Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

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, Original Female Character(s)

Additional Tags:

Missing Scene, episode 5 coda, Developing Relationship, TV canon compliant, (until and unless I get jossed in S2.), Implied/Referenced Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Mutual Pining, Rozanov Family Drama

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of Cruiserweights

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-03 Words: 2,102 Chapters: 1/1

almost out of the woods (awake and alive)

Summary

Ilya hears the door opening before he sees it. He sits up sharply, already angling his phone towards his chest, thumb hovering over the End Call button. Shane doesn’t speak, though Ilya watches his expression shift into something grave and concerned. They both know the routine at this point; it wouldn’t be the first time this week Ilya has ended a call abruptly to avoid interruption.

The head that appears in the doorway is far lower than he expects it to be, and it takes him a moment to fully register.

“Zhenya?” he asks, frowning. “Are you alright?”

The girl nods, her little hand still clutching the door handle. “Can I come in?”

Or: Shane and Ilya speak often, while Ilya is in Moscow for his father's funeral. Tonight, Ilya has company.

Notes

The chill of the night air hits Ilya as soon as he cracks open the window, sharp on his cheeks and nose, stinging in his throat. The street below is quiet, even the rumble of the passing cars muted and distant. Beneath his feet, the wooden floor hums softly, the sounds of music and indistinct voices filtering up from the house below. The week has been interminable, since the first wake; day after day, his family’s home fills with men and women who knew his father a lifetime ago and feel some absurd obligation to tell Ilya that this was the case. As though it means anything at all to Ilya. As though it would have meant anything to his father, who did not know his own name, in his final months.

Ilya is absent, when he can be. More often than he ought to be, really. He forces himself to make an appearance, to shake hands, to nod solemnly and thank people for their well-wishes and accept their kisses on his cheek, before murmuring his excuses: the time difference from America tires him greatly. He is recovering, still, from an injury, and needs rest. He would prefer to be alone, as he grieves. Shameful, maybe, that he is too much of a coward to face them all, but he knows they will think what they want of him anyways. Many will think whatever his brother tells them.

“Is it cold there?” Shane asks, voice fuzzy through the phone speaker.

Shane, too, has given Ilya more of his time than he ought to, mid-season. Ilya comforts himself with the thought that Shane Hollander, as he knows him, wouldn’t allow this kind of personal business to interfere with his playing. His last two games support the theory, and Ilya is simply too selfish to raise the issue and risk denying himself this.

He shrugs. “Yes, freezing. Not worse than Boston, though. Just – different. Moscow’s cold, it doesn’t feel like anything else. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

“No, it does,” Shane says. He’s tucked into yet another ambiguous yellow hallway, some hotel stairwell or another in Pittsburgh. The overhead lights glare horribly off of his glasses, and his face looks pale and wan, exhausted, as he squints into the camera. He’s beautiful. “I think if you put me on a plane blindfolded, I’d be able to tell if we landed in Ottawa just from the air. It always hits me when I’m home, that it smells different somehow? Familiar, I guess.”

Privately, Ilya’s not sure he’s ever noticed a difference between any of the Canadian cities he’s played in. But perhaps Shane wouldn’t feel a difference between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The thought of him here, in Moscow, makes Ilya’s stomach turn, the prospect as thrilling as it is terrifying.

He eases himself onto his bed, settling back against the headboard. “Yes,” he agrees dryly, “I imagine boredom has a very distinctive smell.” This has the desired result of getting Shane to huff an insulted little laugh, face scrunching into an indignant pout.

“Fuck you, Rozanov,” he returns, without any real heat.

Ilya hears the door opening before he sees it. He sits up sharply, already angling his phone towards his chest, thumb hovering over the End Call button. Shane doesn’t speak, though Ilya watches his expression shift into something grave and concerned. They both know the routine at this point; it wouldn’t be the first time this week Ilya has ended a call abruptly to avoid interruption.

