Work Text:
Alex Warwick was the first person not named Hollander to know that the love of Ilya Rozanov’s life was a man, or at least that the person he was gonna fuck next week was.
Alex Warwick had two things going for him. First, He was invisible. As a locker room attendant his presence was often overlooked by players and coaches. Second, his mother’s maiden name was Barkova and she’d spoken to him almost exclusively in Russian most of his childhood. It wasn’t until he was in high school that her comfort with English got to the point she would speak to her children in that language.
Speaking Russian wasn’t something Alex put on his resume. Though thinking about it, when trying to get a job with a team like Boston that featured one of the most famous Russians living in North America he probably should have.
He’d never spoken with Rozanov in Russian because that felt overly familiar, perhaps because Russian was the language of family and home to Alex.
That didn’t change the fact that Alex was a native speaker and he knew not just the rules of grammar but the idiomatic rules of the gendered language.
So when Ilya Rozanov made sure none of his teammates or coaches were within earshot of his phone call and spoke softly to make that earshot as small as possible he wasn’t paying attention to the kid picking up towels and throwing them in a laundry bin. Which is how Alex heard the big Russian’s side of the very personal conversation conducted mostly in English, but with the interesting parts in Russian.
Toward the end of the call Ilya Rozanov said “I’ll see you next week mой утёнок (moy utonok). I can’t wait to be intimate with you again.” Rozanov did not say “be intimate with”, but as an invisible person, Alex had learned to censor even his hearing.
Now if he’d said “mоя утка (moya utka)” Alex would have known he was speaking to a woman. Because Russian is a gendered language and that extends to how Russians choose pet names. If you’re casting endearments upon a woman you use the feminine form of “my” or “mоя (moya)” followed by a feminine noun. If you’re wooing a man you use the masculine form “mой (moy)” followed by a masculine noun.
In Russian “duckling” is masculine while “duck” is feminine. And Rozanov had definitely called whoever it was on the other end of the phone a duckling, not a duck.
Alex had no idea why Rozanov’s go to endearment was “duckling” or who he might be saying that to, but he did know that:
- It was a man
- They were going to be intimate again next week
- Next week was going to be part of an upcoming four game road trip for Boston which included New York, Montreal, Detroit and, for some inexplicable reason only schedulers can understand, LA.
As an invisible man it was none of Alex’s business and he wouldn’t be mentioning it to anyone else, but when March 2021 came around, he was only surprised about it being Shane Fucking Hollander and not at all that it was a man from Montreal.
But he was still really confused about the duckling of it all.