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Chapter Text

Sergei is forty-seven minutes early to his very first meeting with the coaching staff, so he sits in his car outside of the training rink and watches the digital clock in his dashboard tick down the seconds. 

It’s silly in a way he can usually coach himself out of being, but he’d just been so nervous. This morning. Last night. Every night since he got the call five weeks ago, the invitation to attend Dev with this year’s batch of rookies and most promising AHL guys. 

First it was: what if I don’t make the cut during prospects camp? 

Then, when they’d offered him a spot on the team—the actual team, the MLH team—it’d been: what if I don’t pass the physical exam? What if the joint I took a hit off of three years ago somehow shows up in my drug screening? What if there is a mysterious and heretofore undiagnosed anomaly in my blood that bans me from competing at the professional level?

And after he’d passed the initial check-ups with flying colors, no blood disease detected and iron levels right where they’re supposed to be, it’d been: what if I can’t find a place to live? What if my apartment is too far from the training center? What if it’s in a neighborhood that no one else likes and so no one will ever want to come visit me there? 

Which hadn’t really turned out to matter, because the Front Office emailed him to let him know it was unofficial club policy for rookies to board with a veteran of the team; they were willing to waive it for Sergei if he’d already found a place, considering he wasn’t actually a rookie, but their heavy-handed preference would be for Sergei to take them up on the billeting offer. 

Which he had, of course, for reasons that were a little too embarrassing to admit except within the privacy of his own head. It’s just that he’s never lived alone before. Not in Moscow, not during the summers he spent in Derbent, not even when he moved to Canada. The salaries of AHL players are nothing to turn one’s nose up at, but it’d just been easier to find a place with a few other guys, to look for a room to crash in instead of a house to convert into a home.

So of course he took the offer to live with one of the vets, which really means he could have just carpooled to the rink with him today. But Wilkinson was too slow, wanted to sit at the table and properly chew every bite of his toast while perusing the paper like he was really actually close to old-people retirement instead of just being close to hockey-people retirement.

And Sergei couldn’t stand to wait around for him because what if there were sudden and insurmountable street closures no one had reported on yet? What if he stopped to get a coffee but the line was very long and the barista couldn’t understand him so he had to take two extra minutes to type out his order on his phone to show to her? What if he spilled his coffee on his shirt and he had to change in the parking lot of the training rink before he went inside? What if his player pass didn’t work and the security guards didn't let him through the gates?

Which is how Sergei ends up in the parking lot of the training rink, forty-one minutes early to his very first day of mandatory meetings with the coaching staff followed by optional skating practice, cold coffee in his cupholder, two extra shirts in his bag, player pass still displayed proudly on his windshield even though the guards hadn’t taken more than a cursory glance at it.

And now the only thing he has to be nervous about is, of course: what if they don’t like me?

Thirty-nine minutes.

Sergei digs his phone out of his pocket; he calls his big sister.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” She asks as soon as the line connects. But the line connects, which Sergei thinks is the most important thing.

“Sofa, I do not even know what country it is for you,” he tells her, relaxing back into his seat and letting his eyes fall shut. “Are you still in Indonesia?”

“That was last week,” Sofiya says, airy and imperious in the tone of voice that older sisters are born having already perfected. “Keep up, little brother. It is Thailand now.” 

“Whatever. You’re not the only person who has traveled recently, you know,” he says petulantly, and she laughs. After a beat, he laughs too. Partially at the way she laughs, like a goose being strangled, and partially at the sound of his own voice and the whine threaded through it. He only ever sounds like this when he’s talking with her. Thank god she picked up the phone.

Thank god she always picks up the phone, no matter what time it is and no matter wherever she is. 

“Now that you mention it, I think I heard about that,” Sofiya hums, and if Sergei closes his eyes he can see her lounging on a beach somewhere or on the bed of her hostel room, tapping her chin with her finger. “I can’t remember where though. Couldn’t have been the fifty-two texts you sent to the family group chat about being an official MLH player.”

“Yes, not there because I know you have that muted,” Sergei replies. He checks the dashboard clock, then his wristwatch. Thirty-seven more minutes until the meeting.

“Thank god you sent out that newsletter then.”

“Sofa, you know that was mom.”

