Chapter Text
The promotion of homosexuality has sharply increased in modern-day Russia. This promotion is carried out via the media as well as via the active pursuit of public activities which try to portray homosexuality as a normal behaviour. This is particularly dangerous for children and young people who are not able to take a critical approach to this avalanche of information with which they are bombarded on a daily basis. In view of this, it is essential first and foremost, to protect the younger generation from exposure to the promotion of homosexuality …
It is therefore essential to put in place measures which provide for the intellectual, moral and mental well-being of children, including a ban on any activities aimed at popularising homosexuality. A ban of this kind of propaganda as an activity involving the intentional and indiscriminate spreading of information which may be injurious to physical, moral and spiritual wellbeing, including instilling distorted ideas that society places an equal value on traditional and non-traditional sexual relations amongst people who are incapable, due to their age, of critically assessing this information on their own, cannot in itself be considered a breach of the constitutional rights of citizens. …
The bill confers the right of drawing up charge sheets relating to activities carried out in public which are aimed at promoting homosexuality to minors on officials of the authorities responsible for internal affairs (the police) and of considering any resulting cases – on the courts.
The Explanatory Note of the Anti-Propaganda Law 'On the Protection of Children From Information Liable to be Injurious to their Health and Development’ from Russia, 2013.
Your back's against the wall
There's no-one home to call
You're forgetting who you are
You can't stop crying
It's part not giving in
And part trusting your friends
You'll do it all again
And I'm not lying
Standing in the way of control
You'll live your life
Survive the only way that you know
The Gossip- Standing in the way of control
Sochi 2014
One day after the figure skating final.
Shane feels a hard hit against his shoulder, loses his balance and falls to the ground almost face-first into the bushes beneath the palmtree. Deep in thought, for one moment he thinks it's a check on the ice. As he looks up and removes his headphones, he sees two people running along the beach promenade. They slammed into him as he stands, half hidden by the tree.
The runners, wearing black clothes, have open backpacks on their shoulders, with their white paper contents dispersing with the help of the wind off the sea. One of the runners is limping, the other holds their hand. A massive roar behind him comes from two black vans pulling out next to him. The van vomits out what look like cops all dressed in black: no badges, covered faces, guns at their hips and batons in their hands. They shout as they fan out around the runners, getting closer and closer, and then surrounding them against a wall of the ghostly houses.
Shane is trying to will himself to move again, but his otherwise quick feet and legs are heavy, like he has been on the ice for too long. Somehow he is standing up and finally moving backwards, although it is in slow motion and still facing the unfolding violence. The next thing he sees is the weirdest scrum ever.
For a moment, his mind short circuits as the men in black repeatedly slam the runners into the hard concrete wall. It is not a scrum. The black clothed mob tear into the runners, punching, kicking, clubbing them with their batons. It is a terrifying nightmare of choreography, impossible to turn away from. It looks as if the two runners are falling down into a hole as they go down to the ground.
The men in black continue, relentlessly. Shane hears the thud, thud, thud as the beating continues. Despite knowing that he's listening to the sound of the beating, he feels like he's listening to the pounding of his own heart.
Thud, thud, thud. Thump, thump, thump.
What feels like an eternity later, the runners are hoisted up from the ground with firm grips under the armpits as they are hauled towards the vans. Straight towards him. He forces his legs to work, to go backwards, into an alley between two houses. As the cops are passing with the runners, Shane can see blood from his vantage point.
Swollen faces, cut lips, torn clothes, and it looks as if one of the runners has a hand at a funny angle. Their head is lolling back and forth like a raggedy doll. The other runner moans, trying to say something, stretching a hand to reach out for something, for someone, for anyone.
And then they are swallowed by the jaws of the vans that take off. Shane isn't sure if it all really happened that quietly, or if he imagined it did. If the runners had screamed, if the cops had been shouting.
There is a taste of adrenaline and blood in his mouth and he realises he bit his tongue when he fell. Their blood, his blood. For some reason, Shane feels as if he is guilty of something, as if he is those two runners that have just disappeared. He has no idea why, but it was as if someone was about to point him out in the alleyway and they would know.
What would they know exactly? He hadn't really done anything wrong, but he was still scared. He has just seen something he shouldn't, he knew something he shouldn't. Yesterday he had the same punching, gut wrenching feeling when sitting in the cafe with Hunter and Carter.
He stands there, ignoring the phone buzzing in his pocket, and then his legs give out. He drops to the ground, sits and forces one deep breath after another. Trying to stabilise himself against a concrete wall and asphalt as the earth spins around him. The utter senseless precision of the violence must have been over in a few minutes.
What had felt like an eternity was not all that long. The runners were not precise; no choreography of their own could have saved them.