The head that appears in the doorway is far lower than he expects it to be, and it takes him a moment to fully register.

“Zhenya?” he asks, frowning. “Are you alright?”

The girl nods, her little hand still clutching the door handle. “Can I come in?”

“Of course,” he says immediately, shifting on the bed to make room. “Come, sit, sit.” He probably shouldn’t let her; he can take Alexei’s anger, but he worries that it will reflect upon her, that Zhenya might become tainted in her father’s eyes by association with him. Unfortunately, he’s helpless to deny her anything, and his heart aches for her, paraded around by her father to rooms of perfect strangers, small and solemn and silent. She is, in many ways, much like Ilya – a serious, quiet child, internal and solitary. This week has been tiring for her, as it has for him, and she’s started to seek him out when her parents are willing to excuse her, finding him in the quiet peace of his childhood bedroom.

Zhenya closes the door to his room softly behind her, toeing off her party shoes and crossing the room to his bed with little hesitation, now that she’s been given permission.

“Your niece?” Shane asks curiously, as Zhenya clambers onto the bed and settles beside him, tucking herself into his side when he raises his arm to curl around her shoulder. Her dress is nice, he thinks, a thick black wool that’s soft under his fingers and fits her well. Should keep her warm, even in this kind of winter. He’s been watching closely, this week, for any possibility that all of the money Alexei has demanded of him has failed to reach his niece, or her mother. At the very least, they are being taken care of, he thinks.

“Yes, Evgenia,” he tells Shane, adjusting the phone against his bent leg so they’re both in the frame. “Zhenya, we call her.” Zhenya looks up at him at the sound of her name, blinking curiously between Ilya and his phone.

It’s dangerous, maybe, to allow these parts of his life to touch. It would be easier, safer, to end the call with Shane, switch to texting until Shane needs to leave his hotel, talk to Zhenya until she falls asleep. He is, however, incredibly selfish.

He pulls Zhenya snug against him and tells her, “This is my friend, Shane Hollander. He’s a very good hockey player from Canada.” It probably shouldn’t give him such a thrill to say that, considering they’ve been fucking since they were eighteen, but he still can’t shake the juvenile satisfaction at the brand new certainty of it. They’re friends.

Shane’s got that sideways smile he gets when Ilya’s speaking Russian, but he probably recognizes the cadence of an introduction, or at least his own name, because he waves to the camera. Then, surprisingly: “Privet, Zhenya. Priyatno poznakomit’sa.”

It’s a little halting, and his accent is atrocious, somewhere between Google Translate and inexplicably French, but it’s coherent enough. Zhenya giggles, briefly burying her face into Ilya’s shoulder, before she shyly murmurs “Hello,” which is likely the extent of the English she has to offer in return. Against his will, he feels an inexcusably fond smile spreading across his face.

To Shane, he says, “‘Nice to meet you?’ I know I did not teach you this. What other Russians are you talking to, Hollander?”

Shane rolls his eyes, huffing. “Oh, shut up, I downloaded an app, okay? And it’s a good thing I did, since nothing you’ve taught me this week would be appropriate to say to a little kid!”

Ilya sticks out his tongue, smug and petulant. With incredible restraint, he does not think about Shane, alone in his hotel room, or his house in Montreal, on his team’s plane, on the bus to the rink, mouthing priyatno poznakomit’sa to himself.

“Do you need to go?” Shane asks, more seriously.

Ilya shakes his head. “No, it is fine. Her and me, we both want to get away from the assholes downstairs. We can keep talking.”

“How has this been for her, is she alright?” Shane prods. He frowns, adding, “Sorry, I feel bad talking about her when she’s right there, even if she doesn’t understand.”

Ilya glances down at Zhenya, who’s listing slightly against his shoulder. She’s blinking at Ilya’s phone in distant, uncomprehending interest, but her eyelids are starting to droop, her chin nodding heavily as she flags.