Sofiya laughs again, loud and unabashed. “You are kidding, you know that was dad. Mom called me to ask for an address so she could send me a jersey. She is very big on brand recognition, even if you are not a brand and I am not a billboard.”

Sergei sniffs and then fishes his coffee out of the cupholder. It is ice cold by now. He’d been too nervous to drink it, but he takes a sip now anyway. It cost four dollars. “Did you give her an address?”

He likes the idea of it. Of his sister somewhere out there in the world, in a country Sergei has never been to and probably will never step foot in, wearing their family name across her back and his number. A reminder for her, maybe, to come back eventually. That she had a place to come back to. For everyone else, an if lost, please return to. 

“Pah,” Sofiya says, which is how she says yes when she’s embarrassed. “You know she hasn’t called me in three months? It is very clear sometimes who is her favorite child and who is not.”

“There is still time to become a professional hockey player,” Sergei suggests, because he can’t tell her that she’s his favorite. Person, phone contact, safe place. If she gets too embarrassed, she will just hang up the phone, and he still has thirty-five minutes on the clock. “Or give her grandchildren.”

“I am very far away from grandchildren,” she scoffs. “I am closer to being a professional hockey player, I think.”

Sergei laughs. “How far away from grandchildren is Thailand, Sofa?”

“Let us just say that I think you may be closer to them wherever it is you are. San Francisco, yes?

“Sofa,” he whines and she laughs again. “You know I am not in San Francisco.”

“Yes, yes,” she says and he can picture the way she waves her hand, two times fast through the air like she’s batting away a fly. “I also know it is your first day of practice, no? Why are you calling me, Seryozha, you should be out on the ice catching more pucks with your mouth.”

“You make me sound like a dog,” Sergei complains, because when it comes to brothers and sisters, it’s always easier to complain than it is to tell the truth. “I am a professional now, I use sticks to catch the pucks like Ilya Rozanov does.”

“Pah,” she says. “Professional athlete is a fake profession. You play a game that children do and get paid a lot of money.” 

“You write for a travel blog,” Sergei points out, gesturing at no one with the hand still holding his cold coffee. It threatens to spill, liquid cresting just over the rim of the cup. He puts it down very quickly. “You cannot throw the first stone here, Sofa, our grandfather would be disappointed in both of us.”

“Yes, but I do not get paid a lot of money,” she replies, back to airy and untouchable, like they both don’t know Sergei deposits a good portion of his paycheck into her bank account each time it lands in his hands. She’s never asked for it; he’s never asked about it. He just likes the idea of it, of helping her before she even has to ask, the way he’d tumble to his knees on the ice when he was small and she’d skate up behind him and lift him up by the back of his jersey before he could even begin to cry. 

That’s what’s left out of all the stories that the media has started to tell about him and that his mother has been telling for years now: yes, he put on his first pair of skates and stepped foot onto the shitty hometown ice rink when he was barely two years old, hardly able to walk. But Sofiya’d been out there first; all he'd been doing was trying to follow her.

“Sofiya,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else.

Some of the guys on the Magnitude took him out to celebrate his signing a few weeks ago. They’d started with drinks, then karaoke, then more drinks, then bowling. They’d been so wasted by the time they got to the bowling alley, they’d had to ask the attendant to put the bumper rails up on the aisle. Even then, Tremblay had managed to hit the gutter twice anyway, but that’s not what Sergei’s thinking about right now. He’s thinking about those bumper rails, and his sister, and the money, and wherever she is, and the parking lot where he is, cold coffee in his hand and phone pressed to his ear like it's a lifeline. Maybe it is like they are both the assistant, putting up the guard rails, and they take turns being the bowling ball too. Maybe it is like this with all sisters and brothers, or maybe it is just special and theirs.

“Sergei,” she mocks, stretching out the last syllable of his name into an exaggerated whine that matches the way he used to say her name as if it were only yesterday. “You are being stupid. Hang up the phone and go play your professional little game. It is the same as you have been doing all your life, no? Same sticks, same net, same pucks?”

“But what if—” he starts to ask before his throat tightens up enough to stop all the words, which is probably for the better. What if I’m bad? What if they don’t like me? What if this is finally my chance and I can’t become anything and I have to take that and hold it in my hands for the rest of my life?

