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The thing is, Troy knows he’s a piece of shit.
He’s trying not to be. He’s really, really fucking trying not to be. The idea of being like his father makes him want to fling himself into oncoming traffic, or sink beneath the ocean waves, or shove himself face-first into the boards. And it’s fucked up, because he was like that. Deliberately. On purpose.
Yeah, it was a shield, a cloak he wrapped himself in, but Shane’s right. That’s the reason why he did it on the intellectual level, all rationalisations and explanations, but at the heart of it? The core of everything Troy Barrett stood for, once upon a time?
It’s because Troy’s a coward.
He doesn’t want to be. Fuck, most of the time, he doesn’t think he is anymore. He stood up to his dad and gave a giant fuck you to Crowell and told the whole world how much he loves the best person he knows, all in one night, even though it was the thing that had terrified him his entire life.
That was brave. He can give himself that, he thinks.
But it doesn’t change the fact that he was a coward, and, maybe deep inside, he still is. Maybe there’s just no coming back from being that colossal a piece of shit.
Defeatist, a voice in his head whispers. It kind of sounds like Ilya. It kind of sounds like Harris.
It even—just a little bit—sounds like Dallas, and that makes Troy feel like he’s on that fucking plane again. Everything is in freefall. The world is crashing down around him, and he’s got so many regrets, and nothing is ever going to be good enough. Nothing will ever make up for the fact that it’s him.
Dallas Kent is the biggest piece of shit Troy has ever known, including his father and the commissioner and that asswipe Brad that outed Ilya and Shane, and it feels kind of like dying to have his voice in his head right now, even just the echo of it. He watched the man get arrested. It was the best video he’s ever seen in his life, and that’s the voice that Troy’s hearing right now? That’s the shit his brain comes up with to motivate himself with?
Sure, it’s jeering, with a rougher edge to it than even his imagined-Ilya’s, but still.
New fucking low.
It makes him so mad, all of a sudden. Mad enough to see through the haze of self-hatred, just for a little. Just enough to stand up and say, “Fuck it.”
He opens his window, and shoves his face out into the freezing air. He thinks about saying it again, but then he thinks about Shane’s face: desperate, wrecked, heaving. Blotchy and red with rage and no small amount of grief.
Those words wouldn’t be for Shane, but Troy can’t bring himself to utter them again, not with that sight in his mind. He can’t force glibness through his lips, even though he’s known for his mouth, not when shame is choking him, full-throttle.
“Fuck,” he says instead to the outside air. His eyes are stinging. It would be nice to blame the weather, but he’s trying this new honesty thing.
He’s spent so much of his life hiding himself. Lying as a knife, pointed outwards, and he thinks about the look in Shane’s eyes, and Pike saying eleven goddamn years during his speech at the wedding, and he wonders what it must have been like, for lying to be barbed wire digging into the meat of your palms, tearing yourself to pieces even as you smiled for every camera.
Shane Hollander, Troy thinks, deserves a fuck of a lot better than the MLH. He deserves better than Montreal’s fans and team and coach, and he deserves better than the commissioner’s crusade against him, and – and he deserves better than having to be on a team with Troy.
But Troy’s selfish.
He’s spent so much of his life hating himself, with the only honest things being his stick on the court and a clandestine two-year relationship with a man who broke his heart and he couldn’t even tell anyone. Now that he has a life surrounded by people he admires and wants to emulate because he thinks they’re cool, not because they’ll get him a pass from his dad, he doesn’t think he can give it up. He loves hockey. He loves Harris. He loves his team. He’s learning to love this city, at least half because it loves him.
He can’t give that up, but he knows he doesn’t deserve it. Just like Shane doesn’t deserve what he’s got instead.
⊹
“I just think,” Harris says, then pauses. He takes Troy’s hand, squeezes it, one-then-two, quick succession. “Baby,” he says, and it’s stupid and corny and makes Troy’s stomach do flips, because here’s the best guy in the whole fucking world, and he wants to give Troy these endearments. Wants to call him sappy things and kiss him sweetly in public and thinks he’s worth it. “What’s the point of the apology?”
Troy reels back a little, startled. His brow furrows. “He deserves it,” he says.
Harris nods. “Yeah, no, I know that. I get that. I mean, what are you hoping to achieve?” Troy blinks at that, and Harris continues, “I think wanting to repent for what you used to do and wanting to make him feel better are both totally understandable and commendable things! I just think that they’re also probably different things.”
Shit.
“You think I’m trying to make myself feel better,” Troy says dully.
