Chapter Text
Ilya sees the post at 11:47 AM.
He remembers the time precisely, because he remembers waking up and blinking at the bright midday sun shining through his open blinds and thinking that he must have missed his alarm. Then, he remembered that he had no alarm, because he was benched, because Hayden Pike doesn’t review his FanMail videos before he sends them to people, and sometimes those people are named Brad and have a) access to Twitter and b) a moral compass so broken it points fucking south.
The clock on his phone reads 11:47 AM when he rolls over in bed and taps the screen to wake it. And beneath that, breaking through the Do Not Disturb he’s had enabled for the past four days: six missed calls from Yuna Hollander, three texts from Svetlana, and a single missed call from Coach Wiebe. Plus voicemail.
What the fuck, Svetlana’s text reads in accusing Cyrillic, and below that, Did he get hacked? I hope he deleted your dick pics if so.
And then, because Svetlana knows he’d rather throw himself into the Rideau Canal than check social media when there’s breaking news about him, there’s a single Instagram link. A post from @shanehollanderhockeyplayer, which is still, Ilya maintains, an absurdly long and unwieldy username for a man with over a million followers.
It’s not the post he’s expecting it to be.
Ilya clicks the link.
. . .
Yuna Hollander considers calling Ilya for a seventh time, because it’s 9:00 AM and, frankly, any self-respecting adult should be up and showered and ready for the day’s tribulations by that point. But she subscribes to both Shane and Ilya’s Google Calendars (naturally) and keeps a close eye on their travel plans and daily schedules (as one should), so she knows that Ilya’s plane from Chicago to Ottawa hadn’t gotten its wheels on the ground until after midnight. Shane would have gone for his morning run regardless, because her and her son are so much the same sometimes that it feels like she’s cut out a bit of her heart and implanted it in his chest. Routine is more than a habit; it’s a compulsion.
She knows her son. And Shane Hollander does not make life-changing Instagram posts at 2:05 AM two days before the Stanley Cup playoffs begin unless he is being held at gunpoint.
Yuna’s jaw twitches. She exits Ilya’s contact and types in instead one of the few numbers she knows by heart, then holds her phone up to her ear.
It rings and rings and rings. But Shane doesn’t pick up.
. . .
If Ilya had to choose a moment to be outed to the entire world, 7:00 in the morning six days before playoffs start while he’s in the middle of Ottawa’s last roadie of the season really wouldn’t be at the top of his list.
“I have not even had time for coffee,” is all he can think to say as he blinks, still somewhat groggily, at Shane’s pixelated face on his phone screen. Decent hotel, but shitty WiFi. Their FaceTime the previous night kept freezing Shane’s face into the most ridiculous expressions. (Of course Ilya screenshotted them, a fact that he will reveal to Shane ten years from now, or perhaps ten minutes if he feels like seeing that look Shane gets when he’s simultaneously charmed by and sick of Ilya’s shit.) “And you are telling me the whole world knows? Because of birthday message from fifteenth best Voyageur?”
“I’m really sorry,” Pike says from somewhere off-screen. Ilya hadn’t known he was there, and he can’t help the groan that rises in his chest when Pike’s stupid guilty face pops into view. “I fucked up, okay? I know I fucked up. What do you want me to do? I’ll do it, I’ll do anything. I know I can’t take it back, but—I dunno, man. Fuck.”
Shane doesn’t even remind him about the swear jar, which is how Ilya knows it’s bad. Maybe this is what prompts him to say, after a few moments of wistfully thinking about the various riches he could ask Pike to lavish him with, “You will do nothing. It is not ideal, but … it is okay, I think.” He looks at Shane and wishes, more than anything, that he were in Montreal right now and not fucking Tampa, where it’s close enough to the summer that it’s hot and humid and generally miserable outside. “I know we wanted to announce things after playoffs, to avoid distraction, but … this is not so bad.”
