and shuts herself in her room, and fixates on number 81 every time he’s on the ice. When the camera shows him in a close-up, she searches his face for any resemblance. When Canada wins gold in overtime of the final match, Katya watches him kiss his husband on the ice before they are engulfed by their team, gloves and helmets flying, and she aches.
She knows why her Uncle Ilya never came back.
It makes her angry to think about, sticks in her mind like gum to the bottom of a school desk. For weeks after the Olympic final, she walks around fuming.
Her mother said not to miss Uncle Ilya, because he didn’t miss them.
Is it true?
Katya’s Uncle Ilya is a professional hockey player. He makes millions of dollars a year in Canadian money, which Katya knows, now, because she looked it up. Her uncle started a charity in Katya's grandmother's name, a name which Katya only learned when she asked for the sake of a family tree project in school. He came out publicly, when Katya was only ten, and now Katya has read the articles where the entire sports world talked about it for a month.
Uncle Ilya is married to another player, who won the gold for Canada with him. Uncle Ilya is a Canadian citizen, now, because of his husband, maybe, and maybe because Russia no longer wants him.
They used to want him. He was on their Olympic team, years ago. Katya found the articles. He looked so much younger in those interviews. He had been Russia’s pride and joy, until he wasn’t, and the news and sports websites turned on him. Discussions filled with vitriol still linger in forgotten forum posts.
So do the ones from after he came out, and from when the news broke about his wedding. But the difference is that those events do not have articles from official media sources. They are not new. They are buried deeper, as though the whole country decided all at once not to speak of him again, except in hateful whispers.
Just like it had happened in Katya’s house. No one in her home speaks Uncle Ilya’s name, but she remembers what her papa called him, years ago when she asked if he was coming back soon. He still mutters it under his breath when he is intoxicated and foul. Katya did not know what it meant when she was nine.
She knows now.
It fills her with rage. She speaks to her parents even less than before, as the year comes to a close. She throws herself into her schoolwork, exams, and applications with a vengeful ferocity, as though it will help release some of the pressure inside of her. It doesn’t.
She’s known for a few years now how Russia is for queer people. It is another thing that has sat wrong in her stomach as she’s gotten older, and her world has grown. And she already ached for the way the world thinks of her country, and the things that greedy and violent men in power have done to make it so. It is hard to see the way people talk about her country online, when Katya agrees with them, and when she also knows so many people in Russia want nothing to do with any of the terrible things that are done in their name. Her elderly neighbor. The grocer on her street. Her friends from school. So, so, so many people.
Russia has such a reputation for rigidity, cruelty, and deadly cold. But Katya knows it can also be beautiful, and kind. It has been kind to her before. Sometimes it is even kind to her now, though she feels it less and less.
She has already grown accustomed to the hurt that comes with growing up and discovering that the place that raised you will not be kind to everyone who deserves it. But it feels different now. Because it has taken something from her, specifically.
Do not miss him. He does not miss us. That is what her mother told her, when Katya was only nine. And maybe she was right. Maybe her uncle left all on his own and does not miss them.
But now Katya knows that really, he didn’t have a choice. Or if he did, it was a terrible one, more terrible than she can imagine. And how could someone not miss home at least a little, if that was true?
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is seventeen when she starts university in Moscow.
She chooses to study political science. She does not achieve a state scholarship and she is terrified to tell her father. She expects him to rage, and spit, and sneer, and berate her for her failure, if for no other reason than because it will be an expense, and her papa is always, always tense and angry about money.
But he doesn’t scream, or yell, or rage, or throw anything. He gives Katya a long look that she cannot decipher, and then says he will pay.
When the semester begins, she lives at home, because it is practical. She spends as long as she can out of the house between class and study. And when she is lonely, she sits up for long hours online, chatting in English with the friends she has never met about school and life, and everything.
Sometimes they are impressed that she has already begun her degree and is only seventeen. Sometimes she tells them that this is normal for Russia. Sometimes she does not, and tucks the little shining star of admiration without pretense away to warm her when she is cold.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is eighteen, and suddenly she is rich.
There is money, in her name, with a shocking number of zeroes after it. It has been left to her by her Uncle Ilya, and has been waiting for her in a trust that no one in her life told her about.