“No,” Harris disagrees immediately. One-then-two squeezes. “I know you, and I know how much you mean it, and I know how badly you want to make it up to him. I get that, and I love you. I can see that. I can see you. I’m saying that Shane’s a nice guy who’s had so many awful, unfair things happen to him back-to-back that he might not be able to see it right now, no matter what you do.”
It’s like there’s something clawing up Troy’s throat. He’s always thought of guilt as a pit in his stomach, knots forming themselves there, but these days it seems to be everywhere in his body, blooming into every open precipice it can find, until it’s housed itself in all his spaces.
There’s too much space. Too much brightness in this office he loves so much, with its bright lights and comfy chair and endless understanding in his boyfriend’s eyes. He drags his feet onto the chair—wedges them, really, even though there is not enough real estate for them and his ass—to curl his knees up to his chest and place his head between them. He must look ridiculous. Huge-ass thighs cushioning his head. Grown man hiding from the light.
A beat later, he registers that as a thought that’s more his dad’s than his, and everything in him feels revolted again. He’s never going to be done with this shit, he realises, despairing. It’s not the first time he’s thought about this. It’s just the first time he’s had Shane Hollander’s wrecked face in his head whilst doing so.
“So you think I shouldn’t do it?” Troy asks his knees. His voice is weird and muffled. He’d love to blame it all on the knees, but. That shitty honesty thing he’s trying, and all.
“I didn’t say that,” Harris says, and he’s so kind. He’s always so kind. God, how did Troy get so lucky that he gets to have this? Gets to keep this? “I just want you to be sure you want to do this, and why. Just in case it doesn’t go the way you want it to.”
⊹
Once, years before they got their shit together, Ilya had spent a very boring physical therapy session thinking about what it would be like to fuck Shane in front of an audience. To have that beautiful, infuriating boy in front of everyone, to have everyone able to see him fall apart.
It had seemed hot then.
Now, having seen Shane actually fall apart—seeing him tear down the shroud he’d kept up, the perfect smile, the bravery—the very concept makes Ilya feel sick to his stomach. Everything inside him is razor blades and churning vodka and Svetlana’s awful skincare concoctions. He didn’t know.
Or—
He knew, kind of, but he didn’t know. He can’t articulate it. He knew Shane was having a shitty time with the whole situation, probably better than anyone other than Shane himself. But he didn’t know. Not how bad it was on every level, on even the parts Ilya took for granted.
It’s sometimes easy for Ilya to forget that because Shane has so much support on the personal level—parents that would do anything in the world for him, an actual squadron of friends, three fucking Stanley Cups—that he’s always standing on the precipice of a cliff. That to the whole rest of the world, one step out of line, and he tumbles down, down, down.
Shane has the best family in the world, and Ilya spent so long thinking about how completely out of reach that was for him that he forgot to watch all of Shane’s steps. He didn’t notice the minefield his husband was moving through. Sure, he knew the big shit—Dallas Kent being a fuckhead, the commissioner being a goddamn cockbag, the entire city of Montreal proving they’ve never deserved anything good in their fucking lives—but the small things. The little, invisible flinches.
He hadn’t noticed them.
His husband was on a precipice, and he didn’t notice.
Precipice.
Troy taught him that word.
Ilya sits on his sofa, Anya curled up in his lap, and waits for his husband to come home. He does not know what else to do.
⊹
“What do you think?” Troy asks. He’s asking because Ilya is Shane’s favourite person in the world, and knows him best, but. He doesn’t know. Ilya had been so sure it was jealousy, even when Troy had been closer to the mark. It doesn’t reflect on them. At least, not their love. Troy knows they love each other. If they didn’t, Shane wouldn’t go through hell to keep Ilya, and Ilya wouldn’t have moved to the worst team in the league to have Shane.
It just maybe means that they’re not great at telling each other their sharp shit. It’s kind of a relief. Not that Ilya was caught off guard by that or, fuck, that Shane got cornered in his own home. Just—
They’ve always been the pinnacle. The best of the best, the most impressive people on the ice. Well, them and Scott Hunter. It’s just a relief, a little, to know that they’ve got stuff to work on too. Not as big or bad as Troy’s shit, obviously, because neither of them were fucking scumbags to anyone, but. Still something. Just to make them a little more human.
Ilya goes quiet. “I don’t know,” he admits, finally. “I think—I think it will be good for him to see, because he deserves it. He deserves someone to stand up for him. But I do not know if he will like it.”
Yeah. That’s kind of what Troy figured.
