Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Established Relationship, Timeline Set Mid-'The Long Game', Post-Plane Incident, Extended Plane Incident, As In: Shane Actually Has Time To Believe That Ilya Is Dead, Shane Genuinely Thinks That’s The Worst That Could Happen, Which Would Obviously Mean The Worst Is Behind Them!, (spoiler: is it so very NOT), Angst with a Happy Ending, Commotio Cordis, Watching The Love of Your Life Collapse On The Ice, Mourning, Shane is going through it, emergency contacts, Hurt/Comfort, Five Stages of Grief, Hockey Injuries, Heartbreak, True Love, Feat. Ilya Rozanov: World’s Least-Bothered Victim of Blunt Force Chest Trauma, Observe:, Shane: You Almost Died Your Heart Stopped I ALMOST DIED WITH YOU, Ilya: Nothing STOPPED; Heart Just Threw Hissy Fit; Very Annoying, Shane: THEY HAD TO BRING OUT THE DEFIBRILLATOR, Ilya: Yes. As I Say. Very Annoying, Reunions, Caretaking, Cuddling, Desperately Seeking Proof of Life, The Unrivaled Intimacy of Listening To The Love of Your Life’s Still-Alive Heartbeat, Shane Falls Apart, Ilya Catches The Pieces and Tenderly Puts Him Back Together, Marriage Proposal, touch as a love language, Ilya Knows Shane Better Than He Knows Himself, (that’s what trying to hide from your own heart from a decade will do…probably), Happy Ending

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-20 Completed: 2026-01-21 Words: 13,808 Chapters: 3/3

commotio cordis (comes with the territory)

Summary

Shane had truly believed that the worst was behind them.

Mostly because his barometer for ‘worst’ had been recalibrated from a weighted mass of worry lodged in the base of his throat about league reactions, and the strain of hiding his heart, rewritten in an instant where he'd known that the worst was actually a notification bubble in a corner where it never showed, next to a name that taught Shane what it was worth to be alive at all; that opened up and spelled terror and the end of the whole goddamn world—but then it wasn't. They didn't end. Shane didn't lose. They made it through the worst.

Surely that meant everything would be okay moving forward, since they'd already survived the worst.

__________

Or: Shane genuinely does believe they've made it through the storm, that the worst came for them and they walked out okay. Breathing. Alive. Together.

Shane—waiting for his fiancé in a hotel room, watching the man he loves more than life collapse on the ice in high definition, the light vanishing from his eyes, the feed cutting just before a crash cart descends upon him—

Shane realizes swiftly—painfully—that he was really fucking wrong.

Notes

A few housekeeping notes:

1) the plane crash chapters in The Long Game are assumed to be protracted, here: as in, Shane actually has time to think Ilya's dead, and his headspace and anxieties and awareness of his feelings are amplified/speed-run as a result.

2) I technically put this fic in the gdocs bit after writing it because I didn't intend to write for this fandom at all, but the incomparable and amazing cloudsurfing convinced me to retrieve it before it hit the 'permanently delete' date—and then went above and beyond and read through and beta'd it like a fucking pro, and is the only reason this exists. Doll? Thank you, so so much, for convincing me this was worth finishing/sharing/not deleting 🖤🖤🖤

3) Of the things that went in the bin/were retrieved at the behest of cloudsurfing? Were the rest of what is a 5-part series (?!) building from this story, about the Five Stages of Grief and how Shane was an naive fool to think an almost plane crash was the worst that could come for him and his beloved. So like, if you think the rest of those are a thing you'd like to see? Let me know.

4) Just to reiterate: I never intended to join this fandom; I listened to the books during my early long-COVID days and then—as an unrepentant 'I will write a plane crash scenario into every fandom' author—canon had taken care of that for me (if not nearly as dramatically as I'd personally desire), so why would I have to write it myself? But...yeah. Here we are. So: I hope it's a worthwhile read 🖤

 

EDITED TO ADD: because of the archive maintenance and given this has happened to me before—this fic is 3 chapters and they are ALL POSTED TOGETHER, IT IS JUST IN CHAPTERS FOR THE SAKE OF PACING. If for some reason they don't all upload before Ao3 takes its siesta (which I’ve actually had happen when I post before)? KNOW THAT THEY ARE HERE. And I will re-add/edit/whatever-needs-doing immediately after things are up and running again.

Chapter 1: Run

Chapter Summary

Shane had truly believed that the worst was behind them.

Mostly because his barometer for ‘worst’ had been recalibrated from a weighted mass of worry lodged in the base of his throat, tangled up about league reactions and the strain of hiding his heart as it pulled harder, heavier with every passing moment where that very heart grew fuller against all odds, ever-more swollen with the unfathomable breadth of the things he felt for the man he knew he was going to spend his life with even if they were going to wait, even if they were going to hide in plain sight until retirement set them free to reach for forever without constraints, without barriers, together, finally—

But then Shane’s understanding of ‘worst’ had been wrenched in an instant, because worst was the notification bubble in a corner it never showed up in, next to a name that taught Shane what it was worth to be alive at all, that opened up and spelled terror and the end of the whole goddamn world, because ‘worst’?

That was definitively and inarguably: A million memories. Thank you for those.

Shane had truly believed that the worst was behind them.

Mostly because his barometer for ‘worst’ had been recalibrated from a weighted mass of worry lodged in the base of his throat, tangled up about league reactions and the strain of hiding his heart as it pulled harder, heavier with every passing moment where that very heart grew fuller against all odds, ever-more swollen with the unfathomable breadth of the things he felt for the man he knew he was going to spend his life with even if they were going to wait, even if they were going to hide in plain sight until retirement set them free to reach for forever without constraints, without barriers, together, finally—

But then Shane’s understanding of ‘worst’ had been wrenched in an instant, in the squeeze of half-a-heartbeat that just kept tightening, tightening, tightening until he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, until there was no blood in him at all because worst was the notification bubble in a corner it never showed up in, next to a name that taught Shane what it was worth to be alive at all, that opened up and spelled terror and the end of the whole goddamn world, because ‘worst’?

That was definitively and inarguably: A million memories. Thank you for those.

A million too few. A trillion too few. Every fiber, every vein in Shane’s entire shredded heart, all of it too few, and Shane had done it to them. He’d tried to put a cage on this thing that was bigger than him, bigger than anything, and for whole minutes that stretched like lifetimes, he’d been faced with a reality where he’d willfully rejected the best thing he’d ever known, the twitching pulp left in his chest without Ilya a rotting corpse waiting to be put out of its misery, save it wouldn’t be: Shane wouldn’t have deserved it.

Because Shane had stared the heart of him in the eyes and told it to hide, told it to be less. He’d tried to abort a fucking miracle, for fear of things so inconsequential in comparison it churned sick in his stomach just to think of it—he would have had to live with the consequences of turning away from his very soul and telling it to burn dimmer, and what kind of a monster would do that? What had he allowed himself to become, for fear of everything but the actual thing that would devastate him, would destroy him down to the cells?

So, yeah; the worst?

That was: I am thinking only about you right now.

As if that wasn’t the status quo. The true north on the compass rose etching the line of Shane’s sternum. As if it didn’t catch between Shane’s windpipe and his carotid, the crossroads of breath and blood like a threat and a promise and a warning and a vow: the difference between life and death—Ilya, or nothingness.

It was so crystal fucking clear when it wasn’t Ilya but, the alternative of just Ilya, beautiful blinding Ilya, being him in gradations, with caveats built in: how selfish could Shane have been, how fucking stupid—it was stark to the point of choking, of his lungs caving in.

In the absence of Ilya, there isn’t anything, anymore. And Shane had seen fit to what, gamble on it? Hope they had time?

But then, as if that weren’t e-fucking-nough:

The absolutely fucking worst?

The worst, beyond anything Shane’s untenably, uncontrollably overwrought brain could conjure up at its own worst, before: the actual worst was:

Safe in your heart. I believe it.

Believed it. Ilya believed that. Of Shane.

And what had Shane done to earn it? How had he made his heart a place someone as precious as Ilya would even want to rest in passing, let alone stay next to, inside of, comprised of entire without any permission granted, stolen in the dark, hoarded in the shadows because this man was the delicious bite of a fresh breath of air upon drawing, and golden in every way there was to be; because when those words had hit in the moment he had crumbled, and in looking at them even for an instant on the other side of the mere taste of annihilation: it’s everything. It’s the only thing.

Somewhere along the line—maybe, or rather, almost definitely nowhere along the line at all, but right there from the very start, just like Ilya said himself; from the first moment Shane’s breath had caught alongside the way his eyes snagged glorious on those glittery blues—there was a Shane who used to exist before he’d breathed the same air as Ilya Rozanov, and the Shane who’s been fighting this entire fucking time to see the light, to beat free in his own goddamn chest with all the steady-growing blinding love he feels for this one man, this one soul he wants his own to live beside forever.

The only reason Shane thinks his own heart was even here, for anything: to be for him.

And reading those words: that was all he’s ever wanted. And seeing it backlit in black and white: he knew he’d missed it for his own shortcomings, his own failures, his own willful inadequacies. He’d lost everything, and deep at the core of that everything: he wanted the chance to prove his heart could be the only home Ilya could ever dream of, would ever want to call his own.

