Chapter Text
Ilya figures out the key to escaping the time loop on the third consecutive Tuesday. It isn’t exactly hard.
All things considered, it’s not one of his better days—if it were, nefarious cosmic forces or the universe or whatever the fuck else probably wouldn’t have made him relive it. It’s not his worst either, which isn’t saying much. That superlative was won years ago and will remain constant forever, never to be usurped.
Russia loses to Latvia in the morning. It’s not a devastating loss—2-3 in overtime—except for the fact that it is. Because this is his home country and this is his national team and he is 22 and was trusted to be their captain anyway. And he let them lose to fucking Latvia.
The problem has been apparent since the training camps: there was never any chemistry, and Ilya enjoys the envious ways players look at him usually, but these guys are all too busy letting it make them bitter to let it make them better. They’re mostly KHL guys, and it’s not that they aren’t good, but the NHL is the better league and the best Russian players tend to jump ship. The Olympic committee had been apparently more concerned with prioritising players who were loyal to Mother Russia than they were acknowledging this fact, so the team is Ilya, Alikin who plays defence for Calgary, Fadeyev who goal tends in Anaheim, and twenty KHL players. Ilya is the youngest of them and any respect they give him is grudging and tinged with jealousy, and he’s been placed on a line with an enforcer, Dolzhenkov, who is almost forty and well past his prime but too beloved to overlook. Ilya has never once needed an enforcer. He can fight his own battles and has proven it hundreds of times. And this is Olympic hockey: there is next to no fighting. Dolzhenkov is a waste of a roster spot, let alone a first line one, and what the team really needs is a play maker who can keep up with Ilya on the ice.
All Dolzhenkov is good for is cross-checking Latvia’s centre halfway through the third, and giving them the power play that lets them tie the game and take it into overtime. Ilya gets in his face after the last whistle, and shouts until he is lightheaded, and it doesn’t make him feel any better. Doesn’t reverse the loss.
All in all, it probably isn’t Ilya’s fault. But knowing something and believing it are different things, and Ilya doesn’t believe it at all.
He can’t stand to look at any of them after the fact. The game is over and their Olympics are over and Krasnodar Krai is close enough to home that the language is right even if the accent is wrong, and his father has made the trip for the occasion. It’s all wrong in every other way—too small, too few trees, the smell of the sea and the shadow of the Caucasus—but it’s Russia and the Winter Olympics so the expectation, the recognition, that frequently borders on too much has become entirely suffocating and he can’t get away from it.
The rooms in the Olympic village are all shared. Three of them on three single beds. The rest of the team heads back to them to mope, at least until they’ve regained enough energy to leave and drink until there are things more lurid in the mind than regret, and Ilya needs to be anywhere else. The list of places to go is limited.
It takes him to the nosebleeds above a rink that smells a little like home because they all do. It takes him to a place where he can watch male figure skaters skating their short programs to dramatic, wordless music from a distance that obscures the details. Smooths them out. The grand sweeps and leaps and spins are distinct and decisive, and every one that doesn’t end in a fall is perfect. He wonders if those men are lonely out there alone, if any part of them wishes there was someone to pick them up when they stumble, like Ilya sometimes wishes he were able to win or lose under his own power and nobody else's.
It makes him think about his mother, who could never do more than slide forward on skates, but would watch the ice dancers whenever she got the opportunity, until she could recreate their routines, the footwork adapted to better suit the creaky hardwood of their apartment floors. Who, whenever she had the energy to talk, had also had the energy to dance. Who had clapped and cheered when he had demonstrated every flashy, wobbly spin, jump and glide he had managed to reverse engineer on hockey skates and never shown to another soul unless he had managed to find a way to turn it into hockey.
Nobody will be looking for Ilya Rozanov here.
One of Team Canada’s skaters finishes with a grand flourish. His shirt is long-sleeved, made of dark fabric that clings to the sweaty skin beneath. It is studded all down the arms with something that glitters garishly beneath the bright, white lights. Ilya envies him on principle, for any number of nebulous things he doesn’t want to dwell on. His mother is a distant enough memory that he can’t tell whether the routine was a good one. If this man has any chance of medalling.
He spots Hollander in the audience a few moments later. He is already staring, all dark eyed and obvious like someone who doesn’t understand quite how big the everything Ilya stands to lose is. He saw Ilya first, and Ilya doesn’t know how long he has been watching.
Ilya can say nothing to him. It's either that or too much. He cuts his eyes away in the hopes that Hollander might understand that what he means is not here and maybe not ever again. Not anywhere. Not with me. But it has always been part of Hollander’s charm that he misses these things. That on the ice he notices every minute detail faster than almost anyone else can, and off it he needs everything to be stark and obvious or else he can’t react to any of it. People will notice if Ilya shouts “Don’t!” across this arena so he says nothing. So Hollander excuses himself and heads Ilya’s way, and, as much as Ilya knows they can’t speak, he wants it enough that he forgets he can just leave.
“Go away,” he says anyway, because Hollander up close and in his Team Canada fleece is soft around the edges. Ilya envies him too, for some of the same reasons. Hollander looks at his lips when he talks rather than his eyes. Ilya knows this so looks back down at the ice.
Hollander tries anyway. To get through to him, to have a conversation, to pretend they have ever been anything resembling friends. To ignore that all they have ever had to offer each other is fleeting pleasure and the sort of truth that inevitably undoes everything else. He’s hard to hate in a way Ilya makes up for.
He leaves anyway, eventually. Because his patience is far from infinite. Because Ilya is listening to every cue from his fear and none from his instincts. Because here at this intersection between failure and Russia and Hollander, Ilya feels less than human and more than doomed. Hollander doesn’t need to share his mess.
And then a party. As if that could possibly be how he wanted to end this day. It had been planned weeks ago, when everyone involved had felt safe in the assumption they’d be celebrating a win. He’d bought the suit, got it tailored, cared about how it fit.
He ties his bow tie himself and is indifferent to the fact that he’s probably doing it slightly wrong. He stands in a big, empty room inhabited only by his body and his reflection, and the two stare at each other, each waiting for the other’s composure to break first. His expression is hard and flat. The burn of the alcohol tightens it at the corners rather than loosening it from the inside out. His father comes in, presses another glass into his hand, fiddles with the tie and remembers Latvia, that it was Ilya’s fault, but forgets that the mother of his children has been dead for a decade. He exists somewhere outside of time, where the present can persist without the past.
Ilya speaks to Sergei Vetrov, then Svetlana Vetrova who has made it her job to save him for years now. He follows her to an ornate bathroom—a display of opulence and excess nobody needs and, by that same virtue, everybody wants—where Sasha is waiting with cocaine and loose shoulders and an easy posture Ilya has almost forgotten to remember is as much a performance as anything else.
