#363897

Ryan’s been gone for about twenty minutes now.

Kirill’s not usually the worrying sort, but Ryan does have the car keys, and he’d like to know he hasn’t been left behind at the rink. Kirill goes looking for him after he’s wasted as much time as he can packing up his bag, organizing his stall, and poking at his hair in the mirror.

The bowels of the X feel odd after games, busy but not enough, deserted in a way that belies privacy. The couple straggling reporters and trainers give him nods and disappear around corners, and Kirill is starting to feel a little lost by the time he comes across the door.

It’s just slightly ajar, almost discreet. Ryan’s messy like that, Kirill thinks, unwittingly fond. Of course he’d leave this little space where anyone could overhear —

“I just don’t get — what’s your angle, man? Why the fuck do you even care?” Ryan sounds angry. He almost never sounds angry off the ice. Kirill frowns.

“Don’t ask stupid questions.” And that’s — that’s Mats, which Kirill doesn’t —

“Oh, but you get to ask me —”

There’s a rustle, then the sound of an impact, not like a punch but a check. Someone lets out a shocked breath — Ryan, Kirill knows — and then Mats says, “Don’t fuck around. I’m asking because I —” for a moment, there’s just the sound of both of them breathing raggedly. Then, “It doesn’t matter why. It just matters that you’re not fucking around with him.”

“And if I was?” Ryan doesn’t sound serious, but he does sound mean. “Oh, right. You’d be jealous.”

Kirill blinks. He’s not stupid. He knows, very well, that he is not supposed to be hearing this. He holds his breath and ignores the greasy, squirming feeling in his stomach.

“I’m just trying to look after him,” says Mats. He is not doing a good job of hiding the hurt in his voice.

Ryan’s quiet for a long time, but Kirill knows this quiet. It’s the quiet where Ryan is so overwhelmed with hurt that he cannot think of where to begin. That he begins to think perhaps he deserves to take it. Kirill waits until he can’t anymore, until he has to step in, until — “You don’t get to act like I’m not,” Ryan says. He sounds thin, tired. “I turned my whole life upside down for him, and you don’t — you can’t seriously think I don’t care.”