He should have already been that, the whole goddamn time and then it was too late, he was too late, it was over, Shane was over—

Until that screen had lit up again. That name had sang out in bright bold letters—not even his name. More smoke and fucking mirrors. More failing him.

And Shane…Shane wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been blessed by the impossible. He knew, then and there, he needed to be better. Be honest. Be brave.

Make his heart a home Ilya wouldn’t just be safe in, but would be cherished. Endlessly. For always.

Ceaselessly.

And somehow, they had made it through, they’d been lucky enough to make it back from the abyss: Shane’s heart had broken, absolutely, but not beyond repairing, not beyond piecing back together once Ilya was in his reach, in his arms, warm and safe and breathing and with him—and a fucking plane crash is like a one-in-many-millions kind of horror, and they’d survived it.

They’d survived; they were fucking engaged, now, because ‘worst’ was the messages that lived still inside a brightly-colored app icon, the words themselves and the threat of their pixels on his goddamn phone being all he had left—and that wake-up call had shaken Shane’s priorities into proper alignment for maybe the first time in his whole fucking life, after they’d spent over a decade all lined up neatly in the in the absolute most wrong order Shane could imagine, looking back. Touching even the slightest bit on all the what ifs that still made his chest ache.

It’s better now. They’re so much better. Shane’s watching Ilya dominate the game like a partner—not a colleague or a teammate or a rival, a lover who supports his beloved—and their forever is in sight, not just in a nebulous future. Shane can taste it, sweet on his tongue and warm in his chest when he so much as thinks of himself: a husband.

Ilya’s husband.

It’s all of that—all the promise, all the bitter residue in the magnitude of all that was almost lost—that he tastes the strongest, though, soured heinous and hateful in the bile of how, when what looks to his eyes—even though the broadcast, though the filter of the screen—like a run-off-the-mill hit, a stray puck and a too-short stop, stops time in a second, stops Shane’s blood on the way through his chest, before Ilya crumples to the ice: boneless. Motionless.

Empty.

The last thing Shane processes before he’s out of his seat, limbs numb, heart fucking trembling: the last thing Shane sees, in unforgiving digital zoom, is the barest glimpse of the light in Ilya’s eyes not going dark, not snuffing out, not fading away.

No: just…ceasing. Gone.

He’s tripping to the screen at the other end of the room—he’d had a few days to play with, the weather unpredictable enough he could consider attributing any team absences on getting caught in a storm, a course of excuses he’d have never even considered when his priorities were unrecognizable versus the now, but now he’d wanted to wait for his fiancé in a hotel room he’d booked for them, just outside the city proper, close enough to the arena but far enough that it felt intentional, not just convenient, in the direction Ilya would already be going to drive home, not to hide in stolen moments like the hotel had reminded him of in Anaheim but to savor what they had now, to treasure the moments they could make, thousand and millions and billions more to be grateful to keep, to thank each other for with lips and bodies and words, because Shane had sworn to himself he was going to be better with the words, if he had the chance at a forever with this man he was going to fucking use his words to cherish him as he deserved; but now.

Now, in this moment, the distance, no matter its intent, tremors though him, quakes in the certainty, the proof that it’s still not enough, that he should be there in person, next to the ice and running whether he’s allowed to or not, to Ilya’s side, to see his face, to, to…

Shane’s tripping to the screen, heart stuck in his throat and thrashing to get out but Shane’s lungs are frozen, he can’t fucking breathe, his whole weight braced on his hands at either side of the television, staring, begging:

Get up. Stand up. Be okay, be okay, be okay—

It’s standard that the cameras cut when an injury is of genuine concern, of course, and the Centaurs have closed ranks already, taken to the ice as a loyal barricade for their fallen captain as the med team scrambles, and as much as Shane appreciates the discretion, the respect for his heart and soul sprawled, lifeless—

No. No.

But before the footage redirects entirely, before there’s nothing to be gleaned between the skates of a tested-and-tried, genuinely loyal team protecting their captain, Shane sees the thing that undoes him. A thing he didn’t even consider, or else, his brain hadn’t had the bandwidth to run with on its own steam, not yet—it’s the last thing he gets a glimpse of. Three blinks’ worth, if that.

The med team, dropping alongside where Shane can just make out the shape of his world behind all the legs and pads, with…not the normal med cart. Or else, not just, and either way, the point of focus is clear.

It’s a crash cart.

And the AED is being unloaded at a frantic pace, and it looks like someone’s moving to cut away the shirt, pulling at the collar and why, why do they need a fucking defibrillator for Ilya—

They switch the broadcast to a replay, which is maybe the most heinous and offensive thing Shane’s even seen, even felt like acid not just at the back of his throat but running down his throat and lurching in his gut, pooling in his chest to eat away at everything in him he’s done so much to supposedly optimize, to train to peak performance and for fucking what, useless and inadequate and pointless, absolutely pointless in the face of what matters, in trying to keep the only thing any of it was worth being strong for, being enough for.

In the end: Shane isn’t. Shane can’t. Shane failed the man he loved again, and again, and again even when he tried because his trying was pitiful, he was less-than-useless, he had lost—

Maybe it was never a game with a scoreboard, or races with stopwatches. Maybe it was always just the question, the only question: can you keep a love so big when it comes to you, reaches for you, no matter how little you deserve it?

Shane’s knees buckle without warning, then, for the trajectory of his thoughts and the removal of even the slightest hint of his Ilya from his sight through the screen, and then the slow-motion reminder of what it looked like as the love of his life , the footage in half-speed of the moments in which Shane had stopped…being—his time of death called in high-definition.

He feels like he’s drowning, he feels like he’s going to throw up not the bile in his stomach but his heart in tatters and shreds, fuck.

Fuck.

And so his knees give, and he hits the thin hotel carpeting similarly without warning half-a-second later: or maybe there just didn’t need to be any warning, here, for this. Maybe there’s only one result to be had, here, and it’s Shane following the soul-rending lead of the man he loves more than life, or air, and fuck, fuck, so much more than goddamn hockey, how had he been blind enough, idiotic enough to even pretend to himself there was a comparison, a question, a hesitation, not a doubt for what he’d choose but the very idea that there could be a choice at all—

He’d thought Ilya was gone, just weeks ago, on the proof of goodbye messages and what-ifs—and Shane had never felt closer to what it was to die, he was sure of it.

And he’d been a fucking fool, to so much as think that that feeling had anything on watching the man he loved drop on live television, strings cut and life gone from his brilliant-blazing eyes, the eyes Shane had fallen for in less than a heartbeat—and then, and then: the feeling of watching medical professionals on the ice scrambling to apparently restart the heartbeat that gave Shane’s own any reason, any value, any worth in this world at all, which it didn’t, it couldn’t now, and was tripping and racing and pounding and railing frantic for it under his ribs, for losing its purpose, losing its why, losing everything that makes it up from the cells, sparks its electrical currents because Shane’s heart isn’t just Ilya’s.

Shane’s heart is Ilya. If there’s anything he’s known for far too many years to have gone unsaid so fucking long, it’s that every chamber of his heart is crafted from strong hands that touch Shane like he’s previous, the arch of his arteries drawn in the pattern of soft curls that Shane breathes best buried in, the blood of him filtered first through Ilya’s veins to feel like its something his own body can glean anything viable from at all: his heart is Ilya.

And if Ilya’s heart has ceased its perfect thrumming, then, then Shane, he, it’s, there’s nothin—

Oh. Oh, god.

Oh god, he’d said all he wanted was to reach out and feel Ilya’s heartbeat, when he thought he’d lost him before, didn’t he? When he was idiot enough to have waited at all to go to him, to see him, to touch him and feel him and know: too little, too small, too lukewarm, too late, and still he’d pressed to that chest on instinct, by rote the moment he could, and now—

And now.

He clamors to his feet on the same instinct, he realizes in-motion—pure terror, absolute razed-raw desperation: he needs his heart. He needs to know if he still has a heart—

He doesn’t process how much time has passed, notices in the periphery that the game’s off, no one’s back on the ice, generic adverts for various upcoming events, in the league and for the arena, just filtering through: the only thing that land for Shane is that whatever’s happened, it’s looking like it was bad enough they’re not rushing the resumption of play, maybe they don’t have any intention to, because, because…

There’s a pan-over of the ice and Shane thinks it’s stock footage, barely registers but then: he sees motion.

The team colors in the background match today. Oh.

Oh god—

Which, if that’s live: Ilya’s not there. The whole Centaurs bench is empty, and fuck, what the fuck’s going on, where, where is…

Think, he tells himself, bangs the heel of his palm viciously against the center of his forehead. Think: he’s gone.

Shane’s stomach drops, his chest caves, he—

No. No: think.

