Chapter Text
The barbecue was marked in Shane’s calendar.
The physical and digital versions had it recorded like some kind of doomsday. Every time he opened his emails or glanced at the unicorn calendar on his bedroom wall he was struck with immense illogical guilt.
The unicorn looked in judgement down from where she stood in a field of daisies. Shane didn’t realise how much he’d needed a wall calendar until Eleanor had purchased it for a secret santa gag gift. He thought he might as well put it to good use. The unicorn had now been converted into a harbinger of doom. The dreaded day held the words in thick, black marker. A dark omen of sorts.
He knew he was free, he convinced himself that the sadness came from the guilt of the lie, so instead he booked in an extra shift at the practice and told Becca on reception he was ‘just bored.’ It was almost easy to convince himself that the strangely mournful feeling that had collapsed in his chest had gone away, even if he still felt fat and bloated with it.
Becca had called him dearie and had even put on her glasses to look at him better with a surveying glance usually only used on emergency cases.
Shane checks his phone every morning, nearly addicted to the feeling of light metal in his hand. The number, still not added to his contacts, never appears in his notifications. No text, no missed calls. No voice notes with a Russian accent. Nothing. It’s like waiting for a dead dog to come back to life, he knows it can’t happen but still tries to demand it into existence.
The money Rozanov gave him sits in his bedside drawer, the one he never opens right at the bottom. Just knowing it’s there is enough to make him feel nauseous, actually having to look at it would probably make him burn it, which is completely ridiculous and illogical and Shane is neither. The money itself isn’t bad, he knows that he could probably donate it to a charity or something, but it feels bad. It feels dirty.
He tries not to think about the money, or the thick, black ink. He doesn’t think about Rozanov, or Anya.
When a spaniel comes in with a cut cornea he doesn’t think about Anya’s liver spots. When an elderly Eastern European couple comes in with a cat called Lily he doesn’t focus on their accents, the curl of their tongue around each word. He focuses on Lily’s potential urine crystals and then gets to deliver the good news that she’d urinated while in care at the vets. The owners are overjoyed, Lily looks a bit put out by her adventures.
He focuses on the work.
“Holly, are you sure you want to do this? It’s a pretty strange case, it’s at least a page of notes.” She’s watching him with veiled suspicion as he tries to take over the computer.
“You do so many referrals, it’s about time I tried my hand at one.”
“No,” she stuck another piece of pasta into her mouth, “not letting you.”
“What?” He exclaimed, “c’mon, Rose.”
“Nope. It’s my case, my job.” She pulled her phone out of a scrub pocket and popped off the phone case. Handing him ten bucks, she turned back to the screen, “go off to the shops and get yourself something nice.”
He got her the Redbull flavour she loved, the coconut one that was for some reason blue coloured and he got himself a smoothie, a much more comforting pale green. There’s a picture of Rozanov on one of the sports drinks, the drink itself is bright pink and the contrast is so startling Shane almost pulls his phone out to message the man a picture. He quickly leaves the store.
“I said something nice, Holly, Christ." Rose sniped at him as soon as she saw the haul, but she still opened the Redbull can with her teeth and gulped it down, shooting judgemental glares over the top of the can.
“Want some?” She asked with a blue tongue.
Shane shook his head.
The others gave him a wider berth than usual. Something about dealing with the subtle nature of animals everyday meant that the whole practice could tell something was wrong. What's worse is that they had an inkling about how it was wrong.
Nobody mentioned Rozanov, or Anya for that matter. Hockey, never brought up normally, now seemed to be forcibly scrubbed from the air. The nurses let him help them clean more than usual, he helped dilute the F10 solution and used the window scrubber Eleanor found lodged behind the kennels to make all the windows shine. He nearly cried over a PTS.
It was very unprofessional.
