indie s/low activity ice hockey oc, ethan wilson, first overall draft pick with the (fictionalized) toronto maple leafs in the 2025-2026 season, turned carolina hurricanes center. loved by mia (she/hers, 26). muse est. 4/20/2022. blog est. 12/8/2025.
carrd under construction. image credit
AFFILIATED WITH @carolinasbest , @metrosbest , @quad4xel , more tba.
IN LIGHT OF RECENT NEWS, i will not be writing against anyone using hud.son willi.ams as their muse's fc, regardless of he's an fc for shan.e ho.llander, a canon character, or an oc.
Alexei Ivanov Has Won Everything Twice. Now He's Daring the Sport to Take It Back. // @quad4xel
The two-time Olympic champion opens the season at open war with figure skating's governing bodies — and skating, as ever, like a man who can't quite believe what he's allowed to keep.
The first thing you notice at an Ivanov practice is how little of it looks like effort. He takes the ice the way other people take a seat. The quad toe he opens with — the jump that ends careers, that whole federations build development pipelines around — he throws away like loose change, lands it backward into a hydroblade he didn't need, and is already looking at the boards before the snow settles. Somewhere in the stands a teenager who flew in from two states over makes a sound. Ivanov doesn't look up. He has heard it before. He has, by his own count, been hearing it a very long time.
The numbers are not in dispute, which is rare for him. First man to land a quadruple Axel in competition, in 2013. The signature entry the sport now simply calls the Ivanov. The only skater with a ratified quintuple in the books. Two Olympic individual golds — 2022, and again this past February in the Italian Alps, the second claimed despite a quintuple Axel attempt that put him into the boards hard enough that his coach, the Nagano champion Francesca Giordano, was halfway over the barrier before he'd stopped sliding. Ten world titles. A combined-score record he has set, lost, and retaken so often it has stopped making news. There is a long-running joke in the fancams that he looks identical to his 2014 debut footage, that the man simply does not age. He finds this very funny. I have never once heard him deny it.
And yet. The thing about watching Alexei Ivanov, the thing nobody quite writes down, is that he competes like someone who expects to be caught. Not caught failing — he is, by every measure available to the people who score him, the best ever to do this. Caught at something else. There's a held quality to him between elements, a half-second of accounting, as if each program is a story he's getting away with telling and the next jump is where they finally stop him. Twenty-seven years old, every record worth owning, and he skates each free like the medal is already being pried out of his hands.
He'd tell you it's just how it is for a Russian who left. His 2022 team gold didn't reach him until 2024; he has watched the apparatus take things back before. "They are always deciding whether I am allowed," he said once — not to me, to a scrum in Saitama — and then smiled the smile that built the America's sweetheart years and said something about his cat so the quote would be unusable. He is very good at making a quote unusable.
This season he's stopped bothering. After half a year off the ice — he will marry the skater Milena Vasile in December and looked, briefly, like a man who might rest — Ivanov has come back openly at war with the International Skating Union and the federation whose flag he carries. He is stacking quintuples into layouts the technical panel can barely keep current with, daring them to deduct. The free skate is set to "Your Biggest Fan," from the Lestat musical, and if you think a vampire's anthem is subtle you haven't met him: he is playing the monster the sport keeps insisting he must secretly be, in sequins, and he is going to win.
We'd met in Boston that fall, the afternoon before a Hurricanes–Bruins game I was in town to cover; he turned up at the restaurant in a federation tracksuit he clearly hated. "Let them write what they want. Is very much their job, no?" he told me, with the specific glee of a man who has read every headline ever written about him. "I will be skating the correction." (The Hurricanes won that night in overtime — Pyotr Zhuravlev roofed the winner and got buried under James Moffat a half-second later. Ivanov texted me a single question mark when the highlight crossed his feed. I don't think he cares about hockey. I think he cares that I do.)
There's a version of this profile that goes looking for the boy. It's the version every editor wants — the prodigy on a frozen lake outside Saint Petersburg, the parents, the long climb, the wound that explains the man. Ivanov doesn't give it. Ask about anything before the 2012 junior circuit and he goes pleasant and flat, the way a door is pleasant and flat. I've known him a while now — well enough to be called, accurately, a frenemy in at least one of his interviews. I know where some of the doors lead. I'm not going to open them here. Some of that is friendship. Some of it is that I've come to believe a person gets to decide which parts of himself are on the record, and that the most interesting thing about Alexei Ivanov isn't what he's hiding — everyone in this sport is hiding something — but that he's decided, this year, to hide it in plain sight and call it art.