Where are they taking him, Shane needs to know that, he needs to know where Ilya’s gone, where his heart’s left to be—he needs to know what they’re doing, what’s happening, is he, is he—

Shane feels the pressure of his palm in the backs of his eyes, not worse that the build-up there of grief that hasn’t spilled yet, he’s not sure why, this is so much worse than last time, than the long-endless minutes of a plane maybe-crashing, of last words; this is worse because Shane saw, with his own eyes, and the world was reporting it, reacting to it as fact, when before it was all about what they didn’t know until Ilya was there, his voice in Shane’s ear, his face on the phone, him, him, it’s…

Shane needs to know where Ilya is. He needs to know what’s going on.

He doesn’t know his destination when he tears out of the room, toward the stairwell because the elevator’s gonna be too slow, too tight, too much—

He sprints down a flight, knows he’s at least ten stories up, doesn’t care, because he does know his destination: Ilya. Always Ilya.

He just needs to find out the real-world coordinates of his home, his lodestar, his rhythm, his reason: how can he find…

Hayes.

He has Hayes’ number from camp, he can try, he can try—

He barely registers opening the new message before he’s sent the words, even if he can barely make out the screen:

SH: Tell me where they’re taking him.

Shane makes it down two more flights before he gets a response:

WH: who is this

He doesn’t have time for niceties, or introductions, reminders. Who he is doesn’t matter.

He’s reminded, all too clearly, of a thought he’d mostly brushed aside once he’d heard Ilya’s voice after the plane—who is Shane Hollander, without Ilya Rozanov?

He hadn’t wanted to dwell on what even asking the question meant, then. As he stumbles down more stairs and tries to type at the same time, he knows it’s not about what the answer is.

It’s about the fact that there isn’t one.

There is no Shane Hollander worth having in the cosmos without an Ilya Rozanov to love, to hold, to feel in his chest bolder and brighter and stronger and louder than his own heart alone had ever known how to before, before. Without.

It’s so transparent, so offensively unmistakable for how Shane’s not just ignored it—there are parts of this he’s pushed down, put off for later, but this; it wasn’t like that for this—but for Shane to have missed that none of it mattered, none of it could possibly add up not just to something worth having, but to something, anything, period, without Ilya….

He swallows hard, makes himself tap the screen:

SH: Please tell me he’s okay. Please, Hayes.

He’s trembling, flying blind down the steps, losing his footing every few stairs and almost tumbling, but he can’t feel it, he can’t care about it because he still doesn’t know if he’s already a goddamn corpse just waiting for rigor mortis to set in—

WH: the team will make a statement

Shane blinks; does Wyatt think he’s press, or someone trying to get a…a scoop on the way Shane’s heart is hanging in a balance he can’t read the measure of, but knows will destroy him wholly and utterly and irreversibly, the moment it tips for good?

The moment he either sees Ilya, still breathing, or—

WH: fucking vulture

And Shane can’t think to push, to try and reason, to deny that he’s trying to sell a story to the highest bidder for clicks and views, to remind this man that they know each other at the very least: no.

No, Shane is stuck on the words.

Vulture.

Vultures…that feed on the dead—

Shane tastes bile, thick and burning at the back of his mouth and he chokes, eyes burning as he tries to, to—

If the phone hadn’t fallen from his trembling fingers, he might have thrown it; not for anger, entirely for the need to be rid of it, of proof, of deeper reasons to believe the voice in his own mind telling him it’s too late, he’s gone, he’s lost, Shane couldn’t, Shane can’t…

Shane can’t fucking breathe.

He tips over, only just managing to grasp the railings in the stairwell, panting, lungs an inferno, flames licking at the carrion of the heart curled rotten in between. Vultures.

They could feast on the pair of them, him and his Ilya—they could be together one last time like that, maybe, maybe—

Safe in your heart, Ilya had believed at what he thought was the very end, the time Shane should have learned his lesson, should have embraced everything he’d felt at the very end from his side, from his chest—

But Shane’s heart isn’t safe; Shane’s heart is a fucking minefield, he can’t…

If, somehow, the impossible happens twice, and Shane gets to live because the heart of him in the man he loves gets to stay: the only thing Shane is going to strive for as his goal in life is going to be making his heart the safest fucking place for the both of them to tangle together, to clutch each other like the world’s ending and never, ever let go.

Of all the goals and aims and desires Shane’s pitted himself again, set his eye on and shot for in the stars: it boils down to this, and this alone. If he gets another chance—only his heart. Only for Ilya.

Only them.

He startles, belatedly, processing the slam of the door echoing a number of flights above him; he’ll need to move.

He can’t. He’ll have to.

He can’t.

Ilya’s heart might not be moving in this world, how can he he move—

Footsteps bounce nearer, nearer, and Shane doesn’t know what possesses him, what powers of composure make his hand reach for the phone he’d let slip, makes him wholly numb to the way the crack in the case slices his palm paper-thin and slow to bleed—useless heart, twitching its last; he doesn’t know what power overtakes him, makes his fingers shake just slightly, just finely enough for just enough seconds to open Uber and book the quickest ride he can find to the nearest hospital, on the hope, the blind hope that Ilya’s okay enough he doesn’t need a bigger campus, a more specialized trauma bay; he books what he can find which, even this far out of the metro hub, is somehow still a 15-minute wait.

That’s too long.

That’s too long, because Shane’s heart won’t survive that long, not knowing if Ilya’s is still beating—

He can be faster. He can…

His fingers miss the Maps app five times before he gets it open, and the autocomplete screws him over three more before he gets ‘hospitals near me’ to bring up the best shot he’s got, going in blind: but he has to. He has to go somewhere.

He’s dying, he has to do…something.

Shane has to find Ilya, so he can figure out if he’s just dying, or if he’s already been dead since that body hit the ice.

Nothing about the choices he’d made in the last months, the last years, the last fucking decade: nothing has been enough or done enough or made his heart enough to keep Ilya—his love, his only, his everything—safe. Ilya believed in Shane’s heart, and Shane, he’s, it’s…

He can’t change what he’s missed, where he’s stepped wrong. But if the things he’s put first in practice, if not in his soul; if the rules he’d been living by so meticulously, in exchange for loving with everything he had like he fucking should have—if all the sacrifices in the most abysmally wrong places, all this time, have given him anything of worth at all?

He’s got stamina out the ass, and the hospital’s only three kilometers away.

So he fucking runs.

Chapter 2: Call

Chapter Summary

“Sir, we can’t disclose patient information,” the nurse behind the desk had said, simple but firm, not unkind but that didn’t matter, it landed like a physical blow, a threat of violence, of final words and thoughts and breaths:

“Are you family?”

And Shane thinks he may have glazed over those moments, may have lost his footing in the here and now because that question: are you family?

What else did you call the person who took up more space than your own organs in his chest? What else was the beating heart that gave yours a reason, its permission to have the audacity to beat and beat and beat and take up space and make impossible noise and pure him forward in life at all? What other word do you give that?

And yet—

Chapter Notes

Shane doesn’t process the whole of his arrival at the hospital. Largely it’s in earth-quaking sorts of bursts, he thinks maybe jarred by the way his heart’s pounding, like he only internalizes what lands between the sick-sloshing quiver of what’s left of the rabbiting thing in the center of his chest.

“Rozanov,” he remembers gasping, shaking at the desk, a woman eyeing him shrewdly from her seat behind a monitor. “Rozanov, he,” Shane’s throat has closed, his mouth a desert, his tongue too big and too thick and his whole body seeming to betray him, to know it was time to fold in, shutting down because it recognized that there was no reason to keep moving, keep going because: “is he—”

“Sir, we can’t disclose patient information,” the nurse behind the desk had said, simple but firm, not unkind but that didn’t matter, it landed like a physical blow, a threat of violence, of final words and thoughts and breaths:

“Are you family?”

And Shane thinks he may have glazed over those moments, may have lost his footing in the here and now because that question: are you family?

What else did you call the person who took up more space than your own organs in his chest? What else was the beating heart that gave yours a reason, its permission to have the audacity to beat and beat and beat and take up space and make impossible noise and pure him forward in life at all? What other word do you give that?

And yet—

“Please,” Shane remembers the single syllable sticking to his teeth, his breath coming faster, more than even his sprint to the place he stood, the familiar film starting to fall over his eyes, his mind, his thoughts, his concept of space, the sound of his own voice, the echo of his own pulse: please.”

“Sir,” the woman had stood and Shane remembers flinching, remembers something primal beyond his own ability to think drawing him away because the core of him only wanted one thing, one person, and this woman was nothing like what he was seeking, what he needed.

“You need to calm down,” he’d heard it through a fog, though thick water, no sense to the words themselves at all because what was she saying, what nonsense thing was being suggested to him like it was easy, like it was a choice to be made?

“Why don’t you have a seat, collect yourself a bit?”

“I can’t,” Shane doesn’t think he was responding to the words themselves, because how could he have been, no words made any sense, his blood was a roaring thing, a dangerous thing against his eardrums, terrifying and he didn’t care, he couldn’t, he—

“I can’t, I need to, he’s, I,” and Shane had felt the catch in his throat, felt himself lose balance as the spots started to dance in his line of sight, felt himself pitch forward into the triage desk, hands weak to catch himself, scrambling, unsure if he was better off held from impact for a few minutes more or left to plummet, to face the end everything in him was already braced for: less against, than ready as the punishment he’d deserved, for not loving the way his heart had ached to, for thinking himself around the way his own goddamn soul needed to reach and hold and claim and keep, for everything he’d let fear rob from him, fuck—had given fear the fucking keys to take without lifting a finger against it.