Sasha gets it in a way Hollander can’t. That to be Russian and bisexual, which is what he guesses he is, even if every circumstance of his life has conspired to make the label useless regardless of how comfortably it fits, is to be ultimately dishonest. You sleep around in France or North America however you’re inclined to, so long as the circle of people who know stays small enough. Sasha’s circle gets to be bigger, because he doesn’t feel the weight of the fame and the way the law makes it heavier, because his life in Paris isn’t as fragile as Ilya’s is in Boston, but he still understands the circle. The fact that it can never become common knowledge back home because home isn’t safe and is getting unsafer. Because home needs to remain a place you can go back to, a place you can marry a woman who is or is not part of the circle, and you and everybody else involved will decide to forget that there was ever a secret to keep at all. Because if you have the option to be normal you know you don’t have the option not to take it.
Still. He does cocaine like they are still sixteen. Like he has nothing to lose. Like his body is just a place he lives and not the only thing he has to offer. He kisses Ilya like there is no interstice. Bites Ilya’s lip the way he usually likes but now is only annoyed by. Because this is dangerous. And somewhere along the line that has ceased to be part of the fun.
He leaves and he’s barely tipsy and the mattress is hard and the air is stale and he thinks that tomorrow will be better because there aren’t many ways it can be worse.
He wakes up on Tuesday. The light is the same and the air is the same and the way that Ivakin curses him out for the early alarm is the same. They had been in juniors together, something between six years and a lifetime ago, and he still calls Ilya Ilyukha. Still remembers the legend of him. He’s only a year older than Ilya is. Smiley and loud and lacking intensity, lacking urgency. Still coming upon his success by happenstance. Still believing he’s owed it.
Ilya feels fuzzy as he heads down to the canteen for breakfast at the same time as he did yesterday. He sees the same faces in the same hallways, all the way down to the Latvian centre who stops him on the stairs to wish him good luck in clumsy, mispronounced, over-practised Russian with a genuine smile on his face. He accepts, perhaps too easily, that the first run of this day was probably a premonition of sorts. Divine intervention. The universe telling him No. Do it again. Better this time. Mostly because he doesn’t know what he gains by deciding it’s all just a weird coincidence. Hockey players don’t believe in those; everything has weight to it and weight turns into superstition turns into the only way you can win this game is if St-Simon leaves his garage unlocked again.
So canteen. Careful breakfast that is heavy enough but not too heavy, that adheres to a loose diet plan that is still too restrictive for his tastes. Conversation he has had before. He starts telling Alikin’s jokes before he can, because the way he quickly becomes confused and distressed is much funnier than the jokes ever were.
Ilya tries to think of ways to change the trajectory of the game without pulling Dolzhenkov aside and telling him no cross-checking under any circumstances. He tries to remember the minutiae—the tells in their feints, the weak points in their defence, how he had managed to tip the puck past their goalie the first time. He tries to replay the whole game in his head and his memory is good but not perfect, and he can still only see the ice through his own eyes.
He tells the team what he remembers: 17 cheats left, 63 is faster than you think, 56 wants you to forget he is on the ice. Don’t. It’s probably cheating, but nobody will ever be able to prove that, and he cares more right now about being able to look his father in the eyes than integrity.
Dolzhenkov still cross-checks but Russia’s penalty kill is better informed. Fadeyev blocks the shot he let in last time, the angle sharper than it should be because Alikin is right where Latvia’s 56 wants to be, and Ilya steals away with it on the rebound. Takes advantage of the fact that he is the fastest player on the ice and races it into the neutral zone before anyone is even on his tail. He wastes as much of their time as he can and then their power play is over and Ilya is back on the bench at the end of his shift and there are five minutes left in the third and Russia is still a point ahead. Latvia keeps trying for as long as they have the chance but that’s it. The game is over. Russia wins.
Subsequently the rest of the day changes shape around the victory. There is no commiserating, no running, no reckless abandon because there are still upcoming games they have to be in tip-top shape for. Ilya heads back to the Olympic village with his team and isn’t bothered by the weight of heavy arms across his back because these are people who are happy with him. Whose respect has turned honest. Who smile and mean it. Who are thinking of new jokes Ilya didn’t get to hear the first time around, that aren’t any better than the ones from the morning but are better received.
Ilya doesn’t run to the arena where the figure skaters fight gravity and mostly win. He doesn’t see Hollander. He doesn’t think about his mother any more than he usually does, doesn’t stop to wonder if she would hate him like his teammates would if they knew what he was. He barely even thinks, in a locker room drowned in sound, surrounded by cheers of his own name pronounced correctly for once, about how quickly he could turn this whole thing sour. Because he won’t. Because he has been lying for so long that it is second nature and the truth doesn’t scare him so long as it never leaves the circle. Because he has always been a little bit obvious and he could still count the number of people who have ever been able to see through him on one hand. Or at least the ones willing to admit to it.
They celebrate together, lay out plans to beat Finland, review game footage, and leave as a unit. Leave with Ilya at the front of the group because they’re celebrating him.
His father doesn’t try to fix his tie this time. He doesn’t have anything to say about Latvia whatsoever. Or about Ilya’s mother. His eyes are cold and blue and hard and there used to be an unalienable anger in them but now they are dull. The information of this big empty room and this gala Sveta is less incentivised to rush Ilya away from, barely even seems to register. Grigori Rozanov fills space without inhabiting it. He shrinks beneath the weight of all those polished medals on his lapels, the shine of them beneath the chandeliers. Gaudy and glittering. He looks nothing like a Canadian figure skater and Ilya honestly feels little for him besides pity and the vestige of a fear he should have long since outgrown. He certainly doesn’t feel any envy.
He and Sasha talk less this time around. Ilya still doesn’t kiss back.
When he wakes up and it’s Tuesday again Ilya does some reflecting while Ivakin groans. Three repeats makes a loop, not a premonition. Three repeats means what the universe took issue with was not the hockey.
There isn’t that much else it could be. The situation is thrown into sharp relief, and he can acknowledge that a more stable person might have a harder time accepting an impossible situation for what it is, but the answer comes simply to him. Plainly. If the problem isn’t hockey then it’s Hollander. He’s the only other thing on Ilya’s mind, the only other significant part of the original day. The lingering infatuation Ilya needs to forget.
So this day in February is playing on repeat. So to get out of it Ilya has to talk to Hollander—maybe shut him down for good, maybe be honest about why, maybe admit what he wants, maybe explain why he can never have any of it. So time means nothing, and responsibility means nothing, and the eyes on Ilya’s back won’t go away but they won’t remember anything either.
Ivakin slides out of his bed and onto the floor and Ilya lets himself fall just a little bit in love with the time loop.
