Chapter Text
Cliff Marleau doesn't know anyone who isn't at least a little bit scared of Shane Hollander.
He supposes he got a part of it from his mother, who is terrifying in her own right, completely unafraid to put hockey players, managers, and coaches alike in their place.
She stands, at Cliff's most generous estimation, five and a half feet tall, tiny compared to Cliff's own six and a half, but something about the way she commands the room always has Cliff tripping over his own feet, stammering yes ma'ams and no ma'ams like a rookie.
But Shane Hollander's particular brand of scary could only be born of seasons spent in real Montreal rinks, gutter Québécois and a mean left hook the bare minimum requirement for survival.
Shane Hollander had not only survived, but left as a force to be reckoned with, spearheaded a victory for Canada in the Juniors, and quickly earned himself a reputation as a player who fought on just the right side of dirty to get away with it. His steady stream of chirps, both English and French sacres came as easily as his slapshot and the tricky forehand-backhand wrist shot people were already calling The Hollzy, the combination of which earned him aggressive checks and dropped gloves on the regular.
In those days, people underestimated Shane Hollander—they mistook his lean build and lack of showboating for weakness, or maybe they made assumptions about his race—but the junior league rapidly discovered that going up against him was a mistake no one could afford to make twice.
One incident that kept making rounds on the highlight reels involved an overzealous defenseman from the Swedish team, Patrik Allvin. He'd wedged his stick under Hollander's skates in the third period, sending him sprawling onto the ice—and before anyone could even process what had happened, Hollander was back on his feet, delivering a vicious roundhouse to Allvin's jaw, painting the ice with blood. Hollander had walked himself into the penalty box and sat in stony silence, and given the press pretty much the same treatment post-game, pursed lips and furrowed brows but no indication that he was sorry about what happened.
Cliff found out later that Allvin's nose had shattered into five pieces.
Everyone knew that Hollander was getting scouted aggressively by the Voyageurs—Cliff heard through his network that they were offering him a very lucrative contract to play up a diversity angle in light of some controversy surrounding Head Coach Thierault. It would have helped their image tremendously, especially given the owner of the Voyageurs' drawn-out legal battle that seemed, at the time, interminable. But in a twist of fate, an expedited hearing, and theories about money exchanging hands that NHL officials played dumb about, a verdict was reached on the case. The owner (whom Cliff had never really liked) was found guilty of embezzlement, multiple counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, and forgery.
Suddenly, Montreal couldn't afford Hollander by a long shot (not that Yuna Hollander would let her son sign on with them after their name was dragged through the mud), so a good bit of campaigning from Cliff and a frankly insane offer for a rookie saw junior league legend Shane fucking Hollander donning Boston black and gold.
Hollander had been exactly the kind of center the team needed: lightning-quick, almost terrifyingly competent, and out for blood. He had a talent for identifying weakness in the opposition’s defense unlike anyone Cliff had seen, as well as the speed and skill to exploit it for all it was worth. He was a predator on the hunt; foot on the opposition's neck, choking them until they buckled, and then he'd take off between the cracks and shoot.
Sure, he did his time in the penalty box for interference and hooking and whatnot, a couple of aggressive board checks, and once, mouthing off at the referee who understood Québécois just fine actually, and gave Hollander four minutes for the trouble. But he was a good kid under all that, and Cliff grew to like him, chip on his shoulder the size of Canada notwithstanding. The Bears rallied around him, and who could blame them? Certainly not Cliff, when they ended the season high from the deepest playoff run they'd made in a long time.
Cliff was proud of this team, and Hollander was incredible, no doubt—but one great player did not a team make. There were still gaps in their defense, their main rotation of forwards direly needed improvement on their stick handling, and the team as a whole could do with a lot more cohesion. Management wanted to trade in the veteran left winger from Tampa, Cliff was secretly gunning for a criminally underrated forward from Toronto, but the best addition to the Bears that year ended up being another first draft pick, Russia's shit-talking, rule-breaking playboy and Cliff's soon-to-be best friend, Ilya Rozanov.