Weakness had its costs, after all; he understood what it meant to have reached the point of collection.

“Take him over there,” a voice had filtered in, far away even as a brusque set of hands steadied him and made to guide him…somewhere. “Take some deep breaths so you don’t end up as a patient, okay? Then we can talk.” The voice was softer, kinder, still wary but…Shane didn’t know, couldn’t care.
He was deposited by the hands—security, something in him recognized the uniform—and then he’d…he’d been alone.

He’s still alone.

He doesn’t know how the time stretches, how much of it builds. He kept his phone in his hand, just in case anyone tries to reach him, tries to tell him where his heart is, where it’s gone, where he can find it, follow it: not that they’d know to. How would they know—

He can’t breathe. He can’t think. He wants, he wants…

He doesn’t know how he finds it, or manages to tap the screen of his phone in the exactly right sequence to make it work, and he’s also not sure if it’s comfort or self-flagellation that makes him press play, and then again, and then again, this saved voice memo from Shane’s cottage the last time they were both there, the most recent thing he saved, and how many things had he deleted so they wouldn’t be found in the almost-impossible, completely absurd scenario of Shane, what, losing his phone and someone overriding all of his fucking passcode protections, what the fuck was wrong with him, why were there no more recent things he’d saved—

Hollander, stop making green mush drink and come back to bed. I do not want to type in the dark, screen is very bright, so you get voice memo. It is weekend, it is before noon, you have beautiful, very horny man in your bed, your priorities are very, hmm, out of order. Placed badly.

And god: badly-placed priorities, and he’d said it with a laugh, as if it wasn’t about to slit Shane’s throat, how much of a stupid fuck he was, how blind and how undeserving of the gift he’d been given in this one man, more than any other thing he’d been lucky to find in his life, this one single human who was the center of his whole world, who’d been telling him for so long in so many ways that he was loved, that he was valued, that he mattered so goddamn much like Shane was the source of gravity and oxygen and lifeblood and meaning itself when it was the other way around, when Shane didn’t have…when Shane had been pretending anything else could give him a fraction of what Ilya did—like anything Shane had thought held a candle to Ilya would have maybe meant much from the start, because Shane’s never really known his life without Ilya goddamn Rozanov.

And he doesn’t want to. He’s coming quickly to grips with the fact that it wouldn’t matter even if he did. Want.

It’s a losing battle, trying to sustain the breath in him when there’s nothing there for it to move through, when Shane’s a vacant shell on the inside.

And it’s the first losing battle he doesn’t feel inclined to fight against in the slightest.

I do not want to suck on spinach-tongue, remember this.

And that voice, like honey and the sweetest breath of dawn, teasing him. Suffused with so much feeling. So much tenderness and intimacy and a sense of home that Shane’s never…never entirely sat squarely in contrast, Ilya against no-Ilya, but when he does, now, he sees it.

Home wasn’t real, until Ilya. Shane’s maybe been as successful at everything else he’s done so far because he didn’t have a home to rest in, because he was always pushing harder, farther: because at the end of pushing was Ilya.

And something in Shane always knew that if he couldn’t have home the rest of the time, at least there would always be Ilya again. He just had to push through everything in the middle.

He doesn’t think that’s supposed to be what life is.
He knows what life, what being alive is, though: he feels it under Ilya’s stare, the softness of his gaze and his touch, the way even the commanding edge in him was filled to the brim with a level of care Shane didn’t know how to show himself, just…Ilya.

Who Shane’s messy-pulp of a heart twitches in futile anticipation to hear what he knows comes next, the gentle sunshine of his playful joy:

My dick does not have opinions about spinach-tongue, though. So. Your choice.

Priorities.

Shane chokes a sob down absolutely dismally for how that guts him, blade rusty and imprecise but where’s the blood in him to spill anymore, where’s the pieces of him to stab and twist and decimate when the whole of him is empty, now?

Does any of it even matter—

I do want kiss from you, though. Now. Ten minutes ago, ideally, but now, preferably. Come back to bed, moy salahtyk.

He doesn’t know how many times he listens, how many times his breath catches, how many times his skin feels flayed off, how long it takes for his cheeks to feel stiff with the amount of salt tracing down them, endless, fucking endless—

“Holy shit,” he hears distant, flimsy, doesn’t matter, nothing matters, he lifts the phone in his hand closer, needs to hear that voice, no other voice matters—

“Hollander?”

It takes Shane a few seconds to look up, to blink his eyes—they’re swollen, blurry and puffy, he can feel his lashes stuck together—and find a familiar figure approaching him, eyes wide, looking…dumbstruck.

Shane stops trying to swallow, to clear his throat after five whole failed attempts, just grits out on the gravel, the rubble where anything worth keeping was swept from his chest when his world collapsed on a screen in front of him, and then just the same inside his ribs.

“Hayes.” He doesn’t even know if the sound that he makes is an audible one—it burns like hell, but he doesn’t know if it’s something anyone can hear.

Can you hear a soul as it’s dying? Is that in the spectrum of a human’s auditory range?

“Oh fuck,” Hayes, it is Wyatt Hayes, and he still sounds far away even though Shane thinks he’s actually fairly close, now; “fuck, you texted me, didn’t you,” and he looks just a little devastated, for some reason, and he’s closer still, now, but he doesn’t sounds any less remote, like he’s on another shore.

“Hollander, I’m sorry, man,” Hayes is babbling a little, as if any of the words he’s saying mean…anything; “my wife had me do this new year’s digital clean-out thing, and I deleted half my contacts by accident,” and his hands are going with the explanation, which Shane thinks probably is a kind gesture but he has no capacity to give two shits about.

He doesn’t even give one shit about the way his heart’s about to finally give in, all weird shivers and last gasps under his sternum. It’s a slow process, this…dying for the breaking of your everything.

“Hollander,” another figure approaches, almost as close but sounding just as far away; “your mother’s his emergency contact,” and the guy frowns, lips pursed as he tilts his head, curious: “management thing?”

Shane does not care, he—

“His mother?” a third voice slips in, hesitant, almost…shy, cowed almost, like he’s walked in on his parents in bed when he was looking for Christmas gifts. “Are you, umm,” the third man clears his throat, and again—so far away, but Shane…thinks he knows him. Or should know him.

“Are you sure it was his mother?”

And Shane doesn’t remember, didn’t connect what was being asked or why, so it’s a good thing it doesn’t matter, because Shane feels…distant. Floaty. Like something’s coming to a head and soon and he just had to wait a little longer, and it’ll all be over.

There’s a level of comfort, in that. Shane doesn’t know what he believes in for what comes next after this life but what he doesn’t know—maybe the only thing he knows—is that if there’s anything at all? It will be Ilya.

He’ll find Ilya, and keep him for forever, or there will be nothing.

“Yeah, I remember thinking it was, just, interesting when,” and the second man, the one who came after Hayes who Shane doesn’t think he’s ever seen before, no recognition at all: that guys stills, and pales a little before he covers his own mouth and speaks from a continent away, through his fingers: “oh shit, I shouldn’t have said—”

Shane doesn’t know if the man stops talking, cuts himself off, or if the whole underwater din just siphons away when he feels shaking—he hasn’t stopped since…since he saw his life slip away to the ice—and then he registers that there’s a rhythm to it; he doesn’t have a rhythm anymore, his rhythm is almost definitely gone, Shane watch the life leave his eyes, he can’t even tremble into the nothing after him with anything like rhythm so what—

He looks at his hand. His phone.

His phone is vibrating with an incoming call.

It’s muscle memory alone that lets him answer.

“Hello, I’m calling for a…Hollander?” He doesn’t know if he said anything when he picked up, but the voice through the speaker against his ear is the opposite of muddled—it’s stereophonic, screamed down a tunnel and resonating dizzyingly as Shane processes how words can mean things.

“Yes,” he manages to rasp; “yes.”

The voice is quiet on the other end, but it’s not the kind of quiet that means the line’s been disconnected. Shane doesn’t know what’s grabbing at him in this instant, but he feels his chest thumping like someone’s trying to do CPR on him, but from the inside. It’s violent and it’s vicious and Shane presses the phone closer and closer to his head to the point of pain, catches the way the next words come out hesitant, like they’re hedging bets Shane knows nothing of until:

“Would there be anyone you know that you’re listed as an emergency contact for?”

The thumping stops. Stops.

Everything stops.

“Ilya,” Shane barely breathes; “Ilya Rozanov.”
He’s not 100% certain of the question. He just knows that the only answer that matters for…any question.

For anything.

“Your first name isn’t specified here, that needs to be corrected,” the voice huffs a little, like it’s perturbed, like it’s inconvenienced but Shane doesn’t know what the fuck to do with that when those aren’t emotions he gets to even feel anymore. “I’m calling from—”

The minute that the voice says the name of the building he’d ran into a lifetime, a painful fucking age ago, he leaps to his feet, shaky but impossible to stop as he rushes back to the desk, to the nurse who had him sat in a corner of this godforsaken waiting area and he holds his phone out, desperate. Pleading.

