Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Domestic Fluff, Silly, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Post-Episode: s01e06 The Cottage (Heated Rivalry), being seen by someone in a way no one else sees you, Being taken care of

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-01-21 Words: 3,579 Chapters: 1/1

kept

Summary

“You’re such a baby,” Shane pats Ilya’s stomach before gripping the wheel with both hands. “All safe.”

“I feel like I am the president,” Ilya slips the sunglasses over his eyes. “You are taking this careful thing very seriously.”

“I take everything about you very seriously,” Shane is sincere and honest sounding, reaching out to press his index finger to Ilya’s bottom lip.

Notes

I CANT PUT DOWN THE CUUP

Shane agrees to splitting a bottle of wine while they sit by the fire, but there’s none at the cottage. There is an LCBO six minutes away, but they’re nearing the end of their time here, and Ilya doesn’t really care to spend even a minute more than necessary apart. It’s already almost dark anyway, no real risk of anyone seeing them.

He feels this strange, childish elation when Shane opens the door for him to get into the car before walking over to the driver’s side. When he slips into the passenger seat, he already has several things to say about how geriatric (that was yesterday’s word of the day— geriatric, which he only knows because Shane downloaded the Mariam-Webster app to his phone and turned on notifications) sitting in his mouth. Each and every single quip dies a quick and easy death when Shane reaches across from him to tug the seatbelt across his chest, pushes the metal prong into the buckle, and then presses his hand right over where Ilya’s heart is thudding in his chest. 

“What’s this?” he manages instead, as Shane’s hand drags over to his shoulder and squeezes. “You do not trust me to do my own seatbelt?”

Shane smiles at him, soft and shy, and Ilya feels a little like a teenager, a little like a thief. “Well, I can’t have you falling out of my window. You’re precious cargo.”

What a fucking line.

“Are you seeing someone in secret who is teaching you how to do all these things?” He goads, unable to let anything Shane does go, leaning closer just to watch his cheeks get a little redder as he hands Ilya his baseball cap and his sunglasses. “Should I be worried?”

“What things?” Shane has a backup camera, but he gets paranoid that there will be a split second delay that will result in him running over a child, or a baby deer or something, so he still looks over his shoulder every time he pulls out of the driveway.

What’s the point of having so many safety features if you don’t trust them? Ilya had asked, and Shane had said something about retaining good driving habits, and Ilya had called him boring, but the truth is that hearing the logic behind Shane’s more nonsensical actions and lining up with the meticulous procedural style of thinking he uses for everything gives him a blood rush to the head, makes him giddy to be privy to his inner workings.

“These little tricks,” Ilya waves his hand. “To get me to sleep with you.”

“I don’t need tricks to get you to sleep with me,” Shane laughs.

Ilya is about to feign offense about the implication that he’s easy, but one of Shane’s hands comes off the wheel to rest on his thigh for just a second, almost chastely, before sprawling flat across the expanse of his chest again.

“Just have to keep you safe,” Shane murmurs as he enters the turning lane, flicking the signal lever. “You’re fragile.”

“Fragile, he says,” Ilya is in disbelief. “I am the opposite of that.”

Not once in his life has he ever considered himself fragile, has he ever believed anyone else has considered him fragile. Shane sees him very differently than anyone else in his life ever has, even the people closest to him. 

Shane forward parks in the corner of the lot. When he turns the car off, the overhead lights stay on for a brilliant moment, before dimming slowly.

“Maybe you’re not,” Shane smiles at him again as he opens the door. “But I’m not taking any chances about you. I like to be careful.”

He disappears into the little liquor store, leaving Ilya to his thoughts.

If there is anything Shane likes, it’s to be careful. With his belongings, his words, his body. Now, by extension, Ilya. Nobody in his life, loved ones or people bound to him by circumstance, has ever treated him as if he was someone to be careful with. 

His father thought he was too sensitive as a child, this he remembers. If nobody toughened him up back then, the world would chew him up and spit him out. That’s the reason he was given, but he knows in his heart that it had more to do with possession. Alexei was his father’s son, from the bridge of his nose to the curve of his spine to the sound his feet made as they slammed down on the ground. Ilya had stayed his mother’s son for as long as he could, but when she’d gone, he’d been buffed and sharpened and hardened into something else. 

Ilya drums his fingers along the dashboard as he waits, traces his nail down the slopes of the vents. No dust. He looks out the window at the branches of the trees, and he thinks about what it would be like to be a vase sitting on the shelf of Shane’s study. 

