Archive of Our Own

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.

Chapter Text

In a small town taking my hand

From the words into a promised land

How I've wished for a thorn in my heart

And deadly was the rose that I got.

So tonight I'm gonna dance again

To the morning give it all I can

If there's a chance for me and my heart

Then I will give it all that I've got

Kite- Dance Again

Ilya remembers the nights in Moscow underground queerclubs.

The bodies, the beats, the smell of smoke, sweat, perfume, alcohol, the floors that were sticky, the walls that were even stickier, and in the summer the condensation hung and even dripped from the ceilings. He danced there so many nights, together with Sasha and Sveta, and he danced close to everyone who wanted to.

As close as he could. 

He loved it when the dancefloor was so packed that he was pushed into bodies; pushed into sweaty armpits; pushed towards a mouth that came close to his ear and sent shivers down his spine; pushed against soft chests and hips. He moved through magnetic fields of strong, voluptuous men, with hairy chests and arms and red lips; towards fierce and handsome women in suits, t-shirts wet from sweat or short dresses. 

Pushed against hands with long fingernails slowly touching his mouth and then scratching along his throat. Danced with his arms around a beautiful, fat drag queen who called him milyy. It made him smile, laugh, made it possible to take his tired body and let it sweat because of something other than endless laps and drills on the rink.

The clubs in Moscow were famous and infamous. Often in old warehouses or dilapidated buildings, they were created and belonged to those who wished to love. Ilya wanted to love. He didn't know who he loved besides Sveta and these spaces. He loved the freedom the clubs gave, not just him but everyone around him. He loved the feeling of Sasha close, but he didn't love him. Not like that. 

The sex with Sasha afterwards was almost desperate, always incredibly hot. Sometimes in a park or on the cruising circuit close to the toilets around the Red Square, the Lenin hills or by the Gogol statue. It was af if they tried to keep the doors open to breathe more freely, in the same way as the doors to the clubs gave them air. Neither of them looked for anyone else. At least Ilya didn't. Not because there weren't options, but because of the inherent risk it carried. 

The cruising spots were the scariest but also the most exhilarating. Scary not just because of the dangers of being caught by the authorities but also the risk of being bashed by vigilantes. All in all, it would have been more clever to find the darker corners in the club, but for some reason neither he or Sasha did so.

Sometimes Ilya recognised people from clubs out in public in broad daylight. But the unspoken rule everyone followed was always to feign indifference. There were a few exceptions with more outspoken brave folks who were more activists. They dared to be visible. They organised, he knew that much. There were always flyers, reprints of old gay magazines and zines handed out at the clubs, publications that spoke to a future he loved to imagine. 

There were also meeting places not dedicated to dancing or cruising. The line, though, between these spaces was often muddled out of necessity. 

The flyers told him about a history he hadn't heard about anywhere else. The real reasons why Nureyev had defected, about Tchaikovsky (Ilya’s mother had loved Tchaikovsky, and all of a sudden his music became more important), even Ivan the Terrible. One evening, the drag queen Ivanka the Terrible performed a number to a punk version of Tchaikovsky’s Overture to the Nutcracker. 

It was through a reprint of Tema he found Marina Tsvetaeva. Marina had loved Sofia Parnok and wrote to her:

At the skin, my blood calls out to
your heart, my whole sky craves
an island of tenderness.
My rivers tilt towards you.

Ilya sometimes thought about maybe, possibly one day craving like that, turning towards someone with such love. Sveta had teased him about being so romantic. 

Listening to Tchaikovsky was nothing strange, and 100 old year poets and writers carried less risk than bringing home the zines that spoke of them. He knew that was the point of those zines, to connect him and others to something other than silence and invisibility. Ilya found time to read but it was not often. It felt as if he was connected to his mother when he did. Like the words could have been uttered by her voice. The fear that he would lose the memory of what her voice sounded like was always present. Perhaps the queer poets could help him remember. 

Ilya wasn't sure his mother would have liked him going to the clubs. He knew she wanted him to get respite from the confines and open hostility of his father and brother, but perhaps not in a place where it would have been possible to kiss men. Sveta always hollered with joy when it was time to go out, and carefully managed and planned out their precious evenings. 

They had been sneaking out already when they were around fifteen the three of them. Getting fake IDs was not hard. The clubs were safer than anywhere else in Moscow. That included Ilya’s home, and the ice rink he spent more time at than in his home. They could all act as beards at different times if there was a need. Much safer for all of them to walk home, Sasha or Ilya could hang on the arm of Sveta. Sometimes Ilya, drunk and exuberant out of his mind, even acted as the straight man who walked the girl Sveta had picked up. He loved seeing her flushed, knew she thought about pressing kissies into soft, wet thighs. 

Hardly anyone walked home from the clubs alone, the risk of gay bashing was still too present. It was either that or calling queer taxis that were run by volunteers, often driven by kind parents who wanted their own kids and the kids of others to avoid being victims of gay bashing. A risk that was always, always present. It was a strange night if there wasn't any talk of another bashing, or Ilya didn’t see a black eye or busted lip.

Ilya once pulled a drunk, disgusting man off a lesbian couple walking home. Ilya had seen them dancing all night, and through a haze of coke and cigarettes outside of the club he noticed someone catching up to them and harassing the femme of the pair. The butch had stepped in between, but lost their balance as they were shoved to the ground and they were soon covered in fists and kicks. 

Ilya was the only one who intervened, first tackling him at full speed with a shoulder, and then Ilya punched the man over and over, channeling the worst enforcers of his hockey team. The fists of the vile creature managed to give Ilya a split lip, before the fierce femme hauled out a flickknife and moved in between Ilya and her partner. The man took off running very unsteadily, while spitting the most pathetic insults. One femme with a knife, a hockey player with fists, and a butch had stood their ground.

When they got back into the club, someone called the queer taxi service. Ilya joined the couple in the car, leaving them at an address, and eventually making sure they got through the door properly. The driver made small talk on their way back home to Ilya’s. She was an older woman, who said that she regularly picked up queers scared of taking a regular cab. Ilya saved her number in his phone, saving it as 'Customer Service'

When he came home and his father looked at his knuckles and his busted lip the next morning he just said practice had been rough. "I fucking hope that you learn to hit harder and duck better." 