Broken down to the goddamn atoms of him.

“Calling,” he gasps, suddenly breathless again like he’d been at the very start, his heart vibrating now, manic and uncoordinated; “you’re calling me,” he holds his phone out, points at it, feels the lids of his eyes stretching to critical mass:

“Let me see him,” he’s not even sure that’s an option, that that’s what the voice on the phone was calling for but he doesn’t know anything else, he doesn’t know anything, just:

“Please.”

The nurse eyes him with the same wariness she’d had before, but she takes the phone, says a few words to whoever’s on the other end, the perturbed voice, then she looks at Shane:
“Your ID?”

And holy hell, but Shane doesn’t know what in the universe to thank that he had his wallet on him, that he hadn’t taken it out when he was waiting for Ilya in that hotel room, that he hadn’t changed yet and gotten comfortable—he doesn’t know where to put his gratitude, but he feels it flooding his whole body as he hands over what’s asked, trembling and teetering on the balls of his feet, still ready to topple, to hit bottom and shatter on impact but also ready to run toward wherever she might tell him to go, wherever he might find his, his—

“Please,” he manages to exhale, strangled and pathetic and the broken heart of him there in it, torn open for all the endless love to be seen, unchecked and unfettered and all he fucking has, aside from the grief that slithers alongside it now like a rule.

The nurse hands his ID back carefully, still eyeing him warily but it’s back to that softer thing, like it’s at least half concern but Shane can’t care about that, because he doesn’t get to know soft things, not unless it’s Ilya.

She keeps him obviously in her peripherals as he gets the attention of another nurse, shows her something on the screen in front of her before she speaks words that slice through Shane like a shiv, that are the first things he’s heard that feel here, and not far away:

“Escort him, would you?” She looks at Shane, something like pity in her eyes: “Up in 557.”

And Shane feels his heart flaking farther apart with every step he takes to follow his guide on this walk along death row, because they’re his last steps, aren’t they.

In the nurse’s eyes there’d been pity, and what reason could there be for that except—

The fugue of that single thought, that sole realization, dogs him to the door: 557. He doesn’t remember the elevator. He doesn’t remember making his feet move, one in front of the other.

His escort taps his shoulder, and he thinks tells him he can go in, can open the door. He’s not certain, though, because his heart’s screaming out the last gasps it has for this world and it’s so loud, it hurts and it’s so fucking loud and it feels like he’s screaming from the cells in him for Ilya, Ilya, Ilya—

He needs to see. It’s going to kill him, but he’s moving before he can think twice, and in truth: there’s nothing to think twice about.

He needs to see his heart, however it’s laid out, cold and still lost and gone and—

Oh. Oh, fuck.

Chapter End Notes

Translations (also on hover if you have the capability):

moy salahtyk / мой салатик: my little salad

Chapter 3: Pulse

Chapter Summary

“I do not want you, Shane Hollander,” Ilya says, tight and controlled, hand never leaving Shane’s chin as he holds his attention, but his other hand finds Shane’s to lace their fingers.

“I do not see you and feel like you are thing, that I would like to have,” he nearly scoffs, and then he takes their tangled hands and flattens Shane’s palm to his chest one more time:

“You live in here,” he says simply, like the truth is as basic as the sky being blue; “and I need you, like air and like blood and like heartbeat, but more.” He leans in, pecks at Shane’s lips as his breath shudders out:

“So much more.”

Chapter Notes

What’s left of Shane’s heart is a feral fucking animal, corner and clawing and bispting and willing to tear down the world on it’s way out, for how it tortures him the minute he steps through the door, as it snicks shut behind it without a sound over the cacophony of how his blood cries out, gut-wrenching and soul-searing and lost, so lost and so desperate, he, it:

“Lyubimyy,” his heart says, low and warm and full, full, full of feeling, of joy: “Shane.”

Fuck, but Shane didn’t know any of this could hurt any more than it already had.

But then, it’s no surprise, really: he’s already more than proven himself a goddamn fool.

And because he’s a fool, and his heart is seizing out its fucking last, it looks up at him: his heart shoots his sparkling blue eyes, so bright, so alive—

It’s torture. It’s fucking torture, because it can’t be, it can’t be—

“Il—” his tongue is still clumsy, is also foolish, predictably. Reaches for the hope that’s a treacherous, sinister glow beneath his breastbone, an effervescent, glittering hint of what forever could look like, what love without end could feel like in his withered veins: the impossible glimpse of what he could have if he somehow was granted yet another chance, despite how little he deserved it.

If he’d thought his body had known how to tremble before? As he stands, eyes glued unblinking, throat working around wishing and wanting and fear he hates most because fear, fucking fear has been the thing he’s let steal the glorious shine: of this joy, the soul-gilded love deeper than love—if he’d thought he’d known shaking, before, then the way he threatens to taunt the Richter scale as he looks, drinks in the mirage that looks too, real, too real, that despite the machines at his bedside and the wires attached to his chest, he looks awake, he looks aware, he looks vibrant and golden against starchy sheets, he looks strong, he emanates safe and joy and comfort and protection and courage beyond Shane’s reckoning and capability, commanding competent care that brings Shane to his knees and more than all of it love, the way only Ilya knows how.

He’s shaking, he’s shaking because much as he’s memorised every crease and dimple, every dip and plane of this man, Shane is too overcome to put it all together so perfectly. The way that lands like a blow then settles like a balm, it can’t be because he can’t be this lucky twice, but it’s also hard, even for Shane’s ever-imaginative brain always up for the challenge of punishing his failings: it’s hard to justify it, to make it be anything other than the impossible, than, than…

“Come here,” that voice like the first breath after drowning cuts straight through, sinks low and deep through Shane’s pores, saturates him and makes him feel heavy, substantial.

Like maybe there’s something left inside him to matter, against all odds.

“Right now, come here.”

Shane listens, his legs conducting on the cadence of the direction, of the need in those words as much as the way they reach and cradle something fragile in Shane, hold it close and swaddle it in tender affection, in the need to confirm something precious is okay.

Shane can’t even dwell on how that role needs reversing, how it’s yet another way he’s fallen short in the unthinkable gift that is this man who was gone, to Shane’s terrified soul, and now…now seems to be here—

“I,” Shane starts, knees pressed tight against the bed as he hovers, as he stretches lungs that had given up knowing what it was to fill with real air, air that had already made its way through Ilya’s body, already danced against Ilya’s heart:

“I don’t want to hurt,” Shane feels himself sway forward, and pull back because what if it reaches and ruins it, whether it’s an illusion or if it’s real, what if he does it harm, what if he loses again, he can’t, he—

“I don’t,” Shane shakes his head, almost robotic, breath smoother because he can find Ilya’s scent, the taste of him when he lets it wash over him, but frantic, shallow because he’s so scared, he’s so scared it’s not real, that he’s alone, that this is just his own brain betraying him again, in the worst way it possibly could.
But then a hand, warm, known, reaches and threads their fingers tight, second nature and so firm, so strong. Ironclad.

“You could never,” Ilya murmurs, drawing the hand in his own to his lips, brushing against Shane’s knuckles as he studies him, as his eyes dart to take stock of the whole of him and his mouth turns down the slightest bit at the corners where Shane loves to press his lips, to hold and breathe, and can he, is this real, could it be possibly that he could feel this man again, could hold him, could maybe keep him despite everything, every unforgiving threat of loss, could he—

“Come here.”

And Shane doesn’t resist when that hand leads him past the railings at the top toward where the bed’s open near the middle—he doesn’t resist, but he doesn’t, mostly can’t move under his own steam. Ilya’s frown commits to itself, tightening around his eyes as he drinks Shane in for the whole of him, all his brokenness and all his sorrow:

“You’re shaking, rahdnoy,” Ilya says, pained with it and Shane snaps to a level of attention he hasn’t been able to hone in on since he was watching the game, since his world had caved in—Ilya, pain, god no—but his narrowed eyes recognize the sort of strain in him when he focuses, and he feels the clench in his own chest like a fist almost instantly: he’s hurting, Shane.

God.

“Sweetheart,” and the way it’s enunciated in Ilya’s deep rumble is so undeniable, so very true as it vibrates through the walls of Shane’s over-tender heart: “what is it?”

He asks it so gentle, so all-encompassing like an embrace itself, and the tone, the intent captures him first.

But then, again: Shane remembers words mean things. And the words sink in like ice in his fucking veins.

