Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Hayden Pike, Gilbert Comeau

Additional Tags:

Companion Piece, Racism, Homophobia, On Ice Violence, Press Conference, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Teammates, Shane Hollander has had enough, getting better, Carolina Breakers Feel Like Home, Referenced Suicide Attempt, Shane Hollander Leaves the Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros, Man Down - Freeform

Language:

English

Series:

Part 3 of The Distance Between Us

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-27 Words: 5,053 Chapters: 1/1

Man Down

Summary

Shane Hollander has spent his entire career being composed, professional, and quiet about the things that have been said to him on the ice.

Tonight, Gilbert Comeau says the wrong thing.

To the wrong man.

In the wrong arena.

A standalone companion piece to "Breaking Room".

Notes

The thing about playing against your former team was that it was never neutral. 

Shane had known that going into the first game against Montreal and he knew that going into this one. 

He wasn’t going to leave himself any room to be surprised by things he could anticipate. He had talked through things with Kessler and with Holmqvist. He had run his sequences with Zelenko and Blake until it had become more muscle memory than anything else. He had done everything he could in advance and it still was going to be difficult. He knew it was. 

The tension in the locker room before the game was palpable. The team knew what was coming - they’d been there for the last game. The things that were said in good fun. The chirps that were aimed in Shane’s direction. It was nasty. And they had already decided how they were going to meet it this time. They were focused. It was a focus that had weight behind it. 

He sat at his stall and went through his pre-game ritual the way he always did. He laid out all his gear in the same order - cup, shin guards, breezers, shoulder pads, elbow pads, jersey - and his skates were parallel to each other, his stick leaned against the bench at a precise forty-five degree angle. He put on his skates, left skate before right skate. He wasn’t superstitious… it was just his system. Tape - black tape, not white, it made it harder for the goalies to see the puck on your blade. It was the sequence that his hands knew without his brain being involved. He let the noise in the room wash over him. 

Zelenko and Blake were doing what they always did before home games - disagreeing about something that happened in practice the week before and which they would resolve by the time warmups were done. 

Kessler was quiet at his stall. Kesser was usually quiet before games. His authority not needing to be loud to assert itself. His quiet was not tense, just internal, running whatever calculations he ran before he got onto the ice. 

Holmqvist was reading, which is what he tended to do - like Mackinnon - in most situations that didn’t require him to do something else. 

It was a good locker room. 

Shane had spent years in a locker room that had never felt like this one, and the contrast hit him sometimes in ways that he hadn’t fully gotten used to. The ease of it. The way people occupied the space without the low-level vigilance that had been the background noise to everything in Montreal - the constant awareness of who was watching and what was being noted and which version of yourself was the safest to present. Here nobody was keeping score of anything except for the actual game. 

Felix Beausoleil dropped onto the bench beside Shane and the lack of ceremony he usually did - he’d decided during the training camp that Shane’s corner of the locker room was a good place to hang out and he’d plopped himself in Shane’s space regularly ever since. He was a broad and energetic presence, he wasn’t loud - not in the way that Zelenko was loud - but more like someone who had a lot of thoughts and never fully developed the filter between those thoughts and his mouth. Which tended to produce a constant stream of observations and opinions delivered in whatever language was closest at hand in the moment - sometimes it was English and sometimes it was French and sometimes it was a mixture of both that followed its own internal logic. It was either a very good quality or a very exhausting one depending on the day and the thing being said. 

"Tu es prêt?" he said. 

“Working on it,” Shane answered. 

Felix looked at him for a moment - actually looked. “The first game,” he said. “In Montreal. They said things to you on the ice.” 

It wasn’t a question. 

“Yes,” Shane said. 

“Specific things.” 

“Yes.” 

Felix nodded. “Tonight will be different, oui?” He said. “Tonight they are here. And here is not there. Tonight they are in our arena. And our arena is not their arena.” He looked at Shane calmly, with a smile on his face. “Erik and I - we have been talking. You will not hear those kinds of things tonight without someone answering for them. This is decided.” 