A few weeks later, when he was out again to the same club, the couple recognised him. They sat down in a quiet corner and compared the healing of their battle scars, and then they introduced themselves to him as Lilya and Yanna. When he in turn introduced himself by name, they first looked at him with skepticism, then laughed and bought him a bottle of vodka. They shared half of it with him, then left for the dancefloor where they kissed and danced all night. There and then Ilya had, in the din of the club, felt such peace and overwhelming joy. Feelings that he usually found were hard to latch on, feelings that often felt slippery and nonsensical, or that he was just completely alienated from.

The hockey rink was about obligation and a means to an end. But the clubs were about momentary breaths of freedom in the present, and helped him to dream of something else in the future. It fuelled him more than anything. He knew there was another future and knew he could build it, somewhere. Somehow.

That was what Ilya had, for a few summer months each year in his teens, before it became clear that the wider world outside of Russia started to materialise and the inner workings of even the moscovite queer scene started to change. He had already been scouted, chosen for national teams, and then international junior teams, raised to the skies as the new young hockey god, expected to hold up the world like Atlas, and then heading to the international prospect cup as team captain to hold up the glory of Mother Russia.

It was also there that he first met the boy with the freckles that tried to tell him where he could smoke.

Returning home from that first trip to Canada, he pulled away more and more from the clubs. He was old enough that it became harder to blame even youthful stupidity if he got caught. The oh so casual violence ever-present from people on the street was just getting more prevalent. Politicians adding fire to vast oilfields of hatred. It didn't happen over just a day, but Ilya felt it even before leaving for Canada the first time. Like an ever-tightening, slow, inevitable lockjaw closing up. Every single summer he was back home, those years after the draft, he felt the grip tightening. 

The mouths and motivations of the hatefuls who were beating his friends were fed by politicians and orthodox christianity. Moscow was portrayed as a den filled with degenerates. The authorities raised more and more possibilities to curb the "degenerate western imperialism" that had started exposing children to "perversion" and "corruption" of Russian society.

It became impossible to ignore photos of gay men being abducted, humiliated, abused and tortured by men who claimed that they had been hit on by the victims or used entrapment. Impossible to ignore the stories of 'corrective' rape. Even the outside world saw it and reacted. Before Ilya had moved abroad, there had already been talk about who could afford to move away, and who had already gone. He came back to Russia after the first prospect cup hearing of a queer journalist who had been outed in public media and had left Moscow to go west.

He had watched V for Vendetta on the flight back to Russia after the prospect cup, where he had first seen Hollander's freckles. Watching the movie, he felt a stone in his mouth that travelled down his throat and into his gut where it settled. The first part of the movie with a dismantling of a democratic society was not just familiar, but like a blueprint of his Russia. The second part, of the rise and resistance, he couldn't see even as a possibility. The stone only grew in size over the years when law after law was drafted, debated and then mobilised against... him. Against Sveta, Sasha, Lilya and Yanna, against Ivanka the Terrible, against all of them. For three years I had roses and apologised to no one — a quote from the movie he often thought about, those first years in Boston when he was at his loneliest. That was what the clubs were: roses and no apologies.

Ilya was oftentimes thinking of possibilities to find those spaces again, even if it would take time. Time and another life elsewhere. Being able to once again meet the drag queens, the drag kings, the butches and the femmes; more men, and women, who didn't expect him to be the kind of man he didn't want to be. 

The clubs kept open, at least for a while. Ilya’s last visit to the queer club 7FreeDays in Moscow was the summer of 2012 with Sveta. Ilya quietly said his goodbyes to more nights out as they strolled back home over the Red Square, while the early morning light slowly followed in their footsteps. Neither he nor Sveta said a single word on their way home. In October the same year, there were reports of violent attacks against the same club, that had left attendees in the hospital. The police took over half an hour to arrive at the scene. The attackers had weapons and screamed:

“You wanted a pogrom? You wanted a fight? You got it!”while kicking people in the head.

Run boy run. This world is not made for you

Run boy run. They're trying to catch you

Run boy run. Running is a victory

Run boy run. Beauty lays behind the hills

Run boy run. The sun will be guiding you

Run boy run. They're dying to stop you

Run boy run. This race is a prophecy

Tomorrow is another day

And you won't have to hide away

But for now it's time to run, it's time to run

Woodkid- Run Boy Run

Chapter Text

Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind...
The goal; ... place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.

The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.

The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Olympic Charter shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status....
The Olympic Charter- International Olympic Committee

Rules of Conduct for Straight People
Keep your displays of affection (kissing, handholding, embracing) to a minimum. Your sexuality is unwanted and offensive to many here.
If you must slow dance, be an inconspicuous as possible...
Do not flaunt your heterosexuality. Be discreet. Risk being mistaken for a lezzie or a homo.
If you feel these rules are unfair, go fight homophobia in straight clubs, or Go Fuck Yourself.
Queer Nation Manifest from ACT UP in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990

4 days before travelling to Sochi. 

It was the days before takeoff. 

Going to the bloody Olympics.

Finally. 

Looking around in the auditorium, Shane felt a relief that this was the final preparation briefing. There had been many of these and most of them could have been an email. The information had just kept coming, layers upon layers of logistics, rules and regulations.

He just wanted to skate. Eat something decent. Repack his bag for the third time. Try to not think about the kiss in the stairwell from far too long ago. 

Or perhaps actually, thinking about it, have a quick jerk off while thinking about Ilya filling his ass until he screamed, and then Ilya freshly showered —resting on his shoulder.

During the Olympcs, they wouldn't talk, they had agreed to that, but Shane could still go see his games, surely? He didn't need to talk to him, just... watch him play. If nothing else, because Shane always played better simply having watched Ilya. He wouldn't want anything else with Ilya during the games, that would be ridiculous. 

