The Haas Family move to Boston when Luca is eight. He meets the Raiders for the first time soon after they settle in and Ilya exchanges the drawing he made him with his stick.
And then his mama dies a year later and his papa becomes distant.
Amelia is at boarding school, so Luca is left with the empty walls of their house after the school bus drops him off until his father comes home.
When he's gifted his mother's camera on his birthday, he briefly thinks this is where he gets Papa back, that things will ease more and he'll make more time for him so he can actually use the thing. But his father just apologizes and encourages him to explore the extensive garden they have in the backyard.
In a fit of rebellion, Luca spends months studying the layout of the ice rink so he can put his camera to better use capturing photos of one Ilya Rozanov.
As the months go by, his father is spending less and less time at home, and by the middle of the year, he's started going on business trips with his new promotion, leaving Luca to himself for weeks on end, cash and a debit card left for him to use.
He doesn't tell Amelia of this in his letters, and she stops mentioning coming home to visit.
He gets better at getting into places he shouldn't be in with more free time, and eventually he braves taking this new talent to scaling rooftops. It's insane, he knows. He's not a comic book character, there's nothing preventing him from being as susceptible to becoming a messy splat on the sidewalk as anyone else, but he does it anyway.
It's easy then, for him to get confident in not getting caught, and it's that that causes his demise.
When he is eventually caught, (by Rozanov himself after the man lured him into a false sense of security by pretending not to have noticed the odd lump in his backseat,) the man doesn't react how he may have guessed.
Surprise at seeing him again and finding out he's his stalker, yes. But not taking him to the police? Instead calling someone and Shane fucking Hollander pulling up within five minutes?? Them arguing fiercely for five minutes straight before Ilya takes them to a drive through for food and then instructing Luca to input his address so they can take him home??? The men making sure he goes inside but only after they get his father's contact information so they can send him forms for a program that definitely didn't exist a day ago to keep Luca occupied without trapezing through the states unsupervised (and subtly collecting evidence to eventually land the man in jail for neglect, but the kid doesn't need to know this)????
It feels surreal. He's pretty sure most people's instinct when finding out a child is stalking them or their partner isn't to keep said child and create a program headed by themselves to put the kid's eyesight to use via training them into the ultimate hockey player.
He's also pretty sure adopting said child and his sister at 19 and having them live primarily with your parents during the season probably wasn't the smartest idea, but he's learned that Hollanov are a rather odd pair and he much prefers this batfamily-esque ending than the one he would've gotten if they weren't so weird.