Shane looked at him. 

“It is not a discussion,” he added. “It is information.” 

Erik Halvorsen appeared on Shane’s other side, settling onto the bench as usual. He arrived without announcement - which is how he usually did things - and sat in a stillness that seemed to be his natural state. He was a quiet man - not shy, not withholding, just someone who had decided at some point that words that were worth spending were few and he spent his very carefully. He was a tall man as well, and very intimidating due to his side - the only other defenseman that Shane had found equally intimidating had to be Ryan Price. He looked at Shane once, steady and direct, and nodded. 

That was the whole of it. 

That was also, Shane understood, what he needed to hear. 

He looked back at his skates. Something that had been sitting in his chest uncomfortably since the flight back from Montreal began to settle into something that was more manageable. 

The first game in Montreal had been - he had known it was going to be hard. He had prepared for hard. He had sat with Edvardsen on the plane and just let his calming presence wash over him. He’d put a reassuring hand on Shane’s shoulder and told him: you know that whatever happens in that arena, you get to come back after, which was not about hockey and both of them had known it. 

He had prepared for hard. 

He had not been fully prepared for walking into Bell Centre and feeling it. Montreal had been home for three years and the temperature when he had walked in with the Breakers had been hostile. He was used to hostility, he was used to crowds being loud - but it had been personal. 

Places like Boston were hostile because they were hostile towards opposing teams like the citizens of its city were hostile towards outsiders - because you were there and you were not them. 

But Montreal was hostile because it was him. It was like they had taken the news about the trade, taken the line that was given for its reasoning, and chewed on it until they had found a way to make it his fault. Like he had chosen it and not had it forced onto him. 

Shane had been a complication in the Montreal matrix. 

He had captained that team. He had given Montreal three years of his life. The city. The fans. The team. The organization. He’d done it so completely, so thoroughly, so without reservation that it had nearly killed him. 

There were people in that arena that night that loved him for it - he could feel them, underneath the hostility, the warmth of fans that were angry at the organization and not angry at him. But those that were angry at him - that had decided that the trade was evidence of something that they had suspected all along… Those people were loud. 

And their loudness was a specific type that Shane had experienced throughout his entire hockey career. 

His former teammates had been - professional. Correct. But it was the kind of correctness that communicated clearly that it was a choice being made and not a natural and preferred state of being. 

And then the game had started. Comeau had found him on the ice in the second period and said something that Shane had heard variations of his entire career and Shane had done what Shane always did - he absorbed it and kept skating because he wasn’t going to react. Shane Hollander didn’t react. Shane Hollander was a professional. Shane Hollander would not give Gilbert Comeau the satisfaction. 

He thought about being eight-years-old before that and the full inventory of similar moments that stretched back to when he was a kid in Ottawa trying to understand why the ice felt like it belonged to him when he was on it and why it didn’t whenever anyone around him spoke to him. 

He thought about what Felix had said to him. 

You will not hear those things tonight without someone answering for them. 

He thought about a locker room where a sentence like that was possible… and a locker room where it wasn’t. He thought about the years he had spent in the second kind, and he looked around the Carolina locker room and the team around him - his team - and smiled. 

He wasn’t in Montreal anymore. 

He was in North Carolina. 

This game was in North Carolina. This crowd was their crowd. And he had people at his back. He was still learning what that meant for the calculations he had been making for entire career. But he was starting to understand it and rely on it more than when he’d first arrived. 

He had absorbed it in Montreal. 

He was not going to absorb it tonight. 

He finished taping his stick and stood up and rolled his shoulders and looked at the locker room around him. - his team, his people, the place he had made into somewhere he belonged. He felt the evening settle into something he was comfortable with. 

He was ready. 

He stood up and rolled his shoulders and picked up his stick. 