Now thinking about the short conversation in the stairs That Night, after Ilya had fucked his ass for the first time, it had all been very unclear in the post-fuck haze on what had been agreed upon.  

The months leading up to the Olympic games had been gruesome in their glory. No space for texting or sexting. Barely even any energy to think. 

Except for That Night. He had thought about it. A lot. The rest was just: eat (very specific things), train, rinse, sleep, repeat. lya had gone completely silent. Which made sense. Ilya was quiet so Shane could be quiet too.

"Okay, so now everyone knows about access points, accreditation processes, how to get in and out of the village and the transport schedules so no one gets lost," the speaker said, walking up to a table and holding up a brightly coloured map. 

"We do, despite every effort, still have athletes getting lost every single Olympic game. If you are the first one it will be a badge of honor." A few tired chuckles were heard in the crowd.  

"The details specific to each of you are outlined in your information kits. You will also find laminated cheat sheets with key contacts, venue codes, and transport schedules. These will fit into your accreditation lanyard, which you must keep on yourself at all times. The information can also be downloaded from the web in case one of you does loose it. Finally, before we head off to win some medals, this next part I hope won't come off as condescending —we all know about the Olympic spirit and are all grown adults." 

Shane had no doubt it would be condescending. 

"The guidelines on conduct and sportsmanship are there to protect you and your fellow athletes- the Olympic spirit and so on. We do however need to address the current context of these Games. Specifically, we are asking you to be mindful of potential political sensitivities."

"I really do wonder what those would be" Joe muttered under his breath. He sighed and leaned in towards Shane.
"My partner is terrified of me going," he whispered, "competing there. I've told them it will be fine. Sometimes I'm not sure I believe it myself. I am basically pissing myself every time I think about landing a triple axel in a country where I am not supposed to exist. Then in the next moment, it's the only thing I want to do: go and compete. Show the fucking assholes. " 

Him and Joe hadn’t kept in touch much since sharing ice rink time together in their early teens, before they had drifted apart into their respective specialities. They had reconnected during the preparation briefings.

"Now, these guidelines are for your safety. Alongside them, you'll find protocols for any problems or incidents that may arise. Who to contact, where to go, and what to do" the speaker continued. 

"Are we going to a warzone?!" A freestyle who sat right in front of the podium laughed loudly at his own joke. It was followed by a collective sigh. The room was too small for this many egos.

"No, we are just continuing the time honored tradition of hosting the Olympic in questionable so-called democracies," Leah whispered. She was sitting one row down from Shane, right in front of him beside her wife Adrienne. 

Shane knew them as incredible hockey players. A week ago, he had done drills a late evening, the rink completely empty until Leah stepped on the ice. They ended up doing their speed drills together, just for fun. She had nearly taken his head off with one of her turns. 

He had asked if he could film a couple of her drills because there was something there that piqued his interest. Later while reviewing the footage, he'd noticed something different in her edges and the way she moved on the ice. It was something about the angle of her blades and her shifting her center of gravity slightly differently than he had seen before. Small details that resulted in her being everywhere and nowhere at once. 

Shane knew his stickhandling was better, his read on the ice was better and that most people thought of him as being the fastest in MHL; but how she reacted and worked with her speed was something he wanted to understand. Because Shane was nothing but not detail orientated. 

He had been distracted this whole hour. Briefings were usually his thing. Absorb everything, take notice of rules and conditions, make conscious decisions based upon information available. That’s how he won. How he would win this time again. 

Another voice had cut through the room, bringing him back. 

"I gotta ask, and you all probably know why I am asking".

"Go ahead, Riel" 

Jamie Riel- the speedskater that had just come out as lesbian the previous autumn.
"The U.S State Department issued warnings for Americans travelling to Sochi."
Her voice was steady and sharp. "The warning specifically references the Russian 'propaganda' law, which we all can all know is a hateful, homophobic bill that is supposedly going to protect children from the gays." 

The room was completely silent. 

"The law is incredibly vague. It applies to foreigners and athletes. It can result in fines, detention, and deportation. What is Canada’s position? What support are we being given? What should we realistically expect? Do you have legal teams prepared? Do they understand the law? Does that support extend to our partners? Our families? I’ve asked these questions privately and I wish I had some more clear answers before travelling and representing Canada."

The officials at the front had shifted on their feet, looking uncomfortable. 

"Well," one of them began, "it has been clarified that the law pertains to propaganda, not to LGBTQ individuals per se..."

"That's not good enough, we can't know who will be targeted," Jamie continued, "can you actually help us? We are scared. We'll be professional, we always are. However, fear doesn't make us better athletes. Will a partner be propaganda? Can she congratulate me if I win? Are we being monitored? Should we bring burner phones?"

Some rows of athletes seemed to be getting uncomfortable from the discussion, twisting in their chairs or even sighing loudly. Some Shane knew personally, including JJ. 

His stomach turned. He'd been so locked in that he'd barely let himself think about any of this. A burner phone? Not in his wildest fantasies he had considered this. Maybe he should. Move the messages from 'Lily' that mattered, and save them on the cloud. Delete his browser history. Between the lines in the messages  it wasn't that hard to notice 'Jane' and 'Lily' definitely weren't two women. If someone looked closely enough, they could connect the dots and see what neither Shane or Ilya wanted to be seen.

The controversies around the Sochi games and the hate against LGBTQ people in Russia had been everywhere. Sponsors making statements, pressure on and from athletes, organisations speaking up. Frustrations amongst other athletes who just wanted the game to 'not be about politics'.

Shane had even overheard it debated in the Metros' locker room. Pretending to very thoroughly packing his bag, the discussion between his teammates had been shrugged off with a very simple solution: Just don't kiss.  Surely it wasn't that hard to avoid. Shane had accepted it. Of course he could avoid kissing. He could avoid rainbow symbols and kisses, he wasn't doing any of that anyway. It didn't even have anything to do with him. 

He would be fine. 

"We will do everything in our power to ensure your safety," the official said, carefully. "We also must advise all our LGBTQ athletes to be mindful of public displays of affection, attire and also media such as books or movies on devices that could be seen as promoting, I mean, eh, portraying those identities." 