The first time Cliff saw Rozy and Hollander interact was at a team-building event before practice started the next week. Cliff had introduced himself and Hollander to Rozy, but judging by Rozy's shark-like grin and Hollander's scathing glare, they had met already. The pair spent the entire evening running their mouths, trading worse and worse barbs as the night went on, spitting and snarling in English, French, and Russian indiscriminately, culminating in Hollander nearly taking a swing at Rozy. Cliff finally separated them (“take a fucking walk, Rozanov, I don't care whose fault it was, fuck!”), and mourned Boston's chances at the Cup with half a bottle of shitty Jack Daniel's later that night. So much for a cohesive team.
Except training rolled around, and Rozy and Hollander played like they'd been playing together their whole lives, maintaining an awareness of each other on the ice that would later become almost preternatural, lauded by sports commentators and analysts and the fucking Prime Minister of Canada. That first day of practice, Cliff glanced up from his discussion with Coach LeClaire just in time to see Hollander take off like a bullet on the ice, Rozy keeping up, and the puck flying so beautifully between them that Cliff almost broke down in tears then and there.
Everything would have been fine, perfect even, except Rozy and Hollander's on-ice chemistry never came off the rink with them. Their initial spat ballooned into a full-blown rivalry that put the entire team in the crossfire, turning every practice, every game, into a battleground complete with trench warfare and lines drawn in the sand.
On good days, it almost felt like the whatever that was going on between the two didn't even exist. The Bears played great hockey, faced the boos from opposing fans with satisfaction, and then hit the bars in a rowdy pack, poking good-natured fun at Hammersmith for his penchant for fruity cocktails, and at Hollander for his strange one-beer-and-then-diet-ginger-ale ritual—or water if they didn't have his favourite Canada Dry. Hollander and Rozy stayed out of each other's orbit for the most part, and the high spirits of victory did a great job at tamping down any animosity about the scoring leaderboard or ice time or gameplay.
In fact, when they weren't actively fighting—and this never ceased to baffle Cliff—Hollander and Rozy kind of looked out for each other. Hollander would take any questions directed at Rozy if they were too long, or asked too quickly for Rozy to understand—a bait and switch executed without fanfare, like he knew how important Rozy's pride was to him. Plus, Cliff found out after Rozy had to go to Russia for a family emergency that Hollander had personally reached out to most of the major sports news outlets and asked them kindly—with subtle threats and emails CC'ing Yuna Hollander—to be respectful and to lay off on the speculation about pregnant girlfriends or secret mob connections.
Rozy, in turn, came to develop quite the reputation with the press for shutting down any hostile commentary about Hollander's race or heritage, most of the time with just a cutting remark or one of Rozy’s signature backhanded insults that brought an abrupt end to the conversation. If the reporter really wanted to embarrass themselves, Rozy was happy to get into longer back-and-forths that he delighted in taking to Twitter, dragging the sorry news outlet du jour in front of his millions of followers (“if they did not want this they should not have asked stupid questions, Marly. I am making example!”). One Men's Health magazine think piece titled ‘AAPI Allies in Sports: Who’s Doing It Best?’ described Rozy as “a pioneer waging a single-man war against racism in hockey, inspiring diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and Rozy had choked on his water and nearly fallen off the treadmill laughing when Cliff read it to him.
But there were bad days too.
They usually followed losses, after which the locker room crackled with the uniquely Rozy-Hollander brand of hostility that Cliff and their poor Captain and ACs were helpless against.
Hollander wanted Rozy to stop getting himself put in the penalty box (“câlice de tabernak! Don't know how you managed to play like shit, Rozanov, seeing as you barely played at all!”), Rozy wanted Hollander to hold onto the puck longer (“use big fucking brain Hollander, and tell me what possession means, hmm?”), Hollander would snap at Rozy (“maybe you'd be faster if you stopped actively giving yourself lung cancer!”), and Rozy'd bypass him and skip to bait, like he always did (“you are so cute when you are angry, zaychik, see how red you are?”), coming up with increasingly stupid nicknames just to rile Hollander up. Bunny rabbit, lawnmower, spatula—Cliff sometimes wished he'd never picked up any Russian at all.
He used to try and get in between them, but eventually gave up and resorted to soldiering through Cap's post-game pep talks with a stiff upper lip and gritted teeth, before making a quick exit to get ready for the media circus. The tension remained for days, sometimes weeks, in the locker rooms, on planes, and during meetings—the kind of tension that smelled like lightning before it came down on the nearest building, and those were nights Cliff wore himself down to his last nerve waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Okay. The bad days were not great, yes, but Boston played the best hockey they've played since Cliff signed on with the Bears, maybe since even before that. Rozy and Hollander were great on a line but unstoppable on a power play, nothing but a blur of skates and sticks and pucks between the pipes.