After practice he sits on the boards and lets Vasile retie a skate he's perfectly capable of tying himself. The teenager from two states over is still there, hovering. Ivanov waves her down, signs the program she's clearly slept with, asks her name, gets it wrong on purpose so she'll correct him, laughs when she does. For thirty seconds he's exactly the person the marketing promised. Then someone from the federation appears at the tunnel with a clipboard and his face closes like a hand.
He has won everything there is. Twice. He could stop. Instead he's going to spend the year forcing the people who turned him into a record to admit, out loud, on camera, that they cannot tell him what to do — and he's going to do it knowing exactly how long the year is, and exactly how many more of them there are.
Which is the part I keep coming back to. Most athletes are racing the clock. Watching him, you get the strange, unshakeable sense that he's the only one in the building who knows he isn't.
sports journalist ethan sports journalist ethan sports journalist ethan. let me write an ic think piece of ur muse except it's in ethan's voice obviously. like an ic written think piece.
Richie and Austen are often along for the ride
They don't say a lot, but they know every inch of this drive
If these trees started talkin', I bet you they'd only talk shit
'Cause we never do anythin' real, we just talk about it
Endin' of August, the bugs are just startin' to die
All the neighbors are votin' for someone who wins every time
And I thought gettin' older meant knowin' it's too late to try
And I tried gettin' sober, I swear I did bettеr this time
And anythin' you need, I will provide
A ride home or an alibiI know the traffic light you can speed right by
'Cause the camera's down
And I follow New York plates to the county line
I ignore 'em when they wave on 89
The minute that September hits
I'm goin' off my medicine, oh
Late August angst and a pointless night
Oh, and the feelin' of being alive
For the first time in a long time
you made it home before he woke.
you didn’t call it leaving. you left water on the nightstand and two pills beside the glass and a note that said text me, two words, not a sentence, the absolute most your hand could put on the paper before the pen went strange and foreign in your fingers—and you told yourself that leaving water was the opposite of leaving, that a person who leaves doesn’t measure out advil in the dark and count the tablets twice to be sure it’s two and not one and not three, doesn’t fold the note in half and then unfold it because folded looks like a goodbye and flat looks like a habit, doesn’t stand at the foot of the bed for a slow count of sixty memorizing the exact topography of someone asleep—the line of his shoulder, the way his mouth went soft, his hair falling over his eyes, the hand still half-open on the sheet where yours used to be—doesn’t drive home through a dead gray city with both hands locked at ten and two like the wheel might come alive and steer him back. a person who leaves just goes. you didn’t just go. you provisioned, you triaged, you did the leaving thing so carefully, so tenderly, with so much logistics, that it could pass in dim light for the exact opposite of itself.
you did the leaving thing like it was love.
you’re so good at that part. dressing it up. you’ve had practice.
you ease out of the room. you don’t let the door click. down the hall, past sebastian’s—no, wrong person, wrong family, wrong house, wrong year, the host’s kids’ rooms, whoever they are—and out the side door, the one off the kitchen that doesn’t face the street. you don’t look back up at the window. you know which one it is. you make yourself not know which one it is.
uber black. quiet ride requested, because you can’t do a stranger’s voice right now, can’t do thank you, man one more time. you have him drop you at a gas station twenty blocks short of home, because a car that knows where you live is a thread someone could pull, and because the walk is a penance you can give yourself for free. your phone dies somewhere around block six, and you walk the rest in the dark with a dead phone in your pocket like a stone, and it’s almost a relief, the not-being-reachable, the small clean certainty that for these twenty minutes nobody can find you and you can’t ruin anything.
you get home. you make it as far as the bathroom.
then your body does the third honest thing it’s done all night.
the cross on your bedroom wall was brass and small and wade hung it himself the week you moved in. he just put it where you’d catch it from the bed, because he’s watched you long enough to know the looking does something, settles something, gives the noise a direction to point at instead of nowhere. and it works, usually. usually you can lie there and let your eyes go to it and feel the static in your skull resolve into something with edges. a hand on the scruff of the neck. here. this way. down.
it wasn’t working.
you’d been sitting on the edge of your own bed since the sky was the black-before-blue color it goes at the bottom of the night, and the cross was just brass. it caught the gray. it hung there on its nail being a small metal object that wade bought at a shop, and you kept walking up to it the way you walk up to the silence in every chapel you’ve ever knelt in, the way you walked up to it after the first incident with the stalkers, with your knees aching on the kneeler and your hands folded so hard the knuckles went white—say something. anything. give me one word back—and getting the same answer you always get, which is the door is locked, which is it was always locked, which is you knew that and you knocked anyway because the knocking is the only part you’re allowed to keep.