⊹
“Hey, Troy?” Gen says. She’s exclusively here as a favour to Harris, and—okay, well, a little bit because she’s fucking curious. Still, she’s been well-behaved. Just helped set up the lighting and camera and stuff, kept her nosiness to a minimum. But now…
He looks up. “Yeah?” he asks. His hair is falling into his eyes a little, and his mouth is softer, the way it always is these days. It makes something in her cold heart defrost, seeing the way he’s bloomed in Harris’ warmth.
“Just a word of advice.” She waits until she sees she has his full attention, and then says, blunt as ever, “You can’t cry.”
Troy blinks at her, clearly confused. “I wasn’t… planning on it…?”
“No,” she says, stressing it as emphatically as she can. “I know it’s not in the plan, I mean, you can’t. If the feelings get too big or whatever—you can cry if this is for you. But if it’s for Shane, if you’re really trying to help him, then you can’t. Because the second the prettiest white boy in the league starts crying on camera, all those nasty words he hears are going to get a thousand times worse.”
Harris is giving her a Look, she can tell, but her eyes are on his boyfriend right now. He’s gone white. Well. Whiter.
“And also—look, you wronged him. Right? That’s what this is all about? Then you owe it to him to keep it together. If he wasn’t allowed to break down, then you can’t either. I’m not saying it’s fair or right that he couldn’t, but, like, if that was his reality, then you have to meet him where he is. Or else this is just going to be one more thing you get to have that he never could.”
“He doesn’t get to be vulnerable,” Harris says softly.
“All right,” Troy says, nodding determinedly. “No crying. On my life.”
Gen snorts. “Okay, boy scout,” she says, which is the furthest thing from Troy Barrett she can think of, but the affronted look on his face makes her cackle.
And just for a moment, his mouth softens again.
⊹
Ilya is in the shower when Shane gets back from his morning run. It’s a relief.
Shane loves him more than anything, more than hockey, but. They both need some recovery time from that awful night and the exhausting, drag-out conversation they had after that almost turned into a brawl at one point.
They’re better for it, and they’re going to be okay, but. Shane is so tired. He doesn’t have the energy for the eggshells yet.
He flops onto the comfy armchair and makes token protesting noises when Anya hops up onto his lap, but does nothing to actually dislodge her.
“You’re a menace,” he says, then reaches for his phone. It looks like he’s going to be here for a while. Might as well entertain himself.
He scrolls mindlessly for a bit, and then suddenly pauses. Scrolls back up.
There’s a video. It’s the first thing posted from Troy’s account that isn’t a sexual assault awareness resource.
God. Shane probably shouldn’t watch it. Not right now. Not like this.
He clicks play anyway.
The first thing he notices is that Troy looks nervous. There’s a part of him that feels a sick satisfaction at that. Like, good. Now you know how everyone else feels, having to go out into the world without being a dick to everyone before they can be a dick to you. The rest of him feels a low, muted dread.
“Hey guys,” Troy says, waving. He’s not much of a talker. Maybe that’s why the video, though. Easier to get right.
It doesn’t look like the coming out video did, though. That had been sleek and edited, and so fucking open that Shane’s entire chest had felt like it was cracking open with furious grief.
This one is a man in a room, nervous and guilty and beautiful. Shane hates him for it, a little. On top of everything else.
“If you’re watching this, you probably know who I am,” Troy begins. “So, chances are good you knew me back in the Guardians too.” He pauses, then visibly steels himself. Shane watches his armour go up in real time: not just the blank expression he used to be so known for, but something straightening his spine, jutting out his chin. It’s kind of horrifying, watching someone shield themself in real time. Shane isn’t quite sure if it’s because it rankles seeing it go up, because it means they were safe enough not to need it up to begin with, or if it’s something more inherent, some deep-seated wrongness at watching people have to hide away themselves.
Maybe both.
“You probably know about what happened with me and Dallas Kent,” Troy says. It comes out calmer than Shane expects. “That’s not what this is about, but it’s – relevant.” Another pause. “I love Ottawa.”
Okay. Non-sequitur, much?
“I love it for many reasons. The most important one is that I love it because I’m allowed to be myself here,” Troy says, and something shreds through Shane’s ribs. “Everyone was—I announced something, last Pride Night, and everyone was – so great. It was so much better than I could have ever dreamed of. I’d been scared of telling anyone about it basically my entire life, and here was this city, happy to have me, even when my dad couldn’t.” He’s breathing a little hard now, almost like his mouth is moving too fast for his brain. Shane can’t tell if he meant to say that, give that much of himself to the world, but – he looks determined regardless.