Hollander talked endlessly about what he learned from his obsessive viewing of game tapes during practice and before matches, and despite all the shit Rozy gave him for it, Rozy seemed to be the only one who really understood what he was saying. They worked angles, ran circles around everybody on the rink, and kept. Fucking. Scoring. It was Rozy's insane agility meets Hollander's cutthroat genius, and they made playing MLH-level hockey look so easy that Cliff was sure his hair was graying just watching. Some commentators had even started theorizing that there was a curse that followed Rozy and Hollander that made defensemen scatter and even the most prolific goalies lose their shutout streaks, and it was slowly embedding itself into the league's superstitions.
The Bears won their first Stanley Cup in over a decade, beating out the Admirals on New York ice. The crowd was catatonic with rage, a wall of screams and curses, and Cliff would've been afraid for his life if he hadn't just won the fucking Stanley Cup. Then they won one more right after that, in Boston this time, and both times, Cliff just stood there on the ice for a second, laughing and crying all at once and thinking yeah, this was worth it, this was worth all of it before his thoughts were swallowed up by the frenzy, by the crush of his team piling onto him, by the wall of noise from the crowd, and by victory that fizzled on his skin and seeped into his blood and bones. Their already massive legion of fans seemed to double every year, roaring—for the whole team of course—but especially for Rozy and Hollander's partnership, a generational on-ice chemistry they'd started calling Hollanov.
It was during times like these that Cliff gave into hope for their off-ice relationship—and therefore the sanity of the Bears locker room. After Hollander's infamous wrist shot won them game seven of the playoffs and their second Stanley Cup, Rozy had barrelled full-tilt into Hollander, thrown his arms around him, and pressed a smacking kiss to his helmet. Hollander had grinned and knocked his head against Rozy's, and for straight-laced, touch me and die Hollander, that was practically a declaration of love. The cheering from the already berserk crowd reached a fever pitch as everybody and their mother waved their Hollanov signs (with pictures of the two and stickers of stars and hearts, Jesus) and, with the weight of the Cup in his hands, Cliff let himself believe that things might be different.
But come next season, Hollander and Rozy picked up their bickering like they'd never stopped, dashing Cliff's hopes against the proverbial rocks. He'd even started going to meetings with LeClaire and the other coaches to work out strategies to ‘build co-operation, mutual respect and goodwill,’ but because there was obviously no question of making Hollander and Rozy alternate time on the ice or stop practicing together, all they managed to do was make them sit through painfully corporate-coded HR videos about building workplace relationships. That probably ended up doing more harm than good, because all it did was give them new, more exasperating material to use for their chirps (“Hollander, you are being very unprofessional. Let us circle back when you have learned manners, hmm?” and “your shot accuracy is going to shit, Rozanov, what are you gonna say to the shareholders?”), giving Cliff a new headache to contend with.
It didn’t help that around that time, some seedy tabloid released pictures of Hollander with his arm around A-list Hollywood star Rose Landry (“isn't that funny, Marly?” Hammersmith had snickered. “Hollzy, Hollywood?”) and reported that the two had left a club together on a Friday night and had been spotted together later in downtown Boston that weekend. The so-called article said that Rose was “completely besotted,” and that “sources close to Shane Hollander confessed that they'd been dating in secret for months”—which Cliff knew was bullshit—and that they would be making it official any day now.
It was a complete mystery to Cliff how Hollander had even managed to meet Rose Landry, but he joined in on the locker room ribbing and wolf-whistling anyway, shoving Hollander and asking him how Canada's greatest trash-talker had managed to bag Rose fucking Landry. He shoved Cliff right back, grinning, before he was swallowed up by catcalls, “you gonna lock her down, Hollzy?” and “when are we seeing her in the stands, dude?” and “fuck, man, I've seen all of her movies, generational catch,” among more unsavory things and finally, when Hollander was done playing nice, he shut it down (“Jesus fuck, it's not a thing, okay? We're friends, that's all,”), with a promise to ask LeClaire for extra suicides if they didn't shut up about it. They all piped down really quickly after that, Cliff included, because his knees had been aching for a week straight and early retirement was the last thing he wanted.