bless me father, for i have sinned.
you got that far.
most times, it was the furthest you got. it’s a beautiful sentence. it has a shape your mouth knows the way it knows a stick taped your way, automatic, true. and underneath it, further down, smoother—miserere mei. have mercy. the one you’d say before you understood it meant anything, back when latin was just the sound church made, and it surfaced then the way it always does, ahead of thought, ahead of meaning, the body praying while the mind stands off to the side and watches. miserere. mercy. but it was the rest that wouldn’t load—the part where you name the thing and the naming pulls it up off you like a coat lifted off your shoulders by someone standing behind you, the part where the priest says the words and the weight transfers and you walk back down the aisle a few pounds lighter and a little more forgiven than the thing you are has any right to be. that’s the whole machine. confession. you name it, it leaves you. you’ve run that machine a thousand times.
it wouldn’t run that morning because you couldn’t find the sin to feed it. miserere mei—mercy for what. you couldn’t even get the word up out of your mouth, let alone the thing it’s supposed to be sorry for.
because it wasn’t the kiss.
that’s the thing nobody warned you about. the kiss has a name, the kiss has an act number, a place in the catechism, a clean little drawer it slides into—he was drunk and i let him put his mouth on mine and i wanted it, just like i wanted when i was freezing to death. there’s penance for that. there’s a number of hail marys. there’s a version of you that could kneel down right then and confess the kiss and stand up absolved, because the kiss is a transaction and transactions can be settled.
he said i love you.
he said it into the side of your neck, half under, slurred soft, no hedge on it, no i think and no maybe and no escape hatch built in the way you build escape hatches into everything you’ve ever said to anyone—just the fact of it, set down between you like he was stating the weather. i love you. like it cost nothing. like it wasn’t a live thing he was pressing into the hands of someone who has, on the record, in this exact body, destroyed every soft thing he’s ever been trusted with.
you had no blood in your mouth.
and you sat in the corner.
you found the place where the two walls meet and you put your back into it and your knees up and the saint pendant swung down on its chain and pressed a little cross-shaped ache into your kneecap and you stayed there. all night. you watched the light come up on his face by degrees, black to blue to that thin gray that means morning’s coming whether you’ve forgiven yourself or not, and you said it back where he couldn’t hear you. i love you too. two hundred times with your jaw locked and your throat shut—de profundis. out of the depths. except the psalm has the cry go up and out and land somewhere. yours stayed in the room. yours didn’t clear your teeth.
you kept the watch.
you kept the best watch of your life. eyes open, body still, every exit clocked, the door locked, the threat managed, the boy breathing—you did the whole vigil flawless.
vigilate et orate.
watch and pray. the instruction comes in two parts. you have always, your entire life, been able to do exactly one of them.
you watched. god, you watched. you watch so well it’s the closest thing to a gift you’ve got.
the prayer died in the same place the i love you too died. behind your teeth. in the part of you that locks when it matters most, that’s locked since before toronto, that locks like a reflex now whenever the thing you need to say is the thing that would cost you to say it.
iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou, you never say.
instead, you drag your bleeding, half-rotten corpse towards the cross of your own making.
it got worse as the light came up. you’d quickly realized that it always gets worse in the light.
in the dark you could almost believe you were a person doing a hard thing for a good reason. the gray took that away. the gray was, and always is, clinical. the gray turned the night into evidence and laid it out for you piece by piece like a brief, and your brain—your stupid, tireless, never-once-merciful brain—picked each piece up and turned it over and read it back to you in a voice you’ve stopped pretending isn’t there. nowadays the voice sounds like robby, the day you reunited at the draft. first and second overall, on a collision course. through it all—
he doesn’t know what you are. he still doesn’t know what you are.
that’s the one it opens with. it always opens with that one.
he doesn’t. that’s the whole problem and the whole reason and the whole locked door. robby said i love you to a boy he grew up with, a boy he practiced hockey with on the weather-cracked blacktop of the apartment building johnny lived in, a teammate, a best friend, a person—and a person is not what was sitting in that room. the book of enoch has the watchers come down because the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took unto themselves wives, each chose for himself one, and you know exactly how that story ends, you’ve known since you were fixated enough to read the parts of the bible they don’t teach children in CCD. they came down because they wanted something human. they fell because they reached for it. they were bound in the valleys of the earth for seventy generations for the crime of loving across a line that wasn’t theirs to cross. and the children of those unions came out wrong. came out giant and hungry and began to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. that’s what gets made when a thing like the watchers loves a thing like a person. monsters. that’s the fruit. it’s always the fruit. you reach across the line and what grows is something that has to be drowned.