There was an awkward pause. "This extends to partners and family members". 

That was it. Another version of the Metro locker room solution 

'Just don't kiss'. 

"Oh for fucks sake." Leah muttered, threw up her hands,and stood up and spoke up "A little note to anyone here who is not threatened by this law: if you can, help those of us who are. If it's safe for you. It would be greatly appreciated. Outside of the games when still at home, or just when talking to sponsors. Check yourselves, cut off any locker room talk, and just... help us out a bit." She sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair.

"It is not just about kissing or wearing rainbows. The kiss is about not be able to get the same support from our spouses and family in Sochi. I want you all to think about what the support of your loved ones means to you as an athlete, and what it would mean if you didn't have that. Just... please help us." 

As she sat down, Adrienne put an arm around her, kissed her gently on the cheek and opened her shoulder to let Leah rest her head.  

The room is dead silent. 

"Yes... well of course. Yes. A very good point. Thank you. We can't be activists in Sochi obviously, these games are not political but yes. We support and honor every athlete regardless of gender and sexual orientation". 

Shane found the black box hidden deep inside of him that already contained a number of unmentionable items and impossible actions; and added kissing Ilya during the Olympics to those items. He could block this out too. Easy, because they weren't even talking. 

Besides, he didn't really think he was gay. Ilya was bi, Ilya fucked Shane, Shane just... he didn't know who or what he was. He knew he really loved getting fucked by Ilya, getting Ilya off with his hands or his mouth, loved feeling Ilyas lips around his cock. Perhaps he also loved spending time with him, always feeling like their meetings were far too short and far between. 

He kept thinking about what would happen if neither of them got up immediately to leave after they had sex, as they usually did. If they didn't immediately washed everything away. 

Sweat. Cum. Lube. Spit. 

Erasing and removing all traces of them together. Any proof they had ever met. Removing all traces of Shane being fucked, and cumming together with another man. Traces of having sex with another man showered away so it could be forgotten. He didn't like the feeling of the aftermath of them fucking drying on his skin. Even so, there was something about the messiness. Even the smell. As conflicted as he felt over it, he still wanted Ilya all over him, the idea of something that was Ilya's still lingering on him.

The briefing continued around him, but Shane had to shift in his chair as his semi had grown. Why was the thought of Ilyas cum drying on him so hot, despite it being so wrong? Was it because he wanted to hold on to proof of them, of him and Ilya, or because he wanted there to be no need to wash it away? 

Next to Shane, Joe had stopped listening entirely, headphones in, music leaking out with a steady rhythm. After a moment, the music stopped in favour of silent ringing, and he picked up the call, ignoring annoyed looks from those sitting around him.

"I can't do this anymore" he whispered quietly—his voice sharp and then he hung up immediately. 

Shane exhaled. He just wanted to play hockey, that was it. Even if Ilya would be there, playing for Russia with a stupid bear tattoo across his pec. Shane would play for Canada and they would both be safe. Because Shane wouldn't kiss anyone. Not Ilya, not anyone. They would play hockey, play a good game against each other. In the end, when the final whistle blew, perhaps they'd both stand on the podium. Canada with a gold medal and Russia with a silver. 

Shane wouldn't think about kissing. He wouldn't think about Ilya. Not thinking about anything but the game. No talking to Ilya, like they'd agreed. Or something like that. But definitely no kissing.

 — 

A day later, Shane afforded himself one small personal protest; he transferred the 'Lilys' messages away but didn't delete her number.

Chapter Text

At each of the town gates, there will be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels...

...Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the sidewalls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. 

...the major effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility...

The principle that power should be... that the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.

M. Foucault, Discipline & Punish 

Sochi February 2014

Russia lost against Latvia and were out of the run for a medal in the Olympics. Shane had been analysing game footage thoroughly, even knowing Latvia would not get past Finland and so they weren’t really a threat to Canada. However, he wanted, no needed, to understand the very strange game that had played out. It had almost been a given that Canada would play against Russia. They had, like in any circumstance, spent hours structuring play around what they knew about the players in the Russian team.

The ice cream in his cup had almost melted and he was on his second ginger ale while he took another look at the second period Russia game on his phone. Ilya had looked furious and frustrated. Something clearly had been off. The Russians played like their captain was the enemy, passes not connecting and even visible frustration between teammates. Shane could even see how Ilyas's otherwise precise grip on the stick changed as the game went on, with tension that gradually built throughout the game. 

The most glaring example of something being very wrong was when Ilya had a wide open passage for a goal, calling for the puck, stick down, his right wing clearly saw him but the puck went fast as lightning the other way, and the moment to score was gone. It didn't take an experienced hockey player to see what looked like an imploding team on the ice.
Shane felt a pang of sympathetic stress for Ilya. Not so much for the rest of team Russia. 

The international press analysed Russia’s failure from a hockey perspective. Shane finished watching and realised he had seen it from a personal one: as a team captain, trying to play his best, afterwards having to read headlines like The Russian Catastrophe in newspapers. 

He was so deep in thought that Scott Hunter and Carter Vaughn scared him half senseless by tapping him on the shoulder. 

"Hollander! Want company?"

"Hey Vaughny, Hunter, good to see you both. Yeah, sure, go ahead"

The screech of the chairs being pulled over the floor made Shane shudder. 

"That Russia-Latvia game was a shitshow. Did you understand what happened?" Vaughn licked his ice cream cone as if it was the last one he would ever lick again. 

"I just watched some game play this morning, there was nothing cohesive in the team whatsoever. Yegorov practically tried to skate away from Rozanov at one point."

Hunter nodded. "I actually kinda felt real bad for him in the end. Sure, Rozanov can be a pain in the ass but that so brutal. Thought he had played with these guys before. Have you heard anything from him? 

A small sense of unease trickled down Shane's spine before he answered the question. 

"No, nothing." Shane shrugged his shoulders, looking down into an empty ice cream cup, "Haven't run into him and we don't speak. Obviously." He felt Scott's eyes on him. 