Everyone except Rozy, who had apparently undergone a complete personality transplant and not said a single word during the entire exchange. He just pulled his gear on in stubborn silence, glowering at his tape like it had personally wronged him. Cliff chalked it up to a bad day or residual hangover, but realized as the days passed that it was much more than that.
Rozy got twitchy whenever Rose Landry was brought up, which was all the fucking time because the tabloids took the story and milked it for all it was worth, photos, a backdated timeline of Boston games and Landry’s shooting schedule, the whole nine yards. He mouthed off and sulked and threw tantrums, which was standard Rozy behaviour turned up at least four or five notches. Once, Rozy packed up his shit and stormed right out of the gym because a movie trailer with Rose Landry in it played on one of the TVs. Cliff had exchanged looks with St-Simons after he'd left, sharing a wince and a mutual eye-roll before getting back to their respective workouts.
Cliff put the pieces together just like most of the team, probably—Rozy must have dated Landry for a while, or at least had some kind of fling or one-night stand, and the fact that the tabloids said Hollander was seeing Landry made him jealous, or was it just an ego thing? It always seemed to be an ego thing wherever Hollander was concerned.
Part of Cliff wanted to be a good friend and ask him what was going on—but the other part of Cliff, the part that had very good survival instincts, wanted very much to not get his head bitten off. Santiago, one of the new rookies, recently made the grave mistake of mentioning the words Rose and Landry within earshot of Rozy, and he'd been chewed out so bad that he almost cried. Cap reamed into Rozy for that, but that didn't mean Cliff wouldn't get the same treatment.
So he made like Switzerland and stayed out of Rozy's business.
It didn’t last long anyway, and the team breathed a collective sigh of relief when Landry finally put out a public statement on her Twitter account telling everyone to lay off the speculation because she and Hollander were good friends and nothing more, followed by something about public figures and respecting boundaries and so on and so forth.
Cliff didn’t really think the tabloids would take her message to heart, but some Arizona Cardinal got caught doping, so Hollandry fell to the wayside anyway. Cliff would definitely say that tensions cooled off a little bit after that, but, well. It was Rozy and Hollander, and apparently they would fight no matter what, so they were back on their regularly scheduled chirping and scrapping and giving Cliff stress nausea.
He even tried to bring it up to Rozy a couple of times as a friend, despite his vow to separate work from his friendship (“Roz, why do you keep picking fights with him? Can't you just leave it alone?”), but Rozy stood firm in his stubborn mulishness (“I will stop picking fights when Hollander stops acting like he has hockey stick up his ass”) and refused to even hear Cliff out. In the end, Cliff decided to leave it be. This rivalry was clearly driven by forces stronger than he was, and ultimately, it didn't matter, right? As long as they kept putting the puck in the net and kept making Boston the best fucking team in the league, Cliff could deal with a little bit of (okay a lot of) absurd drama and all the putting out fires thing that had somehow become part of his job.
Except, except. Cap announced that he would be retiring next year before his back gave out—so management was looking for a new Captain. Obviously, they’d been talking about it for a while, but now it was just Rozanov, Hollander, Rozanov, Hollander for weeks and weeks, split pretty much fifty-fifty with different board members having opinions about who it should be. Stuck in a stalemate, they finally brought it to the Bears. Have the team vote, they said, or have the Captain pick—just let us know! As if it was so easy. Cap cheerfully left it up to Cliff to coordinate (“you know our boys best, don't you Marly?”) and Cliff decided on the spot that he would rather take a gun to his head outright than commit locker room suicide via team vote—so after a lot of deliberation and pacing holes into his carpet, he asked Hollander and Rozy to hang back after practice and put it to them.
“It's up to you guys,” he said, ignoring their stony expressions and injecting finality into his tone because he was not in the mood for bullshit. “Flip a coin, roche papier ciseaux, I don't care how you do it.”
Rozy looked at Hollander, Hollander looked at Rozy, and they both nodded like they'd already talked about this, like they already had some kind of elaborate plan for who would get captaincy based on stats and awards and who could do more crossovers around Scott Hunter or whatever.
The next day, Rozy showed up to practice with a black eye and a busted lip and declared that Hollander was going to be the new captain of the Bears.