In this fantasy, Shane is sitting at a heavy oak desk and wearing his glasses, and his face is serious as he maps something out across multiple pieces of paper. There are numbers and circles and lines, very important looking. Maybe pertaining to a bridge, or other infrastructure. Shane rubs his temples and glances over at the shelf where Ilya is sat, and offers a smile. 

The rest of this fantasy appears in vignettes, where he’s dusted, moved to the table, holding water and flowers, dried off, returned to the shelf, but he has to stop thinking about it when his mind wanders to the question of who is bringing Shane these flowers, because he starts getting angry.

Ilya doesn’t resent the way he comes off, not all of the time. It feels good to be capable. It feels good to be looked to for leadership. It doesn’t feel good when it extends into an assumption that he can grit his teeth and bear anything, when it morphs into a prison of expectation and thankless performance of duty, but those days are mostly behind him, he wants to say. 

When his mother had died, it had been so physically devastating that he can still feel the aftershocks in his body today. His grief for his father lives on the surface of his skin, passes over him quick. He supposes it’s much more difficult for a feeling to probe through something that has been hardened over time. The kind of son that can hold onto so much resentment for the father that, as much as Ilya hates to admit it, pushed him towards greatness, is one that should be able to stand on his own, withstand and persist and take blow after blow from life with all his teeth on display. 

Except to Shane, who would think to describe him as something fragile. Except to Shane, who thinks that there is something to handle with care instead of testing the durability of inside of him. The car door opens. 

“My mom likes this one,” Shane says as he gets into the car, placing a heavy brown paper bag in Ilya’s lap. “It’s good we got here when we did. They close really soon.”

“Just our luck,” Ilya wraps a hand around the paper over the neck of the bottle, squeezing so the bag adheres to the shape. 

The car starts back up, and Shane looks over at him to ask “all good?”

Just to be annoying, Ilya undoes his seatbelt, looks over at him and grins with all of his teeth. Shane sighs, but he’s grinning too, as he reaches over to do Ilya’s seatbelt for him again.

“You’re such a baby,” Shane pats Ilya’s stomach before gripping the wheel with both hands. “All safe.”

“I feel like I am the president,” Ilya slips the sunglasses over his eyes. “You are taking this careful thing very seriously.”

“I take everything about you very seriously,” Shane is sincere and honest sounding, reaching out to press his index finger to Ilya’s bottom lip.

The evening and the open road brings that out about him, Ilya thinks. Buffs out the edges of what Shane wants to say from straightforward to sweet and earnest.

“Well, that is good. There is probably a hit out on me in this part of the country. Wild Montrealer that has been stranded in wild since 2014, angry that Boston won the cup because of me. Looking for revenge.”

Shane laughs. “Oh, just because of you?”

“Oh, yes,” Ilya grins. “They have carved your face into a tree and they kiss it every morning, and they carve my face into the mud every night so that they can pretend to kill me.”

“What does that even mean, Ilya?” Shane laughs, and Ilya could get used to that, the sound of his name on Shane’s mouth, enveloped in joy. 

“It means I am in trouble, Shane, and that you must take protecting me very seriously until we get back to the cottage,” Ilya slinks down in his seat for dramatic measure. “Especially because I am so fragile.”

When they pull into the driveway and park, Shane turns to look at him with a grin. “You’re home. Safe and sound, as promised.”

The word home hits him as if his heart was a gong.

They start cross legged on the patio couch by the fire, but after four generous glasses, Ilya ends up crawling into Shane’s lap, pressing his cheek into his knee. 

“You are bright red,” Shane laughs, thumb pressing into the side of his cheek. 

“I am not,” Ilya grumbles, and then he wraps a hand around Shane’s wrist, pulls it to his mouth to press a kiss to his pulse point. “Barely feel anything.”

When he looks over himself, Shane is beaming, eyes glittery like the water when the sun rises over the lake. He is so beautiful, Ilya knows this, has had this thought running in the back of his mind for the better part of the years they’ve known each other, but it’s a new kind of beautiful to be so familiar with it. To know Shane sees this in their future, wants to put a name to it, lay a claim to him, no matter how long it will have to be private.

“Shane,” he complains, tilting up his chin for a kiss. 

Shane indulges him, smiles and leans down to connect their mouths, smoothes back the hair that is clinging to his forehead.