"It'll be strange now, not playing Russia. Remember that gold belongs to us. Perhaps silver for you guys and then there could've been a bronze there somewhere for Russia. Now those predictions are all fucked." Carter was almost at the end of his ice cream cone. "This was fucking good, think it was made of clouds or something weird. I am having another one." 

"Vaughny, it's cloudberries," Scott rolled his eyes. "Can you get me an espresso while you are at it?" He turned to Shane. "God, at this point that man would live on ice cream if he could, I had to tell him that they probably stocked Ben & Jerries in Russia otherwise he would have brought an electric cooler with him on the flight." 

Shane couldn't help but smile. "Is that a new thing? I've not seen him doing that before any other game."

"Yeah, we had a great game a few months ago, he had two spectacular assists and then slammed the puck right over the shoulder of the Toronto goalie. They didn't even see it coming."

"I saw that," Shane chuckled. "A great game, but what the fuck does ice cream have to do with it?"

"He ate 'the best sundae ever' the night before. I think he is nervous about the games.
I'm basically the same, skating with banana patterned socks because they have... you know...I play better with them." 

Scott looked down, jaw tense, swallowed and picked up a napkin. He wiped the already clean table with it. Shane didn't have time to ask 'why bananas' before he was asked if he had any of those superstitions or rituals.

"Nah, I just, you know," he shrugged his shoulders, "prepare properly, watch game footage, repack the bag so it is all in the right place and perhaps re-tape my stick a few times. I don't think it is superstition though, I just like knowing where everything is"

He didn't mention the keychain he always carried with him but showed to no one. It was a keychain with two small hockeygloves that could fit on fingertips. It was gifted to him by his mother after they had attended a Centaurs game. Two days after Shane had won a particularly fun game on a lake close to his parents cottage. He always brought them to bigger competitions and they always stayed in his bag. 

Scott rolls his eyes, trying to hide a smile, now ripping the napkin into tiny shreds. 
"Yeah, sure, those are not rituals." 

An espresso and a yellow orange ice-cream shows up, with a Carter looking absolutely elated.
"I just know we are going to win gold, this ice cream is perfect"

Shane and Scott looked at each other, then at him, and raised their eyebrows

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, I will do anything I can to win this. None of you can say differentd. Either way, Hollander, are you up to anything this evening? Me and Hunter were talking about going to the men's figureskating final. Wanna come with?"

Shane thought for a moment about Joe in the auditorium during the briefing. 

"Yeah, let's do it. An old friend of mine is going to skate. I was planning on going anyway to support him."

Joe had been doing solid programs all through the qualifying seasons and the Olympics. He was believed to end up at least in the top five. He was also staying three doors down in the same corridor as Shane and was clearly very nervous. Shane had noticed he had taken all the practice slots on the ice that were available and spent more time in the gym working on choreo than any other skaters. He also didn't speak to anyone, not even Shane. Through the paper thin walls Shane had heard animated discussions and loud, unintelligible phone calls. 

A few moments later, Jamie Riel, Adrienne Riley and Leah Campbell walked into the cafe. Shane invited them to the table that was now quickly filling up with ice cream cups,
Scott's pile of shredded paper napkins, cups with steaming hot coffee, hot chocolate and massive smoothie bowls. 

"Hey Hollander, how's that move I showed you turning out, have you managed to clean up those dirty edges yet?" Leah looked pleased with herself while looking at Shane over the rim of a coffee cup. 

Scott and Carter looked puzzled. 

"Hey, my edges weren't that dirty! Now they are even more polished. Maybe you just helped us to win a gold, Campbell. I'm also pretty sure you guys are gonna win this year as well."

Adrienne butts into the conversation. "Well, yeah, we'll win gold and you silver. That is what mostly happens when the men's hockey is playing and we play the real deal. You know it is called hockey and then men's hockey right?"

"Rude! We're supposed to support each other, Canadian to Canadian." Shane quipped. 

"That's what I was doing, making you skate even faster!" Leah giggled and took another zip of coffee. 

Carter leaned in towards the women on the other side of the table. 

"I just think the US is going to beat all of you, I'm having the best ice cream so I know". 

"Yeah, I agree, Vaughny's ice cream is gonna help us all the way, you Canadians won't know what hit you," Scott said, rubbing his neck "Fuck I'm stiff, those god damn beds will be the death of me. 

"Old man, how do you think you're going to keep up with us if your body can't even adjust and adapt to cardboard beds?" Shane felt very, very pleased with his chirp. Like he had just waited for an opening. 

Even Carter had to bite his lip in order to not laugh at his own captain, but neither Jamie, Adrienne or Leah had the same concern. 

"No, not that again," Scott threw his hands up. "We've already been through this once.
It's like everyone, thanks to fucking Rozanov, has decided to pile on the 'Hunter is ancient' thing. Hollander, if I say something about you sounding like Rozanov, will you drop gloves again? 

"Nah, I'm good, it's all out of my system." 

"Speaking of our Russian Casanova: that game yesterday. What the fuck happened? I wanted a good final and now neither of you get to play Russia. It's frankly boring." Jamie sighed and then stuffed a big piece of blueberry muffin in her mouth. 

Shane thought it looked fucking delicious but decided the ice cream was enough of a deviation from his meal-plan, then mused on the fact that everything seemed to lead back to Ilya. Exactly everything. Inescapeable. 

"Do you actually care about hockey, Riel?! As I live and breathe?!" 

"Yeah, Vaughny, if you'd pay attention, you'd notice I spend a lot of time on the ice and I love spending time with my favorite lesb...," her voice immediately dropped "my favorite friends and talk shit about you boys." 

The banter almost immediately died out. Adrienne and Leah who sat next to each other inched themselves slightly further apart. Jamie exhaled loudly and threw a crumpled up napkin onto  Hunter's pile of shredded ones.

The silence was awkward but no one knew where to go from there. Scott looked around, decided to redirect the conversation. It became clear that the whole group were interested in going to the figureskating that evening, so they decided when and where they would meet up and go there together. 