Well. That was a lot easier than Cliff had thought it would be, and—in the grand scheme of things—fine. Sure. But he should have known the universe wouldn’t throw him this bone. Every day after that, Cliff walked into a locker room so drastically changed that it had him wondering if he needed to check himself into the psych ward.
Suddenly, apparently, and without warning, Rozy vs. Hollander was now Rozy and Hollander vs. everybody else. Russia's Ilya Rozanov, consummate brawler who picked fights with anyone who breathed and did part-time residency in the penalty box, now walked, sat, and heeled for Shane Hollander.
Cliff felt like he had hallucinated the last couple of years of animosity and it drove him all the way to the brink of insanity and tipped him over too. He felt like he was seeing the fucking hat man.
Boston had a home game against Buffalo, and Rozy had dropped gloves with the Buffalo left winger over a particularly nasty check to Hollander, which devolved already tense game into a pile-up of black and blue uniforms. Buffalo's captain yelled “hey Hollander, call off your guard dog!” more out of annoyance than anything, but Hollander reached into the melee, grabbed Rozy expertly by the scruff of his neck, and yanked him out, bloody nose and all. Hollander snapped something at Rozy—Cliff saw a snarl and a flash of teeth—and instead of arguing or rushing back into the fight, Rozy threw Hollander a mock salute, a wink, and skated away. It was over in the blink of an eye, and Cliff had to hit himself with his stick to make sure he wasn't hallucinating.
Even the locker room wasn't safe. Rozy chirped at Hollander as usual, maybe with a little less overt antagonism, but cuttingly and indecently all the same—but if anyone on the team so much as made a passing remark about Hollander, even regular bro-ey trash talk that was fair game until now—Rozy was there like an overgrown German Shepherd (Russian Shepherd? Was that a thing?), hackles raised, ready to swing. Hollander seemed to take to this new dynamic with ease, for the most part letting Rozy do whatever the hell he wanted to with a smirk and a permissive shrug, but reining him in with a short command (“enough, Rozanov”) or a Hollander Classic you’re in trouble look if Rozy went too far. And Rozy listened. To Shane fucking Hollander.
Cliff doesn't think he really grasped the extent of the change until Detroit. He'd slammed into Hollander in the third period, causing both of them to careen into the boards, with Hollander taking the brunt of the force. It was a complete fucking accident—one of those domino things that just happen when you have a bunch of massive guys converging on a puck with knives strapped to their feet—and LeClaire pulled Hollander off the ice and kept him off for the rest of the game. It turned out Hollander had a mild concussion, which Cliff felt really bad about, but it's not like he meant to take out his own fucking captain, hello?
Rozy didn't give a flying fuck.
He spat bloody murder on the ice, and later in the changing room, fisted his hand into Cliff's shirt and shoved him against the wall so hard that Cliff had half-thought he might get a concussion too.
“What the fuck, Rozy!” he spluttered, but Rozy was already storming out, not even bothering to change out of his uniform.
Cliff overheard later that he had insisted on being in the room with the team doctor while she was checking up on Hollander (“—hovering around me like a bat, good lord. Hockey players, right?”), and it became clear he was taking this personally.
He played extra aggressively on the games Hollander had to miss too, like he blamed the Bears, the opposing team, and the entire concept of hockey for Hollander’s concussion.
Which Cliff still feels kind of guilty about, by the way.
Now, it's been years since all that—Hollander still keeps Rozy on a leash, thank god—and they’re celebrating a hard-fought win against Montreal at St-Simons's unnecessarily massive house. Cliff has considered himself too old for this kind of thing for a while now; he just doesn't have the stomach for it. Hell, he can barely down a couple of shots before his head starts to spin. And anyway, ever since fifteen-shots-without-feeling-anything Rozy signed on with the Bears, the pressure came off Cliff to be the life of the party or whatever. Plus, there’s absolutely no fucking point in trying to out-drink the sonovabitch. And Cliff has tried.
But it's rookie Petrov's first win against Boston's greatest rival, and something big-brotherly in Cliff can't say no to the redhead's puppy dog eyes (Jesus, had Cliff really been that young once?)—and that's how he gets roped into doing shots the second he walks into the party, making the mistake of trying to keep up with yet another Russian. Each shot burns like a motherfucker on the way down, reminding Cliff why he'd sworn off them in the first place—but it stops tasting like shit at around the five-shot mark. And hey, it's kind of worth it to see the dopey grin on the kid's face.