Kessler passed behind him on his way to the corridor and said, without stopping: “Give them hell, kid.” 

Shane smiled. 

“Yeah,” he said. “I plan on it.” 

The ice in the Lenovo Center had a quality on home game nights that Shane had come to recognize over the season - the crowd was settled and warm and present. The arena carried an energy to it that made him feel like he was wanted there and that brought a serenity to it all on its own. He’d played in a lot of different arenas over the past three years and there were definitely some that were grander and had more history - but this one felt right. It felt like home ice in a way that Montreal never had. 

He came out for warmups and went through the sequence - laps, edges, the power play movement patterns that had become automatic at this point - and let the ice do whatever the ice did, which was to clarify everything for him. Whatever was happening off the ice stayed off the ice. On the ice there was just this. The geometry of the game that he loved so much. 

He was aware of the Montreal players at the other end without actively needing to track them. He was always aware of people that were relevant without letting them take up space that they hadn’t been allocated in his head. He noticed Hayden and smiled at him and nodded. Hayden smiled back and waved at him. Comeau was over there. He could see him in his peripheral awareness running a drill with Couillard and Gagnon. 

They had been Shane’s teammates once upon a time. 

He felt nothing particularly complicated about that. 

He turned around and ran the sequence he was working on with Blake and Zelenko again. 

Let the ice be what the ice was. 

The game started the way that home games started when the home team had decided what kind of game it was going to be and established their pace in the first two minutes in a way that communicated clearly that they were not going to be managed tonight. 

Montreal came out trying to make it difficult, which was what Montreal always did when they were trying to control a game - tighten the neutral zone, take away the transition, make everything slow and grinding and contested. It was a valid strategy and one that had worked against Carolina before. 

But it was not going to work tonight. 

Shane read it in the first shift - the way the Montreal defense was cheating toward the middle, trying to eliminate the lane he and Blake had been using all season, leaving something else available in the process. He filed it away and kept moving and waited for the right moment. 

The first sequence happened eight minutes in. 

It started with a Montreal line change - two players coming off, two coming on, the brief reorganization that produced a half-second of shifted attention across the ice. Shane saw it before it had finished. He saw the Montreal left defenseman commit to the strong side coverage two beats earlier than he should have, saw the lane that created on the weak side, saw Zelenko on the far side reading the same developing space from a different angle. 

He didn’t say anything. He just moved. 

There was no time and no need - Zelenko had been watching the same ice and had arrived as the same conclusion through his own calculations, which was the thing about playing with Zelenko that Shane had come to appreciate, that he was doing math in a similar manner in his own head to what Shane was doing in his and usually arriving at the same answer. They moved simultaneously, Shane pulling the Montreal center’s attention left while Zelenko got to the space on the right, and the puck found the seam before the defense could close it. 

Zelenko pulled the goalie left. 

Sunk the puck in on the top right. 

The goal horn went off and the crowd came up. 

1-0 Carolina. 

Shane was already turning back toward center ice, already thinking about the next thing because the next thing arrived thirty-eight seconds later. 

The second sequence was simpler and faster - a Montreal forward, that Shane was unfamiliar with, was trying to force something through a lane that looked open from where he was standing and was not open from where the play was already going. Shane saw the turnover before it happened, was already angled for the intercept before the forward had fully even committed to the mistake, was already calculating where Blake would be when the puck came free based on where Blake had been the past seven minutes and where he tended to position himself in this specific zone when Shane was on this side of the ice. 

The puck came free. 

Blake was exactly where he was supposed to be. 

Shane passed it. 

Blake scored. 

The crowd came up again and Shane smiled. 

2-0 Carolina. 

Shane skated back to the bench and Felix leaned toward him and said, in French: “I have been watching you do that all season and it still makes no sense to me how you do it.” 

It was his version of a compliment and Shane smiled. 

“Film,” Shane said. 

“I watch film,” Felix said, in French, before Shane had even sat down. “I watch a lot of film. I do not see what you see.” 