robby’s not the fruit, or the fig, or the apple, or the pomegranate. those fruits are just that to him: fruit. fuel for his body. (once upon a time, you taught him that food just doesn’t have to be fuel. and then you left.)
he’s the garden.
you are not even a watcher. watchers had a category. watchers had a name and a sin and a sentence—there’s almost a mercy in that, in being a thing the text has a word for. you’re the part of the margin even enoch didn’t reach, the thing that exists in the white space past where the apocrypha stops, and the lesson lands the same anyway. to gabriel said the lord: proceed against the bastards and the children of fornication, and destroy the children of the watchers from amongst men. not redeem. not forgive. destroy. that’s how the only story that’s ever felt like yours ends. not grace. removal.
and robby pressed i love you into the neck of that.
and you didn’t burst into flame.
you kept coming back to that, in the gray, like a tongue to a broken tooth. you said it back two hundred silent times and the earth didn’t open. no sword. no flood. no michael at the foot of the bed with his foot on your throat. just a boy in the shape of a garden sleeping, and the light coming up, and you in the corner being the only one who knew what was actually in the room with him all night.
maybe the punishment’s just slow. maybe it’s coming and it’s taking its time. maybe it looks like the morning he wakes up clear-eyed and sees you the way the text sees you and runs, the way anyone would run, the way you’ve been waiting your whole life for everyone to finally have the sense to run.
or maybe—and this is the thought that actually frightened you, more than any of the rest of it—
maybe you’re wrong.
maybe it’s just a book. maybe the watchers are a story scared men told about wanting things. maybe you built another cathedral of reasons you can’t have this out of nothing but your own certainty that you don’t deserve it, and the certainty came first and the scripture came after, hauled in load by load to wall up a door that was never locked from the outside at all.
you don’t know.
you’ve never known. that’s the part that doesn’t have a prayer either. not the rest of it—the not-knowing. whether you’re a thing being justly kept from what it loves, or just a boy who taught himself the most beautiful possible reasons to sit in a corner instead of lying down beside the person who asked him to stay.
and somewhere across the city the note was still on the nightstand. two words. text me. you could see it the way you see everything you’re not in the room for—robby surfacing into the hangover, the water, the advil lined up like an apology that won’t say what it’s apologizing for, and then the paper. two words in your handwriting. not good morning. not last night. not anything a person who stayed would’ve needed to write down. you didn’t know what he’d make of it. that’s the whole horror of two words—you left him exactly enough to fill in himself, and you taught him a long time ago that you’ll always fill silence with the worst available version of yourself.
you haven’t slept. you want to be careful about how you hold that, because the not-sleeping has a texture you know—the light too bright at the edges, the way sound arrives a half-second late and then too loud, your hands a little far away from you, like you’re operating them by remote. you didn’t eat breakfast either. the gear goes on the way it always goes on, muscle running the program while the rest of you watches from somewhere behind your own eyes, and that’s fine, that’s manageable, you’ve skated worse than this. you’ve skated through worse than a body. the body is the easy part.
the locker room is also easy, which is how you know how far gone you are.
except it isn’t, because he’s three stalls down.
you found him the second you walked in—of course you did, you’ve never once been in a room with robby keene and not known exactly where he was, it’s the oldest reflex you’ve got, older than the threat-scanning, older than toronto—and now you’re tying your skates angled a few degrees wrong, a few degrees away, and you’re aware of the angle the way you’re aware of a held breath. he’s right there. pulling his gear on, laughing at something chase said, sixteen feet of rubber matting away, and last night he said i love you into your neck and this morning you put water on a nightstand and ran.
he’s three stalls down being the most alive thing in the room—you can feel it without aiming your eyes there, the heat of him, the gravity, the whole garden of him laughing at something chase said—and you tie your laces.
you can’t look at him.
that’s the whole problem, clean. you cannot look at him, and you are in a room whose entire architecture is built around guys looking at each other—chirping, eye contact, the loose easy net of attention, take warning stitched on the wall somewhere—and the one thing you can’t do is the one thing the room is for.
so you have to give him something. you’ve run the play already, weighed who is in the room to rib some more, somewhere under the spiral, the part of your brain that never stops doing damage control even while the rest of you is reciting enoch in a corner—go fully dark on robby and that’s louder than anything. a flare. these guys don’t know what you are but they know what normal is, and normal is you and keene chirping before practice like every day since carolina, and the absence of that is a hole shaped exactly like the truth.