As they parted ways Scott said with a thoughtful expression, "You guys, I don't think we spend enough time with other female hockey players". 

"Yeah, if nothing else because they are fucking hot" Carter piped up.

"Oh shut it. Don't talk about them like that. Both Campbell and Riley have won more gold than us for years and none of them would ever be interested in you anyway, you absolute tool." Scott had snapped, leaving Carter looking like he wanted to eat his words. 

"Oh fuck I forgot she's g..." and then lowered his voice not saying the rest of the word.

Shane immediately thought about Ilya again. At this point, it felt as if he was a part of a Pavolovian experiment. Those words, like lesbian, bisexual or gay, became bells that invoked Ilya. Forbidden words that had become more potent, lingering in the air. 

No one had said it was not allowed to use those words really, but not knowing what could be said was more threatening. At least at home, back in Canada they could be spoken freely, although he had no doubt it was used as a slur in every single male locker room, regardless if it was in Canada or Russia. 

This mad law about gay propaganda did something to him that he had not expected. He felt as if he was looking at himself from the outside even more than he was usually, because now it didn't matter who was guarding their words. Suddenly everyone was. Regardless if they were gay or straight. 

Later that day

They all arrived early in the evening to the rink, sitting down with buckets of popcorn and beer and talking amongst themselves. It was Carter who was the gossip, who knew who had hooked up with whom and also where the best food was found, including, of course, the best ice cream. 

The whole group enjoyed watching the figure skating and analysing some of the movements like the absolute ice nerds they were. They laughed at the thought of Scott doing jumps, with obvious jokes about old bones shattering at the attempts. Everyone agreed that their goalies would do a great job with some of the choreography given their abilities to do splits and artfully drape themselves over the ice. 

Shane found his mind constantly wandering. As he looked around he saw a figure standing all the way up at the top by the rafter. He knew who it was. Of course he did. And of course he felt the pull. 

Shane continued thinking about the strangeness of it all. The things he felt, the stuff that happened with Ilya, whatever it was, had somehow taken on another dimension that felt too amorphous and unclear to grasp. The pressure wasn't about rivalry or the two of them staying out of sight. It was something else. An unease beyond the two of them. 

Was Ilya ok? Did his messy self get into trouble that could lead to something worse than embarrassing headlines? Shane had seen another English speaking Russian newspaper with the headline "Strong Russian Rozanov turned into weak American". If that was what the English prints of Russian news said, he couldn't even imagine what the rest of the Russian press printed.

The worry kept building in him, together with a frustration fuelled by feeling so stuck in his thoughts. He hadn't received an answer to his text to Ilya asking if he was okay. 

He knew that only a few words, a small reassurance from Ilya would ease it all, like a release of the valve of a pressure cooker. 

That was when he stood up. There was plenty of time before Joe would be on the ice. He would make it back in time. Shane blamed the need for a bathroom break, took an order for more popcorn, a few beers and two hotdogs. He denied Carter's ice cream request because there was no way he could carry it all. 

As he took the steps up to the corridors two at the time, his mind kept spinning. 

Shane wanted... he wanted to care. He truly did care about Ilya who had rested his head on his shoulder a few months ago right after he had fucked Shanes ass for the first time. Ilya had been freshly showered, all of his muscles relaxed and with a soft expression on his face he gazed up at Shane. 

To see Ilya that soft, to be that soft together with Ilya was everything to Shane and he wanted to be the person who gave him that. Wanted desperately to be seen by Ilya as someone who could give him that. He wanted to be the person capable of removing some of the sting Ilya must have felt after a catastrophic game of hockey. Shane wanted to know if he was safe, to ease his mind himself and perhaps say something so Ilya knew he wasn't alone. 

Something else was tangled inside that care. Something harder to examine or even admit.
Being around Ilya unsettled him, he already knew that. Shane wanted so much. 

Wanted to be seen. 

Ilya had seen more of him, of who he was, than anyone ever had. 

He'd seen him before rookie season, all the way through the draft, the photoshoot, the showers and the first hotel room. Ilya's gaze had been there all along and Shane had never been so bare.
He longed for that feeling so much it hurt. 

Then, the absolute most uncomfortable: what Ilya possibly meant for him, and how that reflected back on Shane himself. Ilya was something much more than a rival on the ice, more than a comparison of skill and strength. He was something different and that made Shane different too.

A difference that hinged not just on Ilya's existence, but who Shane was, as his own person.
That the words that were so dangerous to speak, were perhaps words that could describe him. Who Shane actually was, his desires and his longings. As his own person. 

What the possibility of him not being straight — the only apt description he had at this point — would mean. For his future, his hockey career, who he would be in the eyes of the public.
How he knew himself. And he didn't want to find out. He didn't want to be suspected to be that thing he wasn't or didn't want to be. Because what would be left of him then?
Would he simply be that cocksucker in the locker room and nothing else? 

Being near Ilya did something to him; gave him a sense of focus, grounding him, he could even feel his confidence growing. These were some of the parts of the equation that drove him here, in real time towards Ilya. Not just care, even if he thought it was. Because he wanted, no needed, something more from Ilya in return. Validation, comfort, a safe haven. 

They had agreed to not speak or see each other during the Olympics. Still, Shane was looking for a relief of the tight anxiety that had curled inside him. In the end Shane couldn't or perhaps didn't listen to the little voices in the back of his mind that he should avoid approaching Ilya that evening. Because he thought he could care and support Ilya in a way that he needed.
Ilya would understand that Shane cared. And so, Shane walked up towards the rafters where Ilya stood. Because he cared. 

Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way
Anything that may desert you
So it cannot hurt you
You only have to look behind you
At who's underlined you
Destroy everything you touch today
Destroy me this way

Ladytron- Destroy everything you touch 

Ilya knew he was not alone in more than one way. He knew it so very well. The music was not booming through a speaker hanging right above him, even if all of the others were. 

Ilya watched a figure skater on the ice rink. The jumbotron shows the same skater but closer. It's like looking at two versions of the same person with a slight delay in every movement of the skater. Like the cat from The Matrix, but on ice-skates. 