“Watch it differently,” Shane said. 

“How?” 

“Stop watching what’s happening,” Shane said. “Watch what’s about to happen.” 

Felix stared for a moment. 

“That is not helpful,” he said. 

“It’s extremely helpful,” Shane smirked. “It just takes time.”

Felix muttered something under his breath that Shane didn’t fully catch, which from Felix was approximately the equivalent of a standing ovation. Halvorsen, on the other side of him, was looking at the ice with an expression that he wore sometimes when he was thinking about something he hadn’t finished thinking about yet. He glanced at Shane once and then looked back at the ice and said nothing, which from Halvorsen was also approximately the equivalent of a standing ovation. 

The period continued. 

Carolina was controlling it - not comfortably, not in the way you controlled a game against a bad team, but in the way you controlled a game against a good team when you were better prepared and more focused and had collectively decided now the night was going to go. Montreal was pushing back, the physicality increasing as the period went on, Comeau in particular playing with an edge that seemed to have less to do with the game and more to do with something that Shane recognized from their first game against Montreal. He had an account he considered unsettled. 

Montreal was down by three at that point and frustrated about it when the scrum happened. A whistle blew after a collision between one of Montreal's new rookies and a Halvorsen behind the Carolina net. The usual cluster of bodies formed and the low-level jostling and chirping began that referees allowed to exist in the marginal as a pressure release valve. It was a brief and messy human moment between the clean geometric violence of actual hockey. 

In the chaos Comeau found him. 

He came in close and he whispered quietly, so that only Shane could hear it: “I’m surprised you can see the puck at all, sometimes, Hollander.” And he pulled at his eyes making a specific shape. He delivered it so casually, because he had never had to once answer for shit like that. He’d heard comments like it at various points throughout his career, from players who had always known it would land that nothing would come from it landing. He heard comments like it when he had been in Montreal’s locker room as their captain. He heard a similar comment at their last game in Montreal. 

Shane went very still. 

He’d been absorbing language like that for years. He had taken it with him into locker rooms and hotel rooms and his home and sat with it alone and said nothing, because saying something had always felt like a fight he couldn’t win. He had been Montreal’s captain. He could not afford to hand anyone a reason to say he didn’t belong there. 

He was not Montreal’s captain anymore.

He belonged on this ice. 

He looked at Comeau. 

“Say it again,” Shane hissed. 

Comeau’s mouth curved. He had always read Shane’s composure as an invitation - as a weakness - as evidence that the words were landing and that Shane thought the only safe response was to pretend they weren’t. “Hollander–” 

“Say it again,” Shane said. Same tone. Same volume. “Go ahead.” 

Something shifted in Comeau’s expression. Not quite uncertainty - Comeau was not a man who did uncertainty easily - but a recalibration. He had clearly been expecting one response and been given another. This was not how Shane Hollander responded. Shane Hollander didn’t respond. 

“You’re been saying things like that to me for three fucking years, Comeau,” Shane said. “On the ice. In the locker room. In front of the coaches who just kept running the drill. In front of teammates who heard it and changed the subject.” He wasn't raising his voice. He didn’t need to. The scrum had gone quiet - scrums didn’t usually go quiet. “Say it the fuck again.” 

Comeau said nothing. 

The silence stretched long enough to mean something it hadn’t meant before - long enough to be its own kind of answer, long enough for the bodies around them to register what the silence was communicating. 

“That’s what I thought,” Shane said. 

He turned and skated back to his position. 

Behind him, Blake said something short and flat and not remotely complimentary. Zelenko skated past Comeau without stopping or looking at him and said: “Smart choice.” 

The game resumed. 

Shane played his next shift and felt his teammates differently - not with the carefully managed discomfort of people who had witnessed something they didn’t know what to do with - but something else. It felt like a decision had been made and no one had needed to call a meeting about it. 

He had spent years in locker rooms where a moment like that would have been held against him. 