“It is,” she says with all the confidence of a first-born daughter talking to her younger brother who will always be a little bit awestruck by her and a little bit dumber. “It is the same game. And you are the same Sergei Dovonchezky, just with a big boy contract now. So it will be okay.”

“Okay,” Sergei says, and he thinks maybe he almost believes it too. It will be okay. He has played with an MLH team before, he went through the first round of the playoffs with one just last season. He scored goals. Got points. Got ice time. And in the locker room, they liked him. It was good. It was fun. It was hockey. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Sofiya repeats. “Now, it is very late for me, so I am going to hang up the phone, and you are going to go be a Conqueror, okay, Seryozha?” 

“Sofiya,” Sergei whines. “You did not read any of my texts? It’s not the Conquerors, it is the Raiders, I am a Boston Raider.”

She laughs again, goose dying loud enough to wake up her whole hostel he thinks. “You idiot, yes I know. Whose jersey do you think I am wearing right now?”

Sergei’s chest feels so warm that when he takes a sip of his coffee, he doesn’t even notice how cold it is. “I don’t know, Ilya Rozanov’s?”

Because, well, it’s not as if Sergei does not own more than one Rozanov jersey: for the team he played on in Moscow before he was drafted, for the Raiders before he became Captain, for the Raiders after he became Captain, for the Sochi Olympic team, for Worlds. Sofa would have had more than a few opportunities to take one of them. 

Sergei taps the tip of his tongue into the gap where his left canine tooth used to be. Rozanov had rammed him up against the boards back in March, and there may have been some elbows involved because he’d managed to damage the root of the tooth enough that after a few weeks of walking around with it wriggling in his mouth, the team’s dentist had just extracted it herself.

Which is much less cool than being able to say Ilya Rozanov, yes that Ilya Rozanov, THE Ilya Rozanov checked me against the boards hard enough he knocked out one of my teeth and I still got up and skated against him afterwards, blood and all.

But it’s something at least. A nice little souvenir from his time on the Metros. Better than a t-shirt, because he’ll have this forever. Or until either he or Sofiya decides to get married and his mother drags him to a dentist to be fitted with fake teeth for the sake of the photos.

“Now you are just fishing for compliments,” his sister says, and she hangs up before he can respond.

When he takes his phone away from his ear, he has a new text notification.

Shane Hollander (!!):

hey Chex Mix, heard it was the first optional skate of the season for the Raiders. Good luck! You’re gonna do great.

Shane Hollander (!!):

let me know if Rozanov gives you any trouble. his bark is worse than his bite though, I promise

Sergei grins down at his phone and thumbs out a quick response. 

When the Metros had been knocked out of the playoffs in the second round, Sergei had been pretty convinced that that was the bookend of his time with the team. He’d collected all his things from his borrowed locker on the same day that everyone else did, but it’d been different for him. He’d known he wasn’t coming back in August, and it’d made him sad as much as it felt like it made the whole experience real. Like the ending proved that it had happened at all. He’d been a Metro. He’d played on Shane Hollander’s line.

He’d been sort of surprised then, when Shane had texted him a few days later, extending an invitation to watch the Raiders face off against the Philadelphia Blazers for the Eastern Conference title. He’d accepted in a heartbeat, and it hadn’t felt weird to sit among the Metros at Hayden Pike’s house. It’d felt nice, fun. Like he belonged there even though he wouldn’t play with them again. The Magnitudes’ front office had already told him he’d been waived back down to the AHL, which hadn’t been a surprise at all.

What had been a surprise was the way Shane kept texting, periodically over the summer. Like they were friends instead of just temporary teammates. 

It was nice. It was sweet. 

Shane asked him if there were bears in Moscow and if there were, how likely it was to survive a fight with one, and Sergei told him yes there were bears in the city but only in the zoo, and if a Russian was trying to tell him that he’d fought a bear before, then he was having a conversation with a dirty liar. 

Sergei complained about his favorite coffee shop discontinuing their blueberry muffins, and Shane sent him a recipe for whole-wheat blueberry muffins with nine grams of protein per serving. 

