Chapter Text
Boston is having one of the best practices of their pre-season. The energy is electric; the team tried out some new strategies and they went even better than Ilya had hoped.
Ilya gets off the rink to find a missed call and text from his agent. Call me. He immediately presses redial.
“Hi, Ilya.” He could hear a shuffle of papers in the background.
“Hello.” Ilya sandwiched his phone between his ear and shoulder, undoing his skates.
“Do you have time to talk?”
Ilya wonders what is so urgent that it couldn’t be an email or later scheduled meeting. “Sure.”
“It’s serious. You might want to sit down.” Ilya sat on a bench, continuing to take off his practice gear.
“Ok.” Ilya’s stomach dropped. Had someone leaked something about Shane and him?
“I received a message this morning that a woman believes she is pregnant with your child.”
“What?” His chest felt heavy, throat dry.
“She told a very convincing story. It would probably be best to discuss this face to face.”
“Yeah. Ok. I can be there in an hour.”
“Sounds good. I will see you soon, Ilya.” He hung up the phone and threw it in the top of his cubby. He didn’t care if it broke.
Ilya took the fastest shower of his life. The room was spinning, only a little. He had been so careful. He practically kept Trojan in business. He can count on one hand the number of times he went without protection. He would have known by now if anything went awry.
As he left the arena, the cold air snapped him out of his thoughts, grounding him. It was a wake up call, much like the one with his agent. He drove a few minutes to her office building across the river.
Ilya takes the stairs to her office two at a time, lowering himself in a leather chair in front of her. He wouldn’t be opposed to it swallowing him.
His agent gets right to the point. “A woman claims that she is seven months pregnant with your child.” Ilya listened to her, hands folded in his lap, committing each letter she speaks to memory. “She has not gone public with her story. She’s kept it under wraps.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.” He thinks of his father, of his fear that he would be just as shit of a father as he was, that it has to be in his blood.
“I know it may come as a surprise. Things like this usually do. But is there any way at all this is possible?”
Ilya leans forward and looks off to the side, picturing all the women he’s taken to bed in the last year. There weren’t many, especially as of late. Shane had taken priority, not that he’d admit that to anyone. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Would it change things if I said her name is Brittany?” Ilya’s stomach dropped for the nth time. His eyes fell shut.
Brittany.
Brittany, who he and Cliff shared one time. Admittedly, neither of them used a condom. That was part of the experience, part of her fantasy. He almost didn’t do it because of the risk of this happening. However, one thing Ilya made sure of was that she was in fact on birth control. He knows she was, because he felt the damn strings of her IUD himself.
“It- it might not be mine.” His agent tilted her head.
Ilya Rozanov: number one draft pick, Boston’s captain, womanizer, baby daddy.
“Well, in order to be 100% sure, we should get a DNA test.”
It quite literally would ruin the rest of Boston’s season if Ilya had to wait two months for answers. Two whole months of wondering if he was going to have to man up and be a father, he wasn’t ready for that, not now, maybe not even ever. He couldn’t carry this weight alone, but he couldn’t tell anyone either. Should he help prepare anyway? What does a baby even need? What if it was his, and he did nothing to prepare for it?
“Yes, but,” Ilya nods. “I have to wait until it is born?”
His agent shakes her head. “No. Not anymore. They can do the test now, while she is still pregnant.” She types on her computer.
Ilya lets out a sigh of relief. He still isn’t out of the woods, but he will have answers sooner, be able to prepare for the arrival if he needs to. He’s not going to make the same mistakes as his own father, that’s for certain.
“I will give you a form. Go to any lab. They will take a sample from you and then email the results in about two days.”
Ilya locates the nearest lab and hopes this patient confidentiality thing was real. This was the last thing Ilya needed in tabloids. Thankfully, the waiting room was empty, the facility almost closing.
He handed the form to the woman at the desk. She was older, glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. If she recognized him, she didn’t say anything. She asked for his ID, which he handed over reluctantly, still worried. After a quick signature, he was taken back to a room. The overhead lights were unwelcoming and harsh. He sat on a thin sheet of paper, on a table, and wondered what the paper even did. Whilst waiting, he realized didn’t actually know what his agent meant by needing a sample, and hoped that didn’t mean he would have to jerk off in a cup.
Ilya is relieved to learn that they just needed a swab of his cheek, which took all of five seconds. He thanked the staff member for their time and bolted out of the lab.
The next 48 hours pass with an agony he has never felt in his life. Ilya feels useless.
Ilya plays the worst game of his life. They lost to Montreal. Ilya missed an open goal; the roar of disappointment will ring out in his mind forever.
Worst of all, he ignores Shane. Shane sends him three texts, wanting to see him, like they always do when they play in each other’s city.
As much as Ilya needs Shane, needs to lean on someone, he can’t tell Shane about this. He doesn’t trust that his face, his body language, wouldn’t give away that something was off. Sometimes it felt like Shane knew Ilya better than Ilya knew himself. Even though they hadn’t defined what they were, hadn’t become exclusive, it might crush Shane more to learn about Ilya’s past escapades.
Ilya gets a call from his agent on Sunday. He’s been sleeping with his ringer on, in the event that the results come back sooner.
“Hello.” His voice is hoarse. He needs answers, and he needs them now.
“Good morning, Ilya. I received an email from the lab this morning that the results of your DNA test were inconclusive. We are going to have to do the test again to be sure.”
“It’s not mine.” Ilya feels, deep in his heart of hearts, that this baby is not his. He cannot prove it, but he has to believe it, needs to believe it in order to stay focused.