Cliff's just about reaching his limit when thankfully, someone else pulls Petrov away, so Cliff takes that as a sign to find a couch to drape himself over and people-watch through the buzz of alcohol.
The couch is too squishy and every single one of his joints hurt, but there's victory in his mouth that never does stop tasting sweet, so he allows himself to become swept up in it all, the blaring music, the stacks of pizza boxes, and a table so comically packed with bottles that it reminds Cliff of his frat days. He doesn't usually get too into his head after a victory, not when there's games to be played and shots to be taken and sex to be had. But it's hard tonight, with his whole team under one roof, laughing their asses off, getting plastered, cracking shitty jokes that get shittier as the night goes on. His team, his rookies, his friends; after more than a decade, they're practically family. Maman did always say he was too sentimental for his own good.
Carmichael and Hammersmith are over by the kitchen island surrounded by people Cliff doesn't know, and are playing a game with cards and a lot of slapping and the clatter of poker chips on the table. St-Simons is teaching a couple of rooks to play beer pong (beer pong, really?) on the coffee table which really isn't working out, but everyone's too drunk to care. There's a roar from the patio, and Cliff turns his head lazily to see a bunch of guys gathered around their first goalie, who's attempting, unsuccessfully, to do a keg stand. Man can do the splits without batting an eye but a handstand is beyond him?
Cliff's pulled out of his musing by Rozy's thickly-accented voice drawling, “fuck you, Hollander,” but there's no heat to it, he just sounds pleased. Cliff's eyes track him to a tucked-away corner by the kitchen where he's sitting on the floor next to Hollander with a lit joint, the burning end like a small beacon in the dark. He takes a hit and blows the smoke directly into Hollander's face, and instead of decking Rozy, Hollander laughs and swats the smoke away. Rozy grins, Hollander shoves him with a proprietary hand on his chest, and Cliff turns away, feeling inexplicably like he's stumbled onto an intimate moment.
Eventually, Petrov ambles over, traffic-cone hair plastered to his head, and flops down on the couch next to Cliff.
“Damn,” Petrov grins, head lolling to the side. “I am like. So drunk. I feel like I can see shrimp colours.”
Cliff laughs. “You're gonna feel it tomorrow, tête de pioche.”
Petrov bats him away. “Ugh. Let me have fun while it lasts.”
They lapse into pleasant silence, Cliff letting his eyes fall halfway-shut and then Petrov goes, “Marly, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, kid.”
Petrov hesitates. “Cap's great,” he says, flushing a little bit, and Cliff recalls the rookie's half-drunk confession that he still has a Shane Hollander poster on his bedroom wall. “But Rozanov… well, he's Rozanov. Why isn't he captain?”
“Long story,” Cliff says. “Management was fifty-fifty about it. Eh, bunch of stuff happened, we ended up leaving it up to Rozy and Hollander.”
Petrov squints. “Okay. Cap is the best. Like, greatest player of all time kinda great—don't tell him I said that—but no way Roz just let him have it.”
“I actually don't know what happened,” Cliff muses. “They ended up having some kind of face-off, I think. I don't know anything about it other than that Rozy showed up to practice the next day bruised and bloodied to high hell.”
The rookie's jaw drops almost comically, and Cliff has to hide his smile. “Rozanov? Cap? Cap beat up Rozanov? You're fucking with me.”
“So the story goes,” shrugs Cliff.
“Roz has like, twenty pounds on Hollzy,” Petrov protests.
“Oh, Hollzy can fight." Cliff says, and Petrov looks dumbfounded. “He was a terror, back in juniors or whatever, but I've never seen it in person. For a while I hoped someone would rile Hollzy up so I could see what he looked like in action—’cause I'm telling you kid, I wouldn't have believed it either if I didn't see the evidence the next day—but you know Rozy doesn't let anyone touch him.”
Cliff can almost hear his arrogant voice now, words barely intelligible through his mouth guard, anyone who wants to get to Hollander has to get through me.
“What is the latest gossip?” comes a too-familiar voice from behind them, and Cliff's blood goes cold as he hopes fervently that Rozy didn't hear what they were talking about. Petrov immediately goes beet red and stammers out an apology before jumping off the couch faster than Cliff's ever seen him move.
Smart kid.