Sometime in June, Shane texted him in the middle of the night to let him know that Lily was sleeping next to him in bed, at his cottage. The text had been very short but very sweet, like Shane was cupping a fragile, delicate thing in his hands and tilting his palms just enough to show Sergei. Sergei had responded in the morning, at a reasonable time, to ask if Shane needed any more dirty words to tell his Russian girlfriend. He received no response. 

In July, Shane sent him a picture of a ferris wheel at some sort of local fair, and Sergei realized that somewhere between meeting in March and the end of the summer, they’d developed inside jokes. He shared inside jokes with Hollander. Shane Hollander. Wow.

When the Raiders’ front office contacted him at the end of the month to offer him a spot in their prospects camp and, pending his good performance there, a position on the Raiders’ roster, Shane had been the fifth person he told after his sister, his mother, his father, and his captain on the Magnitude. 

Sergei glances from the text thread to the clock in his dashboard, back to the phone. Twenty-seven minutes before his meeting with the coaching staff.

But he can be a little bit early, he decides. It is his first day on the team: early is good. He is Sergei Dovonchezky and he has scored a few points already in the MLH. Not for the Raiders, but at least against them which is impressive in a different way. Ilya Rozanov has almost knocked out his tooth and Shane Hollander sends him recipes for baked goods. It is going to be okay.

Cliff Marleau is very tall, but he walks like he knows this and is trying to compensate for it. He ducks his head and hunches his shoulders and likes to throw an arm around the person nearest to him, which at the moment is Sergei. 

It feels very weird to be escorted from the administrative offices down to the locker room with Marleau hanging off of him, but it is not necessarily bad. It’s sort of nice, actually. There’d been a few guys on the Magnitude that were the same way, clapping people on the back and messing with everyone’s hair and pulling the smaller guys into their sides like they were overly-socialized puppies and not adult men. 

So it feels nice and familiar, what he’s used to. But it’s still sort of weird, just because Sergei has a trading card with Marleau’s face on it and he keeps it tucked into a laminated folder in a binder to protect it, and now the same guy has his arm around his neck as he talks his ear off about the Raiders, the team, the training rink, the game schedule, his wife’s star sign, Boston, on and on and on.

Sergei feels dizzy. A bit like he’s experiencing some out-of-body thing, except he isn’t sure he could make this up. He has a Raiders practice jersey tucked into the crook of his arm, his gear bag over his shoulder. He is being shown the way to the locker rooms so he can get changed and get on the ice. It’s not a formal practice, as half the guys are in and out all day today for fitness tests and their own pre-season meetings, but it’s sort of practice. It’s ice time with his new team, which is the Raiders, which is objectively insane. 

He’s really actually very thankful for Marleau’s presence beside him because he thinks if he’d been left to navigate this on his own, he’d have run into a wall ages ago and passed out in the labyrinth that is the underbelly of the training rink, loose pages of his newly signed contract spread out around him like pieces of falling snow.

“Oh, there he is!” Marleau crows as he shoves them both through the doorway to the locker room. “Here, Rookie,” he adds with a clap of his hand on the back of Sergei’s shoulder, gesturing towards a locker near the door. “This is yours. And this is your Captain.”

Sergei wants to ask him to please slow down, just for a second. He needs a second to process the sight of his name and number stenciled carefully above an empty locker with the Raiders logo etched in the wood of the bench seat.

Sergei Dovonchezky, #57, Boston Raider.

He wants to do something really embarrassing, like pull his phone out and take a picture for the next newsletter his dad sends out. He wants to do something even more embarrassing, like cry.

But then he turns around and sees Ilya Rozanov standing at his own locker across the room, nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, hair slicked back and still dripping from the showers.

Sergei has never turned back around so fast, not in his entire life. “Hi, Mr. Rozanov,” he says in English because he sort of remembers every moment of the game they played against each other in March, and he’d noticed Rozanov’s preference of speaking to him in English. 

Most of the time. 

“None of that mister stuff,” Marleau protests immediately, abandoning Sergei’s side to walk further into the room. Maybe closer to Rozanov, maybe just to his own locker. Sergei would look, but he thinks there’s a very good chance that Ilya Rozanov is still mostly naked behind him, so it’s very important that he busies himself with pushing his gear bag into his locker and pulling out his equipment. Skates and thick socks go on the bench next to him.