“I understand that that’s the outcome you are hoping for, but we cannot jump the gun- jump to conclusions, not yet.”
“I’m serious. I-” He ran his fingers through his hair. “It could belong to someone else. I wasn’t the only one there.” The air felt thick.
“Wasn’t the only one where?”
Ilya had considered telling his agent about one of he and Cliff’s many ventures when he was in her office. If the child ended up being his, then he would have exposed both Cliff’s and his sex life for no reason. But now, Ilya had a reason, and one he felt was pretty damn good.
“With Brittany. When she and I-” Ilya runs a hand down his face. “Fuck.” He takes a deep breath. It’s all or nothing.. “It was a threesome. The baby is not mine.”
His agent is silent on the other line.
Ilya speaks before she can. “How do I get another lab order? I will give it to him.”
He hears tapping on the line. “I will email you two. Another one for yourself, just to be safe, and one for-” she pauses. “Your friend.”
“Thanks.” Ilya abruptly ends the call, dressing himself with clothes from the floor that probably need to be washed.
Ilya prints out the forms with record speed and drives directly to the home of Cliff Marleau in complete silence. He lets himself into Cliff’s place, having a spare key for emergencies. This is an emergency in Ilya’s book.
He barges into his bedroom, door slamming against the wall. Cliff startles in bed and thankfully, there’s no one else in Cliff’s bed. “Marley. Wake the fuck up!”
Cliff squinted from where he lay in bed, propped up on one elbow, trying to figure out the source of the chaos. “Roz? What the fuck?”
Ilya throws the paper toward Cliff’s bed. It floats through the air and Cliff tries to grab it, but fails.
“Are you ready to be a dad?” Ilya was admittedly, too chipper for this conversation. He plopped himself down on the bed, trying not to think about how dirty the sheets might be.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Ilya tilts his head pointedly. “Brittany. She’s pregnant.”
“Who is Brittany?” Cliff shakes his head.
Ilya cackles. Cliff is the reason they are in this mess and he can’t even remember.
“Was she the red head?”
“No, you idiot. She was the one we both fucked raw. With the creampie fetish.”
“Right.”
“Yeah. Right. So, she’s pregnant. My agent called me and sent me to get a DNA test. It’s your turn now!”
“You’re not the father?”
“It was “inconclusive”,” Ilya shared, using airquotes to emphasize the word that will not ruin his life, his paper wrinkling between his fingers.
“So it still could be yours.”
“It’s not!” Ilya craned his neck forward.
“You don’t know that!” Cliff threw his hands up in the air.
“I do. It can’t be mine. It was your idiot idea.”
“I don’t remember you having an issue with the idea back then.”
Ilya threw a pillow at him.
“I am never doing that with you again.”
“You liked it!”
“Maybe I did, but I don’t like this.” Ilya picked up clothes from Marleau’s floor and threw them at him.
Cliff pulls the shirt over his head. “Are they gonna poke me with a needle?”
“You are a grown man. Are you scared of a needle?”
Cliff glared at him. He repeated Ilya’s question in a higher voice, mockingly.
Ilya laughed and ran a hand down his face.
Ilya drags both of them to the same lab he was in two days ago. Thankfully, he doesn’t recognize the receptionist.
He gets his cheek swapped for a second time, and doesn’t think about the fact that his gut could be wrong.
Ilya waits for Cliff in the waiting room.
“You liar. There was no needle.” Ilya chuckles.
They get into Ilya’s car that looks severely out of place parked on this street. He drops Cliff off at his house and goes home to his own. This time, he turns on the radio and turns the volume all the way up, doubt creeping back up about what he’ll do if the child is actually his.
He makes the turn onto his driveway too sharp, and makes a mental note to check the curb later.
Ilya sprawls out on his couch, turning on the TV. He debates back and forth in his head if he should go to the optional practice later. He could benefit from practicing shots on an empty goal to make up for his mistakes during their last game.
He doesn’t realize until later that he had dozed off until he hears his phone ringing again. Grabbing around on the couch, he does not catch the call in time. His lock screen is a string of notifications:
Missed Call: Marleau
Marleau
12 Emails
Svetlana (2)
He unlocks his phone to read the single text from Marleau. You asshole.
He presses redial on Marleau’s name.
Marleau greets him in true Marleau fashion. “You asshole.”
“Such a way with words.”
“It’s fucking mine.” Cliff almost growls.
“What time is it?” Ilya looked at the time on his phone: 5:43
“What do you mean what time is it? We are on the phone. Look at it.”
Ilya hums. “I just woke up. Is 5pm or 5am?”
“You slept all day?”
Ilya groans. “It is dark out.”
“It’s 5pm, almost 6. Anyway, the kid is mine.”
“How do you know?” Ilya can’t fight the smug grin growing across his face as he sits up.
“I had them expedite the test. I couldn’t deal with not knowing.”
Ilya opened his email while on the phone. He found one from the lab they had visited earlier in the day, clicking on it to find NEGATIVE in big, bold letters in the description. “Mine says negative.”
“Yeah, no shit. We can’t both be the father.”
“Mmm, no, but I think it would be fun. I would be Papa and you’d be Daddy.” Ilya giggles.
“Fuck off. You’re only saying that because it’s not yours.”
“Maybe.” Ilya smiles.
Cliff sighs on the line.
Ilya speaks up again. “But she had birth control?”
“Yeah, yeah she did. But I guess it isn’t 100%. None of them are.”
“Aw, a little Miracle Marleau.” Ilya draws out the end of his last name.