He takes it easy this time, just in case he’s wrong. Just in case the loop breaks. He takes unnecessary risks in the game, sure, but Russia wins anyway, by two points rather than one. And the game is actually fun because it doesn’t matter. Because it can just be hockey and not reputation. Because hockey is a game he gets to play for a living, and right now it is one without politics. He takes a high stick to the jaw in the second and Dolzhenkov throws a punch before the ref can call a penalty.
He drinks too much afterwards because it makes the party more bearable. He kisses Sasha back because he’s drunker than he should be. Because the fear has turned dull at the edges. This time around, with the brand new bruise blooming, the bite hurts. The kiss doesn’t feel right. Sasha is like an old pair of boots that doesn’t fit right but are still better than trekking barefoot in the snow. The alcohol is expensive and it tastes bad on his tongue in Ilya’s mouth.
Another Tuesday. It occurs to Ilya that his body won’t hold the memory of practice but his mind will. He fine tunes skills he has never had enough time to iron out perfectly. He stops thinking about Latvia and starts watching videos of Hollander’s best moments and justifies the obsession by recreating them, improving them where he can. He turns a fluke into a new move. He stares at freckles whenever the camera gets close enough for him to see them.
He plays Latvia this way and that way and wins in overtime one game because he got too experimental in regulation time, and scores two goals and three assists in another. He watches the way people around him react. The surprise. The way he is different from how he was yesterday. The way he is watched enough for people to notice it.
He does the cocaine when he is offered it. He fucks Sasha without kissing him because the kissing is wrong. Svetlana finds him later, chides him for being reckless, and cares about everything she thinks he is risking. Will never understand that he is risking nothing because nothing matters.
He skips the game because he doesn’t want to play it. He finds a shady bar and lets a man who knows his name buy him a drink and touch his hands, his jaw, his lips. He lets the day turn to night and does everything that feels good in the moment and hellish in the aftermath because there will be no aftermath. He doesn’t think twice about where the drugs are coming from. He lets the drinks be free even if he has more money than he needs and they cost him in other ways. He feels the thrum of music and smells the sweat of bodies packed in close and sprayed in all manner of different colognes. A camera flashes, his phone starts to buzz in his pocket and doesn’t stop. He stays awake past midnight and doesn’t go back to the village and his head swims and his body slumps and he wakes up in a bed he didn’t return to. Another Tuesday. He isn’t counting them.
He plays a violent game. Takes three minors for roughing before a ten minute misconduct for a hit that was entirely unprovoked, that he only threw because he could. They lose that one. He skips the party.
He beats Latvia. He makes a show of it. Just in case this is the one that sticks. And then he does what he has been too scared to do this whole time and finds Hollander who is right there in the audience at a figure skating final, right where he had been the first time around. Performing the same loop.
He excuses himself and heads up to where Ilya is waiting in the nosebleeds, and Ilya speaks to him without really saying anything. Because he misses speaking to him. Because the loop is starting to feel lonely. Because he wants to see the freckles and the soft edges and the dark eyes that don’t realise how much they’re giving away.
“How does it feel to be home?” Hollander asks, and he says it too genuinely. Ilya scoffs and admires him up close without hiding that he’s doing it.
“Does Iqaluit feel like home to you?”
Three blinks. Hollander screws up his nose and everything about him makes Ilya’s palms sweat. “Why would I be in Iqaluit?”
Ilya doesn’t answer him. He thinks about home, about how hockey is the only reason he ever left Moscow, about how without it he would probably be stuck in the same city he was born in and it still wouldn’t fit right. He thinks about being nowhere. He thinks about how the loop is the closest he can get.
Hollander pivots. “Does your room smell like mould too?” The sort of thing you say when you need to say something but can’t think of anything better.
“Probably.” It’s the sort of thing he doesn’t notice anymore. The sort of thing that becomes usual in old buildings, that you learn to overlook because you can’t afford the distraction. A Russian boy, he does not explain, is necessarily like a callus. A person built up via attrition. A Russian boy whose brother calls him pidor needs to be something harder, something a blade won’t slide through. If he was the sort of person who would notice the mould he wouldn’t be the sort of person that survives here.
He leaves before he can say anything more revealing. He goes to the party. He behaves. No drugs and no Sasha. Just in case.
It doesn’t matter in the end. Another Tuesday. He steps in front of a car because it’s the simplest way he can think of to find out what dying feels like. The answer is a lot, then not very much at all. He gets to feel it only briefly before it’s Tuesday again, and Ivakin is cursing him out again, and he is impossibly alive.
He does a lot one day and nothing the next. He tries to think of more interesting ways to use the loop. He performs an impromptu dance halfway through the second period in his mother’s memory, and falls flat on his ass. He does it again the next day and the next, until he can stay on his feet even if he’s wobbly.
He interrupts other events. He screams and screams and shouts all the things he has always wanted to say and never been able to because the consequences would be too dire. He tells the truth and his team and his country turn just as sour as he thought they would. He falls asleep on the cold floor of a cell with broken ribs and a black eye and wakes up like nothing has happened in a bed that's scratchy but warm.
He gets bored of catharsis. He falls back into the hockey, the infinite time and the infinite loops. He scores the first Michigan in Olympic history and skips the celebrations to tweet out I like dick too, btw to all of his followers just to see what the immediate reaction is. And it is immediate.
They think he was hacked at first. Or that his phone was stolen. He takes a photo of himself in all his Team Russia gear with his lips pursed giving a thumbs up, types the word cocksucker over it, and posts that too. The notifications come in fast and frequent and intense so he turns them off and keeps reading anyway.
He doesn’t leave the Russian barracks of the village even though he knows everyone will have seen it by the time they get back. Even though he knows they will react with disbelief only briefly before they turn to fists and remind him they all fight for a living. He wants it to hurt. It’s not like he’ll have to live with the consequences.
Chapter Text
Ilya wakes up slowly. It strikes him as wrong even before the pain registers, because there is no alarm startling him awake, no Ivakin groaning, saying “Ilyukha, turn that fucking thing off.”
Now there is just dull cold and duller pain. The kind that your body wants to sleep through. That feels damp and heavy. He has had maybe hundreds of repetitions of Tuesday by this point, and the one thing he has never been able to change even a little bit is how it starts. He definitely feels dazed, but the panic is sharp enough to pierce through it.
He’s outside. It takes him blinking his eyes against the darkness a few times to realise that. He is outside and it’s nighttime, and if he looks up enough his head will swim but he will be able to see the stars. Distant and unaffected.
He tries to check his phone. To see what time it is, what day, if those tweets are still out there and people are still reacting to them. If the loop snapped and let him ruin his life for nothing. The screen is cracked and it won’t turn on. He doesn’t know if it’s broken or just dead but right now it isn’t working. He throws his head back into the wall and groans because he won’t let himself cry.