Rose takes him clubbing. She and Kiara dance around each other, metaphorically and literally, clad in very little for the cold night. They grind together and rub shoulders with strangers, dragging Shane into the throng. He attempts a little shuffle, and when all else fails he finds Rose dragging him forcibly by the hips in some kind of strange sway that’s completely off beat. Strangers casually bump into him, perhaps his hip or upper arm, and he’s reminded of the fact he never truly got to touch Rozanov. A man with dirty blonde hair and piercing eyes glances at him. Briefly, just for a second. Shane feels like he’s been turned inside out. He wonders if the other dancers can see his intestines strewn out on the floor under the hazy lights.
Rozanov is, unfortunately, still famous. The genre of fame that goes beyond strange energy drinks. His face appears on some stupid advert when Shane’s just trying to buy some new sneakers. He just decides to rebuy his same old Skechers. Sometimes his name appears on the radio, as part of some otherwise boring and insignificant sports section that the hosts seem to find very exciting. He flinches at the sound of it during a lump removal. The dog's heart rate rises as he makes the first incision and he can feel his rising along with it.
A friend from college needs some help with a farm rotation. It'd been a few years but he volunteered to go out with them for the weekend and was shoved back into a world of grime and snorting bulls. Rose comes along too, she airs out her old boiler suit and joins Shane in the mud. They help the farmer coral a bull for treatment. Shane whistles at it through the winding metal maze and Rose claps threateningly in its direction. The bull snorts at them, nearly charging for a minute to where they’re perched on the gate, but Shane flaps his coat and it reels away. The adrenaline made him forget about Rozanov and his stupid spaniel, and made it easier for him to ignore his mother’s messages. It’s hard to think when you’re shoulder deep in a cow.
As he’s coming up to the hypothetical barbeque he realises the other issue. The guilt from the lie is consuming him, the money is still in his possession and beyond all that he knows that he’s the one who fucked up. These thoughts rule his existence like some perverse holy trinity. But, the thought that rules them all: the fact that Rozanov is taking goddamn depression medication, is like the icing on the cake, the cherry on top.
He drafts a message in the notes app. It’s halfway between an apology and a question. The words are formal yet completely contrary, absolutely illogical. Shane is not illogical. He drafts the message again in his notebook, seeing if the rough paper makes a change.
I still have your money, I can give it to my mom so you can get it from her if you prefer?
I’m sorry, Rozanov. You’re not stupid.
I hope you have help, you deserve it.
I’m so sorry, Rozanov.
How often do you talk to my mother? How often is it about me?
Does it hurt when you fall on the ice?
The messages stay firmly lodged in his notebook when they emerge as more of a vomit of his thoughts rather than anything tangible, anything real.
He breaks and googles the man. Well, Rose googles the man and Kiara pretends to clean around them to watch. Shane decides to stay in the room and cuddle with the corgi in for bloods, even though he could leave. Rozanov’s looks impressive on the ice, Shane can begin to understand why he’s worshipped the way he is. Rose, annoyingly, highlights this as well.
“Huh,” she murmurs as they watch a video, “he’s fast.”
Kiara stops ‘mopping’ to lean over her shoulder, one hand resting on Rose’s lower back to keep her steady. Her thumb moves in slow, gentle circles. “Surprising, he’s massive.”
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“Theres a ton of people who hate him,” Rose points out the next day while Shane is trying to insert an ET tube down a retriever’s throat.
“Huh?”
“Rozanov.” Like the name explains everything. Eleanor looks up from where she’s checking the dog’s vitals, the scent of gossip thick on her tongue.
“Okay?” Shane asks as she moves to lean on the table next to him, absent mindedly fiddling with the dog’s paw pads.
“I think it’s ‘cause he’s always boasting at the cameras, hockey bro’s don’t like that apparently.”
“Okay?”
He sees her glare at him out of the corner of his eyes like he’s stupid. She hands him some pre-cut gauze wrap to attach the tubing to the dog's muzzle in a manner that’s worryingly aggressive. Eleanor glances between them both like it’s a tennis match.
“He needs a trim.”
“Who? Rozanov?”
“No, silly. The dog.” She holds up a paw in her palm, “look, too long.”
Shane just sighs and grabs the clippers. “I’ll do it while he’s out.”
