Chapter Text
Ilya’s lazy. It's a fact he’s known about himself since he was twelve. Same as that he has blue eyes, is from Russia, and has a dead mother. A month after she died, was the first time he remembers his father spitting the words out of his mouth he woke up to them at the kitchen table, his math homework stuck to his face. That week, he practiced with the fifteen-year-olds, then his own age, a plan delayed by a few weeks from what his father referred to as “the accident.” But he whispered his apology to his father, rubbed his ear where he cuffed it, and when he was alone again, he hoped his teacher wouldn’t notice the numbers blurry from the tears that fell from his face silently as he finished the assignment.
Since his mother died, he didn’t want to wake up anymore either, so every morning, his father pounded his door, using the word as an aggressive alarm clock. At breakfast food tasted like sawdust, so he missed it on purpose. Lunch, at school, he could mostly avoid, but dinner was the worst. Pushing food around his plate until his father yanked it away calling him lazy and ungrateful, the second adjective made his father take away breakfast the next morning, so that saved him some effort at least.
After a month of not eating, not sleeping well, he started missing shots at practice. So many, the coach talked to his father about it, suggested he go back to only playing with the boys his age, that it was a mistake to pull him up. So his father started coming to practice. Both of them. Tracking the shots he missed, each earning that word and a slap on his face, his back. Games, earned his belt. After Ilya missed a goal in the championship and his father was done with him, he scratched the word into his thigh with a safety pin. Not hard enough to bleed, so the marks faded fast, and he decided to stop acting lazy, he would always be, but at least he could try not to act that way. So he woke up at six everyday, did his school work, and stayed after practice, always to lift weights. Stopped moping, became charming, started sleeping with people, going out on the weekends.
Now he’s 4,500 miles away from his father, and he’s eighteen, and perfectly capable of disciplining himself with the refrain as often as he needs. When coach tells him to pick it up at practice, lazy turns the ignition in his quads. Lifts after practice until he’s red, shaking, and can’t breathe properly. When he doesn’t get Hollander off before him the first time they hook up, all that he can think when he comes down from his orgasm is lazy and selfish. So to undo the second word, he swallows. In the mornings, when he hasn’t bought groceries, hasn’t bothered to order from a meal service, and can barely get up in time for practice, all that the tinny voice in the drive through microphone repeating back his order sounds like is, “lazy, lazy, lazy with a side of black coffee.”
Sometimes, when his father calls him after a game, it’s nice to get it straight from the source. Not just echoing in his head. Because he’s afraid that it’s not working as well anymore. The single word can’t lift him out of bed on weekends when it feels like someone dug an empty hole in his chest and filled it with rocks. One Monday, after forty-eight hours passed in fragments and wisps, the light moving under the curtains, the only noise, the TV playing a reality show he used to love imitating with Sveta, he decides he needs a permanent reminder of who he is.
He waits until that weekend, an away game in New York to act on his idea. He doesn’t bother saying goodbye to the guys who came out to celebrate their win. They probably think he’s going home with the pretty girl he danced with all night. Or maybe they don’t care. Why would they as long as he’s on the ice Monday scoring goals?
So he slips out into the night, walking with his head down all ten blocks to the tattoo parlor he looked up in the bathroom. The only one that’s open this late and takes walk-ins.
Opening the door to the parlor, the bell tinkles above his head.
“Hey man, what can I help you with?” A skinny guy, seated at a small table, looks up from his phone.
“A tattoo. I have it here, on my phone.” He pulls up the photo of the word, “I want on my hip. I do not care about font. You choose.”
“Ok, we can do that.” The guy hands him back his device, “What’s it mean?”
“It means I’ll tip you in $1000 in cash if you don’t ask again.” He pulls out the money and puts it on the tattoo table. So on top of being lazy, he’s an asshole. But he’s desperate. Scared what will happen if he doesn’t get the word on his skin, make it part of him.
“Ok,” The guy says, “No harm in keeping some things private.”
Ashamed, Ilya nods, “Thank you.”
They don’t speak for the rest of the appointment. Ilya just nods when he shows him the word, the placement. Closes his eyes, lets the whir of the pen, the scratching on his skin quiet the lazy, lazy, lazy refrain in his head.
“All done man.” The artist says. “You like it?”
He looks down. Against the reddened skin, the words glare back at him: ленивый
“It’s perfect.” He says sliding off the table and tugging down his briefs, and up his jeans. Buttoning the fly, he asks, “To take care of it?”
“Try not to get it wet for a couple days. No working out, heavy sweating for at least one full day.”
“I’m lazy, so no problem.”