Chapter Text
Gabriella Marchaud was worried about her friend Ilya Rozanov.
She had spent the first week of the playoffs in Vancouver visiting friends and had deliberately not told him where she was going. She did not know why that mattered, but apparently it did, because he was not handling it well. She did not actually need to tell him. He was not her minder, they were not involved, they were strictly friends. So why was he blowing up her phone?
There had been two reasons she hadn’t told him. First, she assumed he would be too busy with Shane to notice. Second, she had no interest in explaining her personal life to the nosiest man she had ever met.
It was not that she did not trust him. She did. The problem was that Ilya treated every unanswered question like a personal challenge, and she did not want to answer these questions. She did not want to explain why she needed a break, what she was running from, or who she was visiting. Some things were hers to keep, and Ilya had never been good at respecting that boundary. So she had turned off her phone, enjoyed the mountains, enjoyed the wine tastings, and made a conscious decision to keep Ottawa and Vancouver separate for a few days.
But in hindsight, that had been a huge mistake. Because while she had been drinking wine and watching the sunset, Ilya had been unravelling, and she had not been there to see it happen.
Instead, she witnessed it through her phone. Every time she disabled Do Not Disturb, without fail, there were at least twenty unread messages waiting for her, each one more frantic than the last. A few were normal. Where are you? What are you doing? Are you alive? The rest were about hockey. Not ordinary hockey. Obsessive hockey. Unhinged hockey.
There would be three paragraphs on Montreal's power play followed by four more on Washington's defensive zone coverage. Then a detailed breakdown of why a coach should reunite a specific line combination. There was even one memorable six-hundred-word analysis of a third line defenseman she had never heard of, featuring several genuinely creative insults.
It was not the sheer volume that concerned her, though that was certainly alarming. What worried her more was that none of Ilya's messages felt like a conversation. They were not really meant for her. He was not talking to her so much as thinking out loud through his phone, using her as a sounding board for thoughts he could not seem to contain. She had somehow become the unwilling recipient of every spiral, every obsession, every unhinged thought that crossed his mind.
Usually he talked about hockey because it was his job, sometimes because it was his hobby, occasionally because he was trying to annoy someone. But this felt different. The messages had a compulsive quality to them, as if he could not stop. As if stopping would force him to think about something he desperately wanted to avoid.
The more she read, the more convinced she became that whatever was wrong with Ilya had very little to do with hockey itself. Months of friendship had taught her how to read between his lines. Hockey was not the problem. Hockey was the symptom. So she watched from a distance, increasingly concerned and increasingly unsure what to do about it.
Several times she considered texting Shane. Several times she typed a message and deleted it. Shane was busy carrying Montreal through the playoffs. He did not need a concerned friend showing up in his inbox with: Your boyfriend is texting me manifestos about third line defensemen. Please intervene. Shane would laugh or worry, and neither option felt helpful. So Gabriella kept the messages to herself and waited.
+++
When Round Two started and she returned to Ottawa, she assumed things would improve. Montreal was playing Boston. Ilya had history there, former teammates, former coaches, half a city full of memories. Surely that would pull him out of whatever strange emotional bunker he had built for himself.
It did not. If anything, he seemed to disappear even further.
Gabriella found herself checking social media more often than she cared to admit. She scrolled through fan photos, arena shots, restaurant check-ins, anything that might prove Ilya still existed corporeally outside Shane's house. She found nothing. No coffee shop sightings, no blurry background figures that could have been a six-foot-something Russian lurking near the edge of a frame, no telltale glimpses of his silhouette in a window reflection. It was as though he had vanished completely, leaving no trace of himself in the outside world.
At first she tried to rationalise it. He was supporting his boyfriend, that was admirable. She knew how brutal the playoffs could be, how demanding and consuming they were. The travel, the pressure, the exhaustion. Supporting Shane through that made perfect sense.
But as the games rolled past, the silence everywhere else grew harder to ignore. There were no updates from anyone else. No sightings. No casual mentions from mutual friends. It was as if Ilya had poured himself entirely into Shane's orbit and left nothing behind for himself. He was fading into the background of someone else's life, and no one seemed to be noticing.
Eventually, the realisation arrived all at once. Gabriella was halfway through reading a message explaining why Comeau appeared to be powered entirely by pure assholery when the pieces finally clicked into place.
Ilya was not just visiting Montreal. He was not simply supporting Shane. He was actively haunting the playoffs. The thought stopped her cold. He was watching from the edges, hovering in the shadows, trying to stay close to something he could no longer be part of. And she had no idea how to pull him back.
For years his entire life had been built around reaching this point of the season. The grind, the routine, the singular focus of playoff hockey had given him purpose and direction. Now the structure was gone, and he seemed completely incapable of replacing it with anything else. He had narrowed his world down to two things: supporting Shane and writing dissertations. Neither appeared particularly healthy.
Her concern only grew when she realised she was not the only victim. Ilya had clearly been doing the same thing to Svetlana, his childhood best friend. Gabriella knew because he had started forwarding Svetlana's responses to her as well. The messages arrived in dense blocks of Russian that Gabriella could not read but could certainly count. There were dozens of them. Apparently, Ilya had decided that what her life really needed was more hockey analysis. It was not. What she needed was for him to stop spiraling.
Gabriella loved him dearly, but something had to be done. The Conference Finals were approaching, and everything pointed towards Montreal and Washington. If that happened, she was genuinely concerned that Ilya would disappear completely into Shane's orbit and never emerge again. She needed a plan. Preferably before he started attending Voyageurs practices disguised as arena staff.
+++
The solution to all of Gabriella's worries arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, unexpectedly and without fanfare.
She was sitting at her desk catching up on emails when a notification appeared on her phone.
May 18. ESC
She almost ignored it, but then she looked again and the date seemed important. She checked it against her playoff schedule, then checked it a second time to make sure she was not hallucinating.
"No way," she whispered to herself.
The dates lined up perfectly.
Potentially Game Five between Montreal and Washington. And, most importantly, a day when Shane would be somewhere else —on the road, locked into his own playoff bubble— and a day when Ilya would almost certainly be alone, haunting Shane's house with nothing but his thoughts and his phone and the hollow echo of his own loneliness.
A slow smile spread across her face.
For the first time since she had returned from Vancouver, Gabriella could see a way forward. A distraction so powerful that she might actually be able to pull Ilya Rozanov's attention away from hockey and away from Montreal. It was loud and ridiculous, exactly the kind of chaos he needed, and she knew it was something he loved deeply, especially after a few drinks.
The plan was clear and admittedly insane. It would require logistics, recruitment, preparation, and possibly even bribery. But for the first time since the messages began, Gabriella felt a flicker of optimism. Ilya Rozanov was having a playoff crisis, and she intended to save him from it, whether he liked it or not. She already knew exactly who she needed to recruit first.