Chapter Text
When Shane Hollander was growing up, the world was mostly gray, although that was not quite the same thing as saying it was black and white. There were shades and depths and temperatures to things, enough that he never felt especially deprived. He could tell one jersey from another, could pick out the dark blur of trees against snow, could distinguish his mother’s pale sweaters from his father’s darker shirts. He knew what color was supposed to be because every child did. Red was one thing, blue another, yellow brighter, green somewhere in between. There were charts and coded labels and educational toys and entire school units devoted to teaching children how to identify colors they could not yet see.
Some kids hated that. Shane had known classmates who obsessed over the day it would finally happen to them, who wanted desperately to know whether sunsets were really as beautiful as people said or whether the sky was actually blue in a way that mattered. He had never been one of them. Hockey had always seemed more immediate than the possibility of some unknown person appearing one day and changing the way his eyes worked.
His parents helped with that. Neither of them talked about soulmates as though they were sacred. They talked about color as something remarkable, certainly, but not as proof that the universe had chosen the course of a person’s life for them. Shane grew up with the understanding that soulmates were real, but destiny was optional. People could meet their soulmates and love them, hate them, leave them, marry someone else, or never meet them at all. Color meant connection. It did not mean obligation.
Shane liked that idea very much. It meant that when his own colors finally arrived, he would still get to decide what they meant.
By the time he was old enough to be invited to prospect showcases, Shane had almost stopped thinking about it. There were too many other things to worry about by then; scouts, rankings, draft projections. Whether his skating had improved enough over the summer or whether his shot was getting quicker or whether every person sitting three rows up with a notebook was quietly deciding the rest of his life while he tried not to look at them.
That was more than enough destiny for one person.
The showcase itself was exactly the sort of thing Shane expected: cold rink, generic jerseys, too many talented players crammed into one building, everyone pretending not to size everyone else up while doing exactly that. The organizers had divided them into temporary teams with dark and light jerseys marked by colored striping and numbers, though to Shane the colors were still only shades. He knew which markings were supposed to be which because someone had told him, because there were printed rosters, because people who could already see color used color words casually all the time. None of it meant much to him.
One player in particular was getting talked about constantly. Shane had heard the name before, obviously, everybody had. The Russian kid- Rozanov. Scouts were apparently obsessed with him, which meant coaches were talking about him, which meant other players were talking about him too. His hands were incredible. His vision was incredible. His release was incredible. Shane had been hearing variations on the same sentence for weeks and had reached the point where he disliked Rozanov on principle.
The fact that Rozanov was every bit as good as advertised did not improve matters. He was impossible not to notice. Even his skating looked arrogant. He seemed to take personal offense at ordinary plays, laughed too loudly with the other Russian players, and had a habit of smiling after doing something difficult as though he expected everyone in the building to acknowledge that they had just witnessed greatness.
At one point Shane caught him looking across the rink. Rozanov smirked, and Shane looked away, deciding with great satisfaction that he was an asshole.
Later, during a scrimmage, Shane stripped the puck from him cleanly along the boards. Rozanov swore in Russian, and Shane understood none of it but enjoyed the tone. At the next stoppage, Rozanov skated over with the expression of someone who had come to lodge a formal complaint.
“You are Hollander,” he said. His English was better than Shane had expected, although his accent was heavy enough that some of the consonants landed oddly.
“Yes.”
Rozanov tilted his head and looked him over. “You skate like old man. Very safe. Very careful.” He made a stiff little motion with his shoulders, apparently demonstrating Shane’s alleged elderly skating technique, and Shane stared at him for a second before saying, “You skate like you’re trying to get benched.”
That earned him a grin, wide and pleased, as though Shane had finally said something interesting.
“Maybe coach likes excitement.”
“Maybe coach likes players who don’t turn the puck over.”
“I do not turn puck over.”
“You did thirty seconds ago" Shane chirped.
For the first time, Shane saw the grin tighten. It was a tiny thing, barely there, but the knowledge that he had managed to annoy Rozanov gave him a disproportionate amount of satisfaction. He was still enjoying that when Rozanov turned away.
And the world changed.
For one disorienting second, Shane thought something had happened to his eyes. The jersey in front of him was wrong. Not wrong exactly, but different in a way his brain could not immediately process. The stripe running across Rozanov’s shoulder was no longer one more gray shape against another.
It was red.
Not the theoretical red from charts and labels, not the dark shade he had been taught to recognize by value. Red. Actual red. Bright and impossible and startlingly deep, as though somebody had punched a hole through the world and let something vivid come pouring through.