“Not so bad,” Shane echoes, a bit numbly, like he can’t decide whether he’s agreeing with Ilya or not. Probably, he’s still processing. Ilya is too. It’s not that he’s not worried, because of course he is. It’s all out there now for anyone to see, their private lives made abruptly and violently public, and Ilya’s Russian passport is currently burning a hole in the pocket of his duffle bag where it’s wedged like contraband. He’s fucking scared, just like Shane is. (Though, he thinks, whatever fear he has, Shane has tenfold.) He just also feels…
Ilya exhales. “What’s done is done,” he says softly. Not for Pike. Just for Shane. “The cat cannot go back into the bag, or however you say it. The cat is out. Maybe it’s best to let it run free. Kinder, yes?”
The corner of Shane’s mouth twitches. It’s not quite a smile, but the potential is there. Ilya wants to hold him, so badly he aches with it, but there will be time for that later. There will be the rest of their lives. Because everybody knows now, and it’s a terrifying thing, but beside the terror, there’s something else, a soft body curled up and purring away in his chest.
The cat is out. And Ilya is so fucking relieved.
. . .
The cat is dead. It has been ripped from him and slaughtered by three square-aspect pictures of white sans-serif text on a black background, a meticulously-composed notes app apology posted on Instagram by @shanehollanderhockeyplayer at 2:05 AM two days before the first game of round one of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Ottawa vs. Montreal.
Ilya makes himself read through the whole thing three times, even though it makes him want to vomit, because he needs to make sure he understands exactly what it says. Needs to make sure he isn’t still fucking dreaming.
I’m sure all of you have seen the video by now, and if you haven’t, I’m asking you not to look it up and not to circulate it any more than it already has been. I’m sure many of you have also seen the post Ilya Rozanov and I shared in the aftermath implying that the contents of that video were genuine. I didn’t realize until I saw everyone’s responses to that post how big this thing had become, and I feel terrible about letting it go on for as long as it did. So I’m coming clean.
The video is fake. It was a prank Rozanov and I were pulling on Hayden. We thought he would see it before sending the video, but he didn’t. When it went public, we thought it would be fun to play along for a bit, but clearly, we went too far. Rozanov and I are not romantically involved with one another, and we never have been. This joke may have been in poor taste, but that’s all it was: a joke. I’m deeply sorry to my fans, to my team, and to everyone in Montreal for allowing this to overshadow the upcoming playoff series and for distracting from what matters most right now: hockey.
I have always been committed to hockey above everything else. This sport means everything to me, and so do my teammates and my fans. I never wanted to put that into question. I understand that I am a prominent public figure and that my actions have consequences for myself, for my team, and for the people who look up to me. I deeply apologize for my and Rozanov’s actions, which were completely unprofessional and disrespectful to everyone involved. I hope this statement allows us both to put this unfortunate misunderstanding behind us and return to our respective teams in time for the playoffs.
The worst part, probably, is that a little more than 24 hours ago, Ilya was looking at a different Instagram post. This one had four pictures, candids, taken with terrible phone cameras in bad lighting of bad angles of beautiful people sharing beautiful lives together. Most of them were in sunlight, which is probably some sort of metaphor that Ilya isn’t quite grasping at the moment. He’d just been thinking about how beautiful Shane’s freckles looked when the sun hit them just right, like little constellations scattered across his cheeks.
It was a mirror image of the one on Ilya’s profile. Two accounts, two posts, one statement, one relationship ripped from them by force and splayed out for the world to see and then carefully scraped up and reshaped into the tender thing Ilya knew it to be. It was a good statement, too. Professional, but real. Farah really knocked it out of the park. They’d posted it together, like they do everything that matters nowadays, and then Shane had smiled that carefree, giddy sort of smile Ilya rarely gets to see from him and said, “Fuck, I’m really gonna spend the rest of my life with you.” Like it was a precious thing, the greatest sort of gift.
The post Ilya remembers doesn’t exist anymore. Deleted, some time between 2:05 AM and now, and replaced with an ugly thing that is tearing Ilya slowly apart the more he looks at it. He can’t stop looking at it.
He just doesn’t understand. How they got from then to now. When Shane decided he’d like to return his gift for store credit, because it turned out he’d kept the receipt all along. Just in case.