He doesn’t know how he ended up here or how long he has been here, bloodied and bruised and slumped against an exterior wall. All he knows is someone left him here and nobody stopped them. If anyone has seen him since they decided not to bring him back inside. He forces himself to his feet. He feels the strain of yesterday’s game in his knees—the feeling has become unfamiliar after so many days spent without consequences—and the shape of Ivakin’s soles in the bruising on his ribs. He takes a deep breath and it hurts but he can do it, so he decides nothing is broken. He doesn’t have time for anything to be broken.
He needs to get out of here, which is easier said than done when everyone here knows his face and wants to cave it in. He squints through the dark until he can tell that the building he is slumped against is a shed on the outskirts of the Olympic Village. One of the ones where they house the garbage bins. Figures.
He isn’t sure where to go from here. The train station probably, but he doesn’t know how to get there, and he doesn’t have a phone he can use to call a cab or google directions, and he has a face that is conspicuous if disguised from all the beatings he has taken. He doesn’t have his passport either. Or any of his things. They’re all still in that shared room he is already experiencing too many consequences to ever consider going back to. He braces himself against the wall and hates the way that thinking hurts. Hates the way that it’s almost certainly tomorrow and he is woefully unprepared to be returned to chronology.
The risks of seeking Hollander out now are still real, tangible, terrifying. But if the loop is already broken then this won’t break him out of it. Besides, he has nowhere else to go.
Finding Team Canada’s barracks is easy. Ilya has had nothing but time to become well-acquainted with the lay-out of this place; he is only just starting to wish that had extended to the rest of Sochi. Finding Hollander’s room is more difficult, because Ilya had been too busy avoiding him to think about following him here. He’s sure he looks a state, stumbling through the corridors, gripping the railings of the stairs he is all but hauling himself up, trying not to breathe too heavily because it hurts. But it’s the middle of the night and these people are all top-level athletes with important events ahead of them, so nobody is there to see it. It’s warmer inside at least, and these people won’t be quite so obliged to hate him as his own countrymen, so it’s one of the safer options he has. It’s not a comforting thought.
It’s the sort of silent that’s eerie. The kind that lets you hear the hum of the dim lights and the way the walls groan in the wind. When he hears a floorboard creak he stops in place just to make sure it isn’t coming from beneath his own feet because it cleaves the quiet so decisively it’s hard to believe it’s coming from anywhere else.
There’s another creak, the sound of muffled footsteps. Like someone is pacing in their socks. Ilya follows the sound to one of the thin doors and presses his ear to the wood so he can hear the muttering on the other side. The words are lost to him but the voice is one he knows. He knocks, not loudly because Hollander will have roommates too, and if Ilya can avoid waking them up he’d like to. The door squeals on its hinges and it is loud enough to smother the silence entirely for a moment. Hollander only opens it a couple of inches and peers through, blinking against the light of the hallway with red-rimmed eyes. His face does something complicated when he sees Ilya but what he says is flat, simple.
“What the fuck?”
Ilya tries to laugh. It makes him cough. He refuses to reassess whether one of his ribs might be broken. Hollander opens the door the rest of the way, casts a furtive glance at the beds where his roommates are sleeping, and heads out. Ilya says, “I fucked up.”
“No shit.” Hollander is reaching his hands out to Ilya’s face but not touching him, just sort of hovering there like he’s scared Ilya will run away if he gets too close. Like a skittish cat. It makes him feel pathetic but leaning into the touch would only make it worse. Hollander is just assessing the bruises, taking stock of the damage, learning what the consequences for being wired the ways they are look like. Ilya regrets coming suddenly. Probably wouldn’t if he had the chance to do this again. “Why the hell would you do that?”
Ilya really does laugh at that, because he doesn’t know what else to do. It feels like being stabbed in the side. He doesn’t know what possible plausible explanation he could give because the truth is ridiculous, unbelievable. And, even if he wanted to tell it, he’s out of the loop now so can’t even predict the immediate future in an attempt to prove it. “I snapped.”
“You snapped?” Hollander sounds unimpressed. Ilya can’t blame him.
“Got tired of winning for a country that hates me.” The English feels unnatural on his tongue. He’s had little reason to reach for it in the loop and he’s out of practice.
“So you thought you’d try to get yourself killed?”
“I proved they hate me.”
They’ve been sort of whisper-shouting at each other in the hallway outside Hollander’s room. Standing close but not touching. Hollander keeps tugging on his hair and pulling at the cuffs of his hoodie. Ilya is seeing how hard he can poke a brand new bruise on his thigh before the pain levels out or he stops being able to bear it.
“Jesus. Rozanov, seriously. There’s something wrong with you.”
“Yes. Teammates agree.”
“No, you idiot. Not that. This!” He waves a hand in Ilya’s direction. The gesture is vague and nebulous. Ilya doesn’t ask him what he means by it. “What were you even thinking?”
That it wouldn’t matter. That nothing mattered so maybe he didn’t have to hide anything. That his life was already over in a way he couldn’t help but enjoy. And now it has started again in a way he can’t cope with and wasn’t ready for. “Nothing.”
“You need to get out of here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not here.” Hollander gestures again, at the close walls and the closed doors and the humming lights and something showing through the paint that’s probably that mould he was talking about. He grabs Ilya by his arms for just a moment, just to keep him in place when he is on the verge of running away. The touch is soft and doesn’t linger and hurts anyway. By this point Ilya isn’t surprised that the brevity just makes him want more of it. “Here. In Russia. Vaughn was saying it’s not safe and-” His face does something else complicated, and his eyes are wet as they track slowly across Ilya who just stands there and lets them. “Well, he was clearly right.”
“There is law.” Ilya isn’t crying. He is blinking a lot and swallowing more and the words are thick in his throat. But he isn’t crying. “About propaganda. Being famous and-” he waves a hand, keeps the gesture loose, honest if non-specific. Lets himself be, for a moment, someone whose brother calls him pidor even though there’s no way he can know how right he is about it. “It will count as promoting lifestyle.”
“Are the police going to be looking for you?”
“Maybe.” Ilya doesn’t actually know. This isn’t a thing that happens, much less to him. People know better than to do ridiculous things like this, care too much about their lives to throw them away like he has. “People might see me, recognise me-”
“Fuck. Okay. We need a plan. How do we fix this?”
Get back inside the loop, Ilya thinks and does not say. “We?”
“If I leave you to deal with this on your own you’re actually going to get yourself killed next time.”
Ilya thinks about dying again. About the way it had been a lot and then nothing. He thinks about experiencing that rather than this and tries not to want it. He knows he could try harder but he won’t. “My phone isn’t working and I don’t have wallet, passport.” He starts listing things he doesn’t think he can live without and the panic grows.