Shane stared at it, and then everything else arrived at once. The blue line cut across the ice. Green curved around one of the advertisements on the boards. Yellow flashed from a logo over the benches. The crowd separated into a thousand different tones. Jerseys that had always been distinguishable mostly by contrast suddenly announced themselves from across the rink. Skin was no longer simply pale or dark. Hair had warmth in it. Even the ice reflected color back at him.
For a second, Shane forgot where he was.
Then Rozanov turned around.
The grin was gone. He was staring at Shane with the same stunned expression Shane suspected was on his own face, looking first at Shane’s jersey, then at the ice, then back at him. The realization landed with almost as much force as the color itself.
Oh.
OH.
Rozanov looked down at Shane’s chest, where the numbers on his jersey were outlined in red. When he lifted his eyes again, his expression had sharpened into something curious and wary at the same time.
“What color?” he asked. Shane’s mouth had gone dry.
“What?”
“First one.”
Everyone knew what that meant. The first color people saw when they met their soulmate was supposed to be important, or at least memorable. There were registries that asked for it, wedding ceremonies built around it, jewelry designed to match it. Shane had always thought that level of sentimentality was excessive, but now, with Rozanov waiting for an answer, he looked back at the stripe on his shoulder and said, “Red.”
Something flickered across Rozanov’s face. Surprise, maybe. Then he gave a short, incredulous laugh and glanced down at Shane’s jersey. “Mine too.”
Of course it was.
For several seconds they simply stood there, surrounded by everything neither of them had ever seen before. Shane became acutely aware that he was staring at Rozanov’s face. His skin looked different now, warmer than Shane had expected. His mouth was pink. His hair was a light golden brown. His eyes were harder to categorize, somewhere between green and brown, and Shane found himself frowning as he tried to reconcile the messy reality of color with the neat categories he had learned as a child.
Rozanov noticed immediately. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You look confused.”
“I’m not confused.”
“You do not know color.”
“I know colors.”
Rozanov leaned in slightly, clearly enjoying himself again. “You look very confused.”
Shane felt his irritation return, and with it came an absurd sense of relief. This was better. This was familiar. He could work with irritation. Irritation made more sense than whatever had just happened to his eyes, and Rozanov being annoying was at least something Shane understood.
A whistle sounded across the rink, calling players back into position, but neither of them moved right away. There was an etiquette to soulmate meetings. Shane knew that. Everybody knew it. If it happened in public, you were supposed to acknowledge it, exchange names if you did not already know them, maybe exchange contact information. At major youth events there were even counselors available in case the experience overwhelmed someone. People cried. People hugged. Sometimes entire arenas cheered when it happened during games. Shane had always thought that sounded humiliating.
Rozanov glanced toward the benches and then back at him, and for a second Shane wondered whether he was about to say something serious. Instead the corner of his mouth lifted. “Your skating is still boring.”
Relief hit Shane so hard it almost made him laugh. “Fuck you.” Rozanov’s grin widened. “Maybe later.” Shane’s face went hot enough that he was certain, even with no frame of reference, that it had changed color too. Rozanov skated away.
The rest of the scrimmage was a disaster by Shane’s standards. Not visibly disastrous, probably. He still made his passes, kept his positioning, and did everything his coaches expected him to do, but he was distracted in a way he had never experienced before. The whole rink had become too much. The advertisements were ugly and bright. The boards reflected colors. The crowd looked chaotic. At one point he nearly missed a pass because he was staring at someone’s blue helmet, and when his coach yelled his name, Shane snapped back into focus with a jolt.
Color, he told himself, was just sensory information. Nothing more. His brain would adapt. People did this every day. Rozanov was still an asshole. That helped. By the time Shane reached the locker room, he had decided that nobody needed to know. It was surprisingly easy. No one looked at him and somehow knew his vision had changed, and nobody could tell by the way he pulled off his jersey or sat unlacing his skates. His teammates were busy talking about the scrimmage, the scouts, who had looked good and who had looked terrible, and Shane let their ordinary conversation wash over him.
The only difficult part was not staring. A teammate’s socks were bright blue. Someone had an orange sports drink. The logo on Shane’s own bag was red, something he had looked at hundreds of times without ever knowing what it actually looked like. Every ordinary object seemed to be demanding his attention, but Shane ignored all of them as best he could.