Ilya didn't really care at all. He had seen skaters on ice and skaters on jumbotrons before.
The speaker wasn't speaking and he was pretty sure why that was. It didn't matter anyway.
He wasn't planning to say a single word that evening, not even answering his phone that had been exploding with messages from god knows how many people. 

When he had arrived in Sochi he had tried a new strategy; no distractions before the game. His phone stayed mostly on silent, he didn't even stay in the Olympic village. No girls, obviously, no Sasha or Shane, almost no alcohol, besides vodka as a nightcap, and a cigarette before bed. Sveta was granted access a few times, he needed to hear her voice. 

Ilya should have felt great. He wasn't and his new strategy didn't work in the end. This year his return to Russia had felt different again. He felt it immediately when he stepped out of the aeroplane. It felt more suffocating than ever before. Not only the pressure from the competition but also the realisation that something was even more tense now, was more claustrophobic.  

In the months leading up to the Olympics he had followed the news more closely and it was not just about the new law. It was the reversal of something his mother had spoken about when he was very young. She had always been skittish and nervous and it was only outdoors that she moved and spoke as if she was completely free. Like when she moved on the ice, strong, free and graceful. 

That was why he had gone to the rink that evening, to see bodies flying over the ice; strong, free and graceful. He never watched figure skating otherwise, but he needed the escape with less people and not being spoken to. He couldn't say that there were fewer eyes on him here, or that no-one was listening because he wasn't that foolish, but at least he could hide a bit and just listen to the sound of ice beneath blades. 

Touching the cross in the chain on his chest, he thought about how his mother had internalised years of surveillance, repression and distrust. The glasnost had done its work so well that Ilya and his generation experienced none of what the brutal years of the Soviet Union had actually meant. 

That didn't mean it wasn't still present in the bodies and imagination of people around him or that it was missing from the society in the country of his home.  

Internalised checks and balances that lived in the bodies of older generations. Passed down in distorted memories to younger generations. It was first many years after she died that he understood her anxieties that weren't just personal and private. They were built into a society which tried to heal through forgetting, moving forward. Years of repression, surveillance and distrust had made a home into the society his mother grew up in, into his mother and years later, into himself.  

Ilya had himself started to understand those things when they slowly became more prevalent in his own life. People started leaving Russia for being queer already before he had been drafted to the MLH, but he knew queer exile had grown exponentially since the new propaganda law.
A return to more distrust, to more restriction and more suffocation. 

Athletes travelling to Sochi to compete, queers leaving Russia to find lives free from persecution. 

If he was  in Moscow right now, he wouldn't visit any of the places he longed for the most. Except his mothers grave. That was one place of peace he still knew in Russia, the rest felt too dangerous, even the places he had loved before. Fear could taint exactly everything and sometimes it felt as if Ilya's fears destroyed everything he touched.  

He felt like the knowledge of what surveillance could mean had been inherited from his darling mother. As if it was an inescapable fact that had built a nest inside of him, that he just had to accept and adjust to. 

Ilya was pretty sure about what is going to come in the future and it did not feel bright. It felt like Russia was the Ouroboros; and doomed to forever move through endless cycles of eating its own tail.

When Ilya arrived in Russia a few weeks prior, his brother worked longer hours than usual which in one way was a relief.  On the other hand, Alexei had proudly exclaimed to his father that the Olympics had brought a larger workload and new assignments. What those were he did not divulge. 

Ilya had been busy trying to wrangle the russian team together as their captain and that was hard enough even without all of the tension in his family. For some reason, his teammates had harboured resentment. The team and its members had not made sense. He wasn't playing like he was when he left Russia all those years ago. He played like he had learned hockey in Russia and then learnt more in the US, distinctly different in style and precision now several years later. Definitely stronger and faster, also more calculated rather than random bursts of power all over the ice like in his late teens. Still explosive, never not on fire, but more tempered. 

The thoughts returned to Shane. Shane in his Mr. Landlord fuck-pad that last autumn. Ilya resting on his shoulder after the shower. How easy it was to rest there and then how easy it was to kiss Shane so very softly. How easy and perfect it had been standing there in the staircase.
Leaning over Shane, there had been a thought in the back of Ilya's mind; something about wanting to stay there. In the postfuck bliss kiss and not get back into the cab. 

It hadn't felt like that with anyone before. Perhaps with Sveta. Definitely not with Sasha. With Sasha there was the rush of getting caught, obviously, but it was also not as easy as he had told himself and the few others who knew. 

If the experiences with most straight girls (and Sasha) had been exclamation marks and full stops, the grammar of him and Shane were filled with question marks and dot dot dot. Shane was also capital letters and semicolons. He was paragraphs and jumbled sentences in languages with strange, unknown grammatical rules. 

That kiss in the staircase with Shane had contained tenderness and aching; longing for not having to... not having to what? Hide? Fuck fuck fuck. Hiding was the only thing he could do here. Even thinking about hiding came with a danger that no-one who didn't live in it could understand. 

Go into the red closet. Close the door. Stay there. Shut up, look down, don't give away the game. No dance, no kiss, no gentle touch and no shoulder to rest upon.

He knew if he saw Shane, he would not be able to avoid looking up. He would not be able to shut up. Ilya had only seen him once here in Sochi. Seen him walking towards the stadium several hours before the game against Russia. Why he went in that direction so early, he did not know. It made his head spin. They had said... what did they really say? That they would not see each other at all? Not talk? What was said there, in the postfuck haze in the stairwell? If he was unsure, he was convinced that Shane was as well. 

He couldn't do any of that which he wanted to with Shane. He knew he couldn't and he knew why. Shane perhaps didn't know the full extent of it, was in all likelihood absolutely oblivious in comparison. A kind of innocence Ilya would never know. That oblivion made Ilya almost angry, he wished he had even a morsel of it for himself. Ilya knew what was at stake and the knowledge alone felt like it was killing him.

As long as we are both safe it is ok. As long as I am careful and don't do anything stupid. As long as I deny myself any touch I will succeed in not destroying us. 