“It’s okay,” Ilya assures Shane again. “She is tired, will fall asleep soon, and I will take her to her room.” He purses his lips, debates how much she wants to say. “She is – I do not think she knew my father well enough to be too sad. But my brother, her father, is broken by this. That, I think, is hard for her.” Towards the end, he hadn’t recognized her, Ilya knows. Had either spoken to her with cold kindness, or had been unable to look at her, because she had Irina’s eyes, Irina’s nose, Irina’s ears – the same as Ilya does. It must have been confusing for her, perhaps frightening. He hopes only that Alexei’s habitual neglect of their father meant that she hadn’t been subjected to it too often.

“I’m sure it is,” Shane murmurs, sympathetic. His mouth twitches in the way it does when he’s about to ask more questions, as though they all line up neatly in his brain and wait for permission to leave his mouth.

Quickly Ilya says, “Is Boizeau injured? I have never seen him skate as badly as he did last night.”

The brief, terse look Shane gives the camera says, in no uncertain terms, I see what you’re trying to do. He allows the distraction, though. “No, but he thinks he might’ve gotten food poisoning from room service. I’m fucking telling him you said that, he’ll break your nose at our next game.”

Ilya grins. “He can try. If he can keep up.”

They talk. About hockey, mostly, which Ilya adores and which Shane seems to think about during most of his waking moments. It is another novel, childish kind of thrill to learn that while he enjoys arguing with Shane, he enjoys just as much when he agrees with him, especially when Ilya is able to coax out some terribly unkind opinion that polite, camera-friendly Captain Shane Hollander would never dare to admit to the media, or perhaps to anyone but Ilya.

They drift to other topics as well, though. Pike’s twins have apparently been begging for a puppy, which Ilya supports wholeheartedly on the basis that he thinks it would be an absolute nightmare for Pike. He is dissuaded from this position only by the reminder that this nightmare would also be inflicted upon Hayden Pike’s wife, who seems to be a perfectly nice woman. For reasons Ilya fails to recall, he ends up trying to explain, with great difficulty, the concept of belochka to Shane. His efforts are impeded in part by the fact that he's exhausted enough to remember the word squirrel, but cannot for the fucking life of him conjure the English word chocolate.

(It’s very nearly the same word in the three languages they speak between the two of them. It takes them entirely too long to actually confirm this.)

“I will bring you some, when I come back next week,” Ilya promises, after they’ve finally agreed upon the basic concept of chocolate.

“My diet—” Shane tries, and Ilya waves dismissively.

“Will survive one piece of candy. Come on,” he wheedles. “I will let you try to feed me strange Canadian foods, even.”

“Fine, fine,” Shane agrees, defeated. His smile widens, goes soft. “Think your little buddy’s asleep.”

Ilya looks down, sees that Zhenya’s nodded off, her face smushed into Ilya’s arm. He feels little puffs of air against his skin as she snores softly. Apologetically, he tells Shane, “I will need to take her to bed, before her parents come upstairs.”

Shane shakes his head. “No, of course, go do what you gotta do.” He’s got the look on his face that says he’s not done speaking, so Ilya waits him out. Eventually: “She seems like a good kid. I’d love to meet her properly, someday.”

Ilya’s chest aches, and he feels his heart high up in his throat. Shane had said it quietly, like a confession. In some ways, it was one. It feels like the closest either of them have come to admitting that they want there to be a someday. That in five, ten, fifteen years, when Zhenya is old enough to choose things for herself, when they’ll both be in the twilight of their careers, that Shane will still want to know him. That they will still want to be in each other’s lives, outside of the temporary secrecy of a hotel room fuck.

Hoarsley, Ilya admits, “I would like that.”

Shane smiles, lopsided and unfairly perfect. “Goodnight, Ilya. Spokoynoy nochi, Zhenya.”

“Goodnight, Shane,” he murmurs, and waits a few moments too long to hang up.