He packed his UnderArmor, right? No. Right, right. He’s already wearing his UnderArmor shirt beneath his business shirt. Right.

“Is okay,” Rozanov says, sounding closer and unbothered. “Is nice to have someone polite around.”

“Rookie, don’t you dare call him mister,” someone else pipes up, and Sergei glances over at him. Flanders, 2D, #20. “Rozy’s got a big enough ego as it is.”

“Yes, I do,” Rozanov agrees and Sergei can hear the smirk in his voice. He sits down on the bench and carefully unties his shoes. “You only wish your fitness tests went good like mine.” 

Flanders makes an offended sound, and Marleau jumps in with a chirp of his own. And then they’re off, raised voices echoing over each other as some of the other guys in the room join in. In the bubbling action and noise of a locker room clicking together again after a summer spent apart, Sergei is forgotten.

He changes quickly, eager to get out onto the ice. It’s so close he can almost smell it. It takes him two tries to get the pads settled right on his shoulders, that’s how excited he is.

It’s when he’s sitting back on the bench in front of his locker—his locker—that he feels eyes on him again. Heavy, unignorable. He slips off his left sock and puts the thicker hockey sock on before slipping his foot into his skate and tying it tightly. Then he does the same thing with his right skate.

Then he lets himself look up. 

Rozanov is studying him from across the locker room, a strange expression on his face as he blinks at Sergei’s skates. He almost looks confused, sitting in his stall and twirling his phone around in his hand. 

He’s still only in a towel even though it’s been at least ten minutes since Sergei and Marleau entered the room. It’s like he doesn’t even notice his own nakedness—or, probably, like he just doesn’t care. 

Sergei glances down at his skates, thinking maybe he’s tied them together or something, but they look fine to him. Separately laced and everything. 

There’s a small sinking feeling his chest though. Rozanov looks like he’s chewing something vaguely unpleasant, and Sergei can’t shake the feeling that he’s put the expression on his face. That Rozanov, for some reason, just doesn’t like him. It doesn’t make sense because it’s not like Sergei’s ever even beaten Rozanov at hockey or anything. Or stole from him or insulted his mother. Or shoved him up against the boards and cracked his tooth, for example.

He unties his right skate and then ties it again, tighter. He wants it to be perfect. He wants to be perfect. He wants to believe it when he repeats Sofiya’s words back to himself: you are Sergei Dovonchezky, and it will be okay.

Even if his new captain does not like him.

“Dovonchezky,” Rozanov says, and Sergei startles because he is suddenly much closer. Directly in front of him. Towel and all.

“Um. Hello,” Sergei says. Wondering if he should stand up. Rozanov isn’t so close to him that it’s inappropriate or anything, a good two meters in between them, but he isn’t sure this is a conversation he wants to have sitting down.

On the other hand, he isn’t sure he can survive this kind of conversation standing either. Rozanov’s abdominal muscles are front and center, and Sergei’s been in and out of locker rooms since he was five years old so he should be used to this sort of thing. It’s just that none of those locker rooms ever had Ilya Rozanov in them. 

“Yes, hello,” Rozanov says. And now he sounds impatient, which is not good. For a moment, Sergei is so distracted trying to analyze his captain’s tone that he doesn’t recognize the fact that he’s spoken the words in Russian. When he does though, he can feel his eyes go round.

He didn’t realize Rozanov knew how to say hello in Russian. He sort of thought maybe he'd forgotten how; he's only ever heard him use the language for threats. To Sergei. 

“Shane says I should apologize,” Rozanov tells him, point-blank and in Russian, the hand not holding his phone scratching at his bare hip. Sergei almost chokes on his tongue.

He wonders wildly if he could let Shane know that next time, it’d be really appreciated if he could make sure Ilya Rozanov decides to put clothes on before apologizing too. If that’s not too much to ask.

“For the game in March,” Rozanov adds when Sergei doesn’t say anything. His eyes are very intense. He looks like he did during that game, during the face-off he’d taken against him. 

“It’s okay,” Sergei says, more tentatively than he wants to sound in front of Ilya Rozanov. He sticks his tongue through the gap in his teeth where the canine used to be, partially out of habit. “It was hockey.”