“Okay.” Hollander nods like someone trying to be stoic. The spit soaking into his chewed-on hoodie strings gives him away. “I have cash. You can have it all. We’ll use my phone for directions and I’ll walk with you to the… train station?” Ilya nods. “And we’ll find somewhere we can buy you a cheap one on the way. You can have some clean sweats and a hoodie, a hat, some sunglasses. We’ll cover your face as much as we can. We can’t do anything about the passport but you can find someone at the border and tell them- tell them you’re seeking asylum.”
“I’ve ruined my life.”
“No. No, you've just made it difficult. You’ll get to…?”
“Finland, probably.” It’s the neighbouring country he can imagine being most concerned with keeping someone in his position safe. It’s also two thousand kilometres away. He feels nauseous with dread and he still is not crying.
“Finland. We’ll get you to Finland and they’ll keep you safe until the Bears get you a lawyer who can figure out how to get you back to Boston and you’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”
He sounds like he is trying to convince himself. Ilya does his best to believe it all anyway.
“Come on.” Hollander cracks the door and it squeaks again. Ilya isn’t sure if it’s that or the not-quite-shouting in the hallway that wakes Boiziau up. Either way, when Ilya steps in, backlit by the dim bulbs, Boiziau is blinking slowly at him like maybe he’s part of a dream. Ilya stares back at him in the low light even though one of his eyes is swollen half shut. Eventually Boiziau seems to accept that Ilya is more than a figment of his imagination.
“Hollander,” he says, “what is Rozanov doing in our room?” It strikes Ilya that he isn’t telling him to get out. To be fair, he’s more or less aware of what he probably looks like. It would probably be cruel to kick him out right now.
“We’re helping him flee to Finland.”
Ilya is expecting more questions. Maybe a why? or a why me? Why us? Why did he come here, of all places? What he gets is “This is not how I thought the Olympics would go,” as Hollander shoves a well-worn hoodie into Ilya's arms. He thinks he might recognise it, from a moment in a stairwell where he had let himself pretend that the thing between them could ever be something other than casual, a bad idea that was always going to catch up to at least one of them, and had let himself stop pretending in every other way. For just a second. It smells like Hollander’s sheets did. Ilya doesn’t bother feeling self-conscious as he strips off his old clothes to pull it on. He leaves the Team Russia pullover where it falls on the ground in front of him and not even Hollander reaches down to move it.
He is only bleeding from a couple of places—his nose, his lips, his knuckles—and Hollander helps to clean the blood away without making a fuss about it. Boiziau whistles from a distance, says “They really did a number on you, eh?” and doesn’t ask Hollander why he is helping Ilya when he obviously and famously hates him.
“What time is it?” Ilya asks him after a while, just to be sure. Certain. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no chance everything is going to reset itself and he will be fine and this isn’t just a momentary waste of infinite time.
“Two in the morning.” Which means it’s Wednesday. Tuesday is over and Ilya doesn’t know what he’d give to have it back again.
They’re still trying to be quiet, because there is a third roommate who is still sleeping. A vet who plays for Pittsburgh, the guy who beat out Shane Hollander for captaincy. Someone they probably all respect but none of them are close to. Someone who shouldn’t be burdened by Ilya’s bullshit—not that Hollander should be either. He doesn’t care that much about inconveniencing Boiziau.
Hollander looks up the train schedule, works out how quickly they can get to the station and how long it’s going to be before Ilya can get out of here. Even if he can only go as far as Moscow right now, it’s a busy metropolis and people aren’t going to know he’s there. Not for sure. Not like they know he’s in Sochi. Muscovites have bigger problems than Ilya Rozanov. They can do the walk in about an hour, even with Ilya limping, and there are no good trains until 5am, so until then there is nothing to do but sit and wait and not sleep and hope nobody thinks to look for him here. Maybe they should use that time to sit and talk. Maybe he should try to explain himself, tell the truth, apologise for the texts he hasn’t responded to and the way he made them jump straight from total intimacy to absolute silence.
Neither of them is that well-adjusted. And Boiziau is there and clearly hasn’t figured anything out, beyond that Ilya needs help and this is a place he thought he might find it. It’s almost silent. Definitely awkward. “You have game,” Ilya remembers, when it’s already much too late to do anything but apologise for interrupting their sleep.
“You are kidding.” Boiziau squints at him like he’s being ridiculous.
“Rozanov.” The look Hollander sends him is scathing.
“Nothing is more important to you than hockey and this is Olympics.”
“Some things are.”
The walk to the station is slow-going and laborious. It’s still very much dark out and there could probably stand to be more streetlights, though Ilya is glad for the darkness and the way that it hides his face. Boiziau is still back at the village, trying to catch up on sleep and prepared to cover for Hollander’s absence if anyone wants to know why he isn’t in his room at 6am. They still don’t use it to talk. Not about anything that matters. Hollander doesn’t try to grill him for answers, better ones. Ilya sort of wishes he would.
It’s too early for any of the stores to be open so Ilya says he will just get a phone while he is in Moscow, waiting for the train to Helsinki and hoping nobody thinks to look twice at the guy fidgeting in the corner with his hood up and his head down. He thinks he looks like a conspicuous drug dealer who is probably going to get caught soon but doesn’t say it because that feels like a jinx if he’s ever heard one. Hollander makes him promise to buy it, makes him promise to text as soon as he has. Writes down his number on the back of a bus ticket he has tucked into his wallet because he is the sort of person that always carries a pen, even if he doesn’t have paper. Ilya tucks it into his pocket and doesn’t tell him that he’s pretty sure he already has it memorised.
They part ways at the station. The streets are still empty and the sky is still dark, and Ilya is cold in his borrowed hoodie but not in a way he hasn’t been used to for a very long time. He remembers, against his will, being a teenager. Walking home from the rink in the winter because he had no choice but to go and no expectation of being driven home or being given money for the bus. Walking home with feet that were often bleeding because his father insisted on letting him properly outgrow his old skates before he could expect to be bought new ones. It didn’t matter how good he was, or that they had the money to afford it.
He hovers by the station door, at the top of the wide staircase, and Hollander watches him not move. His shoulders are tense and he is chewing on the string of his hoodie again, so hard Ilya can hear the plastic aglet crack between his molars. Ilya stares back. Pokes his bruise. Hurts all over. He gulps, dry and sore, then turns to leave.
“Ilya,” Hollander says, taking half a step closer before he thinks better of it and stands stock still on the bottom step. “Just, everybody else is going to forget to mention it. Congrats. On the lacrosse goal, I mean.” And they leave it at that.
Ilya still doesn’t cry. He fiddles with the cuffs of the sleeves of his borrowed hoodie, feeling at the holes that have already been worn into them. He presses his mouth into a line and counts his cash and tries to believe he is making it out of here any time soon. The alternative is not an option.
The train is just a little late. Aside from Ilya and an older couple who don’t spare him a single glance, the platform is empty. It’s too early for the world to have started up properly and Ilya doesn’t want to enjoy the safety that affords him too much, because he knows it is fleeting.
