Chapter 1: bear claws
Chapter Text
The locker room still smelled like ice and sweat and cheap champagne.
Music blasted from someone’s speaker—too loud, distorted, triumphant—and the Bears were everywhere at once: shouting over one another, knocking shoulders, towels snapped like warning shots. Someone had dragged a cooler into the center of the room. Someone else was standing on a bench, chanting the score like it might disappear if they didn’t say it enough times.
They’d won. That was the important thing.
Ilya was standing in front of his stall, wet from champagne and beer. His skates were partially unlaced, and his pulse still hummed in his ears. He had grabbed his phone to text Shane his usual victory picture when his phone buzzed—short, sharp. Not a group chat. Not the team.
Jane: Are you alive, or did you finally break your ribs?
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“Whoa, whoa—who’s texting Captain Happy?” Cliff said immediately, leaning over his shoulder like he had a right to be there.
“Yeah, Roz, you smiling like that is unsettling,” Carmichael added.
Ilya locked his phone and placed it into his cubby. “Mind your business.”
That, predictably, made it worse.
Varkov narrowed his eyes. “You don’t say that when it’s nothing.”
Kane, already half undressed and unbothered by the chaos, glanced over. “Who is it?”
“No one,” Ilya said.
“Bullshit,” Cliff said. “You don’t smile at no one.”
The phone buzzed again. Louder this time—traitorous. Cliff lunged and caught a glimpse before Ilya could thrust it into his pocket.
“Jane?” Cliff read. He blinked. “Who the hell is Jane?”
Silence rippled, then collapsed into noise.
“Jane who?”
“Jane from where?”
“You got a secret girlfriend named Jane?”
“I do not have girlfriend,” Ilya said, standing and yanking his jersey over his head. “And Jane is just...” he paused. “Jane.”
“That’s not an answer,” Carmichael said.
Ilya ignored him and peeled off his shoulder pads and tossed them into his stall. He turned away from his team, trying to avoid the conversation. As he reached back to pull his compression shirt over his head, the room collectively noticed.
“Holy shit,” Varkov said.
Cliff whistled.
Across Ilya’s shoulders and down his back, faint but unmistakable, were scratch marks—angry pink lines, half-healed, deliberate.
“Oh my god,” Carmichael said. “Someone tried to kill you.”
Ilya turned to the mirror to look at his back. He’d forgotten about those marks. “It was a bear, I fought and won,” Ilya said sarcastically with a smirk on his face.
The team ignored his comment.
“That was Jane, wasn’t it,” Cliff said. Not a question.
Ilya shrugged. “She has…how do you say it, strong excitement.”
“Enthusiasm,” someone in the back chimed in
“Jesus,” Varkov laughed. “What did you do, insult her favorite team?”
Ilya smirked despite himself. “Sex is good,” he said, like that settled everything.
It did not.
“So she’s real,” Carmichael said. “You’ve been holding out on us.”
“I have not,” Ilya replied. “I simply do not share.”
“You are literally shirtless with claw marks,” Cliff said. “That ship sailed.”
Kane tilted his head, assessing. “She’s not just a hookup.”
Ilya reached for his towel. “You make many assumptions.”
“She has your number,” Cliff said. “And she texted you straight after our game.”
They circled him like sharks with beer bottles.
“You gotta bring her to a game,” Carmichael said suddenly. “Next home game. Mystery Jane makes an appearance.”
“No,” Ilya said immediately.
“That was fast.”
“She is busy.”
“With what?”
“Life.”
“Convenient,” Cliff said. “Does she even like hockey?”
Ilya hesitated—just a fraction too long.
“Ah,” Varkov said. “There it is.”
“She likes being private,” Ilya said, defensive now. “And not being stared at by idiots.”
“So… yes,” Carmichael grinned.
Cliff clapped Ilya on the shoulder. “Bring her. We wanna see the woman who turned our captain into a scratched-up mess.”
Ilya grabbed his phone as it buzzed again and typed quickly, thumb moving like muscle memory.
Jane: You played well. Don’t let it go to your head.
He smiled, small and private, then locked the screen.
“We’ll see,” he said vaguely.
“That’s not a no,” Varkov said triumphantly.
Ilya slung his towel over his shoulder and headed for the showers. “Keep dreaming,” he called back. “Some things are not for team.”
Behind him, the locker room erupted again—laughter, jeers, chants of Jane, Jane, Jane—and Ilya let it wash over him, already composing an excuse he’d probably never need to use.