Rozanov nods, looking satisfied for a moment. Then he shakes his head, gaze following the movement of Sergei’s tongue. Sergei stops moving his tongue very quickly. “No, it was not,” Rozanov says. “It was personal, and it was stupid. And I am sorry.”

“Oh,” Sergei says. He glances around the locker room, but no one else is paying them much attention. Then again, even if they were, they’re speaking in Russian. No one else speaks Russian here, Sergei is pretty sure, and so it’s like a secret language just between Rozanov and him. Millions of speakers in the world, and only two of them matter right now. “Um, thank you for saying this.”

He sort of really wants to ask Rozanov what was personal about it. Or, like, what Sergei did in the three minutes they met before the game that made Rozanov dislike him so much. He probably has the right to ask, but something makes him hold his tongue.

Rozanov looks different now than he did in March. And it’s not just the near-nakedness or the slight flush from his fitness test and the shower. It’s something in his eyes and the fall of his shoulders. He looks calmer, brighter—-still intense, still a living hockey legend pinning all of his attention on Sergei like he’s a lab rat to be dissected, but there’s something settled about him now that wasn’t there before. 

Maybe Rozanov was just working through something back in the spring. Shane’d said his dad had been sick and passed away during the season, that must have been really hard on him. Maybe seeing another Russian was too much at the time. Maybe he was just grieving and trying to pretend everything was normal, and Sergei just represented Russia in ways that needled him. 

Sergei can understand that. The tip of his tongue taps along the edge of the gap again. It’s a nervous habit he’s picked up since May. 

“Do you want another?” Rozanov asks abruptly. He’s looking at his mouth again. Sergei is going to have to break this habit as soon as possible if Rozanov doesn’t stop looking at him like that, all quiet intensity. 

“What, hit?” Sergei says, mind flashing back to the way that Rozanov had checked him into the boards back in March. He’d had a bruise on his back from the end of Rozanov’s hockey stick slamming against his kidneys. It’d hurt like hell, but that was hockey. Sometimes, it got violent; sometimes it got personal.

Rozanov smiles, a thin, flickering thing. “Tooth,” he corrects, tapping the edge of his lip. “Shane says you had to get it removed. He sent me a very strongly worded text.”

Sergei blinks. How often does Rozanov talk with Shane? How often does Rozanov talk with Shane about Sergei? It sounds like the answer is not never, which would not have been his first guess. 

“Uh,” he says, so startled by the revelation that Rozanov and Shane Hollander text that he slips out of Russian and back to English, the only language that can convey how poleaxed he feels right now. “Is fine, I am okay. You are not first.”

“If you’re sure,” Rozanov says smoothly, still in Russian. “I would pay for it.”

Sergei wonders if Shane had told him to say that. “Mama says I do not have to fix my teeth until I retire or marry or my sister marry,” he tells him. “Both are many, many years away hopefully. Ask then.”

Rozanov blinks. Then he smiles, which is maybe worse than the focused intensity from before. “Okay,” he says. He looks away from him, down to the phone in his hand. “Here,” Rozanov unlocks it with a quick practiced motion before holding it out to Sergei. “Put in your number. I will add you to the Russian group chat.”

“There’s a Russian group chat?” Sergei asks, back to Russian now because he feels too dizzy for anything else.

“There are two chats,” Rozanov replies. “One with everyone and then one only with the Russians in the Eastern conference, because I do not care for Sasha in Las Vegas. He is my least favorite Russian.”

Sergei types in his phone number in a daze. If Aleksander Volkov, goalie for the Las Vegas Silver Crusaders, is Rozanov’s least favorite Russian, that means Sergei isn’t. 

Forget the photo of his stall, that’s definitely going in the next newsletter.

“Good, thank you,” Rozanov says, accepting his phone back with a smirk that Sergei doesn’t know how to translate. “You are skating for the coaches today, yes?”

Sergei looks down at his skates then back up to Rozanov. He’s holding his gloves in the crook of his elbow. If someone tried to stop him from getting on the ice right now, Sergei thinks he’ll start crying. “Um, yes, I think so.”