When someone asked why he was so quiet, he said he was tired. Nobody questioned it, and that frightened him a little. Not because he wanted them to know, but because it meant something enormous could happen to him and remain completely invisible if he decided to keep it that way. He showered, dressed, and left with everyone else. No one knew.
That evening he called his parents from the hotel. His mother cried anyway, not dramatically, which somehow made it worse. Just a small catch in her voice and a few sniffles that made Shane feel guilty for not being happier about the whole thing. His father, predictably, asked practical questions. Did Shane know who it was? Had they spoken? Was the other person seeing color too?
“Yes, yes, and yes,” Shane said. “And I don’t really want to talk about it.”
There was a pause before his father said, “Okay,” and Shane loved him for that.
His mother, however, was not quite finished. “Can we at least ask what the first color was?”
Shane looked around the hotel room. Everything still seemed overdone. The bedspread was blue. The lampshade was cream. The carpet had some horrifying pattern involving red and gold shapes that looked as if several design decisions had gone badly wrong at once. “Red.”
His mother made a soft, pleased sound. “That’s lovely.”
Shane immediately regretted answering. “It was his jersey.”
His father laughed under his breath, and his mother ignored him.
“Do you like him?” Shane thought about Rozanov’s grin, the insult about his skating, and the smug little maybe later that had made his face burn. “No,” he said, too quickly, which only made his father laugh harder.
“Shane,” his mother said, in the tone she used when she thought he was being transparently ridiculous.
“I don’t.”
“All right. Then what’s his name?”
That stopped him. Saying the name felt different from admitting that he could see color. Names made things concrete, and Rozanov was already taking up more space in Shane’s head than he wanted to allow. He stared at the framed landscape over the desk for a moment, wondering whether there was any version of this conversation in which he could simply say never mind and hang up. Eventually, he said, “Ilya Rozanov.”
The line went quiet. His father’s amusement disappeared first, and then his mother said, “The Russian player?”
“Yes.”
“The one everyone keeps talking about?”
Shane stared at the ugly red-and-gold carpet. “Yes.”
There was another pause, heavier this time, before his father said, “Well.”
Shane closed his eyes. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to say it’s interesting.”
“It’s not interesting.”
His mother laughed softly. “Shane, of course it’s interesting. You found your soulmate at a hockey showcase and he happens to be one of the best players in your age group. You don’t have to be happy about it, but you can’t seriously expect us to pretend that’s ordinary.”
Shane looked back at the landscape over the desk and wished, not for the first time that day, that everything would stop being so vivid. “I can try.”
Across the city, Ilya said nothing to anyone. It was not a difficult decision, because as far as he was concerned there was no decision to make. He knew before he even left the rink that no one could know who his soulmate was. Not his teammates, not his coaches, certainly not his father. Perhaps there were people in the world who could discover that their soulmate was another man and immediately start thinking about romance or fate or some beautiful future waiting for them, but Ilya did not have that luxury.
He was Russian. He played hockey. He knew exactly what those facts meant.
So when one of the other players complained in the hotel that evening about the hideous carpet in the hallway, Ilya agreed with him even though it was the first ugly carpet he had ever actually seen. When someone argued that a shirt was blue and someone else insisted it was green, Ilya looked away before his reaction could betray him. When his father called and asked about the showcase, Ilya talked about hockey and scouts and nothing else. He did not mention Hollander, did not mention color, and certainly did not mention that the world had changed.
Only when he was finally alone did he allow himself to look properly. The hotel room was almost offensively colorful. The bedspread was dark blue. The curtains had thin gold lines in them. A red label sat on the bottle of water beside the television. Ilya walked slowly around the room, touching nothing, simply looking, as though he had been dropped into a foreign country where every object spoke a language he had studied but never heard aloud. He stopped in front of the mirror. That was the strangest part, seeing his own face suddenly made specific in ways it had never been before. His hair was golden brown, which he had known. His skin was warmer than he had imagined it would be. His lips were pink. His eyes were harder to categorize. He had learned the words, but the reality seemed less orderly than the charts had promised. He remembered Hollander staring at them and almost smiled. Then the expression disappeared.
Hollander. His soulmate. A man.
The words sat badly together in his mind.
Not because Ilya had never thought about men. He had. More than thought about them, if he was being precise. He had learned very young which thoughts were safe to have and which ones were safe to say aloud, and those were not the same category of thing. Thinking a boy was attractive was one thing. Soulmate was another.
Soulmate was public. It was family. It was expectation. It was the kind of thing people asked about and celebrated and photographed. It was supposed to lead somewhere, and Ilya had spent his whole life understanding exactly where certain roads were not allowed to lead.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the red label on the water bottle. Red. That had been the first color. Hollander’s jersey.