And her parents had to have known. She can’t imagine that they didn’t. The day she gets the call, Katya is out with a school friend for her birthday, and she is so sick with betrayal that she cannot bring herself to go home, to meet her parents’ eyes, and know what they know, and then sleep under their roof. She stays on her friend’s couch until the weekend.
The revelation of the trust throws her father’s quiet ambivalence into sharp relief.
She knew there was something she was missing. Her father has never shown her any great love, not in living memory. But he is not cruel to her. He provides. She has always had enough, even if it was not given with affection.
She thinks of the way he acts toward her mama, and begins obsessing over every remembered interaction since she was small, comparing behavior. She thinks of the way she shook when she told him about her tuition, and the way he uncharacteristically did not make a fuss, when he has screamed at her mother for far, far less.
She thinks of her father’s drinking, and the drugs. She thinks about the number of zeroes in her new trust, and everything falls into place and makes a horrible kind of sense.
She’s staggered by it. How long he must have been waiting. What he will inevitably ask of her now.
Fuck him.
That money is Katya’s. It was left to her. He has no right to it.
And he had no right to keep the knowledge of it from her for all those years. All her agonizing was for nothing, and he knew, and he never said anything. She had a future, just waiting for her, and he didn’t even tell her.
She doesn’t know what she would have done differently if she knew, but there are things she could have done. Plans she could have made. Maybe college in France, or Germany, or anywhere else in the world. Something.
Katya likes plans. No, she needs them. She needs to be prepared, because it is foolish and naive not to be, and Katya is neither.
But no one prepared her for this. No one prepared her to have sudden millions dropped into her lap by her estranged, gay, famous uncle. And now, everything has changed, and all of her careful plans are meaningless.
She buys a studio apartment in walking distance to the university, and hires movers to bring her things. Her father is not home when it happens, which is all the better. Katya marches into her parents’ apartment and points out which things will go with her while her mother watches from the kitchen in shock.
Katya, her mother says, and Katya does not know if it means what are you doing or stop being dramatic, or simply goodbye. But looking at her mother, who must also have known, makes Katya sick, tangles her up in resentment and pity and anguish.
So she takes her things and she flees, and she settles in her new little place. And it is good to be herself, good to hold her own key in her hand and know she is in charge here, in her own room which she bought with her own money, and that no one can take it from her.
She still lays on her bed, newly spread with her childhood quilt that first night, and cries.
*~*~*~*~*
It takes three weeks for her father to call. Katya ignores him for two days, then blocks his number. When her mother calls her next, she does not answer.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is nineteen when she has her first kiss.
Her name is Evgeniya, but she tells Katya to call her Zhenya, quietly, where no one hears. She sketches in charcoal in a large, spiral-bound book and she blushes when Katya asks to see her drawings, which are sometimes cartoonish and sometimes fantastical and beautiful, and which she shrugs off like they are not wonderful. They exchange numbers and talk about American TV shows and get coffee after class sometimes, and Katya invites her along when she spends long, long nights in the library, which turns into long nights studying in her apartment with Zhenya stretched out on her stomach on the floor, or leaning back on the headboard with her sketchbook propped against her knees.
They talk about everything, about how Zhenya wants to go to Paris so she can see the greatest art in the world, and how Katya wants to go everywhere. They talk about everything except for how handsome Katya thinks Zhenya looks in the low lights of her warm lamps, smiling at her over cream-white paper with her fingers stained with charcoal.
And Katya never wanted to kiss the boys in her classes in school. She didn’t like the way they looked at her. It made her skin prickle in the wrong ways, and thinking about getting close to them, letting them touch her – it had felt unnatural. Like she was the wrong shape for it.
It feels like the most natural thing in the world, the night Katya leans in and touches her lips to Zhenya’s. The way Zhenya brings her hand to Katya’s face to deepen the kiss, the way she is warm and smells so good, and the way Katya’s heart feels like it’s trying to escape her chest just to be closer to her feels like something Katya was made for.
It is not natural to her, the way that Katya gets to see her flushed cheeks for and shining lips for only one instant before Zhenya goes still and the color drains from her face, and it is not natural the way she stammers as she packs up her things, and makes excuses, and it is not natural the way she flees from Katya’s little apartment, and Katya can hear her heavy footsteps on every stair.