“You are taking very good care of me,” Ilya sings, kicking his feet over the armrest. “I feel like the prime minister.”

“I thought you were the president,” Shane’s hands are working in careful circles at his scalp.

“Well, I will be Canadian one day, so,” Ilya reaches at the ground below him and tries to feel for his glass. “I am changing my position.”

“I like taking care of you,” Shane says in response, staying ever true to the theme of honesty, of saying things that make Ilya want to crawl out of his own skin and slink around the perimeters of this place like some kind of wild animal, embed himself into the plaster, bask in this feeling forever.

Instead, he says “you do not have to do that.”

“I like to,” Shane has a way of making all of this sound so simple, so matter of fact. “You take very good care of me too.”

“You don’t have to take care of me for me to take care of you,” Ilya can be honest too.

He realizes that he means it, sincerely. He understands what is expected of him, but there is still this traitorous part of him that is hungry for reciprocity where he knows it will never come. With Shane, the pleasure is in the act of doing. It feels good to see Shane feel good. Maybe the traitorous part of him doesn’t speak because it’s sated, because it knows that even though the act of just doing for Shane is enough, Shane isn’t selfish, and will feed inside of him what he doesn't even realize is hungry.

“I like seeing you like this,” Shane says, turning Ilya’s face towards him with a gentle hand on his chin. 

Ilya knows he means soft, but he still asks “what?” just to hear Shane say that he’s soft, that he’s someone that can evoke that kind of feeling.

“Just… exposed,” Shane traces along the line of his jaw and Ilya nearly goes cross-eyed. “It’s good.”

“Why’s it good?”

“Lets me know what to give you,” Shane’s pupils are big. “To make you feel good.”

Shane’s hands, capable and tactile and willing to be so good to him, wanting to deliver so much good to him, move down to his hips. Ilya shifts so that he’s sitting up, and he watches as Shane’s eyes droop. Shane, who only has the best of intentions for him, he thinks as they’re mouth to mouth, who recognizes what he needs before he can even dare to think of asking for it, or was maybe just born in some symmetrical fold of the universe and fallen into Ilya’s lap, perfect for him by chance. The crickets sing as the fire crackles, but all he can focus on is the staccato of their breathing, the only human sound for what feels like thousands of miles. 

“I like when you are like this too,” he whispers, feeling Shane smile against him.

“Like what?”

“Saying what you want. So I can make you feel good.”

That’s what lies at the core of this thing, he thinks. Ilya wants Shane and Shane wants Ilya and they’ve been positioned by the whole world to take from each other. If one of them wins, it is at the other’s expense. It is very easy to imagine that somewhere in all of these years, this would give way for something territorial and angry and mean, but it never does. Sincerely, Ilya wants everything for Shane, and he is happy to see him have it, even if he is fighting to keep it from him.

Shane swings a leg over to straddle him, squeezes both of Ilya’s shoulders. “Okay.”

“Okay what?” Ilya looks up at him.

“Okay. Make me feel good,” Shane whispers, and Ilya watches, pleased as his freckled cheeks flush pink.

Ilya kisses along the path of them and then grips the underside of Shane’s thighs, stands up to walk them both to the bedroom, but then Shane suddenly squirms out of his grip to put out the fire. Then he pushes Ilya so that he’s sitting back on the couch, smiles like he’s done something brilliant, and then straddles him again.

“Okay, now,” he says, and Ilya huffs just for the charade of it, before standing up again, grinning into the crook of Shane’s neck as he walks the both of them inside.

The closeness is what he likes most about being with Shane now. It’s always been hot, being with someone with such an intense focus and regimented approach to everything, and watching him give up all that control to do what Ilya wants, but what makes it so fucking good now is the closeness. Observing the little twitch in Shane’s eyebrow, watching the sweat catch on his upper lip, feeling the heat of his palms against the top of his head, knowing that every thread in the fabric of his being is tangled up with Shane’s. We aren’t supposed to do this, and nobody would believe it if they didn’t see it with their own eyes. Look at this spectacular thing we have, he wants to say. Nobody else comes close to touching what we are. Everyone thinks that they have dictated what we are for us, but we have the whole fucking world fooled. This is ours. 

When they finish, Shane is twisted up in one of the sheets, not yet lucid enough to voice a complaint about how gross the sheets are. Ilya doesn’t really like having to get up and pull away, but he likes the ritual of cleaning him off after, getting to be sweet, getting to see Shane preen like a bird at the praise. He does the impossible, prying himself away and walking over to the bathroom.