But he wasn’t in one of those locker rooms anymore. 

Nobody said anything directly in the intermission, which was its own complete answer to a question nobody had asked out loud. But Kessler passed him on the way back from the water table and put a hand briefly on his shoulder without breaking stride or saying anything, and Felix appeared at his elbow and looked at him for a moment and then said in French: “Good,” and went to get his stick. 

That was enough.

That was, in fact, exactly enough. 

The second period was when Comeau decided he had an answer instead of silence. 

Comeau had always been a little bit slow on the uptake.

Too many concussions did that to a man. 

Shane knew something was coming. He could see it coming in the way that Comeau was moving - it wasn’t the normal physical presence of a player doing his job without intention underneath it. It was the kind of movement that screamed he had been just waiting for the right moment. Comeau was never a man that could let things stand. He had never once, in Shane’s three years of knowing him, been made to answer for anything he’d said on the ice to anyone. 

The first period had apparently not sat well with him.  

Shane tracked him. 

He played his shifts and kept Comeau in his peripheral awareness. He watched as Comeau became more physical than he had been before and how that physicality was harsher and more pointed. 

It came in the twelfth minute of the second period. 

A play behind the Carolina net, the puck already gone, the whistle already in the referee’s mouth, and Comeau came in from behind with a hit that had nothing to do with the play and everything to do with his bruised ego. The kind of hit that lived in the gray area - not clean, not obviously dirty, the kind that referees sometimes saw and sometimes didn’t.

Shane felt it land. 

He went down to one knee and felt the pain and fury arrive together and stayed down for a second because the second was useful - because he needed the second to be able to make the decision on what he was going to do next clear and not reactive, to know that what he was about to do was what he had decided to do and not just what his body was going to do without his permission. 

He got up. 

Comeau was already moving away with a casualness that suggested he considered the matter closed after delivering a message. 

“Fucking seriously?” Shane shouted at him. 

“Too much of a pansy to take a hit now, Hollander?” Comeau sneered. “Man up!” 

Shane turned around. 

He looked at Comeau’s face, at the casual satisfaction on it, the easy confidence there because he’d never even dared to imagine a different outcome other than just getting away with it. 

Shane dropped his gloves. 

He grabbed Comeau by the front of his jersey. 

And he punched him right in the stupid fucking face. 

It was quick. It was clean. Comeau went down. 

Shane leaned over him. 

“Man down,” he smirked. 

The referee’s whistle was already blowing before Shane straightened up. He rolled his shoulders and he skated to the penalty box without argument. He wasn’t unbothered by it, but he didn’t regret it. He said what he needed to say and the five minute penalty for roughing was worth it. It just wasn’t worth arguing with the referees - it never once produced a useful outcoming. 

Five minutes. 

He could be patient for five minutes. 

He watched through the glass as the came continued and as Couillard came out of the scrum looking in Shane’s direction with heat and fury radiating from him. It was palpable. He was definitely going to try to finish whatever the hell Comeau had tried to start. Shane watched him from his spot in the sin bin and sent a little wave in his direction. Shane had no doubt that Couillard would be aiming for him as soon as he came back onto the ice. 

And just like he predicted, within thirty seconds of freedom, Couillard came at him like a freight train. It was a cheap shot, clean, the kind that would have lived in the same gray area as Comeau’s had. 

Except this time, Felix was there. 

He stepped in and rammed Couillard into the boards with the kind of force that communicated something and Couillard went down. A hit like that should have knocked a few teeth loose. 

Halvorsen was already there - not dramatic, not aggressive, just present, positioned between Shane and the rest of the Montreal players with the stillness that was his natural state, the stillness that communicated that he was exactly where he intended to be and was not going anywhere. 

The game continued. 

Gagnon tried on the next shift, and this time Halvorsen was there before Gagnon had fully committed to the attempt, and Gagnon went down hard after Halvorsen sent him crashing into the boards. 