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He can’t have Rose doing all the research for him. He understands hockey, to a degree, but it still feels like he’s looking through code as he glances through hockey forums and game logs. The videos are interesting as well, especially the ones where Rozanov appears damp and shirtless, boastful with his words and entirely sexy in the way he winks into the camera.
In 2017 he had a dip, for a normal player it would be business as usual, for Rozanov it prompted hours, actual hours, of analysis. Podcasters, sports commentators, randoms online all piled in to discuss his downfall. Two games later the numbers shot back up again, the incident was classed as an outlier and Rozanov reached equilibrium once more.
His move to Ottawa makes no sense either, years of comparing lab results have trained him for being able to just about decode the stats and notice the discrepancies but these skills aren’t even needed with how glaringly stupid the move was. He, as a single player, had more goals than Ottawa as the entire team did the last season he was with Boston. The numbers are a little insane when Shane dives deeper, reaching far into the back of his mind to conjure up memories of what the strange numbers meant and what was actually good, bad or average. Rozanov was definitely good, more than good. He barely dipped his toe into average.
Shane found himself willingly watching hockey games, curled up in his bed staring at his phone, concentrating a little more when Rozanov would suddenly flash into frame like some angel of death and whisk the puck away.
When he saw the man get hit, smashed into the boards by a bigger player, he had to pause and pace his apartment. The video continued with Rozanov casually launching himself back towards the puck in a way that was strangely feline. There was a zoom on his face, his white teeth glinting and he smirked at nobody in particular. His nose was bleeding slightly, mottling his upper lip with the dark red that a pink tongue lapped away.
Rozanov hadn’t mentioned any family in their meagre conversations, the internet didn’t either. His father had died, apparently of dementia, but you’d think that Rozanov had just emerged from his father by mitosis from the lack of mention of any mother. Maybe he’d never had one, but from the general attitudes of Russia Shane thought this was unlikely.
This wasn’t the only Rozanov mystery, the man was private, aggressively so. Only in regards to family, there were multiple groups of women online discussing hookups. He had a varied diet, his claims were spread out across Canada and the US and there were even a few in Europe and one woman in… Australia? Which is somewhere Shane couldn’t imagine Rozanov ever going. The man exuded ice, his accent, his hair, his sharp eyes. The abstract image of him dutifully fucking a bronzed woman in the scorching heat seemed fantastical. His pale hands encasing her golden skin and, from what Shane read, making her see stars that rivaled those above.
Reading about Rozanov was making him feel worse. Yet he still does. The man was addicting in every way, his photos, his stats, the seemingly random Instagram posts. Every time he looks, every time he clicks, the anxiety curdles in his stomach. He feels a little like a dog, clicker trained with a strange negative reinforcement that made him nauseous whenever he saw anything related to Rozanov.
But he keeps on clicking.
Keeps on looking.
His mom messages him, telling him about the barbeque but then this message was covered by some others, general plans she wanted to make with him, asking him about birthday plans. She sends him some photos of him from an old album, decked out in his full hockey gear but still clutching a science book in his hands. That’s ultimately why he stopped, he couldn’t spend so much time in hockey and still know everything he wanted to know. The others eventually got pissed, blaming all their losses on Shane’s inability to drag his head out of a book. A little shit called Tommy had told all the guys, and their coach, that his dad said it was because Shane was ‘one of those Asians.’ Shane at the time, and now, thought that this was illogical and stupid. His mom was the one who encouraged him to pursue hockey, his mom was the person who bought him his first skates and told him he didn’t need to stress about schools. Tommy hadn’t listened when he’d pointed this out, his dad’s word was considered gospel.
Eventually he couldn’t justify spending so much wasted time running after a small piece of rubber and getting injured in the process, especially when he dropped to an A in math.
His replies are short and sweet. His dad messages him a photo of a crossword with the clue ‘Name of a horse one year of age,’ Shane sends back the answer and his dad responds with a thumbs up and a photo of a blue jay looking at him through a window. The blue jay was very cute. Shane sends back a photo of the bat someone had found in their shed that they were keeping in a kennel until the rescue turned up.
Shane, absolutely, under no circumstances, thinks about Ilya Rozanov.