“What is it?” Shane gapes, pulse ratcheting up in a way he hadn’t felt while it was dying, and he doesn’t know if it’s better or worse because it’s too fast and it’s too strong and it does feel a little like dying of another kind, careening toward oblivion versus shriveling into nothing:

“You collapsed,” Shane shrieks in that breathless, strangled way that rips from the linings of his organs, that comes into the world more like a haggard whine. “You, you,” he stammers, he stutter, he grasps at fucking straws—

Until Ilya’s other hand grasps for him, both palms closed around Shane’s one close to his wrist, impossible to miss the assault of his pulse at the thin skin below his touch and all Shane wants in that moment—visceral and vibrant and like life again where he’d thought it was gone forever, but he doesn’t, he can’t trust it—but all Shane wants is for the force to break the flesh and make an opening for Ilya to climb inside, for every fumbling pump of his blood to flow around Ilya and Ilya alone as it should be, as it’s meant to be—

“Am fine,” Ilya gathers Shane’s poor excuse for speech up in the breadth of his hold, leans almost too far, wires that shouldn’t be pulled that taut looking fit to snap where they connect Ilya to the monitors on the opposite side of the bed, but he seems wholly unconcerned with them, entirely focused on Shaneas he whispers, vows:

“I swear to you, I am fine.”

He squeezes Shane’s hand, tight, so tight and uses the other to stroke Shane’s violently hammering pulse point at the wrist, slow and steady and heady and Shane wants to believe it, wants to believe it all but the hand grasping his is so real and firm and Shane thinks unbreakable, unshakeable, not that he can be absolutely sure because there’s no way in hell he’s going to try, but: that hand has a damning plastic band wrapped around its wrist; the other, trying to tame Shane’s pulse with the stroke of a thumb, is caught on too many wires, stuck to too many parts of Ilya’s, Ilya’s…

“You’re in a hospital,” Shane hisses, because you’re not fine when you’re in a hospital, flat out, no other argument needed.

But he has other arguments, shit, does he have other arguments, every blink of his eyes shows him the replay in fluorescents, Ilya’s eyes dimming, Ilya’s body crumpling, Ilya’s—

“They had to,” Shane doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t want to admit it out loud because it hurts, it hurts so much but he also doesn’t know that there’s a way he can possibly hurt more, and his eyes are drawn to the biggest of the monitors across Ilya’s bed, the one with the jumping line, the soft beep tracking, counting, proving:

“Your heart stopped,” Shane shudders out in shards, drawing blood with every letter: the monitor says it’s not, says that’s passed, but Shane, Shane can’t, he can’t…

“Stop, no,” Ilya says, his voice powerful, almost echoing: Shane feels it with more presence and meaning than the blood chewing through his arteries. “Threw little tantrum at getting hit at wrong time, in wrong space,” he says, glaring at his chest like he’s scolding a fucking misbehaving child, before he brighten a little, pulls down the neck of his hospital gown to display mottled skin that seizes up Shane’s throat:

“Big bruise,” Ilya says, way too close to proud, it surges violent and acrid up through the frenzied slog of his overtaxed blood through Shane’s veins, his ventricles. “Perfectly fine, now.”

And Shane: Shane can’t think, he can’t process this, he can’t hold this and bear this and wade through the buzzing, the white noise in his ears that drowns out his pulse, or might be his pulse, his dizzy, he’s nauseated, he’s…

“They had to shock you back—”

“Not back, went nowhere,” Ilya half-barks, less aggressive and more unflinching, unquestionable. “Did not stop,” he tightens his hold on Shane’s hands enough that his fingers feel the strain, could break and Shane wouldn’t care. “Needed only to be,” Ilya tilts his head, considering for a second, never letting go of Shane’s hand as he weighs his words, decides on:

“Nudged, to right rhythm. Slapped out of hissy fit.”

It’s so…casual. So blasé.

Shane’s heart feels like it’s on fire, like lungs when there’s no oxygen and they gasp anyway, begging until they’re raw, and that’s Shane, he’s a stripped nerve, naked and shivering and firing all wrong because:

“You died,” his voice trembles, wobbles, water-logged and salt-slick and he’s just, built of the devastation that’s sunk into his bones, now, maybe, he’s—

“Is not true,” Ilya snaps, definitive in a way that would feel like anger if it were anyone else, if it were any other moment or context, if Shane didn’t know Ilya from through the layers of his flesh and back to the surface again: this is passion. This is certainty.

And Shane doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do in the face of it, because he knows one thing based on what he watched happen on his screen as the world ended, and then replayed; but he knows Ilya, and he…he doesn’t doubt him in the things that he knows, not like this.

“Not true,” he repeats, softer now but no less resolute; “am here. With you.”

Shane must not react to that declaration the way Ilya wants him to, because in the space of a second, Ilya’s huffing out his nose and jerking Shane further down along the edge of the bed, then hauling him up despite the way he squawks at the way his body is suddenly wrenched upward, dragged as Ilya pulls even more perilously against the wires connecting him to the things that professional people paid to make sure he’s okay decided he needed, and Shane feels his heart jump in his throat at the fear of it, before he registers where he’s ended up.

Because Ilya was pulling the wires to adjust where he was lying; and now he’s made room to settle Shane face-to-face, chest-to-chest on the bed, close enough to feel Ilya’s breath on his lips, to make it easy for Ilya to cup his cheek, and of course he can’t help but to lean into that touch, to melt into it with a finger-drum fit of his heartbeat for the feeling.

“I asked the doctors, asked Coach, also. It never stopped,” Ilya says, his thumb stroking the bow of Shane’s lower lip now as his eyes pin Shane, stare into him like he means to brand the words and the emotion within them in the deepest corners of Shane’s soul.

“Never once,” he tells Shane firmly, fiercely; “And I had to know it, because,” and then he’s tempting fate again without a second fucking thought as he leads Shane’s hand to where it’s wanted to be and he thinks maybe was too scared to find nothing, to ruin the facade too fast, but now?

Now it’s not his choice, there is no shying from it—no more space to surrender to the fear—because Ilya’s flattening Shane’s palm to the center of his chest, wholly unmindful of the leads stuck to him, sliding Shane’s hand under the wires of each like they’re mere inconveniences until he has Shane’s hand where he wants it, just above the highest stuck-on electrode, stretched across his sternum, beneath all the fucking cables and cords like he’s more essential, like he’s more necessary, the only p—

Shane’s heart clogs up his throat for the thought that shakes him then:

Like he’s the only priority, fuck. Fuck.

And Shane: he would have probably said he knew what Ilya’s heart felt like, sounded like, could pick it out if he was asked, knew exactly where to touch or press his lips or rest his head—he would have been confident, because he was in love the way he thinks he’d always dreamed but never known before, so how could he not know all of those things?

But here, right now: Shane shakes around a blood-letting sob that drains everything in him and fills the space left behind with only Ilya’s heartbeat under his hand because is so strong, it’s so steady, metronomic and hypnotizing and everything that is good and right in the universe and the only life Shane needs to be—and he knows it.

He knows it, and his eyes are streaming where he hadn’t sobbed before because there’s something primordial, something written in his DNA that leaps and ties himself to that beat, because it cannot be forged, it cannot be a half-truth or wishful thinking or the need in his marrow: it can only be Ilya. And Shane knows his heartbeat.

And this is—

“This cannot stop while you are breathing,” Ilya states it as fact, precludes question or denial. It is immutable. It is the lifeline written in Shane’s palm stretched across the pulsing muscle endless, endless, endless—

“It belongs to you,” Ilya’s leaning, mouthing warm and wet and real against the shell of Shane’s ear, coaxing a shiver down his spin, something like a mewl in the back of his throat where he thought such sounds were foreign to him until he was long-rotten in the ground, because only Ilya could coax them out, only Ilya could lead him on this road, only Ilya…

And so: this is Ilya, alive and exhaling like dew on his skin, teeth ever-so-slightly teasing the sensitive line under his lobe, close to the hairline; this is Ilya, holding Shane’s hand uncompromising to his real, living

beating heart and telling him, telling him:

“It is yours alone,” Ilya tells him plain, with the exact same certainty, and Shane whimpers, because that heartbeat is a heady thing to hold, an intimacy that feels somehow new and beyond even all the things, all the things they’ve shared: this is so much. This is unfathomably more.

“You are this,” and somehow Ilya holds his palm closer, tighter to make his point, to make Shane feel his heart move like a massage, like a wave on the shore of all that Shane is and ever will be, like a flower in bloom, over and over again without end as he breathes, and he kisses Shane’s neck, his jaw, below his chin and whispers reverent:

“Serdtse moye.”

And Shane doesn’t know that word, not yet—he will learn, he will throw himself to the task and every other that’ll bring him even the tiniest, most minuscule bit closer to this man who is his whole soul, who holds his being in his soft-strong-safe hands—but Shane doesn’t have to know the word.

He feels it. And it’s enough to crack open whatever was holding back the world-wrenching sobs.

He thinks, in the background of his own consciousness, that maybe he couldn’t cry because if he had he would have broken beyond recognition, there would have been nothing left of him to run, to find, to seek his heart; and maybe the heart in his chest hadn’t died entirely, hadn’t stopped and had dwelled in the liminal agony, because his heart would know if the better, closer, truer heart of him, outside his chest, had been lost.

It would know. He would know, and he’d have been done.
And now, now that he knows otherwise, beyond questioning: he can break, because his heart is here to hold him, these hands are here to catch his pieces, this mouth is waiting to fit him back together with love, and love, and more love in the cracked places.

Now, he can break—so goddamnit: break he does.