Ilya runs the tap until the water is steaming before wetting the washcloth. He wrings it out in the sink and chooses a dry hand towel before walking back towards the bed. Shane is staring at the ceiling, head propped up by the headboard despite the pillows on either side of him.

“It is going to give you a headache,” Ilya tells him. “Bad for posture. Lay down straight.”

Shane turns to look at him as he sits on the edge, reaching out with the wet cloth. He extends a hand, as if to take it, but Ilya jerks it away, shakes his head. He wants to do this for him.

“Who are you, my physio?” the flesh of Shane’s cheek moves up as Ilya tries to wipe him off tenderly, is much more clumsy in execution.

“I am so jealous of your physio,” Ilya groans. “Get paid to touch you all day.”

“You get paid to slam people against the boards,” Shane points out. “And he doesn’t just feel me up all day, idiot.”

“That is very different. If it was just you I got to slam into boards…”

“Yeah, you’d like that,” Shane laughs. “Bet half of Boston would pay to see that.”

“Hollander,” Ilya calls out, indignant. “Way more than half. They do not like you over there.”

“It’s a good thing we’re over here then,” Shane turns so that Ilya doesn’t have to reach over to get a spot. “And the only person being hunted for sport is you.”

“Oh yes,” Ilya  tosses the used washcloth in the direction of the bathroom, and starts with the dry one now. “Lucky me. Is good, because I am very strong, and can fight these people off. You would not survive being hunted by Boston.”

“I could absolutely survive being hunted by all of Boston,” Shane argues, but Ilya shakes his head no with a smile.

“You are very delicate,” Ilya tells him as he slides the dry cloth down his neck now, over both shoulders. “Not made for fighting. Require a gentle hand.”

“Fuck off,” Shane says, but it lacks venom because he’s grinning with all of his teeth. “You’ve never used a gentle hand with me.”

No, Ilya supposes he hasn’t, when he’s had the option to. In these sheets, when Shane is looking up at him like that, there really is no choice for anybody involved. 

“Because I am making you stronger, better player. You’re welcome,” Ilya sees the goosebumps on his chest and pulls the duvet up to his chin. “Maybe I should be using gentle hands. Should not give my competitor free training.”

He shifts his weight and slips under the covers, grabs blindly for skin, and when he gets it, he pulls the two of them together, close. He presses the cold flat of the bottom of his foot to Shane’s calf and squeezes him tight so that he can’t squirm away.

“I’m going to throw you out,” Shane laughs as Ilya breathes down his neck. “Stop, it tickles!”

“Not nice,” Ilya frowns into the skin of Shane’s shoulder. 

“I’ll let the loon get you,” Shane threatens. “I will call them and tell them to get you.”

“Don’t joke, Hollander,” Ilya tries to sound serious, but when Shane turns to look at him, eyebrows quivering in an attempt to look angry, he can’t help but laugh. “Is not funny. I am very scared.”

He bites at the skin of his neck just to listen to the sound of Shane’s laugh catch into a breathier little sound, and then he keeps his teeth in there for a couple of moments, so that he can stare at the indentation when he pulls away.

“I wouldn’t let the loon get you,” Shane whispers, reaching around to stroke Ilya’s cheek with the back of his index finger. 

“Promise?” Ilya whispers back, likes that it feels like they are sharing a secret.

“Promise,” Shane indulges. “You are very safe here with me.”

The outside world could be melting and deforming into something monstrous, for all Ilya cares. Shane looks at him with the same sincerity he brings to everything else he does, and Ilya is one of those things now. A permanent fixture. An object of care.

“If I was your vase,” he asks, unable to help himself. “Would you take good care of me?”

Shane laughs, and Ilya watches as his mouth twists to do it. A hand comes up to touch the back of his head, and Ilya loves this, loves getting to be a kept man after laying his claim.

“You don’t have to be a vase,” Shane is so lovely like this, looking at him. “I’ll take good care of you just like this.”

“Really? I don’t feel very much care. My feet are very cold,” Ilya brings his foot back to Shane’s calf to prove his point.

Shane rolls his eyes, but then he’s reaching under the covers, and squeezing Ilya’s cold foot with his warm hands. “Better?”

“Yes,” Ilya says, grinning like a thief, and then he steals a kiss off the bridge of Shane’s nose, and then another, and then another, and then another.