Chapter 2: Who is Jane?
Summary:
Illya gets caught texting Jane.
Notes:
Thank you so much for the love and support you gave me on my first chapter.
Again, there are probably a lot of mistakes so plz forgive me!
Chapter Text
The café was too loud.
Not in the rowdy, locker-room way—just the steady hum of a city that never quite stopped talking. Cups clinked. The espresso machine hissed. A couple argued softly in the corner like it was part of the background music. Ilya sat near the window, jacket still on, phone in one hand, coffee in the other, pretending—badly—to enjoy the normalcy of being a person instead of a headline.
He wasn’t.
His thumb hovered over the screen, then typed.
Ilya: You watch game?
A pause.
He took a sip of coffee and grimaced. Too bitter.
The phone buzzed.
Jane: Of course. You almost lost in the third.
He smiled to himself.
Ilya: Almost is not losing.
Jane: You were sloppy.
Ilya: You are cruel.
Jane: I am honest.
Illya: Do I get reward?
Jane: For almost losing?
He smirked.
Jane: 4218 Saturday 9p.m.
Just three days away, he thought. The corner of his mouth twitched. He leaned back in his chair, shoulders loosening, the noise of the café fading into something manageable. Shane always did that—cut through the static, ground him in something real and familiar.
He was typing a reply when he felt it.
That prickle.
The subtle sense of being watched.
He didn’t look up right away. He told himself it was paranoia, the residue of too many cameras, too many fans who thought they knew him because they’d seen him on a screen. But then a shadow passed the window, and out of the corner of his eye, he caught the unmistakable motion of someone lifting their phone.
Not toward him.
Toward his phone.
He turned his head just in time to see a stranger across the café lower their phone and pretend to scroll.
Ilya’s jaw tightened.
Too late.
—
It was trending before he finished his coffee.
The post popped up in his mentions like a spark in dry grass:
WHO IS JANE??
(photo: a blurry zoom of his phone screen, his open text thread, his name at the top)
Replies multiplied beneath it.
is that his gf???
thought he was single
damn she got him smiling tho
anyone know her??
Ilya stared at it for a long moment, something cold settling in his chest.
He locked his phone.
—
The interview was supposed to be routine.
Post-practice. Bright lights. A chair pulled too close. The team logo behind him like a reminder of what people wanted from him: goals, quotes, flirtation, something clean and consumable.
The reporter flipped through her notes. “Last one, Rozanov—”
He relaxed slightly.
“Fans are curious,” she said. “There was a photo circulating earlier today. You were texting someone named Jane. Care to tell us who that is?”
There it was.
The room felt suddenly very quiet.
Ilya blinked once. Then twice. And then he laughed—not loud, not sharp, just a small, genuine sound, like the question had caught him off guard in the most mundane way.
“Jane?” he repeated.
The reporter smiled. “Yeah. Who is she?”
Ilya leaned back in his chair, shrugging like it truly didn’t matter. “Some girl,”
The cameras waited.
He tilted his head, smirk ghosting across his mouth. “She is very bad at hockey.”
There was a ripple of laughter from off-camera.
The reporter chuckled. “That’s all we get?”
Ilya stood. “That is all.”
—
Jane didn’t take long.
His phone buzzed the second he stepped into the quiet of the hallway.
Jane: I am not bad at hockey.
He stopped walking.
Read it again.
A smile crept across his face, slow and crooked, the kind that belonged to a version of himself no camera ever saw.
Ilya: I am good liar.
A pause.
Then:
Jane: You are terrible.
Ilya: And yet you still text me.
Jane: Unfortunately.
He leaned against the wall, the noise of the rink muffled behind him, thumbs moving easily.
Ilya: Are you ready?
Jane: For what?
Illya: 4218
His breath caught—just slightly.
A few seconds passed. Illya felt a gust of worry.
Jane: I don’t mind being a secret.
He closed his eyes for a moment, relief and affection tangling in his chest in a way he never quite knew how to name.
Ilya: Good. Because you are mine.
A beat.
Then:
Jane: Careful, hockey boy. That almost sounded romantic.
He laughed under his breath.
Ilya: Do not get used to it.
He pushed off the wall and headed back toward the locker room, the world already trying to pull him back into noise and spectacle.
But in his pocket, his phone buzzed again—quiet, private, real.
And for once, that was enough.