Ilya settles himself into a seat at the back of a carriage, tucked tight against the wall beside the window. He keeps his head low, keeps Hollander’s sunglasses on even though they are the type with the little pads that are pinching at the bridge of his injured nose just a little too tightly, keeps the hood over the cap he has borrowed and hopes nobody stops to think about the Canadian flag embroidered on the front of it above the brim, much less the swollen face beneath. He’d love to sleep, and he doesn’t have a phone or headphones or even a book to distract himself from the urge, but even in this empty carriage on this empty morning he doesn’t feel safe enough to let his guard down. The train will keep moving, keep stopping, and more people will get on, and all it will take is one person who recognises him and has opinions about his stupid fucking declaration for the illusion of safety to shatter entirely.
He taps his fingers, traces shapes on the window, looks at the landscape and tries to remember that it’s beautiful. That the world is beautiful. That his home is beautiful even if it can’t be his home anymore. That this place was never home to begin with, no matter how fond of it the loop has inadvertently made him. That he shouldn’t feel much about leaving because the moments in his day-to-day life in Boston he spends missing things about Russia that haven’t been dead for a decade, are few and far between.
His back hurts where he is leaning on it. He is black and blue all over. He still feels like he is being stabbed in the side whenever he moves or breathes wrong. His head hurts and he aches like he pushed his body as far as it would let him yesterday, and now he’s actually living with the consequences of it beneath all of that. Sleep is beyond tempting but fear holds his eyes open. Wide open. Focused mostly on the floor. He’ll be on this train for maybe 24 hours and he is committed to spending every one of them awake.
There is food available. He buys and cannot eat it. The train stops and someone else sits in Ilya’s carriage. He tries to make himself small in his corner and regrets for the first time ever that he can’t take up less space. They are talking on the phone, not especially loudly. He eavesdrops, mostly because he needs anything at all to keep himself awake. He sneaks a glance to complete the picture, of a young woman with long blonde hair and her shoulder lifted to keep the phone against her ear while she digs through her purse, talking to someone or other about her children and how excited she is to see them.
It stings, somewhat. To be watching someone else who is just having a day. A good day. Someone whose life is not falling apart. Someone who doesn’t seem to have any idea that his is either. Somebody the world won’t repeat on, who seems relatively safe and relatively happy outwardly, whose happiness every circumstance of Ilya’s life thus far has made it impossible for him not to doubt. His mother would have been excited too, to see her sons after time apart. But she wouldn’t have been happy. She would have smiled and sang and danced and joked, and held Ilya’s hand and clapped at a jump he barely landed, and she still wouldn’t have been happy.
It makes him resent the loop. More than a little bit. For cracking on him and proving that nothing is forever and everything leaves. For choosing that Tuesday to occur, for choosing Hollander to worry about, for choosing to punish Ilya for not bending to its whims. For not being around ten years ago when he could have used it to try to save his mom. When, failing that, he could have at least used it to say goodbye. He doesn’t remember the last thing he ever said to her, because it was just like any other day until it shifted shape so dramatically everything else was forced to bend around it. He’d change that if he could. He’d do that loop properly, if he were given the chance. He’d tell her to leave, maybe, if he had to. To take him with her if she could but to leave him behind if she couldn’t. To find someone to talk to and meds that worked and a life that was actually hers, whether or not there was room for him in it. He wishes he had known to tell her anything.
He wonders if she’d had an inkling. Even when he was twelve years old. Like Alexei had. Like Sveta had. If she cared. If she would have reacted well to the confirmation. If he ever would have told her. He wonders if she’d have loved him anyway, even if that meant hating things like her country and her husband and her eldest son.
The window of the train is cold against his cheek when he falls asleep.
So is the rough exterior wall when he wakes up.
Chapter Text
The pain feels new again, like it hasn’t had time to settle in yet. Ilya isn’t sure if it’s better or worse. He is sure he has much bigger problems to worry about right now.
It’s important, as a hockey player, to be well-attuned to the difference between being hurt and injured. It’s important to know where the line is. When to keep pushing against it and when to take a careful step back. By something like sheer force of will, Ilya has spent a lot of time hurt and very little injured, and it hasn’t significantly backfired yet so he keeps pushing. He’s hurt, which isn’t ideal but is manageable. Which he has no option but to manage.
The cold air and the night sky and the refuse sheds at the edge of the Olympic Village are of significantly more concern.
Something about Tuesday ad nauseam has made the rhythms of a loop recognisable, one of the simpler explanations to reach for even before he does any sort of precursory checks. These are the early hours of a Wednesday and they do the impossible by making him miss Ivakin’s complaining.
There was something wrong with his approach to yesterday, then. Unlike Tuesday, there is nothing apparent that will resolve the issue. His stomach turns over itself violently enough to distract, if only momentarily, from the stabbing feeling in his side. It’s either that or the universe is pissed off at him for ignoring the win conditions of the first loop so blatantly.
He groans, gets to his feet and lets the wall bear all the weight on his behalf. He tries to remember everything through the thick fog of a burgeoning headache. He tries to remind himself he is a person who has to know that the only productive thing you can do with pain is ignore it.
In a moment of weakness he had let persist for far too long, he had run right to Hollander and all but begged for his help. A pathetic thing to do, really. Something apparently totally incompatible with reality. He remembers thinking in the moment that it was the wrong choice, that Hollander didn’t need to be involved, didn’t need to see what Ilya was risking the whole time, manifested in black and blue all over his skin. Didn’t need to know that there were bigger things than hockey at stake.
Hockey is, to Ilya, first and foremost a way out. An escape route. A game he loves enough to live it, sure, but a game. Occasionally, when he lets himself wallow, it is the thing that prevents him from being Sasha. The thing that narrows his circle to a pinprick. And Russia is a home that doesn’t want him and never has. That he hasn’t wanted in a long time either. His body, positioned somewhere between the two, is skin and muscle and bone. A place where he hurts. The only thing anyone cares about. And somehow that’s all he has.
He stares down at his dead phone and his bruised knuckles and the dirt under his shoes and thinks he has managed to lose them all at once.
He almost wishes he didn’t have time to dwell, but he knows that the first train isn’t for hours now, and he knows the way to the station, more or less, and if he gets lost enough to waste all that time on the way then he has bigger problems. He doesn’t have any money for a ticket, of course, but he dodged the fares occasionally as a teenager. Not on a 24-hour train, sure, but he needs to believe this is an option. Needs to believe there is a way out, that the loop isn’t holding onto him again now because there is nowhere else for him to go. Because it is the only safe place left for him.
He scrubs a hand across his face and winces at the pressure. The thing about loops, he knows now, is that he can be broken out of it at any time. Any repetition can be the one that sticks. He has to try, earnestly, truly try, to do every single one of them right. He can’t do anything else he can’t live with.