one line. you need one line.
you find it. you don’t look up from your laces—you can manage the words or the eyes, not both, not today—and you pitch it across the stalls, flat and dry, the exact register that’s only ever been his:
“keene. you look like death. happy new year.”
and you’re already turning away. already reaching for tape you don’t need. gone the second the line clears your teeth, like you tagged the base and now you’re allowed to leave.
not enough to be safe. too much to survive. that’s the trap.
seth catches the turn. catches that you delivered the chirp to your own skate laces instead of to robby’s face—that ethan wilson, who locks onto everything, who tracks every body in every room he’s ever walked into, just said something to his best friend without once aiming his eyes at him.
he doesn’t say that. seth never actually says the thing he sees around you to your face. not anymore. not since you were sixteen. you doubt he and you will ever go back to the dynamic you had at that age, in the months before you fucked everything up intentionally.
what he says is, “fuck’s up with you, wilson?”—light, surface, a chirp—and a couple of the guys pick it up because a thread’s a thread and it’s early: yeah you’re off, man. rough night? first overall can’t handle a team party. easy stuff. the kind of ribbing that means they like you.
you take it. you give them a little—a grin that never reaches your eyes when you spiral, yeah, yeah, laugh it up, fuckers—because letting them chirp the surface keeps them off the thing under it, and that’s a trade you’ll make all day. let them think hungover. let them think tired. let them think anything except the true thing, which is that you’re three stalls from the boy you love and you’d rather eat the boards than meet his eyes.
you’ll pray about it later. you’ll pray about a lot of things later.
(later. the way you prayed in toronto—knees on a kneeler with no roof over it, breath going to fog, the cold doing your thinking for you. don’t. you put it down. you’ve gotten good at putting it down.)
"you're getting warmer, sethy," you say. dry. and you watch it land as the first thing and not the second—seth grins, takes the banter, lets it go—and something in you unclenches a half-degree, the specific clean relief of having set the truth down in the middle of the room and watched everyone agree it was a joke. you said it. nobody heard it. you win the hand. you always win the hand. that's the trick of it, the one you're actually good at: you can be as honest as you want, right out loud, as long as you do it in a key no one's tuned to.
because seth used to push. there was a year seth would've heard the second meaning and walked straight into it, called the thing what it was to your face, refused to let you wave him off—back when he was the one person who did that. you trained it out of him. you don't remember the exact mechanics, which is its own kind of damning; you just know that somewhere after sixteen he learned that seeing you clearly cost more than it was worth, and he stopped. everyone learns that eventually. seth was just faster than most.
unlike most of the wreckage you've made peace with, that one you haven't.
your fingers find the tape. you peel a strip you won’t use.
you can feel it without looking—that’s the cost of the reflex, you always know where he is, so you always know the exact moment he goes still. the laugh died a beat too early on his end. he took the one line you gave him and turned it over and felt the size of it: one chirp, dry and perfect, and then your whole back. drunk-certain memory and sober dread running the play you taught him at sixteen—he hasn’t pulled away but he’s going to—except now he has more things in his arsenal to use against you. the fact you didn’t say i love you back, if he remembers that. the water by the bed. the empty space where you should’ve been when he woke after you said you wouldn’t leave.
or you saying goodbye in the only language he speaks.
you stand before your hands can betray you worse. tape you won’t use in your fist.
and then you look.
you don’t decide to. it’s not a decision—it’s the oldest reflex you’ve got slipping its leash for half a second, your eyes going to him the way water goes downhill, and you catch—something. his head already turned. his eyes already where you are, or where you were, you can’t tell, you’re already wrenching your gaze back down to the laces before your brain can finish developing the picture. maybe he was looking. maybe you only want him to have been. you’ll never know now; you didn’t let yourself hold it long enough to read it.
you leave the locker room, avoiding eye contact with james the entire time you walk past him. you stop at the mouth of the tunnel where the rubber gives way to the cold coming up off the sheet, for the one sheet of the world where you and robby know exactly how to be next to each other and none of it has to be said out loud. and you breathe, and you count it down the way you count everything down—one, the boards. two, the red line. three. then you go.
Drawin' of a place, oh, we're a photo on the fridge
They mined copper for years, oh, there was nothin' left to dig
Oh, everythin' you see out here will die
Oh, it's a matter of time
'Til it's fields of ice and reflector lights
'Til it's our town
