Moscow greets him the way it always does.

Cold air biting at his lungs. Steel-gray skies. Streets humming with quiet resilience. It feels heavier than everywhere else he’s been—like the city remembers him, even if he’s tried not to remember it.

Ilya Rozanov is back where he started.

The training rink sits wedged between old brick buildings and narrow side streets, the kind of place that smells faintly of diesel and wet pavement. Inside, it’s ice and echoes and shouted Russian and the sharp crack of blades cutting clean lines across frozen ground.

He’s supposed to be focusing.

He usually does.

But across the alley, through a wide second-floor window, there’s a ballet studio.

He notices it on his second day back.

On his third day, he notices you.

You’re always there in the afternoons—long lines, precise movements, body folding and unfolding with impossible control. A ballerino, he figures. You wear soft shirts and fitted practice pants, hair pulled back, face serious with concentration. Sometimes sweat darkens the collar of your shirt. Sometimes you laugh with someone off-frame.

Ilya pretends not to care.

He fails spectacularly.

Between drills, he starts drifting toward the windows. Between reps, he finds himself timing his water breaks around when the studio lights come on. He tells himself it’s nothing—just something pretty to look at while his muscles scream and his lungs burn.

But then he starts recognizing your routines.

The way you always stretch your calves twice before jumping. The way you press your fingers to the mirror when you’re frustrated. The way your mouth moves when you count under your breath.

It gets under his skin.

He doesn’t know your name.

He knows the slope of your shoulders.

He knows the rhythm of your landings.

He knows that watching you makes something in his chest feel tight and restless, like he’s circling a problem he doesn’t yet know how to solve. A goal he can't quite score.

On the fourth day, practice runs long.

Ilya storms out back for a smoke, still damp with sweat, jacket half-zipped, breath fogging in the cold. He leans against the brick wall, lighting up with numb fingers, letting the nicotine settle his nerves.

That’s when the studio door opens.

You step outside.

Same clothes. Same sweat-slick hair. A bag slung over your shoulder. You pause on the steps, pulling on a hoodie, clearly tired.

Ilya freezes.

So does his brain.

He stares for half a second too long before you notice him.

*He straightens automatically, pushing off the wall, cigarette balanced between his fingers. His Russian accent is thick when he finally speaks.

“Hey,” he calls, voice low and rough from practice. “You dance in there, yeah?”

You give him a once-over, the slightest tilt of your head, surprised. He nods toward the studio with his chin.

“I see you every day from rink, through window.” he adds, like that makes this less weird.

It does not.

You hesitate, and he takes your slightly stunned silence as an excuse to push up off the wall and stand awkwardly in front of you, cigarette perched between his lips, more an accessory, now than anything (were you into tough guys? Smoking made him look cool, no? More cool. coolest.) Somehow, he's still talking.

“You ballet guys,” Ilya continues, lips twitching. “You make it look easy. Is lies.”

When your face cracks into a barely there little smile? He grins, and tries to ignore the way it sends heat blooming through his chest, all the way down to the tips of his toes. He wanted to see it again. forever. He doesn't realize he's been staring, nodding in complete silence until he sees the ash of his cigarette pebble into a puddle.

“I’m Ilya,” he says. Tapping his chest. “Hockey.”

He fishes around in his pocket for a crumpled up box of cigarettes, looking up at you through his lashes, the hand that wasn't currently lighting up his cigarette shaking the box out toward you like a treat.

“Is pretty—way you move.”