He should go inside, get out of the cold. He slides his back down the wall and sits back on the cold, damp ground. Pulls his knees up to his chest and squints through the dark.
Secretly, silently, he has probably believed for the past decade that there would always be a way out if he ever needed it. That if ever everything got too bad and too bleak and he stopped being able to handle it and didn’t believe it could ever get better, he could just end it all. Quietly and efficiently and without anybody knowing. Not that he’d ever been planning on doing it. Just thinking about it. Turning the idea over, remembering how much it had hurt when his mother died and reassuring himself it was different, somehow. It was just an idea, an escape hatch; he’d never do it unless he couldn’t help it.
And now death isn’t an end. He knows this absolutely. It feels like a lot and then a little and then he wakes right back up into the same ruined life. The same endless cycle lodged in the middle of it, an eternity away from any conclusion at all.
Ilya doubts the second consecutive Wednesday is going to be the one that sticks. From general familiarity with loops, sure, but also because he stays awake longer than he managed to the first time, and when they crawl to the next stop someone steps on to take tickets and he doesn’t have a ticket, and he’s half asleep enough it doesn’t occur to him in advance to sequester himself in the toilets or something until the train starts moving.
He gets thrown off the train in some random town he has never heard of, and he can’t tell if the people here are staring at him because they know who he is or just because he looks like shit. Either way, they’re sitting him down and issuing him a fine and they need to know his name to do that. He lies, of course, and they search him for an ID he doesn’t have, and he’s stuck.
The uncertainty makes him nauseous: the knowledge that the loop could crack open here and spit him out. He could be stuck with this. Or it could not matter at all. He could forget this Wednesday like he has most of those Tuesdays. He could lose the precise details in the overlap and never think about it again.
Local authorities let him go eventually, because he has nothing to give them and, evidently, they haven’t recognised him. They have other things to do, and he has to think of a way out of here,
He finds himself on a park bench because there is nowhere to go. One of the wooden slats is broken entirely and another might be actively giving him a splinter. His throat is sore and dry and talking has only made it worse. He doesn’t have any water, or a proper coat, and his pullover is inside out because otherwise it is too easy to tell what it is. He’s sore and he’s cold and he is trying to think in an empty park, staring at a pigeon and racing to find a solution before his brain shuts down entirely.
By the time it does, the only thing he has managed to think is that he needs to go back to Hollander.
He doesn’t have to listen out for the footsteps this time. Wednesday number three and he knows for sure which is Hollander’s door. He knows for sure that Hollander is awake and restless on the other side of it.
He wants to enjoy that: Hollander is worried, because of Ilya and perhaps even for him. But it’s hard to enjoy anything at all with how the fear ebbs and flows in his gut and some strange guilt surges up every time it leaves a gap.
It occurs to him that, even if he gets out unscathed, there will be people left behind still bearing his disgraced name. His brother, the Moscow cop whose entire circle will be dialed into this. Who doesn’t get to escape this. Who Ilya should know better than to feel bad for. His brother’s family who he does, largely without major complications, wish well for. His father who is in Sochi, surrounded by the scandal. Who will forget this like everything else if he hasn’t yet. Who has always known Ilya was going to shame him, if not how.
Ilya knocks and Hollander says “What the fuck?” and this time Ilya is aware of the venom Hollander is collecting behind his teeth but fails to spit.
“Help me.” It sounds pathetic to his ears. He is probably out of options for not looking pathetic, if he’s honest. “Please.”
“What the fuck?” Still no venom, maybe more panic. Hollander steps into the dimly lit hallway and the door swings shut behind him. His hands find the vicinity around Ilya’s face without touching his skin, taking stock of the damage without prodding, poking, touching, soothing inflamed skin.
“I could not do it anymore,” Ilya explains, which is not a full answer but does come out more honest than he thought it was going to. “Needed to break something.”
“Next time, punch a wall.”
“Mr. Landlord wants me to damage property?” It’s supposed to be a joke. It doesn’t land like one. Hollander’s eyes drop to the floor between their feet, at what little distance stands between them right now. His hands, still hovering by Ilya’s face, considering and not touching, start to shake, just a little bit. Ilya leans his cold cheek into Hollander’s warm palm in a moment of weakness and decides there are better things to feel than the pain that flares at the contact. It probably won’t stick anyway. Next time he wakes up it will never have happened.
“Your teammates did this to you?”
“Did not like knowing who was in their locker room. They don’t like people like-” he almost says us, then corrects because there is no such thing, “-me here. In Russia.”
“So why did you…?”
Ilya considers it. Considers the hand that is still on his face and the thumbnail that is scratching softly through a layer of dried blood on his chin. “You will think I’m crazy.”
Hollander tries to cock an eyebrow. Both of them shoot up his forehead instead. Ilya has to look away, step back, break the contact.
“No. Really crazy.”
“You’re trying to get yourself killed.”
“Crazier than that.”
“Rozanov.”
“I was stuck in time loop.” It occurs to him, only as he says it, that in all of those Tuesdays he never tried to tell anyone anything. There was nobody he wanted to tell except for the one person he was trying to avoid. Svetlana, maybe, but she worries too much already and he hates to think of how much of her time—limited in a way his apparently is not—has been wasted on him.
“Sorry?”
“Tuesday,” he says, “kept starting over and over and over again.”
“How hard did they hit your head, Rozanov?”
He groans, frustrated, and it makes his chest hurt. “Not especially.” That one might be an outright lie. “Please, is true. I can’t prove it. It was Tuesday until wrong Tuesday stuck, and now it is Wednesday for third day in a row. When you go back in your room Boiziau will be awake. He will help without asking questions.” You will help, like I haven’t been ignoring you. “My phone is dead.” He pulls it out of his pocket as proof. “I know when next train to Moscow is anyway.”
“Rozanov. You’re scaring me.”
He’s scaring himself more. “Please.” It’s all he has left.
Hollander still invites him in but the glances this time are doubting, concerned. He shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot when Boiziau blinks slowly at the Ilya Rozanov-shaped disturbance to his sleep. Ilya does not say I told you so but thinks it loudly enough Hollander might be able to hear it anyway. He shakes his head, as if to say that doesn't mean anything in response.
The air is more tense. The material risk is the same as last time but now Hollander thinks Ilya is going through an extra layer of personal crisis that he mostly is not. It makes him careful to a whole new degree, which in turn makes Boiziau protective in a way he hadn’t been last time, and worried about Ilya in an overstated way nobody ever should be. Especially not a Voyageur. Ilya regrets trying to say anything.
Hollander sponges the blood off his face and Ilya lets himself be gently manhandled. By this point, even after all those Tuesdays, the smell of his body wash is familiar in a way that makes Ilya’s stomach ache.
His hoodie smells like him. His sweatpants are just a little too small. Ilya still sort of hates his sunglasses.