Rozy flops down in Petrov's place and fixes him with a bland grin, eyes bright and hair wild. There's a glass dangling precariously from his fingers with a little bit of what Cliff assumes is neat vodka. He also seems to have lost all the buttons of his shirt, and the sheen of sweat on his chest tells Cliff that he's drunk drunk.
“Hello Marly.” He says Marly like he's pushing each syllable out of his mouth. “You are very obvious, you know?” he drawls, tilting his head towards Hollander, who is still settled contentedly in his corner, eyes half-shuttered.
“You were talking about why Hollander is captain instead of me, yes?” he presses. “You wanted to know why?”
Well. Rozy's never been one to beat around the bush.
Cliff swallows, feeling distinctly like a butterfly pinned to a board. “I mean. Not really? It's fine. I don't—”
“I will tell you,” he says, grin going shark-like. “Hollander wanted to fight. I am very good fighter. Hollander said Rozanov, meet me on the ice, and I thought, this will be easy. He takes gloves off, I take gloves off.”
Rozy's gaze somehow sharpens even further.
“He was angry, yes? You remember. He swings at me. But I do nothing. I did not understand then. I could not do anything. This whole time I was against Hollander, when it is so much better to just be with Hollander. You understand?”
It sounds like a line from some kind of bullshit friendship is magic movie, but Rozy's delivery is deathly serious. There's something he's implying, but Cliff's brain runs at half-speed on a good day and he's plastered now, so. No dice.
Cliff squints. “Wait. You choked me out that time I crashed into Hollander.”
“Sorry,” Rozy says, not sounding the tiniest bit apologetic.
“It was an accident.”
“Okay. And I said sorry.”
Cliff rolls his eyes.
“Anyway, Hollander is better captain,” shrugs Rozy. “Speaks English, French. He could probably learn Russian in two weeks. Perfect, no accent. Perfect Hollander.”
“Um—”
“You want to know my plan?”
Rozy has never shared so much before and Jesus, Cliff is still reeling, Rozy and Hollander? But Rozy barrels on, seemingly on a roll. He leans in conspiratorially.
“I will play hockey for five more years, maybe ten. I will win a few more Stanley Cups and enjoy beating Scott Hunter. Then I will retire, become WAG. Or, ah. What do you say? Puck bunny. I will drink champagne out of little glass and wear Shane Hollander jersey when I watch him.”
“Christ, Roz,” Cliff says weakly, and not just because he just heard Rozy refer to himself as a puck bunny. If this is a dream, and it very well might be, it's the most bizarre one he's ever had.
Rozy fixes him with another pale stare. “You have problem?”
“Fuck, you're not pulling my leg, are you?” Rozy glares and Cliff adds hastily, “No, of course you're not. I don't have a problem. Obviously. I mean are you with Hollzy or—but there were so many women? I'm—I'm just struggling to understand. I have so many questions.”
“You can ask one.”
Cliff clears his throat. He can't pretend this isn't maybe the craziest thing he's ever heard or that he isn't actively losing his shit. But at the end of the day, Rozy's his boy. He deserves the best things, and if Hollander makes him happy… well.
“Is he good to you?” he finally asks.
Rozy doesn’t say anything, doesn't move, but he twitches ever so slightly and Cliff knows he's well and truly shocked, like nobody had ever asked him something like this before. Cliff high-fives himself mentally for not screwing up this interaction, even while drunk off his ass.
Rozy breathes for a good minute at least, in through his nose and out through his mouth, and when he finally speaks, he sounds tender. Jesus fucking Christ. On second thought, actually, Cliff could do with another drink.
“Yes,” he says, like he's testing the word for the first time. “He is—he is the best.”
“Okay,” Cliff says, already resigning his confusion to another, different day, preferably a day when Rozy isn’t cracking his heart open for him. “That's good, right? That's the important thing. Like, fuck everything else.”
A smile flickers at the corner of Rozy's mouth. “Yes. Fuck everything else.”
Cliff blinks a couple of times, wonders if he can get away with pinching himself to check that he’s really not dreaming, before Rozy laughs and pushes off the couch. Fucker’s too perceptive for his own good.
“Enjoy party, Marly,” he grins, ambling away. “I think I will let Captain take me home tonight.”
“Fuck you, man!” he splutters, but Rozy’s already out of earshot, laughing the whole way.