“Good,” Rozanov says again, and he reaches forward and claps Sergei on the shoulder through the layers of protective wear. The warmth from the hit radiates down to his bones anyway. “Make sure to show off, Dovonchezky. I suggested they should look at your game tape from the Magnitude and see if your contract was up for the taking when they started talking about trading Brexton. So if you fall on the ice, I’ll never hear the end of it, okay?”

Sergei promptly drops his gloves on the floor. “I—you—what?”

“Yes, good, like that, get that out of your system now,” Rozanov tells him, waving a hand and turning to make his way back across the locker room.

“Rozy, you bullying the rookie?” Marleau accuses, bending down to grab one of Sergei’s gloves and giving it back to him. “Whatever he’s saying, don’t listen to him, alright?” he tells Sergei, voice pitched purposefully loud. “And whatever you do, don’t call him Mister again, the fucker doesn’t deserve your respect. It’s Rozy, got it?”

Rozanov sinks down onto the bench in front of his locker like a king sits on his throne. His eyes are sharp, focused, and his lips are pulled up into a smirk that reminds Sergei of the stories his grandfather used to tell about leaving his village in the dead of winter to track down wolves that made a nuisance of themselves by picking off livestock. Sergei doesn’t know if he’s looking at a hunter or a wolf. He isn’t sure it matters; his skin pinpricks with instinctive awareness all the same.

“Oh, Dovonchezky already knows my nickname,” Rozanov says in English, scratching at his arm like he’s disinterested in the proceedings before him. 

Sergei can feel his face scrunch up in confusion. “I do?” he asks. His tongue taps against the hole in his teeth as he thinks. “I don’t,” he decides.

Rozanov’s eyes flick down to his mouth, the gap between his teeth, and then back to his face. He grins, wolfish. “You do,” he disagrees, Russian now, slipping into the language like it’s a well-loved coat to be shrugged on. “You can call me Lily.”

“Lily,” Sergei blinks and then frowns, bending down to grab his other glove off the floor. Lily? That’s funny; the only Lily he knows is—

“Just not around Shane, okay? He is a very jealous lover,” Ilya tells him. He leans forward in his stall, eyebrows crooking up like he’s sharing a secret. “He hears you call me that, he might knock out your other canine.”

Sergei drops his gloves again, but he doesn’t even notice as they leave his hands. 

Rozanov’s grin is all fang. “Tell you what,” he says. “You win me a Cup and you can even call me Lilichka, yes?”

“Rozy,” Marleau snaps, hands on his hips like Rozanov is a misbehaving child. “It’s the Rookie’s first day, save the bullying for after he’s had lunch at least, alright?”

“And no chirping in Russian, that’s not fair,” Flanders calls from his stall. “We want to know what you say too. That goes for you as well, Rookie.”

Sergei opens and closes his mouth but he doesn’t think any sound comes out. He’s pretty sure no air goes in either. He blinks at Rozanov. He blinks at Rozanov again, like that’ll change anything.

Holy shit.

He sent Shane a list of Russian words to use when eating his girlfriend’s pussy. But Shane doesn’t have a girlfriend. Shane has a Rozanov. Holy shit. Sergei sent Shane Hollander a list of words to use when eating his girlfriend’s pussy—Rozanov’s pus—no, nope. No. No, thank you.

“Now, now, Marley,” Rozanov chides in English again, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off Sergei. “No need to call him Rookie, I hear they called him Chex-Mix on the Magnitude.”

Sergei’s mouth is very dry and his tongue feels very heavy. His cheeks are very hot; he feels like maybe he should start believing in spontaneous combustion again, like he did when he was fourteen and scared of everything. “This is a terrible apology,” he hisses in Russian, and Rozanov–-Ilya, Sergei decides, he’s going to call him Ilya if he’s going to have to face the fact that his captain is apparently fucking his one-time captain and current friend—tips his head back as he laughs. 

“Welcome to the Boston Raiders,” Ilya says, in English. And then he winks, and it takes Sergei six whole practices and a party-sized bag of chex-mix left in his stall before he realizes that for whatever reason, Ilya has really, actually, honestly decided to let him in on a joke no one else in the locker room knows about. 

Probably as a thank you for the Russian lessons he gave Shane, Sergei decides later as he munches on a handful of pretzels. They must have come in handy somehow. 

Not that Sergei ever, ever wants to hear the details.