The thought should not have mattered as much as it did, but every time Ilya tried to dismiss it his mind returned to the same image: the outline of Hollander’s numbers becoming suddenly, impossibly vivid.
His mother had loved soulmate stories. She had especially loved hers. Yellow scarf, university party, first look across a crowded room. She had told Ilya the story so many times when he was little that he could still remember exactly where she paused before saying yellow, as though the word itself contained magic. His parents had been soulmates. It had not saved anything. It had not made his father kinder or his mother happier, had not kept resentment out of their marriage or made love permanent.
Whatever color did, it did not guarantee a good life, and there was something almost comforting in that. If soulmates could fail, then they were not fate. They were not commandments. They were simply people connected in some strange way that nobody fully understood.
That thought steadied him. Color was not destiny, and Hollander was not destiny either. Nothing had been decided simply because Ilya could suddenly see red.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling until his eyes hurt, letting the certainty settle into place. He would not tell anyone- not tomorrow, not next week, perhaps not ever.
The next morning Shane and Ilya ran into each other near the elevators. Shane was alone. So was Ilya. They saw one another at the same time and both slowed, neither quite willing to acknowledge that they had been watching the hallway for the other. Shane looked tired. He was wearing a dark jacket over a lighter shirt, and Ilya knew the colors of both now. He pretended not to notice.
“Good morning, soulmate.”
Shane’s expression hardened instantly. “Don’t call me that.”
Ilya smiled. “Why?”
“You know why.”
“I do not.”
“Yes, you do.”
There was nobody else in the hallway, which changed the atmosphere in a way neither of them acknowledged. Without teammates or coaches nearby, there was no audience to perform for and no reason to pretend they had not spent half the previous day thinking about each other.
Ilya glanced toward the elevator. “Did you tell anyone?” “My parents. Nobody else.” Something tightened in Ilya’s chest at the answer, and Shane seemed to notice immediately. “Did you?” “No.” “Nobody?” Ilya looked at him. “Nobody.”
Shane held his gaze for a second longer. He clearly had questions, but to his credit, he did not ask them. The elevator arrived with a soft chime, and they stepped inside together, standing side by side while the doors slid shut. For a few floors neither of them said anything. Ilya watched the numbers change above the door while Shane stared straight ahead, his shoulders set in the same careful posture he used on the ice.
Finally Shane said, “We don’t have to do anything about this.” Ilya looked over. “About elevator?” Shane gave him the expression Ilya was already beginning to enjoy provoking.
“You know what I mean.” Of course he did.
Shane drew in a breath and continued, quieter this time. “We see colors. That’s all. It doesn’t have to mean anything else.” Ilya studied him. Hollander looked serious, very serious, and beneath that there was something close to fear. For entirely different reasons, Ilya understood it. “Yes,” he said. “Colors. That is all.”
Shane looked at him, perhaps surprised by how easily he had agreed. “So we’re good?” “For first and last time, we agree.”
That almost got a smile. Almost. The elevator doors opened, and they stepped into the hall. Coaches and players were already gathering at the far end, scouts talking in little clusters, everyone preparing for another day of measuring and ranking and predicting their futures. Shane slowed before they reached the others and glanced sideways at him.
“You’re still an asshole.” Ilya smiled. “And you are still boring.” “Good.” “Good.” Then Shane walked away.
Ilya watched him go for a moment before turning toward the coaches. There was a red logo on the back of Shane’s jacket, a blue sign above the doorway, and too many other colors everywhere for Ilya to take in at once. He had known this version of the world for less than a day and already could not imagine losing it, which was exactly the sort of thought he had decided he was not going to have.
Shane, meanwhile, made it halfway down the corridor before looking back. Rozanov was standing with a group of players now, already laughing at something one of them had said. He looked entirely ordinary from a distance, which seemed unfair. The universe had just rearranged Shane’s entire visual world around this person, and Rozanov was leaning against a wall like nothing had happened. Shane turned away before Rozanov could catch him staring.
He had spent his whole life learning colors as facts before he could ever see them. Blue was the color of the sky. Green was the color of grass. Yellow was the color of sunlight. Red, apparently, was the color of anger. That made sense to him. He was angry at Rozanov for being Rozanov, angry at the universe for making any of this his problem, and especially angry at the small, treacherous part of himself that was already wondering when he would see him again.
Red was the color of anger. Shane could live with that.