“When is the next train?” Boiziau asks.
“4:56,” Ilya says. Hollander squints at him and pulls out his phone to check the train schedule. He pockets it again without saying anything, just tenses his jaw and looks at Ilya with narrowed eyes. He shrugs back. Boiziau looks carefully between them. He doesn’t know—obviously not—but they’re giving away that something is up. As if Ilya showing up here in the first place didn’t already do enough.
Ilya uses the walk to the station to try to prove it. He’d give up, honestly, if he weren’t so scared of this being the loop that sticks. If he could convince himself that it doesn’t matter if Hollander spends the rest of his life thinking Ilya has lost his mind entirely.
“It will be quiet until man drives past playing very loud, very angry rap.”
“There is a missing cat poster on streetlight around corner. You can’t read it but will look upset anyway.”
“We will see big group of magpies and you will stop to let me catch up and tell me about British superstitions you learned from English figure skaters.”
That one prompts a response from Hollander, whereas the only response to the others has been a dubious squint. “How do you know about that?”
Ilya shrugs. It hurts. “I only know the word magpie because you told me.”
“I didn’t do that.”
Ilya pointedly raises both eyebrows at him.
Hollander stops him again, before he can walk into the station, from the bottom of the stairs. Probably because Ilya didn’t tell him he was going to.
“Ilya,” he says again, with the same, sad weight. Ilya turns to look at him. “I-” he sucks in a deep breath, “I believe you. I guess. I don’t know what to do with that, just- just be safe. Please.”
Whatever response Ilya could have—be it thank you, or I will try, or I’m sorry—gets stuck in his throat. He nods. Just once, curter than he means to be. And then he has to leave.
He sits in a different part of the train because he’s experimenting with the loops. In the same carriage as the old couple but behind them, so he can see them but they can’t stare at him. He tries harder to stay awake, stands up to walk up and down the aisle before sitting back in his seat, presses every smarting bruise when his eyes begin to droop. Ultimately it doesn’t do much.
Ilya limps back to Hollander’s room again and again. He doesn’t try to approach Wednesday unaided for even a second time. Because it was especially miserable and went especially wrong and if he tries earnestly, desperately, to do everything right this time then that is the only sort of damage control he can do right now. From the deep end, where he is treading water because his feet don’t touch the ground.
He tells the truth sometimes, tries to explain the loop, never gets Hollander to admit he believes it until right before they part at the station. Most of the time he lies because it’s easier. Because he doesn’t like the way Hollander looks at him when he tells the truth and the truth is world breaking.
He leans into the touch sometimes. Others he just lets it linger, close enough he can’t ignore it no matter how many times Hollander’s hands have hovered there, less than an inch away from his sore skin. One time he pushes the hand away and takes a step back because he shouldn’t be accepting softness from anywhere, is supposed to reject that sort of thing outright, and his gut twists with it uncomfortably. He doesn’t meet Hollander’s eyes for the rest of that loop and he helps anyway. Like it doesn’t occur to him that saying no is even an option. Next time, just to make up for it, Ilya puts his hand over Hollander’s as soon as he raises it, and holds it softly to his own cheek. He’s as regretful as he is glad that loop isn’t the one that sticks.
Hollander stops him outside the station in every subsequent iteration of Wednesday. He says “Ilya,” each time and Ilya never gets used to hearing it. Ilya is supposed to end this, he knows. For good. Especially now. Especially now that he has blown his own secret so handily and, provided he can ever find his way back to Boston, is going to be under the sort of scrutiny their old pattern of clandestine rendezvous will never be able to withstand. The loops aren’t making it any easier.
The words that follow Ilya’s name in Hollander’s tentative voice are changeable. Dependent on what happened beforehand. Almost always, they aim for casual in a way the preceding Ilya fails to be. They come after a conspicuous pause. A moment Hollander spends changing his mind because he is the sort of person who thinks things through. The sort of person something like this would never happen to.
A couple of times Ilya breaks, walks back down the stairs and spends a moment holding him by the arms, waiting for him to say what he had wanted to say in the first place, never getting to hear it. Or Ilya hugs him. Not because he can—he probably can’t—but because he has to. Because Hollander lets him. They’re hockey players, so being touchy-feely is nothing new. Nothing that wouldn’t happen as part of a celly. But the hugs are a little too tight, a little too honest. Not undeniable, but something closer to it than Ilya can afford. Somehow knowing that doesn’t stop him.
He thinks about kissing him more than once, just one last time, because it’s something he knows he’ll never get to do again. But he doesn’t, because that doesn’t have the same plausible deniability as a not-platonic-enough hug. Because someone might see them and it might stick, and he isn’t going to leave Hollander to deal with the consequences.
He sits in different parts of the train. He talks to strangers who stare openly at the mess of broken blood vessels beneath his skin. He keeps to himself and tucks his body against the window with a wall behind him and an eye on the door. He waits for hours by himself for the next train even though it’s slower, and there’s a change in the middle, and there are so many more apparent risks.
None of it works.
He tries not to sink further into the hopelessness already threatening to consume him. He tries to think about it from a different angle. He tries to believe there is some way out that doesn’t involve giving in and making everything even worse. He tries, through the headaches and the exhaustion and the stabbing in his side and the tightness in his chest, to think.
Maybe it isn’t Hollander. Not this time. Maybe it’s the train itself. Not the timing and not the carriage. Just the whole idea.
But if he can’t take the train then he needs another way out. No passport means no airport, and all the security there means there’s no chance of sneaking through. Stowing away on a boat across the Black Sea is, he supposes, technically an option. But it doesn’t feel like a good one; he wouldn’t get far and he doesn’t even know how he’d figure out where he was going, much less the actual methodology. He tries not to tear out his hair and prays to a God he probably still believes in to give him any chance at all of getting out of this.
When he thinks of it, it comes to him with a specific sort of clarity. The kind that has him sure that, if this doesn’t work, nothing will. He almost wants to avoid it for that reason, so he can hold onto the hope even if he remains trapped in the loop. But he knows now that avoiding the answers is what gets him spat out unceremoniously, to live with the choices he made only because he was certain he’d never have to confront them again.
He limps to Hollander’s room. He could do it in his sleep by now. The pain is familiar which isn’t doing as much as he would prefer to dull it to background noise.
He hauls himself up the stairs and waits at the top of them, for just one moment, to hear the pacing. Not because he needs it to find the room but because he wants to guiltily enjoy the reminder that Hollander cares. To remind himself that it will become more than either of them can afford for it to be if Ilya doesn’t cut it off. To remind himself that he has a real knack for making the people he cares about miserable.
Ilya knocks. Hollander cracks the door open and peers out. “What the fuck?”
“Can I use your phone? Mine is broken.”
“What?”
“I need to call Svetlana.”