Taking a deep breath in, Shane realises the weight around his neck is missing. The lanyard with all of the accreditation for the games. He realises he had fallen to the ground by the palm tree before moving away. Adrenaline still surging, Shane jogs back and his lanyard is right there, by the base of the trunk of the palm tree, half-hidden beneath some sad looking plants. Leaning down to retrieve the torn lanyard, it's heavy with all of the pins he has collected.
Taking one extra look in case a pin had fallen off, he spots a small piece of paper and something else. The paper is held down against the wind by a shimmering object. He looks around, the promenade is completely silent, people hurry past with their heads down or just stand, looking, kind of dazed. For some reason, he picks up the piece of paper and the tiny little shimmering object at the same time as his lanyard.
Before leaving, he looks back a few meters,and there are traces of blood on the ground and the wall. He still tastes blood in his mouth and his heart is still beating so hard he can hear it loud and clear. A deep thump and sometimes he can still hear the sound of bodies being hit.
Thud, thud, thud.
Earlier that morning.
Shane woke up and felt disorientated, sticky, restless. It was the day after two catastrophes, or perhaps one figureskating scandal, and one emotional hurricane. It felt like they both lingered in his mouth, a sour taste of sadness, adrenaline and frustration. First, fucking Rozanov who had completely obliterated him, telling Shane how boring he was, how they were not anything.
Then Joe. Sweet Joe who did what no one else dared to do on the ice and then he had to flee the country. Shane closed his eyes and took a breath. They were separate things. One personal, private and emotionally devastating, even infuriating. The other, so devastatingly public it made Shane want to hide.
He was supposed to go to sleep early each evening, that was the whole Olympic Plan he had set up. A plan that had been blown to smithereens already. After him, Jamie, Leah, Adrienne, Scott and Carter had gotten back from the figure skating arena none of them wanted to go their separate ways. There was too much to process, even when they all wanted to do it in silence, while sipping lukewarm beer and ginger ale in Jamie's room. Even Carter had been unusually silent.
JJ was still snoring, and the room smelled even worse than it had yesterday. Shane had cleaned his clothes every single day since he arrived at the Olympic village, not wanting the stench to infuse them. Shanes room mate had not adopted the same strategy, so the humid stench of mold mingled with day-old sweat from workout wear thrown over the floor.
Shane slowly sat up in the claustrophobic room, the sheets feeling like plastic. He had forgotten to cut the tag in the neck from the t-shirt he was wearing, and he could feel it keenly against his skin.
He dared to think that this bed doesn't even have... Not even Rozanov's shoulder to rest on... but then the next thing that comes to mind is the cold, cold words, and those eyes looking at him with a disdain Shane had never seen in him. Not on or off the ice. The look, and his words, had cut, sliced through Shane together with a hot, angering disappointment.
He didn't deserve this, not any of it. What did it even matter that he tried to show care, if Rozanov was so hellbent on just fucking him and then fucking him over? He had been so different from their last time, when he had leaned over in the staircase and so slowly kissed a post-fuck, blissed out Shane. That time there was only the softness of clouds and a tease in Rozanov's eyes.
Shane wanted fresh air, to run until his lungs ached. He considered doing laps around the olympic village, down to the promenade by the beach, but despite all of the palm trees, the ground had been covered in black ice every morning.
It was early enough that it was still dark outside. Even if he sometimes acted on a bad idea like getting railed in the ass by Rozanov... going for a run on black ice just days before a game was a step too far. The gym was open all hours of the day, and it was early enough that no one was going to be there.
He got dressed, and carefully remembered to take his lanyard with his accreditation. The pass had been a pain to acquire on his arrival to the Olympics. A Canadian athlete had joked that the Russian bureaucracy moved slower than the embalmed body of Stalin.
From other athletes he had been told that a lost accreditation pass meant losing a full day of planned program, or even practice hours. His lanyard was heavy with pins traded and gifted from other athletes around the world and the weight of it anchored him somehow; why he is where he is, who he is.
Opening the door, the corridor smelled marginally better. He moved through the dimly lit corridor and thought about himself skulking in hotel corridors back home. Just because those lips, that cock and that body drew him like in with hook line and sinker. People ran in the corridors in the nighttime here as well. The condoms that had been plenty a week ago were apparently running low. Selling condoms here would be a good extra income for someone with an entrepreneurial disposition.
Shane corrected himself almost immediately. It wasn't people, it was straight people, or so he assumed. Knowing that so many could have some casual intimacy and create happy, sexy memories during the most important games of their careers, he felt a pang of envy knowing that the only person he wanted had, not even twenty-four hours ago, stared at him while having nothing but contempt in his eyes. No sexy corridor sneaking memories for Shane in a room that stank of mold, sweat and Olympic anxiety.
He was walking down the stairs to the gym when the penny dropped, and he stopped dead in his tracks. The realisation came out of nowhere. Rozanov.