Halvorsen spit on the ice when Gagnon went down. “Stay down there where you belong.”  

After that the Montreal players started to give Shane a wide berth for the rest of the game, which was no accident and it was not something that needed to be acknowledged out loud. But Shane could see the red fury raging on Coach Theriault’s face as he tried to get his players to cooperate. 

The Breakers won 7-1. 

It was not a close game and had not been a close game since the first period, and when the final buzzer went and the teams went through the handshake line Shane moved through it with the same composure he had brought to everything. When Comeau took his hand his expression communicated he was not finished and Shane just smiled at him and continued on. 

Hayden clapped him on the back and smirked when he reached him towards the end. “Man, Shane…” he shook his head. “I wish I could have punched him in the face like that - living my fucking dream.” 

“Swear jar,” Shane smiled. 

He let go of his hand and kept moving. 

The press conference was in a room off the main corridor, the usual setup - table, microphones, the assembled media with their records and cameras and questions ready. Shane had done hundreds of these when he had been captain. He didn’t have to do them as often now that he wasn’t… but he’d asked if he could take this one. 

 He sat down, looked at the room, and waited. 

The first few questions were about the game - the score, the performance, the season trajectory. He answered them the way he always answered questions from the press - direct, sufficient, no excess. 

Then: “Can you speak to the unprovoked attack on Gilbert Comeau?” 

Shane looked at the reporter. 

He let that question sit for a moment - not dramatically, just long enough to make sure he knew what he was going to say before he said it, because what he was about to say was going to go somewhere and he wanted to make sure it went where he intended. 

This was an important moment and he didn’t want to derail it by discussing how the attack hadn’t been unprovoked. It didn’t matter how Montreal or the reporters were framing it - if he had been any other player, they probably wouldn’t have called it an unprovoked attack at all. They probably would have asked him why he did it and what Comeau had said that warranted his anger. But he wasn’t just any other player. 

He squared his shoulders. 

“Violence is not an answer to things,” he said calmly, steadily. “On the ice or anywhere else. I have believed that my whole career.” He paused for a long moment to let that land. “But sometimes it is the only language you can speak when racist assholes don’t speak any other.” He could see the heads turning and hear the murmurs breaking out. “I have been quiet about it for a long time,” he continued. Then he looked at the reporter who had asked the question with narrowed eyes. “I am done being quiet.” 

The room went still. The room always went still when someone said something that could not be unsaid and everyone present understood the significance of it. 

Shane sat in the stillness. 

He answered two more questions about the game and then the press conference was done and he walked back through the corridor to the locker room and Edvardsen was waiting for him outside the door. He looked at him with a steady attention and said nothing.

Shane didn’t say anything either. 

They went inside. 

He didn’t check his phone until he got back to his condo, knowing that it would already be blowing up with messages from his mom and from Farah about what he had said during the press conference. About what he had done on the ice to Comeau. He didn’t really want to deal with any of it at that moment. 

He sat on the couch and turned on the screen and saw the first message that popped up in a long string of notifications. 

Ilya. 

He opened it.

The press conference. I heard you. What you said - it mattered. I am sorry it took me this long to listen.

Shane looked at it for a long moment. 

He put the phone down and sighed. 

He was getting so tired of ignoring Ilya’s messages. He wanted to message him back. He wanted to do it so bad it felt like he couldn’t breathe sometimes. He missed him. 

He was angry with him. He was upset with him. He wanted to fucking hate him… but he missed him. 

Fuck. 

He sat back on the sofa in his condo in Raleigh. The city was quiet outside the windows because of the late hour and thought about what it felt like to have finally fought back and taken a stand. To have said out loud what kinds of comments Comeau had been directing at him in a room full of cameras. To have handed the truth over to the word and not taken it back. 

It felt like something. 

It felt like the beginning of something. 

He was done being fucking quiet. 

He went to bed. 

He slept better than he had in years.