“The thing is,” Troy says, and he shoves his hand through his hair, clamping it so hard he could probably rip it out if he tries. He looks like he might.
Shane doesn’t know what to do with that.
“The thing is, I was really, really lucky. I have a great team, and this city rocks, and I got to do it because I wanted to. I got to tell the world how I wanted.”
Oh. Fuck.
“Not everyone gets that,” Troy says quietly. Shane’s stomach rolls. “Shane Hollander joined the Centaurs this year, and we’re lucky to have him. We really are. But I owe him an apology.”
No. No no no no no no—
“I mentioned Dallas Kent earlier. If you follow hockey, you probably know he’s not going to be around on the ice, considering his upcoming court cases,” Troy continues. If he looks quietly, savagely pleased, well—this is one time Shane can agree. “But he used to be a Guardian, back when I was.” Pause. “He used to be my best friend.”
Troy looks down at his hands, then says, mostly to them, “He said a lot of shitty things a lot of the time. And. And so did I.” He swallows, visibly, then says, “Some of you have heard about this before, and I know a lot of you have been supportive, forgiving. That’s – that’s kind of you. But. I think it’s important that I say this.”
He looks at the camera. Shane looks into those blue eyes, and blinks away the memory of those eyes across the ice, asking if Shane sucked off his coach before or after the lineup announcement. Kent had laughed. J.J. had tried to take Troy’s head off.
“I said some real shitty things, and it doesn’t make them go away just because I didn’t mean them. Just because I was scared, that doesn’t – make it okay. I’m grateful, truly, for how welcoming you’ve all been. I’m not saying this because I want that to go away. But my mom once told me that the only way anything ever changes is if we use our spaces to do it.” There’s a flash of a smile on Troy’s face, there and back again.
Shane knows that part of why Ilya feels so resonant with Troy is their fathers. He hasn’t asked for details about Troy’s—doesn’t want to know, frankly—but he’s picked up on that much, at least.
He’s never thought about Troy’s mother, but it’s clear he loves her.
It doesn’t change anything, but there’s a little part of Shane, in the back of his head, marking off another box in the Similarities With Troy Barrett column. That part of Shane is an asshole, so obviously he sounds like Ilya.
“So I figured I should say, I’m sorry. I said some vile things, and I genuinely hurt people, and it actually doesn’t matter that I was scared. That’s why I did it, but that doesn’t make it any better. That doesn’t make them any less hurt. That doesn’t change the fact that I was a coward,” Troy says, and Shane feels – numb.
It’s like he yelled it all out of him the other night, and it’s still there, still everywhere in him, but he can’t dig his fingers beneath it. Can’t separate it from his skin, can’t figure out where it starts or ends in order to expel it. It’s just – him. The first rage he ever got to release, and now the rest of it is trapped beneath, pins and needles, numbness from its omnipresence, the same way ice can be so cold it burns. Your body does not know how to process this.
“And some of the people—” Troy starts, then pauses. He tilts his head away from the camera. One moment, two. Then he looks back at the camera, sounding clearer. “Shane Hollander is a great player. A great player. He’s a generational talent, a three-time Stanley Cup winner, and he turned the Voyageurs into an actually formidable team. And the second he got outed, it was like none of that mattered anymore.”
Shane blinks back tears, scrunching his hand in Anya’s fur to ground himself. Fuck.
“I don’t get it,” Troy says plainly. “I was a complete asshole to Shane for most of my career. He’s never going to tell you that, so I will. I’ve called him so many things, and I stood beside other people calling him worse. Those were my friends. That was my team. And I’m happy to be shot of them. I have a great team now, and I have good friends, and I have someone I love. I am so happy. But it’s crazy that Shane lost so much, when he never did anything wrong.”
Troy takes a deep breath. “I don’t really talk this much often. I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I just—I’ve learned a lot of things here with Ottawa. Important things. Like how sometimes, you have to say them, because someone has to. And I owe it to say it. I really do.” He pauses, then says, “Um, we’re playing the Admirals this week. Please… tune in.”
The video ends.
Shane stares at his screen. He can’t decide if the sensation coursing through his body right now is adrenaline or panic.
“Do you feel better?” Ilya asks quietly, startling Shane. He’s leaning against the doorway, towel wrapped around his waist, and his voice is gentle. Non-judgemental. Patient, even, which is frankly a miracle, considering who’s talking.
Shane looks at Anya’s fur, tufting through his fingers, and thinks, no.
He’s just not sure this is the kind of thing that’ll ever feel better.