He shakes like there’s a faultline drawn along his aorta, from the arch all the way down, snapped in two and crumbling as he tries to wail but his throat’s too tight so all he can do is whine into Ilya’s shoulder, press himself as close as he can into Ilya’s body as he heaves against air that does nothing to calm, nothing to sustain, just gets sucked in for an instant and then choked back out as he sobs, words spilling from the place his heart’s cracked down its septum, bleeding out free and unfettered, nothing held back:

“I died,” Shane moans into him, the ache still so deep; “I was dying, the whole time,” Shane shakes his head against the crease under Ilya’s arm, shivers, tries to meld into his skin and under, closer, elementally-bound: “because if you were,” and Shane’s breath hiccoughs back into his lungs with a searing kind of pull and he can’t, he can’t say it again, he can’t go back to believing it in any part of him—

And Ilya: oh, but Ilya knows him like he’s never been known, beyond what he’s allowed as a choice and instead fundamentally bound, entangled with him so that to breathe as either of them is to breathe as them both, so he knows what Shane needs before Shane could even imagine articulating it, fitting it into words. He doesn’t need such mundanities when he knows on a cellular level what it will do, what it will mean to Shane if he uses those hands, that strength in his living-breathing self again to rearrange Shane’s body pressed to him, to replace Shane’s hand on his heart with Shane’s head, the ear he’s kissed and murmured his love to crushed to the beating, so close he thinks he can make out the rush of the blood, the slosh-release of valves working seamless, like he’s okay, like he really is okay—

“Shane, lyubimyy,” Ilya murmurs on the same register in one ear as the drumbeat against Shane’s other, and it’s…symphonic, it’s otherworldly, it’s like wrapping his soul up in comfort, in the kind of balm that only come from inhaling after forgetting how to breathe at all for too many minutes, too much of a lifetime.

“I can’t lose you,” Shane whispers, reedy and thin across Ilya’s chest; “my heart is you, the whole thing,” Shane rubs his cheek back and forth against him, needy and wanting and needing him to understand:

“You are my whole heart, Ilya, and I cannot lose you,” he mouths to Ilya’s chest, the familiar planes of it, the steady-true-never-stopped beat of it, unbelievable.

 But undeniable, here, steeped in that glorious rhythm. Shane could live here, like this, forever.

“I won’t survive it,” he mouths into that stretch of skin, the mark of impact making so stark how thin, how delicate it is to protect that most important thing in the world.

“You’re everything to me,” his lips drag wet as he speaks it with fervor, with feeling, like he can speak directly to that beating heart beneath him and make it live there, make his declaration, his devotion a permanent thing that cycles through Ilya every moment through on to always:

“Everything.”

“And you are mine,” Ilya cards his fingers through Shane’s hair and Shane feels something in him untangle, uncoil as Ilya’s voice rumbles through his chest as much as through the air between them: “my heart, my everything.” His lungs lift Shane up as he breathes deep, again so perfect; again so alive, even as he asks:

“Why would I want to breathe, without you?”

And Shane both hates and loves that question, rhetorical or not: he cannot think of Ilya not breathing, it’s too raw, too real, too close and treacherous—but he also can’t deny he agrees, wholeheartedly.

So all he can really say is:

“I’m sorry.”

Ilya stills. Shane focuses on the beat in his ear, so that panic can’t get a hold of him for the way he freezes under him before he hisses out:
“What?”

Shane presses his lips to Ilya’s chest as he sighs out a shaky exhale:

“I almost lost you once, and I didn’t,” he trembles a little around the thoughts clamoring to make themselves known in all their frenzy—he presses his lips back to Ilya’s chest like a touchstone. An anchor in the tempest.

“I thought it was enough,” Shane barely breathes it, the blasphemy of it, the shame. “I was an idiot,” no, that’s not strong enough, that’s not dire enough; “a fool, a fucking fool, Ilya,” and the breath he’s riding, clinging to pathetically with tremoring hands: it cracks around that name, but he can’t even blame it.

Every part of him wants to be pried open to take in Ilya, to reshape the whole of who and what Shane will be in the rebuilding after unraveling: all that Shane has and is wants to be made within Ilya poured into his foundations, not something he found and built his world around, but something that suffuses him, that seeps and swims inside him every time his blood sees fit to rush.

He wants, but first: he needs to ask forgiveness, confess his transgressions. His deficiencies.

“Months from now, I said fucking months?” Shane barks out hatefully, wretchedly. “I’d been stupid enough to tell you years, as if, as if,” as if Shane could bank on them as a rule, as if the world weren’t more precious and cruel, as if Shane was some special exception, just because his whole heart was lucky enough to be full to bursting, like that exempted him from the world’s vicious indifference, and maybe the love he feels is enough to bend that world to his will, to snatch the heart of him in Ilya’s chest back from the brink, but not the way he was toying with it, not the way he thought he could put it on a timescale, could ration it for consumption by people who would never understand what it was to love, not like this.

“And then my answer was months, and not right that goddamn second?” Shane scoffs hatefully, so fucking disgusted by his own actions, his own choices, by the way he knows he had genuinely believed his plan was a good one, a sound one, a flawless way to get what everyone wanted.

 Fuck: he hadn’t even properly acknowledged the only thing he wanted. God.

“And now, now this, and I,” Shane groans, wet and pathetic as he presses himself harder to Ilya’s chest, loses himself in the beating, the reminder of how even under-appreciated, even starved by his own clumsy, thoughtless hands: this love had beat back the abyss, had been strong enough and singular enough to spit in the face of death, not once, but twice, and…

Good god, but how did Shane get this lucky? How was he blessed in this by something bigger in the cosmos than he can even wrap his head around, for the blessing itself to be this much, this man?

And then, on the flip-side of that coin:

“How can you look at me, how can you,” Shane’s voice catches because…it’s one thing to think all this; it’s another to flat out own his shame and well-earned insecurities and ask:

“How can you want this?”

Ilya is still, again, and Shane presses close to his heartbeat; knows it as it grows a little faster, a little deeper, just that extra-bit more resonant.

“Want,” Ilya draws the word out, and then, voice going sharp and a little cold as he spits out: “want.”

Shane cringes, curls inward a little, but can’t pull himself from Ilya’s chest, but Ilya.

Ilya has other plans.

“Look at me.”

He grabs Shane’s chin and slowly, slowly but not allowing Shane to fight it, guides Shane away from his chest and back to where they started, face to face. Shane lasts less than a second before lifting his eyes to Ilya’s.

Finally, this at least: his love is so much more than his fear, his doubt in himself, his sense of shame and regret.

His love has always been more, and he’s not interested in playing at anything less any longer.

Ilya’s eyes on him, though: they’re not for the faint of heart. They are incisive, they are penetrating—they demand Shane’s heart in whole.

So it’s good that he’s already laid it bare for the taking.

“I do not want you, Shane Hollander,” Ilya says, tight and controlled, hand never leaving Shane’s chin as he holds his attention, but his other hand finds Shane’s to lace their fingers.

“I do not see you and feel like you are thing, that I would like to have,” he nearly scoffs, and then he takes their tangled hands and flattens Shane’s palm to his chest one more time:

“You live in here,” he says simply, like the truth is as basic as the sky being blue; “and I need you, like air and like blood and like heartbeat, but more.” He leans in, pecks at Shane’s lips as his breath shudders out:

“So much more.”

And Shane doesn’t realize tears have formed until they start to fall, until Ilya catches them with his thumb, with his lips:

“How can I look at you?” he asks, incredulous, like he cannot believe the question can exist in the world in the first place. “How could I be living, and do anything else?”

Shane’s breath catches at the fire in Ilya’s eyes, then, the heavy-heady thumping of his heart for the sheer enormity of feeling, somehow Shane knows that as a fact, and he loves so deeply; Shane loves this man so fucking much.

“You are,” Ilya starts, considering Shane from different angles, taking him in as he tilts his head back and forth, heart still drumming under Shane’s fingertips with so much power to it, so much conviction; “moyo solntse, my sun, my light, my reason for,” and he leans, kisses Shane sweet, long and unhurried:

“So much, so much,” he murmurs to his lips; “all things.”

“Ilya,” Shane is powerless but to half-gasp that sacred name between them: “I love you,” he breathes into Ilya’s open mouth, hopes the words float down to that heart in all its mighty certainty; “I love you.”

And Ilya: he licks those words straight from Shane’s tongue, hungry, devoted—eternal, somehow, and it feels like flying, like living, weightless and ecstatic in the rhythm of those lips, that beating blood, and Shane’s never felt so…at rights in the world, somehow. So much like he’s where’s always been meant to be.

“I am sorry I scared you, zolet’sye,” Ilya mouths across Shane’s jawline when he finally pulls their lips apart, panting freely. “I am so glad you are here,” he says them like parallel truths, and Shane sacrifices his hand against Ilya’s heartbeat, makes himself be brave so that he can reach, and wrap a careful, lovesick arm around his fiancé, this singular love in all his life.

“Mmm,” Ilya nuzzles into him in reply, his smile pressed to Shane’s clavicle; “so nice, so warm,” he drags the tip of his nose back and forth until Shane can’t help the bubble of something impossible close to a laugh for the sensation as Ilya sighs happily:

“So safe.”