It was something more than contempt. The person Shane most all wanted to connect with, the person he wanted to comfort, was scared.
Rozanov had been scared, not just tired, tense and angry but fearful and Shane had missed it because he had missed that piece of the puzzle. The other emotions were easier to pick up and decipher. Rozanov had been angry, sure, but he had also twitched, taking a few steps back away from Shane as if he expected, no, like he needed to escape from him. Shane had scared him. How and why he couldn't understand.
He would never hurt the man physically, but he also wouldn't risk showing any kind of affection, not here and not ever in public. It is one of the many things he dreamt about sometimes, but only alone. The most physical he had ever been in public with him had been in faceoffs, or towards the boards of the ice rink. And that time on the rooftop in Las Vegas.
The extent of the fear didn't make any sense to Shane, he had just meant it as a casual check in of someone he cared about. And instead that person became cruel, cold and fearful and Shane could not understand the reason for it.
Shane's realisation of Rozanov's fear made the first few strides on the treadmill harder. It takes time for him to find a pace and then he let go, letting his arms, lungs and legs do the work. Each breath opened him up a bit more. It's always movement that does this to him. He opens up, in the gym, on the ice or simply shaking, kneeling on the floor with Ilya's cock in his mouth. Or movement originating from Rozanov's hand in Shane's hair, pulling and pushing him until Shane gags. It's almost unnecessary because there, on his knees, is where he wants to be anyway, being face fucked.
Usually he can run on the treadmill and it is exactly what brings him out of his head but this morning that wasn't enough. He went to breakfast with headphones in, gave a slight nod to some Canadian athletes sitting at another table, and returned to his room.
Returning to the room the smell was still disgusting and JJ was still sleeping. Nothing strange since it is not even seven thirty in the morning. As he got into the shower he found that he even missed the subpar water pressure from North American hotel chains....
The scalding hot shower does nothing to the claustrophobic feeling still lingering. Picking up the fluffy team Canada fleece, he is grateful that the tags in the neck are already cut out. He walked down to the beach promenade instead of running.
Shane is enough of an athlete and a grown up that he needed to act like it, get his head into the game. Solitary time, using tools he has hoarded for mental clarity, that is what he needs to focus on right now. Canada is playing Sweden next, and he knew most of their plays, they had a fair few tells to exploit, now it was time to think about them instead of god damn team Russia that didn't even get past Latvia.
The snow with the palm trees was a view as weird as ever, his breath was clouding around him and the cold was sharper than expected. The sea breeze and fresh air opened up his lungs and the dank, mouldy smell that had lingered in his nose finally lifted. Behind him the weird grey and once white brutalist boxes disguised as houses and apartmentbuildings were looming.
On the first day in Sochi he took a walk to look at them. That day, they had felt interesting, all of those geometrical sharp angles, concrete, uniformity and almost monumental impression contrasting against the palmtrees and the sea. Apparently most of them were still intact from the Soviet years, at least that was what his architect in Canada had told him when they had met in the autumn to start discussing the cottage.
She had asked if he was going to the Olympics, he had responded with a "maybe, it would be an honor to represent Canada but I can't say anything at this time" and then they started talking so much about brutalism, functionalism, German Bauhaus and Soviet architecture that he became interested in the language of the shapes himself. However, here in Sochi, Shane's initial curiosity had shifted from a fascination to unease. Nothing of how he wanted to live could be found in those buildings.
All materials in his life that were important were missing. No softness, no tactility, just unforgiving static cold rigidity. His cottage would never look like any of these Soviet ghosts. Instead, he imagined Rozanov on the dock by the Cottage in the golden light of a setting sun.
There were few people out by the promenade in the early morning. Only a few partygoers heading home and volunteers in the easily recognisable uniforms walked towards their duties of the day. Shane was leaning against a palm tree, and looked over the sea. With headphones in he was trying to block out as much of the very loud everything around him.
He had started thinking about angles, about a puck moving, visualising a distance and trajectory across the sea, as if it had turned into a hockey rink and sported a goal with a goalkeeper. Neutral, offensive, defensive. This was good, this was him starting to get it together.
His music was making him think about a skating tempo, about sharp cuts and beautiful edgework into ice that makes it feel like he was flying, doing perfectly every little thing his body already knows. This is something he recognises.
Shane is endless here. Other players materialise like watercolours and they move through his sea turned into a positional matrix. The sharp lines of the matrix, red, blue, crease, starts to blur when they move and he notes possible passes, openings, he sees a play before it happens, feigning directional changes, reaching for a pa...when all of a sudden he is tackled to the ground.
—
When he got back to the village, he took out the pair of good luck hockey gloves he always kept with him. They were small, from a particularly successful game as a 10 year old and he always took them with him on special occasions. He tucked the piece of paper and the tiny metal object away inside them, and then sat down on the bed holding the gloves in his hands that were still shaking.