He tried to convince himself, knowing it was fruitless. He never felt safe travelling back to Russia these days. Not only just because of the humiliation and verbal abuse by his father and brother but also of the memories of the physical abuse and the knowledge that his niece was still stuck in the middle. 

More than that, Ilya knew far too much about what it meant to not just love women in Russia. To be queer. Shane didn't really. He could try to imagine, but from his perspective, it was more about losing a career as a celebrated hockey player rather than state sanctioned violence.

Every single day in Russia he guarded everything about himself. How he dressed, how he spoke. He only went to the gym if no one else was there. He didn't do his evening or night time runs in the park anymore. 

The cruising was gone now from his local park next to his childhood home.
First the entrapment which resulted in nighttime raids where groups of men were escorted out and charged with indecency. Their faces often ended up on the front pages in newspapers.
Then all of the greenery in the parks had been cut down so no one could hide and fuck there. 

He had left Russia before that happened, but figured it out quickly when he came back from his first season in Boston and went for his usual run. The park was cut bare, the lush bushes and the tall grass gone, instead the shrubbery was cut into neat squares. Very orderly. Very straight. 

His brother loved to talk about it — had apparently been in on the operations. He spoke about it with a glare that felt like needles on Ilya. Those faggots had been purged. 

Зачищены.
Zachischeny

As always though, his idiot brother had missed out that there were a lot more of those cruising circuits remaining throughout Moscow. Life finds a way, Ilya thought to himself. Jeff Goldblum 

His phone was burning in his pocket and he felt like it was about to explode from the humiliation and contempt that moved through it. So many messages. So many eyes on him.
In Russia he couldn't ignore comments as he did when everyone around him was speaking English. The Russian language, its very sounds break through his armour every single time. It is like a reflex, his brain always picking it up. 

Ilya knew Shane was there before he saw him. Feels he is there. He tried to control his breathing as he knows it is Shane’s steps moving slowly towards him, even as Ilya has his back towards whereever the steps were coming from. 

Fuck Shane, don't do this. Please, I don't know how to save myself, please, I am so scared. I know you care, I just can't care more than I already do, I just care that you are safe but I don't think I can even keep myself safe. 

"Hi"

Ilya whipped his body around. Out of pure reflex he moved away from Shane, taking a few steps back, towards a loud vent, he looked at the windows above the vent, returned to looking into Shane’s eyes, then away again, pretty sure the old surveillance camera was not turned off.
And he gets so angry, he hated that Shane is here, no he loves it but he hates that Shane... Let the vent be loud enough. Please let the vent be loud enough.

Afterwards;

Ilya’s words and his response to the attempts of Shane wanting to care are the most vile words he has ever spoken. Never has he ever been so cruel. He hears himself on repeat and he still hoped that loud vent had drowned out anything. That he had moved far enough away from Shane. He knew every step back he would take, Shane would follow, like they were always pulled towards each other. And perhaps the loud vent had been enough.  

Maybe there wasn't anything there, maybe the window was just a window, maybe the quiet speaker was just broken, maybe nothing and no one saw them through the lens of the surveillance camera.  

That is not how risk assessment works though. It also meant the ugliest of words to Shane. The ugly words he uttered as a response to Shane’s care fell out of his mouth and felt like black, burning tar filling up his mouth, throat, like it ran down his chest all over his lungs and heart. 

That was the only thing he could do. Be cruel and unloving and push Shane away to protect them both. Be cruel and unloving to protect himself. Making sure not a single step, utterance or loving caress was to be given space. It was about his fear, his fear that became the primary driving force of all of that cruelty. 

And he hated Shane for doing all of that, for Shane being so Shane, so driven by care but also so naive and... his throat closed up when he realised- perhaps even selfcentered. Ilya had perhaps already seen it before, that strong need for being validated, being told he was good enough.
Like the whole rooftop thing after the rookie awards. He had rarely been mad at Shane. That time at the rooftop perhaps frustrated but Shane didn't scare him then, not like he just did. 

Shane; blind to the boundaries or capacities of others.  So pulled into his own anxious world and in a desperate need to be told he was good enough. Ilya realised that was basically himself as well, a reflection of who they were on their own and when they were...together. Ilya could also be being selfish and tonight he had been downright cruel, but Ilya also realised the actual danger it would have been and Shane simply had not realised.

Ilya was famous, so that might save him if anything came out. Other famous people though had not been so lucky, the fame was not a solid shield and he could still fall from grace. His fame could be propaganda for Russia, but it could also be a leverage against him. Instead, the fame could be used as an argument that this was not a private matter, and the fame turned into infamy when they were famous was to be said as someone who promoted the disgusting queer propaganda. 

It was never about protecting children, it was about existence. Simply being successful or even a happy queer would be enough to be considered propaganda. God forbid any child would believe that joy or freedom would be in the hands of a fucking bisexual hockeyplayer. 

Turning into fucking faggot propaganda that would put children in harms way.

Ilya wanted to scream at Shane. Scream that he was propaganda, that Shane must know what that meant, that it would be impossible to have missed it in the months leading up to the games. That Shane had the capacity to become excellent propaganda himself.

That after the shitshow of the game against Latvia Ilya was really shitty propaganda that could easily slip further from grace; from a national treasure to a national danger. 

That, despite Ilya's bravado in North America, he felt disgusted by himself, that orthodoxy and surveillance had found its way into his skin as well, like threads weaving through his mind, his heart, his hands, his legs and around his throat. That every single time Shane touched his body, some of those threads were carefully teased out and annihilated. He didn't say it. Because it would have been said in all the wrong languages and far too loud and it would have been too easily heard.

And he still needed to wear a tuxedo. He needed to drag his bisexual, scared, numb ass to his father and meet all of the right people. And Ilya would do it, like he had done so many times before while dissociating. And Ilya would listen to all of the ways in which he was a failure. And Ilya would feel the eyes on him from his brother. His eyes that told him he was a fucking homo, a faggot. Alexei couldn't even get that right. He was a bisexual fucking faggot.