Ilya threw his own receipt away long ago. He knew he’d never need it. Or at least, he thought he knew.
He thought he knew a lot of things.
. . .
Ilya finally picks up the phone at 12:56 PM, which is almost exactly an hour after he first woke up. Yuna knows this because he wears his Fitbit like it’s a religion, and she has access to his analytics so she’s been monitoring his sleep cycle like a hawk. David thinks it’s a touch overbearing, having access to Ilya and Shane’s health information like this, but she thinks it’s just the responsible thing to do. And right now, she feels very validated in this opinion, because she knows that Ilya has been awake since 11:45 AM and that at 11:47, his heartbeat spiked hard enough that she knew he’d seen.
She allows him the extra hour. This is the best kindness she can offer before the rest of the world comes creeping in.
“Ilya,” she says as soon as the call connects, gentling her voice through sheer force of will even though she wants to jump straight into triage mode. She’s not feeling very gentle right now, but she’ll try. For Ilya. Whose heart rate is still far too high for a man she’s certain is still in bed, feet tangled in the top sheet he uses because Shane insists upon it. “Sweetheart.”
There is silence from the other end for the longest moment, and Yuna allows this, too, giving Ilya time to collect himself. Then, finally, when the clock has ticked over to 12:57 PM: “I cannot reach Shane.”
Ilya sounds so small, and Yuna is reminded once again, as she so often is, how young her boys are. How much they have endured. How much the world still asks of them anyway. She takes a steadying breath and says, “Neither can I. When did you last hear from him?”
“I…” Ilya floats for a moment, lost. “I don’t know. Last night, maybe? It was during layover in O’Hare. I texted him when we were delayed the third time, and he sent me the eye-roll emoji and some statistic on flight delays during off-peak times. This was maybe … six o’clock? And then things were busy, we were being transferred to fucking hell and back—” Yuna can practically hear Ilya’s wince, even though she’s told him time and time again that she doesn’t mind if he swears in front of her. “Sorry. By the time I was on the plane, it was late, and I did not think to text until we were in the air. I sent Instagram messages, but … I do not know if he saw.”
A pregnant pause. Yuna knows they’re both thinking of what she has begun to mentally dub The Post, capital-T capital-P. She’s already fielded over two dozen calls about it and it hasn’t even been twelve hours. It deserves the designation. “Okay,” she says, calm, because if she’s not calm, then nobody will be, and then where will they be? “That’s good. We can work with that timeline. Can you send me screenshots of your text chain? I already have access to Shane’s location services, so you don’t need to worry about that, and his health information, of course, though it looks like he wasn’t wearing his Fitbit last night, so—”
“You think something is wrong?” Ilya cuts in. His voice is unsteady, and Yuna’s jaw clamps shut. She’s getting ahead of herself, she realizes. She’s been processing this for hours and has already made at least ten different plans of attack. Ilya has been processing this for minutes. Even if he’d also had hours, though, he probably wouldn’t be any better off. The situation is quite different for him, after all.
She doesn’t know how long it takes to get over a heartbreak like this. The answer, she suspects, is somewhere between never and so long as you both shall live.
“Oh, honey,” she says, standing up from her desk and reaching for her car keys. She didn’t think showing up at Ilya’s house to knock the door down was the right course of action, but now, she feels the sudden and irresistible urge to gather him in her arms. “Of course I do. This isn’t Shane. You and I both know that.”
Silence. Yuna is already exiting the house, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder as she climbs behind the wheel of her car. She can make it to Ilya’s in fifteen, she thinks. Twelve if she pushes.
“I’m going to Montreal,” Ilya says finally. There’s something in his voice that Yuna can’t name but that she feels reflected in herself tenfold—something more akin to desperation than determination, but no less of an immovable object.
Yuna nods, even though he can’t see her, and checks her gas gauge. Plenty of fuel in the tank, with extra snacks already tucked in the glovebox because David is a dangerous combination of relentlessly peckish and very particular about his granola bars. “We both are,” she says, checking over her shoulder as she backs out of the driveway. “I’ll be there in ten. We’ll get coffee on the way.”