And oh, fuck: but that’s a bucket of ice of Shane’s contentment, Shane’s feeling of lightness and the world turning right, because: that’s what he failed at. From the start, he has failed, and Ilya notices the shift immediately, pulls back sharply, eyes trying to read what’s gone wrong and Shane…he can’t let him think he has anything to find, or he’s done anything to cause it, because this is Shane.

This is all Shane, and he cannot let his fear keep trying to eclipse his love. It doesn’t. It’s incapable.

“It’s not,” Shane forces himself to speak it out loud, no matter how shaky. “I can’t, I can’t keep you safe,” he bursts out with the words, breathless like he ran a marathon, or from a Hyatt to a hospital when his world had gone dark. “I’m not good enough, I’m not,” and Shane maybe knows he can’t let his fear overshadow him, decide for him, but: he is still afraid, and so he bends back to hide in Ilya’s chest, to cover himself in the blanket of his beating heart as the safety he can’t provide, but Ilya’s never not embodied with the whole of him.

It’s almost a given that Shane moans out:

“I’m not enough.”

Ilya is quiet for only seconds, but they feel bigger. Longer.

It feels like the silence is more of a rule than it is, when Ilya shatters it wholesale, his tone one of heartbreak, of absolute ruin:

“How can you say this?”

Shane whines, doesn’t plan to but can’t help it: there are foundational parts of his self that cannot bear Ilya so visibly tormented, because of Shane.

God, but it hurts.

But then Ilya, who knows everything in Shane long before Shane ever suspects it: Ilya is pulling Shane up, despite how Shane grapples, paws at Ilya’s chest not wanting to leave, but Ilya’s strong, and knows his trajectory, his intended course—he sets them nose to nose, presses their foreheads together to breathe for long moments before he looks Shane in the eyes, straight and true and fathomless, before he tilts his head away, dips the slightest bit down.

“Safe,” Ilya’s lips press and hold to the pulse in Shane’s neck; “safe,” he says again, leaning to suck at the beating between Shane’s collarbones; “safe,” he presses his open mouth like he means to hold Shane’s heart between them as he kisses Shane’s chest, taps Shane’s pulse back to him in the way he closes his lips, pursed and smacking like a point, like a promise, like a challenge.

Like love, unequivocal.

“So safe, my Shane, I believe this,” and then he’s claiming Shane’s lips, devouring him with purpose and precision, this mouth and this body and this heart that he knows inside and out, that he’d kept safe even as Shane has waffled without meaning to.

It feels like a sacrament in the only church he thinks he’d ever devote himself in, the only holy thing he would consecrate his life before.

He’s never going to falter again. He will never.

“You are the place that feels right in all of the world,” Ilya pants hot against the divot above his upper lip, tongue flicking out there to fit just so; “you are home.”

“Dusha moya.”

And again Shane doesn’t know the words, but he feels them.

In his fucking soul, he feels them.

“Ilya,” he breathes, and hopes the same feeling those words gave Shane can fit inside that name, from Shane’s lips. He means nothing less.

The way Ilya reaches, cradles his face again with such tender affection, makes Shane believe he at least managed something close.

“Stay here, yes?” Ilya asks, his eyes looking less for agreement than confirmation, but it’s a moot point.

“I wouldn’t leave you even if you told me to.” Because Shane’s done with doubting. He’s done with…assuming the worst from the best thing he’s ever known.

“Would never,” Ilya’s quick to counter, catching Shane’s gaze again and speaking into him as he repeats: “never.”

And that…that word, like that: that promise—it’s so full. It holds so much, and Shane feels all of it pouring between his ribs: life-giving.

Life-saving. Love and love alone.

“Marry me, Shane Hollander.”

Shane peeks up at Ilya’s gaze, swimming now, half-besotted as he looks at Shane.

 Just Shane.

“We’re engaged,” Shane mouths against Ilya’s skin, the steady thump at the side of his throat a siren song, a conductor for his own heart to follow to the letter, clench-and-give: safe-safe, true-true.

Love-love.

“I know,” the smile in Ilya’s voice is the warmest, brightest thing, and it spreads like the sun from the middle of Shane’s chest, like the clouds parting after the longest, most deadly storm he’s ever weathered.

“Just thinking of it makes me,” and Ilya hums, considering, and Shane dares to tilt his head up from where he’s listening faithfully, just enough to see him, to read his expression.

Ilya brightens, takes immediate advantage of the space Shane leaves open for the tip of his chin upwards to slide the hand of Shane’s that Ilya’s still holding to his own chest, deftly curls Shane’s fingers, cups his palm instead of pressing it painful to the ribs, and then covers those fingers, less like a demand and more like a shared secret:

“Mmm, you feel?”

And where he’d relished the steady beat before, the way his hand is made to catch, now, to hold like a conch to listen to the secrets of the ocean rushing up to meet you: Shane feels that heartbeat like a wedding waltz, like a love song, like the aurora borealis dancing magnificently, all color and wonder and magic and light, whatever science to explain it paling at the spectacle, the marvel of it: that’s what Shane feels. That’s what paints him head to toe in warmth, in finally…finally feeling like things might just be okay.

Like they are okay.

“Thinking about it makes me, this,” and Ilya’s voice is a summer storm of delight, cleansing and torrential in the most freeing and exquisite kind of way and Shane can’t do anything, save let his lips part and curve to fit the shape of his own leaping heart, and its own unspeakable relief, its own unquantifiable joy.

“But I mean, soon as we leave here,” Ilya toys again with Shane’s hair, lightness in the touch now as Shane meets his eyes, as he smiles so soft, so full as he breathes out a smile somehow, even the air in his lungs soaked in his reveling:

“Marry me.”

Shane…Shane had envisioned the dock lined with candles, but once he’d turned that script in reverse, there was no part of him expecting this to happen, but what he can say?

Is he’s absolutely fucking floored by how good, how light it feels to be asked like this, to be Ilya Rozanov’s forever.

“We can do again, with your parents, with anyone, everyone, whatever you want,” Ilya assures him, promises simple things that clench in his chest in the best way for once—remind Shane a heart can clench for being overjoyed when he thinks he might have forgotten; “the world should know you are mine and I am yours, forever and always.”

And that’s all Shane wants. That’s all Shane fucking wants.

“But I want you to be mine in all of the ways people would need to know, for something like this, today,” he says, careful but pointed, deliberate: “together through all things.”

Again: all he wants.

“In my heart, you’re already mine in every way,” Shane tells him, and it’s unquestionable, it’s been that way for longer than Shane thinks he can even accurately say—not that it matters: Shane refuses, consciously, and rejects in his bones, any life that’s not the both of them, together:

“In all things,” Shane tells him, swears on his soul. “For the rest of my life.”

“In my heart,” Ilya nods, echoes, meets him step for step, beat for beat: “all things. All of time.”

“Don’t leave me,” Shane lets himself speak the thing that’s still drenched in the fear, that’s still tight in the muscle when his heart moves; “don’t ever leave me.”

“Never. Is impossible,” Ilya tells him like it’s a given, like there is nothing else in the universe to consider but: “impossible, lyubimyy.”

And Shane…thinks he believes it. From Ilya’s lips, from his heartbeat so sure and undiminished: yeah.

He believes it.

“Forever, you are my whole heart,” Ilya murmurs, leaning to kiss the top of Shane’s head, breath warm as it ruffles his hair.

“My whole heart,” Shane affirms, vows with his full chest: “all of me.”

And then he asks, because…because he cannot let fear try to tether his heart anymore:

“Will you let me try again,” he presses his hand into Ilya’s chest, splays his fingers a little plaintive, a little possessive, a little in awe: “to love you like you deserve?”

Ilya covers his hand and smiles soft at him as he shakes his head. “You always have.”

“Out loud. Without holding back,” Shane clarifies, sets his declaration into the world because he means this, he means this.

“With everything, in every way. For everyone to see it.” He flips their hands and brings Ilya’s palm to his lips.“You, the most.” And he holds there for a second, breathes, just breathes, because he can.

Because it’s warm, and they’re alive, and he can.

“No hiding. No trying to convince anyone that you’re anything but my world.”

And Shane gazes through his hair where it’s tousled a little, falling into his face, and Ilya is there, looking back with his beating-blinding-brilliant heart like a supernova behind his eyes:

“It would be privilege of my life,” Ilya says, somehow solemn and soulful and soaring with the kind of elation Shane vows to himself he’s going to put on this man’s face and in this man’s heart every day, every hour, every second Shane is blessed to keep him, this precious human who is Shane’s entire soul, who tells him then that:

“Every way of being loved by you, is a privilege.”

And he means it. Ilya means it. The world can still turn.

He’s still here.

Chapter End Notes

Translations (also on hover if you have the capability):

Lyubimyy / Любимый: beloved
rahdnoy / родной: darling
Serdtse moye / Сердце моë: my heart
moyo solntse / моё солнце: my sun
zolet’sye / золотце: sweetheart
Dusha moya / Душа моя: my soul