Katya is nineteen, and shares her first kiss with a beautiful girl, and right after it is done, she lays back on her bed to stare at the ceiling, and feels something horrible and slimy settle over the warmth that has been lit in her chest, something that could suffocate her if given the chance.
Outside, the city is white and silent with falling snow, and Katya does not look for anyone on the street. She lies very still, and through the little window by her bed, she watches flakes fall in diagonal columns lit by streetlights.
When she finally goes to brush her teeth so she can sleep, she sees the charcoal smudge on her cheek. Something about washing it off makes her feel very, very small.
Zhenya does not come around again. When Katya texts, she does not answer.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is twenty years old when tells her mother she is going to study abroad.
It has become increasingly clear that she does not want to stay in Russia. She’s known as much since she was a teenager hiding the light of her phone beneath her covers and absorbing everything she could about places she’d never seen.
Katya has been doing her research. Political science became international studies, which she has a mind for. Something about her loves the density of the documents, the rules, and finding all the ways that they come together to create something larger, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
And it is the perfect excuse to go somewhere else.
Katya is smart. She is hungry. Her English is very, very good, polished from years in school and even more online. She knows she can excel in this. Her professors say so. She keeps her face schooled around them, and nods, and talks about opportunities and serving the public and the importance of international relations, and being a good ambassador for her country.
She doesn’t talk about the fire in her belly that wants for more. She doesn’t talk about lying awake, staring at the ceiling, and the way she knew, young, that she didn’t want to get married, even if she didn’t know all the details of what it meant. She doesn’t talk about dimly lit kisses, or how she has been searching her uncle's name more and more in recent days.
She doesn’t talk about somehow, somewhere along the line, wanting to leave home became needing to leave.
She thinks, sometimes, if she talks about it, it will be enough to shake her apart.
She applies to exchange programs, and only some of them are in Canada. She makes plans, because she cannot help it, but she makes plans for all of her options, as though if she treats them all equally, she can pretend that she does not have a clear favorite.
She thinks about what her mama told her about Uncle Ilya. She thinks if he did not miss her, he would not have left her the money. She thinks if he did not care about her, somehow, it would not be as much money as it is. Full tuition money. Buying property money. International travel money. Lawyer money.
Katya makes herself sick for weeks from the sheer anticipation of it all, and then she is accepted into a program to study in Ottawa. She nearly throws up from the wave of relief and new anxiety.
Katya is twenty years old when she tells her mother she is going to study abroad. That she will be spending a year a continent and an ocean away.
Katya is twenty when her mother responds, okay, quiet and resigned. She has been quiet and resigned for years now, and it makes Katya want to scream. She thinks that once, her mother had been full of life. At one point, she must have laughed.
Say something, Katya wants to demand, have an opinion on something, for once in your miserable life.
“How is papa?” she asks listlessly, instead.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is twenty years old when she leaves Russia.
She goes out drinking with her friends the week before, who wish her good luck, and tell her they’ll miss her, and hug her tightly at the end of the night and say they’ll see her next year.
She sells her studio to another student and easily lies that she is not keeping it because she doesn’t want the work of renting it out while she’s away, that she can always get another.
She packs anything she can’t bear to leave behind in a series of suitcases, and sells or gives away anything she can. It is easy, among students. They are always looking for things on the cheap.
One day, she makes her way to her old neighborhood, and walks, once, down her old street, and stands, for long minutes, looking up at her old bedroom window.
It is possible she will come back. On paper, it is only one year abroad. On paper, Katya is planning to come back. Her friends all said they will be happy to see her again. They are expecting her to be there, when they all graduate next year.
Her heart still thrums with the sound of goodbye.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
She is sitting in the back of the cab, just arriving at the airport, when she receives her mother’s text.
Fly safely, it says. Tell me when you arrive.
Katya reads it once, twice. Taps the screen when her phone goes to sleep, to read it once more.
“We’re here,” the driver says. They’ve stopped. He’s popping the trunk, to help her with her bags.
Katya dismisses the notification and slides out of the car before he can get the door for her.
*~*~*~*~*